MarbleMice.com

Well another cold meant I have only just got back into coding. Feels like a long time since I hacked away on my spidersynth rewrite. Starting with some small tasks to get back into the flow I decide to flesh out the generated sound display. Basically it uses JFreeChart to display a sound wave.

I was not really expecting any problems but of course I got some. Performance was terrible. My previous custom display for this was snappy it could take a 3 second wave sampled at 96KHz without breaking sweat. I didn’t do anything flashy to get this performance, the first implementation was fast enough. So I was surprised to see JFreeChart struggle with a 1 second wave sampled at 22KHz. When I say struggle I mean redraw took a very long time.

Perhaps I am doing something very wrong? Or perhaps people just don’t use JFreeChart that way. The two possible solution are ditch JFreeChart for this component or decimate the wave in some way. Decimation seems the easiest route as I guess you really do not need 22000 points on a chart being displayed on a width of 600 pixels. Getting the decimation algorithm correct to avoid weird artifacts should be fun.

Update: With only 400 points it was too slow, redrawing he screen seems to take ages. I will spend half an hour look to see if I am doing any obvious performace errors otherwise I will be rolling my own sample display.

After getting very familar with apt-get over the past few nights I think I am finally at a point where I can knuckle down and get on with some serious coding. There was a lot of stuff to download and install.

The only nagging issue I have is I installed it using wubi. Means I take a slight hit in disk access. Initially i did this as I did really expect linux to work that well on my laptop. Well I was wrong on that
account so a small niggle in my mind is that I really should do a proper install. It is only a niggle though and given the amount of time that seems to have flown by just sorting out the mess that was my laptop for now I will leave it as it is and get on with some coding rather than tinkering.

I have to admit I only checked spider synth worked on linux by creating a few effect and never really put it thought a proper testing. This is fairly obvious when you adjust the UI in some way - it doesn’t look pretty. It look terrible with bit that should resize not resizing. Of course this all works on windows fine and it is not something I actually hand coded I used matisse gui builder that comes with Netbeans. I expect it was something I was doing wrong rather than Netbeans but still annoying.

I have started to use Emacs, This predates my move to Linux. I was looking for an editor that would not impose a build system on me. That way I can continue to use the rapidly improving SBT. The Scala mode in Emacs is usable and I am gradually getting learning my way around the massive number of features that Emacs has.

I am taken with orgmode as an outliner/to-do organiser/note taker. Emacs seems to be a world on itself and it is certainly an improvement over the eclipse scala plug that contains a fair number of bugs. If I find a free rainy afternoon I may even take a look at Emacs lisp to learn more about it’s configurability.

I am not sure Emacs is going to be my editor of choice over the next 5 years, but for the next 6 months it fits the bill while Netbeans/eclispe improve their scala experience. Although it is possible I may get addicted to all those cryptic keystrokes.

I have had a tendency to use a usb pen drive to back up data and store my svn repositories. With all this rethinking the way I work I thought I would look around for free hosted svn repositories.  I tend not to publish all my code as open source so the offerings from Google and SourceForge are not appropriate. But there are a
few. I choose XP-Dev at almost random. Seems to work but my needs are not large so not a real test of their service.