Blog Without An Important Name

I’ve just put out an 0.20 release of eMusic/J. This fixes an issue that appears only on some JVMs (in this case, it seems to be Blackdown) where System.getenv(String) isn’t supported. However, it doesn’t fail gracefully, no…it throws an Error (not just an Exception even).

See these Sun bug reports for details. I think that in Java 1.5 they put it back in, and GCJ seems to handle it OK too, which is why I hadn’t noticed it in my testing. Good thing too, I think removing it to be a very short-sighted decision. It’s more ‘pure’, but so much less practical for real world things that I can’t believe they actually took it out at all.

Users of eMusic/J 0.19 don’t need to upgrade (and won’t be prompted to), nothing else has changed. This is just to help new users.

I’m writing this post from my new computer, finally an upgrade from my venerable old Duron 700.

The specs on the new one are:
Athlon64 X2 4600+ AM2 2.4Ghz 512Kb cache
Asus M2N4-SLi AM2
2x 1Gb DDR2-800
2x Western Digital Caviar 250Gb SATA II 7,200RPM 16Mb cache
Gigabyte 7600GT PCIE Graphics card 256Mb DDR3

and I’m running Ubuntu 64-bit. It’s a nice change to have a machine that behaves in a responsive fashion.

A note to hopefully help anyone out there: I spent some time, with little success, looking for hardware compatibility reports for this motherboard on the internet. I’d heard issues with similar models and Linux. In particular, the M2N32 which has an nForce 5 chipset is supposed to be quite problematic. I’ve heard that Asus doesn’t care all that much about Linux users. The M2N4-SLI however uses nForce 4. So let me put this in a single sentence for anyone searching: The M2N4-SLI works great in Linux, I’ve had no problems whatsover. Sound, network, SATAII, USB, all that stuff was autodetected just fine. The only thing that doesn’t work like it should is hibernate, and I suspect that’s due to the closed-source nVidia graphics drivers. I’m not too concerned, I didn’t plan on using it anyway.

The other good thing is that it’s almost totally silent. Any noise from it is drowned out by the other, old machine that runs beside it, and that’s a fairly quiet one too.

The only issue I’ve had with the setup is that the graphics card won’t drive my 17″ CRT at anything under 85Hz, which it can handle, but makes it go a bit blurry. No matter what I told xorg.conf or XrandR, it wouldn’t change. So I’m using that as an excuse to buy a 19″ LCD, which I’ll have on Monday.