Java News from Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Damn It. Somebody just sent me a spoiler for The System of the World. It's a 900 page book that came out two days ago! You may not have a life, but I do. Please give me a little time to read the thing before sending me commentary. I am officially not reading or answering any e-mail on the subject of Enoch Root, Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, or The Baroque Cycle until I have finished The System of the World. However, if you've finished Cryptonomicon yourself, you may be interested in new content I added yesterday to the What's up With Enoch Root? page. If you've finished The Confusion and Quicksilver, go ahead and read the new Baroque Cycle page which introduces some hyptoheses and evidence about the nature of Enoch Root from the first two books in the cycle.

The Eclipse Project has posted the second milestone of Eclipse 3.1, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It also doubles as a base platform for your own applications, an alternative to the AWT and Swing, and a powerful floor wax and dessert topping. The main new features in 3.1 are Ant 1.6.2, quick fixes for serial version IDs, and some (still incomplete) support for Java 1.5. New features in this milestone include:

• View all available keyboard shortcuts directly from the user interface or all keyboard shortcuts assigned in Eclipse from the Workbench > Keys preference page

• The SWT Browser widget on Linux now works with Mozilla 1.7 GTK2 as well as with previous Mozilla 1.4 GTK2 and above.

• CVS Outgoing commit sets allow you to organize outgoing changes into logical groups before they are committed.

• CVS label decorations can be configured to use color and font to highlight file states.

• Plug-ins can be downloaded in the background

• Breakpoint groups sounds potentially helpful, though I don't think this yet gives me the feature I really want (breakpoint conditioned on another breakpoint being reached. For instance, I want to break inside my SAX ContentHandler's startElement() method only if it's being invoked from the testBigDocument() method).

• Improved Java 1.5 support

Carnegie-Mellon University has posted the first beta of Sphinx-4, an open source speech recognition engine written in pure Java. features include:

• Live mode and batch mode speech recognizers, capable of recognizing discrete and continuous speech.
• Generalized pluggable front end architecture including implementations of preemphasis, Hamming window, FFT, Mel frequency filter bank, discrete cosine transform, cepstral mean normalization, and feature extraction of cepstra, delta cepstra, double delta cepstra features.
• Generalized pluggable language model architecture with support for ASCII and binary versions of unigram, bigram, trigram, Java Speech API Grammar Format (JSGF), and ARPA-format FST grammars.
• Generalized acoustic model architecture
• Generalized search management. Includes pluggable support for breadth first and word pruning searches.
• Utilities for post-processing recognition results, including obtaining confidence scores, generating lattices and embedding ECMAScript into JSGF tags.
• Standalone tools for displaying waveforms and spectrograms and generating features from audio.

Java 1.4 or later is required.

IBM's alphaWorks has released version 1.2.3 of the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4, a Java class library for working with MPEG-4 video and audio. Version 1.2.3 makes various bug fixes.