joustlog

Thanks to the QTComponents project, you can listen to music in Ogg Vorbis format with iTunes. However, the plugin does not import track numbers, which means iTunes plays albums of Oggs out of order.

A small Python script was posted a year or two ago at Mathieu Fenniak’s weblog which tries to fix this, but it doesn’t support the track numbers in files which also specify a track count (like “5/12″ to mean track 5 of 12).

I’ve fixed the script to support these files. You can download the fixed version here.

A week or two ago I posted an article here asking if anyone else’s browser locked up when a Java applet loaded. I did this because a Sun engineer, Jitender, said he or she “could not reproduce the momentary freeze” when I filed a bug report about it.

After I replied to Jitender with the responses I got to that article, they accepted the bug into the database. It’s Bug 6267809: Java applet on page causes browser to hang until Java is loaded.

Thanks to everyone who posted replies to the original article.

The bug

I filed a bug report to Sun after I was very surprised to find it had not already been filed, years ago. I got a response from a Sun engineer named Jitender:

“I tried this but could not reproduce the momentary freeze you have mentioned. It seems it could be related to RAM also. Even more RAM requirements are mentioned in JDK 5.0 Installation notes available at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/install-windows.html”

I have 512MB RAM, a 1.8Ghz P4-M, and a 5200RPM disk. Visiting a Java applet locks up for about 10 seconds the first time I visit. It happens to my friends, in IE and in Firefox, on Windows and Linux. I think it’s obviously not “not reproducible.”

Help get this fixed

So, tell me - when you visit a page with a Java applet, does your web browser completely lock up for a few seconds? If you’re not sure, visit this calculator applet and count how long your browser is unresponsive. If you notice any freeze, please leave a comment below with your system specs (memory, CPU, disk speed if possible) and how long it froze for.

Your results will be most useful if you make sure all Java programs on your computer are closed, so we get a “cold start” time. It would be even better if you restart your computer and don’t run any Java programs before visiting the above web site. However, any results will help!

I will forward your list of lock-up times and system configurations to Sun, so maybe they will believe me. I think fixing this problem would be a huge step towards Java being more accepted on the desktop.

UPDATE: The bug was filed as Bug 6267809 and was quickly marked “Closed, not a bug.” You should post your lockup times as comments to that bug, instead of here. I have posted all previous comments here as comments on the bug as well.

According to Graham Hamilton’s weblog entry, Java 5.0 Update 3 will not be distributed via java.com or the JVM auto-update feature, supposedly so as not to confuse users. This is despite Update 3 being informally labelled “the ‘.1′ release of the Tiger family” by Sun.

It looks like if you want your application to run on the latest Java 5.0, you have to ask your users to go through the tedious and confusing java.sun.com download page, with the invisible yellow button text and list of seemingly identical (but very different) download links.

If you want Sun to distribute the latest Java update in a way that makes it easy for users to upgrade, I suggest you post a comment on Graham’s weblog entry. I think with enough support they may change their policy.