desertlounger's comments

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: How to center a div in CSS

Classic!

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: 2024 Quadrantid meteor shower to peak January 3-4

How does a constellation become "obsolete"?

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: Wait, what's a bookmarklet?

FWIW, javascript:// bookmarklets don't work on the standard Chrome home / new tab page, but data URL bookmarklets work everywhere. Here's my bookmarklet for Day Of Year...

data:text/html,<script>now=new Date();alert(`Today is DOY ${1+Math.floor((now.getTime()-new Date(now.getFullYear(),0,1).getTime())/8.64E7)}`);</script>

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: JDK 21 Release Notes

The reference is to a previous licensing change, which made it less free, with Oracle shaking down groups using the Oracle JDK. They've changed their terms before and could do so again with future releases.

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: Features of Project Loom incorporated in JDK 21

src/main/java is a convention that started with Maven; it's simple to change in the project build file (pom.xml). Otherwise, it's due to the fact that a package namespace in Java must correspond to a directory tree.

desertlounger | 2 years ago | on: Request: Re-open JPEG XL issue

lossless? large sizes? multi-band (> 3) data? transparency? animation? I work in software support of scientific imaging, and jpeg-xl looks to be the only format to date that supports those features in addition to excellent compression and royalty-free licenses (we currently use jpeg-2000 which has no good/fast open-source implementation, we really on an expensive proprietary license with lots of restrictions on redistribution, in fact our industry is largely moving back to TIFF now with the storage factors you mentioned, but using 10x the disk space is non-trivial).

desertlounger | 3 years ago | on: Java 20 / JDK 20: General Availability

Yes. And with "records" (record classes, something with the characteristics of a tuple or struct) you can get further away from getter/setter boilerplate code.

desertlounger | 3 years ago | on: Java 20 / JDK 20: General Availability

AFAIK Java was GPL'd by Sun (before the Oracle purchase). This resulted in the OpenJDK, which is the basis for all distributions of Java. Oracle is a big contributor to the development, but so are many others. You can get a pure OpenJDK or any of a number of branded JDKs like those from Eclipse, BellSoft, etc. You can get non-free distributions with support too. A sticking point for a number of years was the TCK (Technology Compatability Kit) used to validate Java, but that too was GPL'd. Java has evolved quite a bit since being open sourced. IMHO C# has some great features, but Java is great for certain things. For instance, making native apps for Mac, Win, and Linux based on modular libraries from the JDK is now fairly easy (and with a modern UI using the OpenJFX framework).

desertlounger | 3 years ago | on: 58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

Can't help but think that both would look a lot better w/ text-align: justify on paragraphs.

desertlounger | 3 years ago | on: Plain text, with lines

And if you write "polyglot" html (html written as syntactically correct xml) then you can use xpath or other tools to extract data from it (i.e. from tables).

desertlounger | 5 years ago | on: Why Do Mirrors Flip Things Horizontally but Not Vertically? Here's the Physics

I always thought it is because our eyes are arranged horizontally and not vertically...

desertlounger | 5 years ago | on: Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014)

I write a lot of Java, and like checked exceptions. The problem is rather the opposite, basically all of the concrete exception classes that you might think to use (e.g. IllegalArgumentException) are unchecked!

desertlounger | 5 years ago | on: Performance of modern Java on data-heavy workloads

Since Java 8, there are two ways to build a binary: the javapackager tool, and the Ant JavaFX tasks (with the OpenJDK, install the openjfx package). It'll include the JRE [~50MB], and there are pros and cons with that obviously.