Re: thanks once again to michael and louise :)

On Jan 7, 12:05 pm, Ben Bullock <benkasminbull...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It's written in Java, so it's supposed to run on a refrigerator or
something. Which reminds me, I accidentally left Java switched on in
Firefox and today Java crashed Firefox so badly I had to reboot the
computer.

I know exactly what you mean. I get the same problem with firefox at
times. In fact one of my favourite webpages has a stock ticker written
in java - and firefox stupidly loads this in it's main event dispatch
thread - which means firefox freezes while the program loads. This
means you can't switch to another tab, you can't minimize firefox or
close it, and you can't cancel the load. Very annoying.

This kind of problem seems to happen incessantly with anything
to do with Java - first of all it eats all the memory in the computer,
then it crashes it.

In this instance the problem is with firefox - not Java. But I can
understand why you would think it has to do with Java, since the
problem only occurrs when Firefox loads a large Java applet. I'm not
sure exactly what part of firefox waits for the java to load but it is
definately a problem with firefox.

I've had some truly insane problems with the software
on my cellphone, also in Java, which at one point deleted almost all the
information in my Outlook calendar and all of the contact information in
Outlook when attempting to "synchronize" itself with the PC.

Dear lord. I've had that problem as well. I'm embarrassed to admit
that I had the synchronization configured from my palmpilot to the PC
- it deleted all my files on the PC because it thought I wanted to
make the PC look like the palm! Thank god for the trash bin. Once I
had recovered my files, I reconfigured the sharing app to copy files
both ways and I didn't have that problem anymore.

To be fair though i've seen some very weird problems with java myself.
As a palm owner (Tungsten E2) I've seen my fair share of oddities -
although to be honest only on the palm, never on the desktop. It would
crash a lot and if it wasn't for the reset button on the back of the
palm I would have thrown it in the trash a long time ago.

Another problem, when I test my program in the IDE it fails to close
about 1% of the time and I have to manually terminate the process.
This never happens outside of the IDE however so it wouldn't affect
end users of my program. Still it's something weird.

I don't need a flashcard program but I'd advise anyone who values their
sanity to steer clear of anything to do with Java.

Heh - I can understand your frustration with Java, which is one of the
reasons the Windows version will be available as an .exe file. That's
right, you won't need Java at all. In fact I'm going out of my way to
make sure you don't need to know anything about Java - the installers
for each computer will look like native code. The windows installer
will be a .msi or .exe file; macs will use .hqx or whatever it is macs
use. Linux will have a .bin file or an .rpm.

At any rate.. the latest java is stable enough that my development
environment, written in java, has never crashed. Kongzi is far simpler
than an IDE so I really don't expect any problems on that level. You
might want to make sure that you have the latest *stable* version of
Java. I'm in the habit of using the cutting edge beta versions as soon
as they're available and I do notice they have their fair share of
bugs - they're usually gone by the stable version. Come to think of it
now that I've installed the stable netbeans 6 and the stable java 1.6
(Java 1.6 update 3, not the beta version) I don't experience the
problems I talked about earlier.

-
.