cool / creative — by Toomas Römer
15
Jun 11

Fling – Detecting Little Fockers Furballs

This piece is the second installment in the series of Fling – Game of Furballs. It has been in the drafts for 6 months because of lack of time and/or interest. I’m on a bus to Tartu and I just might as well finish this.

So in the previous part I gave you an intro of the game and how I stumbled upon the game and how it took over our lunches (now we have recovered and are back to random discussions). In this part we’ll look how to detect the furballs from Fling screenshots.

Abstract

Lets build a web service that accepts screenshots of Fling and sends you back a webpage link of the solution to the image or just bunch of attachments.

Solution

Lets divide and conquer.

  • Image/Color recognition to detect the Furballs (covered in this piece)
  • Algorithm to solve the puzzles (not covered, but code available)
  • Algorithm to draw the 1 step screens (not covered, but code available)
  • Email handling (not covered, but code available)

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rant / review — by Toomas Römer
03
Jun 11

MailChimp – No More Bananas for You

I have not ranted for some time but I just heard and saw so much crap about MailChimp that I just had to open up a draft here and let some steam out. MailChimp was my choice of newsletter software years ago and it worked fine if you leave out some quirks here and there. As the usage has grown it has been brought to my attention that this software does not scale. Throughout the conversations I’ve also discovered a way how to block any account on MailChimp. So lets start.
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cool / tips — by Toomas Römer
27
May 11

VisualVM and jps Not Finding my Java Process

Today I was hit by a weird problem and I thought I’ll share the problem and the solution (thanks for the solution goes to my colleague Lauri). Googling did not help me much (probably bad keywords or not much information about it) and hopefully this post will serve as future destination for a solution for this problem.

Problem

You are running Mac OS X (maybe the problem is relevant on other platforms too) and even if you’ve started Tomcat and you can see the Java process in the Activity Monitor or with ps you can’t see the process with jps. You are not able to connect to the process with VisualVM nor JConsole. Bummer.
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rant — by Vladimir Šor
15
Mar 11

I fought the F.A.S.T. and I won

Editor note: You probably would want to write a rant or downgrade something when a migration wizard fails and you lose your migrated files? Yes, yes, yes! This is what happened to Volli, he was able to partially save his files but read on for the details…

Introduction

My current Lenovo T60 laptop is at least 4 years old (nobody at my company knows anymore how old it is, as even support department doesn’t have any records about it) and is waiting for the replacement. It was running Windows XP pretty fine, if one doesn’t count some sporadic hangs and reboots. Around 1 month ago I started to experiment with different operating systems to see what’s happening in modern operating systems world.
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cool — by Toomas Römer
12
Jan 11

What are the default -Xmx and -Xms values?

Happened to read Inspecting HotSpot JVM Options and found a solution to one of the questions that I have every now and then. What are the default -Xmx and -Xms values for this JVM on this machine? The solution? Invoking java with some flags, check out the terminal session.

toomasr@cigarillo-2:~$ java -server -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal -version | grep -i heapsize
uintx ErgoHeapSizeLimit                    = 0                {product}
uintx InitialHeapSize                     := 65011712         {product}
uintx LargePageHeapSizeThreshold           = 134217728        {product}
uintx MaxHeapSize                         := 1040187392       {product}
java version "1.6.0_22"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-b04-307-10M3261)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 17.1-b03-307, mixed mode)
toomasr@cigarillo-2:~$ java -client -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal -version | grep -i heapsize
uintx ErgoHeapSizeLimit                    = 0                {product}
uintx InitialHeapSize                      = 0                {product}
uintx LargePageHeapSizeThreshold           = 134217728        {product}
uintx MaxHeapSize                          = 130862280        {product}
java version "1.6.0_22"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-b04-307-10M3261)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 17.1-b03-307, mixed mode)

If there is an easier way, let me know. Will put this one on my tool belt at the moment.

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