Ramblings about Xataface, Java, and other software development issues.
I did a little bit of research into the OpenJDK policies for generative AI after the ban I received yesterday from /r/java. I had assumed that code inside Oracle and specifically inside OpenJDK must be incorporating generative AI in 2026, since Oracle has been such a big proponent of AI.
I got banned from r/java today for posting a Swing WebView component that I made. A lifetime ban.
So my son said to me this morning, just before heading to his swimming lesson, that he didn’t notice any commercials for Hoppers, this movie that he wants to see, and it’s already out of theatres.
Like everyone else, I’ve been playing with AI a lot lately. I’m always building things, and sometimes it is difficult to find the time to write about the things that I build, because the writing time comes at the expense of building time. Hence the scarcity of recent posts in my blog.
I took advantage of the long weekend to finish up the first release of the jDeploy desktop app. This has been many months in development, and I’m happy with the result. I think this should eliminate most of the hurdles that stopped new users from adopting it. With the new template gallery, it is possible to create a new Swing or JavaFX project, and publish it to GitHub or npm for others to…
Note: Throughout this post, I’ll use “us”, “I”, “me”, and “we” fluidly, since I did most of these things with my friend, and I just can’t decide whether each thing was done by me alone, or together with my friend.
I started collecting baseball cards in 1988. I know this because I still have the Panini sticker book that started it all off. I don’t remember how I got that sticker book – probably as a birthday present, which would have made it technically the end of 1987, rather than 1988.
Pytube is a great little Python utility for downloading videos from youtube as .mp4 files. It has a command-line interface that makes downloading videos as simple as entering the following command:
I used to be the “Web Coordinator” in a university faculty, and I often had to provide tech support to the office staff. One morning I received an urgent call from one of the program assistants (let’s call her Carol) who had misplaced her notes, which, among other things, told her how to use her computer. I jogged down to her office, and found her with a panicked look on her face.
I still remember my first computer programming book. It was a glossy, black, brick of a book on PERL 5. I had started building web pages a few months prior, using the copy of Adobe PageMill that came with my bondi-blue iMac. It didn’t take long before I outgrew the “what you see is sort of what you get” interface of PageMill and started coding the HTML by hand. And it wasn’t long after that, that…