Science & Code

• Michael May 17, 2010

  Mobile tagging is awesome.

  Culture, General

  

  One thing you have got to love about Japan is the fact that the Japanese actually apply new technologies in real-life situations. Studying computer science I’ve seen tons of cool things which (sadly) never made it into the real-world.

  Concentrating really hard, an old orange-juice commercial comes to mind. A guy walks into a grocery store and modifies the EAN code using a felt pen, forcing the register to display “I love you ♥” instead of just “0.39DM”, which of course makes the cute female teller fall madly in love with that guy.

  Putting Romanticism and the fact that usually cool guys in leather jackets don’t know the EAN coding of uncommon ASCII characters aside, the cute cashier would of course never fall for something that involves things as uncool as EAN codes. Anyway, here, QR-codes are in heavy use. You whip out your phone, take a shot and are able to buy, browse, read-about, etc. whatever code your cellphone’s camera captured — a system called mobile tagging which is, to put it in just one word, awesome! You can encode virtually anything with these markers :)

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• Felix May 6, 2010

  Wolfram, NKS and lot of books

  Culture, General, Science

  Caused by an intensive (yet, sadly, fruitless) use of Wolfram|Alpha¹ I recently came upon the strange phenomena duped NKS and its inventor² and main proponent Stephen Wolfram. What a strange character.
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  1. Tell me any other tool that can answer important questions like this? [↩]
  2. I’ve read several accusations of Stephen Wolfram stealing ideas; at least one can say he did not properly address previous work in that direction [↩]
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• Felix May 3, 2010

  Handling mouse events transparently in Swing

  Code, Tutorial

  I recently had the task to implement a basic roll-over behavior in a Swing GUI. Pretty simple — or so I thought.

  The main problem in Swing is that mouse events are consumed automatically once you employ the very convenient MouseEventHandler, but that might cause some trouble in more sophisticated components. In my case it came down to a JTextPane which can display html and thus had clickable links in it. This JTextPane should be hidden by default and only be visible if a certain element was rolled over by the mouse cursor (similar to a pop-out menu). And there the headaches began: the mouse enter/exit events needed to be captured, but the JTextPane should still receive all mouse events in order to handle the link clicking.

  To make things short: this is simple unsolvable in Swing alone. We needs to get our hands dirty and use some of the underlying AWT (yuck!) event handling.
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