Teppefall Labs

Changes to the website

2010-03-06T21:04:48Z

The Colorspace RGB color picker product page has been updated. Teppefall Layout and Effects have been moved to the Hybrid application development page.

We build bridges on top of other peoples bridges

2010-02-26T10:30:28Z

Some people are advocating that programmers should be hold to the same standards as structural engineers. Well, there are many problems with this line of thinking. Programmers don't build "a bridge". We build a bridge on top of another companies bridge. Which may be built on some third companies bridge, but we don't know that yet because the second company is under a non-disclosure agreement. In fact there may be several other bridges that we don't know about, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, affecting the structural integrity of the whole project.

]]> Engineers, pilots and medical personnel are highly regulated professions because they can kill people if they make the wrong call. Most Xbox programmers just make people slightly fatter. Some people point out how a bad piece of medical software killed two people by overexposing them to radiation. Software once blew up an Ariane 5 rocket. And Toyota is being hounded over the Prius by a bunch of pork farmer wannabe politicians who pretend to be worried about safety. Are they for real ? In the 1950ies American cars cut people's heads off on a regular basis and nobody raised an eyebrow.

One American wrote a book a long time ago called "Unsafe at any speed". American politicians should read a little and then understand just how dumb this whole Toyota thing looks. The real reason why programmer regulation is even an issue is because the American insurance industry is desperate for cash. So they're lobbying to turn programmers into yet another medical system cash cow. Because Obama might cut off the "free blow and hookers" employment clause that so many American CEO's depend upon. American logic is so complicated and subtle and yet the end result so primitive and immature. Or in the words of an American:

"Those guys are so full of shit".

PS
According to InfoWorld, the United States actively discriminates against programmers. I didn't know that. And the corrupt legal process doesn't help either. No wonder all the consulting work is going to India and the hardware production to China. It's judicial indemnification. Why do people think Linux/Nokia was started by Finns, Spotify/Ericsson by Swedes and Qt/Opera by Norwegians ? Because we don't have to piss away our lives in the legal system to "create something" "that works" "maybe".

Why the Apple iPad has no Java or Flash

2010-02-02T23:38:56Z

For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support. Personally I wonder why these people are still employed in the technology sector, but why not write down all the reasons before I get too arrogant and annoying.

- HTML5 and open standards might be seen as a reason, but it's not. Apple will always use closed Apple API's if they believe this will give the best result. Apple loves the web because it gives them access to millions of potential users who just browse Facebook and GMail all day long. Safari is an easy sell. Also, Safari is based on open source and Apple hand is more or less forced.

]]> - Cocoa Touch is not the same thing as Snow Leopard. Carbon support, several subsystems and the older Cocoa stuff is not there. So porting a desktop plugin system becomes harder and may result in a less stable platform. Adobe has a terrible track record when it comes to plugins. Acrobat and Flash are hated by millions of people. Acrobat startup time is terrible and Flash 10 is horrendously bad on PPC. And moving Photoshop to Cocoa took so long that Apple lost all faith in Adobe's ability to deliver a good experience on Cocoa Touch.

- Flash and Java are not known for their lightweight CPU usage. Even if Cocoa Touch had stellar implementations installed these plugins would eat a lot of battery time. On my single core machine I can either surf two websites with Flash advertising or 50 websites without Flash. Just install FlashBlock if you don't believe me.

- Adobe/Macromedia shot themselves in the foot many years ago by adding advertising templates to Flash Professional. And because of this every moronic graphic designer wannabe in the world started producing Flash advertising running at 99 percent CPU. Because 60FPS is better than 30FPS right ?

- Flash cookies are pure deep evil and in use every single day. Several websites refuse to show video without them because they are selling your ass to advertisers. Flash trackers steal CPU every single time you visit major websites and would pollute the 3G network with trillions of worthless HTTP connections. Install FlashBlock to see them on top of websites everywhere.

- Free Flash games directly compete with the iTunes App Store. Apple could loose thousands of paying iPhone developers, with Apple hardware, if they added Flash support. And suddenly the exclusivity is lost since the Flash game runs everywhere else as well.

- The codec nightmare continues. Steve may bitch about Bluray all he wants, but it's all a BIG FAT LIE. Apple doesn't want to support Bluray yet because HDCP will make Apple users feel like complete fraking retards for choosing Apple hardware. Oh, your $3000 screen or projector doesn't support this film and/or YouTube clip ! How sad.

- But what about JavaFX ! Yeah, right. There is no multi-touch API and the JavaFX developers are trying to EOL all the Swing developers by fire-walling the dependencies with Web Start. Windows 7 already has multi-touch support and Sun/Oracle and Adobe are still playing the waiting game. Either support Windows 7 multi-touch or shut up.

Apple iPad is the first complete, general purpose, computer DRM platform and all people bitch about is plugins. Music DRM went away because it was stupid. Idiot users pirate everything not bolted down and you end up with Bluray, Xbox, Playstation, Kindle, iPhone and now the Apple iPad. There has never been more DRM and people think they are winning. No, because Internet piracy and hardware piracy has given birth to yet another locked down platform. Because companies need to make money and do what is required.

The iPad exists because you wanted it. Blame yourself if you don't like it. Personally, I might buy one for my mom. Because it's probably a great piece of web surfing, picture browsing, hardware. And OMG do I need one of those.

Apple iPad proves that OS X has a huge piracy problem

2010-01-28T17:21:56Z

So finally the myth about the wealthy Apple user has been broken. These people spend all their money on hardware and then Apple has to smack them into legal mode with a cryptographically signed application platform.

Sure, the iPad is a very cool product. But it's basically a DRM platform for people people who claim to hate DRM. The fight against music DRM was not "won". The reason Apple removed DRM from music was because, unlike movies and software, music is something we move around with. We listen to music in the car, on our cell phone, while painting a fence and when we wake up. Music needs to be mobile and multi-platform. Music needs to be an open standard.

I don't care about DRM or no-DRM. I just build what people want and what is financially sustainable. And the iPad more or less tells us everything we need to know about the marked. And that most people are children who can't understand copyright warnings.

There is no "no-copyright" world. Only more DRM. Like Xbox, Bluray, Kindle, iPhone and iPad. The alternative story would be that 3G forces a DRM solution. But is that really the case when you run one application at a time ?

Technological analysis of the Apple iPad

2010-01-28T15:20:44Z

Enhanced iPhone OS instead of Snow Leopard. Logical maybe, but there are many problems with this.

No multitasking ? Uploading files while surfing the web is too fancy ? Downloading email while checking out some music in iTunes is advanced ? Working in a console while moving files ?

Does this thing only run Apple signed applications ?

People who hate the wide bezel are idiots. You totally need it.

Does this product prove that Apple users pirate music, film and software because they can't afford the hardware in the first place ? Feels a bit like a DRM platform.

The application "iBooks" looks like something from Delicious Monster.

There is no camera because why would you need one ? It would shake around like a rubber ball.

Are we all sitting like girls now ? What about people with testicles and small sofas ?

Windows 7 tablet users will make fun of it. LOL, it only runs one app at a time.

It's affordable because it has to be. If it had cost a $1000 everyone would buy a MacBook or an HP instead. If they had the money to begin with that is. The economy is weak and the credit marked tight.

JavaFX is a Trojan horse

2010-01-27T09:46:50Z

JavaFX is not about integrating with Swing. JavaFX is about turning Swing into OS 9 Classic. Soon enough JavaFX will be "enhanced" with a new Swing incompatible rendering engine and the divide will be complete. The Java Store DRM platform works as a legacy launcher and as a public relations move. This is why JMediaPane is gone, the JavaFX designer late and why the whole thing is based on Web Start. Swing will get access to JavaFX through some ass backwards API.

What's pretty funny about this whole drama is that Microsoft is backing down from their "pure WPF/Silverlight" mantra. Because almost all their internal developers are pissed off by msbuild and slower than Java Swing bootup time. WPF is pretty and simple, but heavy and hard to debug when something goes wrong. Read something somewhere about binding logic creating new types of memory leaks as well.

Here is the dirt from Oracle. Check out "Java" and "Developer Tools".

Sure, Oracle will still support Swing and add features. It just looks like one part of Sun is trying to get another part of Sun fired. How do you else explain SwingComponent.wrap() and JXScene ?

Speculating on the Apple tablet

2010-01-22T14:42:07Z

I think it's going to be based on the Apple Air, because of the battery design, with a big chunk of either SSD or generic Flash storage. With some new form of virtual keyboard layout. And a few extra touch moves.

The reason Java is not on the iPhone has little to do with Java and everything to do with Cocoa Touch being a fork without all the crufty Carbon stuff which still lies underneath Cocoa. And Flash was banned too because Flash 10 has privacy issues (advertising trackers) and uses way too much CPU. An iPhone with Flash would survive 12 hours, or something like that, if the user was a fan of Youtube. People would be mad as hell and blame Apple. Apple will probably use HTML5, Animated PNG/MNG/SVG and CSS3 as a replacement.

]]> Basically "pure Cocoa" on the desktop is a myth created by people who only use the latest and greatest and who live inside Interface Builder. The reality is that a serious programmer has to support the operating system that existed before the current one. And that means in effect that people have now started to drop Tiger support. Just think about creating a Windows application that only supports Windows 7 or even Vista. OS X people are actually more forgiving than Windows users in this respect.

I think Apple will use Snow Leopard for the tablet though, unless the device is tiny and is a one hand thing. Then Cocoa Touch is more logical. Though a tablet would be a great showcase for the Snow Leopard resolution independence code.

Web apps are not apps, they're well-oiled DRM

2010-01-20T01:53:55Z

Ehm. Sorry about that mental image if you a synonym person.

I love the web. Love it. But spending my life in web apps all day long sounds like a nightmare. This because Internet bandwidth and Javascript speed is not the problem. People see YouTube and suddenly think it's like TV, except it's not. And people see "web apps" and think they're like other apps. And for many people Facebook is "the killer app". But the thing is that the biggest problem in computing is latency. And 3G sucks at latency. And yet mobile computing and cloud computing is seen as the future.

]]> Studies have shown that people will drop a company if the website loads too slow. Heck, they will drop the services of billion dollars companies and try out the new upstart because they think they have better servers. There is no limit to the amount of retarded web application developers talking about how their new service is "faster than Twitter". Yes, and if you don't understand why then maybe software development is not for you.

The questions so becomes. Can you compete with Google's dark fiber or simply create a desktop application ? Because if you want to compete on latency, there is only one choice. The cloud is just bullshit marketing resulting from government spending and a truckload of servers sitting idle in huge AC cooled data-centers. Even at idle, they still need AC. And AC creates "the cloud". And it's all powered by cheap electricity produced by nuclear power and coal. The cloud will never scale as a dominant computing platform. A laptop with a solar panel powered battery will. Apple will build it and Google will looks like planet haters. And what do you expect ? Google is an ad agency. They sell bullshit for a living. Don't be evil is a SQL injection attack without the hostile code. *Zing*.

San Francisco is flat. I live in Norway. We have tunnels, mountains and one of the best 3G networks in the world. And it's crap compared to a hard line. It's like living in 1996, then 2009 and then 1987. I know an inside industry guy who tells me that some places in the city has so much radio noise that it's impossible to move a signal from one building to the next. There is a loudness war going on right among us and nobody notices because we can't hear those frequencies. We just complain about lost cell phone signals. Yeah and the fact that human fertility is going down for some reason. *Gulp*.

The mobile web app has been "the future" for ten years now. Maybe it's time to deliver. We can't all be Google, Twitter and Facebook. I'm just so utterly unimpressed by everything. I use Spotify, File Explorer, Dropbox, Open Office, iTunes, Putty, QtCreator, Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Battlefield 2 and wonder what the hell people are talking about. The only web applications I use are related to hosting, blogging, sales and advertising. Is this the world of a "normal" person or a blow-hard marketing guru ?

Teppefall releases brand new Norwegian language website

2010-01-18T17:21:22Z

Go check it out at http://teppefall.no. Very sparse, but developing software takes time. The underlying tech is more interesting though. This is the first Teppefall system based on Xen and hot deployment. Still using dedicated hardware, but trying to reduce cost. So far the experience has been rather bad because of tons of SSH problems. Hopefully this will be resolved.

64bit support is coming

2010-01-15T23:46:34Z

Supporting 64bit is not very important when most of your code is in Java. But Teppefall does have around 300kb of C++ that needs to be ported. And the process is something like this.

Install crazy big Windows SDK and Visual Studio on Windows 7.

Realize that the Windows documentation is wrong when it comes to "vcvarsall.bat amd64".

Dig around for a while.

Find the correct BAT based configuration files and drag them into the application menu.

Create custom makefiles.

Scratch your head as Microsoft uses the suffix "32" in paths and library names everywhere.

More mind numbingly boring rewriting of makefiles.

Everything compiles, but Winsock related code is broken. Might be configuration. Might be worse.

Realize that 64bit JRE writes a registry JVM value that points to a non-existent file. My fault ?

But the code supports that, so just use TEPPEFALL_JVM variable.

Success!

Itanium support is probably not happening. The compiler can't find "Windows.h" under the IPF configuration and that's kind of a problem unless I want to dynamically load every method. 64bit Windows 7 also seems to crash some plug-in based systems. They keep changing the security model and developers are behind all the time for some reason. Although, the same problem exists on 64bit Linux. Which is stranger since 64bit compiler support is just a GCC parameter away.

Colorspace 2.6

2009-12-20T17:04:09Z

Release notes 2.6
The old theme is still supported, but you must now add a parameter to activate it. On Windows you use the parameter -Xgraphite and on OS X you must follow the instructions inside the Info.plist file. You only get the old advanced color panel by choosing this theme.
Tiger support is solid, but Leopard and Snow Leopard users might have problems if they have incompatible system wide settings. This is a result of Apple choosing to lock the JRE to the OS X version. This makes it harder to test multiplatform software.
The Colorspace Hue value is not RGB compatible. This is not a bug. The color logic used internally is based on RYB (red-yellow-blue). This has no effect on the color picker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_color_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Color_star-en.svg

Native LAF logic is being rewritten
-Xlaf=org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceOfficeSilver2007LookAndFeel

Happy holidays and a happy new year!

Teppefall releases Spotify and Twitter powered music site

2009-12-17T10:21:41Z

Platespiller.net is a 100 percent meta-music service based on web services. This means that Teppefall depends 100% on external content providers and that the service can be altered or shut down at any moment.

Basically, this is just an experiment. It's all about learning new things. Platespiller.net is targeted at the Scandinavian marked. The idea is to think of music as social objects that move from friend to friend through the social web. There are no plans to support Facebook or Myspace integration.

This product is a work in progress.

Spotify links
http://platespiller.net

Twitter search
http://open.platespiller.net/twitter?q=%23nowplaying

Which one is Swing and which one is WPF ?

2009-12-11T09:54:35Z

The volume component gives it away. But Silverlight 4 may change that.

Sun is missing out on a huge opportunity

2009-12-10T21:54:36Z

By being hell bent on "finishing" JavaFX instead of augmenting Swing Sun has more or less destroyed their credibility as a desktop platform company. The reality is that Swing plus a scene graph, accelerated layers and a new media framework is more valuable than the entire JavaFX ecosystem. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla and Google all believe that XML is the future of layout and yet Sun believes a non-standard syntax based on Lisp and JSON is the way to go. And the fact that C#, Actionscript, Dalvik and Javascript are all Java clones seems to indicate that Java is just fine as a user interface language. Adobe even exports twine animation code as XML and vectors as SVG. I sit here working in Adobe Creative Suite and wonder what Sun is thinking.

]]> Microsoft has been working on WPF for ages and yet WPF-Silverlight compatibility is a nightmare. Why should Sun succeed when almighty Microsoft is still working out the kinks in their new UI platform ? How can Sun rip out Swing from JavaFX and still be relevant ? Is this even realistic ? JavaFX is basically just a new way to make resolution independent software. Swing developers have to babysit a bunch of pixels so I understand why JavaFX is seen as a good idea.

Let JavaFX exist. Let them work on it full-time. Take care of that poorly hidden Android envy. But don't ignore Swing and Java. Porting WPF code to Silverlight is a royal pain in the ass. Qt and Phonon breaks on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 64. Flash 10 requires you to buy a small nuclear power-plant for some reason. The only media player I have that runs everywhere is my Swing based media player.

Quicktime for Windows is terrible. The Windows Media Player is conservative. The Adobe Media Player requires extra uranium rods. And yet Sun doesn't want us to make something better. Something that Sun could use to promote their own brand. Something that removes the need for Flash based video players on Sun dot com. Something to be proud of. Something that people actually use. My web server runs Java 2D and ImageIO code. Even in a world of zero Java desktop customers, they will still be using Graphics2D when they access the Teppefall website. Because the technology behind Swing runs almost everywhere.

I simply ask, why is Swing obsolete when Linux people still use X11 and severely broken audio API's ? Why can't Java 2D get its Cocoa moment ? If web developers can code Objective C, then surely Sun can create a better Swing. All they have to do is move parts of JavaFX into the core via a kernel update. Everybody wins.

People who claim that Swing sucks have never tried multi-platform programming. Everything sucks. And the moving target that is the Microsoft security architecture will just amplify this. WPF exists because native DLL's and Windows API calls are being locked down for security reasons. This is all hugely ironic. Microsoft rejected Java and then reimplemented everything themselves with a similar focus. And what's even more ironic is that developers turned to Nokia Qt instead of WPF because of the fear of vendor lock-in. So this is all very "Back to the Future". Microsoft goes all resolution independent plus VM and developers run away screaming towards Qt/C++ and Cocoa/Objective C.

The alternative is to create web applications. And all that does is move us into a world of 100 percent DRM, dropped calls and extreme pollution. Imagine a world where everything is as slow as Google Docs. There is not enough uranium in the world to run all the shitty Chrome OS clients connected to Youtube. Desktop development is suddenly the green alternative which really sounds absurd. Google Chrome OS is simply Sun Rays with browsers instead of VNC targeted towards middle class people in India. I wonder if Google demands lead free Chrome OS computers. Chinese people would prefer their rice without lead "vitamins" (Pb).

I love the web, but most web applications are, well, just terrible. And a ten times faster Javascript engine will not change this. Because killer apps don't survive view source and never will. On the web everything gets cloned, repackaged and resold. Those who survive simply hide their code on the server. And this is why Google is such a hypocrite. Do you think Google would survive server side view source ? No, their advertising network would implode because of click fraud. On the web you win because you are ahead of the other guy by a tiny margin. People use Google because they don't think Google is gamed. And if you don't understand what I'm talking about then check out Digg. If people knew the internal sorting algorithm everything would be spam, Google and big corporations. Search would turn into email. Do people really think that Google engineers moving to Web 2.0 companies are in no way related to their understanding on how to build traffic ?

The most damning thing about JavaFX is that Jonathan Swartz claimed it would let you escape the "hostile browser". The browser is not hostile. It's the new security sandbox. Java, Actionscript, C#, Vmware, Parallels and Firefox are all protecting Microsoft Windows from the web. The entire Web 2.0 phenomenon was simply a manifestation of a weak Windows XP security architecture. Web developer smugness is based on an extremely naive world view. They have jobs because the web used to be a mess. But in the future, web applications will be made by your mom and foreign students with pirated software. Just look at blogs. Everyone is doing it. 16 year old girls have more traffic than I do. Because 14 year old girls are a bigger marked than whiny programmers who don't want to pay for anything. The web is a manifestation of economic principles. The problem is just that everybody wants to be a Starbucks in Beijing. Which is economically absurd.

WPF MediaElement and Qt Phonon demos released

2009-11-14T08:22:09Z

You can now compare the Swing JMC system with the WPF and Qt equivalents. These Windows programs are beta quality and not feature complete. The big problem here is of course that the latest version of JmediaPane is not available to anyone outside the big castle surrounded by fire breathing dragons. And therefore bug reports and general feedback is just a colossal waste of time.

]]> And while I'm talking about wasting time. Why on earth is there no web version of the Java Store ? The website store.java.com is just a stupid promo site. Imagine a world where we had something called web servers that where indexed by something called search engines and people could link, using something called URL's, to content that was interesting to them. Instead of trying to compete with the real world, Sun developers have created their very own VB5 client connected to the mother-ship computer. Because everyone knows "that client" and "what they used" and many other VB5 clients that served "some company" in 1997.

But what really gets me is that Sun makes a big stink about the fact that the store is free for consumers. The word free is even in bold on the Java Store homepage. It sort of feels like the people behind this project are unaware of what a fancy store actually -is-. Maybe Sun employees are all warehouse club members who purchase 700 liters of generic Coca Cola once a year ? Is Sun really trying to be the Costco of software ? How much is a pallet of software going for these days anyway ?

User experience doesn't mean "hire some designers". It means embrace and evolve the product on company time, even when that means pissing people off. But those people better not be external developers during decision making time. You can piss people off, but only after having brainwashed them with snazzy effects and one dollar bills. Quarters only work with vending machines. Developers have standards.