So, everybody knows that Apple's OS X Leopard operating system did not ship with Java 6. Even Java 5 did not work too well on it. Which is sad.

But then a smart individual called Landon Fuller stood up and with the help of the open source community he ported a version of BSD Java 6 to Leopard. This project is called SoyLatte and today they announced third preview release.

It is not production ready yet and it works only on Intel Macs at the moment. There are things missing like sound and native Swing implementation. But it seems to be active project and very interesting to follow. Unfortunately my mac is older with PPC architecture and this port wont work on it.

SoyLatte project site
Landon Fuller's blog

I had to exchange bunch of USD to HUF. The time is not really good for such transaction but it could not wait too much longer as USD seems to get weaker and weaker. I knew that there are places where the rate is really bad (airport, train stations) and then places where it is just bad (Váci utca, tourist areas). Because I had time during the weekend I took a walk and checked numerous places.

In the shopping malls there were exchange booths but the rate was 166-168. Then I took a 4/6 tram and I took a closer look whenever I saw a exchange office. This way I spotted a small place with rate of 172. First I checked from the guy in the booth the actual amount I would get and then I handed over the cash. This way I saved around 4000 HUF. Not much but at the same time I was able to do Xmas shopping as well.

Time to do some shopping before shops are totally crowded. Typical place to have hot wine and kürtős kalács is the Xmas market at Vörösmarty tér. But it wasn't ready yesterday as the construction of those huts was still going on. Most likely it will be ready for public on December 1st.

Besides shopping I am busy with planning. Especially the beginning of the year will be busy and exciting. Plenty of changes coming and I hope everything goes well.

Yesterday I returned home around 3 am. The reasons for such a late time was snow. I spent my weekend in UK and on the way back my flight was delayed 2.5 hours due some snowing at Luton airport. The big problem was that we were already in Wizzair's plane and we sat there. I was really tired so I slept that time partly. I have had bad luck with Luton airport. The previous time I was there somebody private jet overshoot the runway. Despite there was no real accident the whole airfield was closed for overnight.

Otherwise I had a great trip.

I am going to travel to UK on Thursday and my flight takes off from Ferihegy 1. Because I read some time ago that there is a train connection from Nyugati Pályaudvar I decided to check how it would work. Today I did some shopping in WestEnd and then I went to check the station.

But I could not find any information which train would go to the airport direction. After wandering around I spotted a small printed timetable where I could see some trains stopping at Ferihegy. But that timetable did not have track number and on the other hand the electronic timetable did not have train number or any hint about an airport connection. To find out the right track I would need know train's destination. If I would be an average tourist I would have to run around a lot to find the right train. After this research trip I decided to take a taxi or the usual metro+bus connection.

So, MÁV (Might ArriVe) has still a long way to go with customer service...

It has been snowing quite a lot today. But because ground is warm it wont stay. Well, nice difference to raining of the previous days.

After jMonkey Engine reached version 1.0 I decided to take a better look at it. So, this weekend I spent time checking examples, documentations and coding. And I have to say I am pretty happy with it.

I mentioned before, I have an idea for a simple game. The idea of it is that player could manufacture own fireworks in the workshop and then fire them away outdoors. Yea, it is far from World of Warcraft but I wanted something simple, fun and suitable for smaller kids also.

Those fireworks rely heavily on particle effects and therefore I started to learn about those. There are some useful examples and a nice particle test bench in the jME. Starting with those I managed to get my fireworks flying pretty easily. I only had to memorize some Newton's laws - shame on me. Other issues were zbuffering and alpha settings but searching jME discussion forums solved that.

After that it was time to add ground and sky. Again, there were examples providing ideas how to do such. This was more or less painless in programming vise but creating nice images of sky with stars caused headache. I used old Bryce 5 which used to work on OS X 10.3 but turned out to be really unstable on OS X 10.4.

Naturally a game needs some sound effects. I searched for suitable free sounds and I added sound playing calls. Again, minor problems as I did not know that volume of the audio clip has to be set explicitly.

At this point I refactored code and modified game to use more modern StandardGame instead of older SimpleGame. I am not sure how important it is to use StandardGame but it was easy to do at this point and I hope it will make switching between workshop and outdoor scenes easier.

I almost dropped from my chair while watching movie (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) from Hungarian TV. During commercials I noticed that Ievan Polkka is playing. It is used by Hungarian McCáfe... it definitely got my attention.

Arr... I joined Facebook some time ago but it did not really get me interested in it. The main reason was its slowness and confusing user interface. I was mostly curious about those 3rd party applications and how to develop one. Today I got notification that my friend has added a question application. But I can not answer to any of those questions without adding the same application to my own page. And that is so annoying... So instead playing with such I rather continue experimenting with jMonkey Engine and its particle features.

I have not updated this blog for a while. Maybe nothing really interesting has happened meanwhile. Or maybe I just consider it to be boring or private matter. Oh well, I heard a song from Radio Helsinki and it got stuck in my mind.

Happiness - Eternal sunshine