How to install JOGL on Debian

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JOGL is an OpenGL binding for Java (wiki) which wraps the C OpenGL API. On Debian-based systems, installing and using it is not a complex task.

First, install it:

apt-get install libjogl2-java

Next, you need these JAR files in your build path:

/usr/share/java/jogl2.jar
/usr/share/java/gluegen2-rt.jar

In Eclipse, this is achieved by clicking Project -> Properties -> Java Build Path -> Libraries -> Add External Jar.

(If you don’t have gluegen2-rt.jar, then you need to install the libgluegen2-rt-java package as well).

Re-arranging columns on JTables

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As I’m only new to Java UI work, I was surprised to see how easy it is to work with tables. A few things I’ve learnt:

  • JTables only show column headers if the table is placed inside a JScrollPane
  • It’s really annoying to drag-and-drop narrow, resizable columns, so turn off resizing.

I ended up with this user-rearrangeable table:

Basic code for this, thanks to Google Windowbuilder:

import java.awt.EventQueue;

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JTable;
import javax.swing.table.DefaultTableModel;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;

public class TableTestWindow {
	private JFrame frame;
	private JTable table;

	/**
	 * Launch the application.
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
			public void run() {
				try {
					TableTestWindow window = new TableTestWindow();
					window.frame.setVisible(true);
				} catch (Exception e) {
					e.printStackTrace();
				}
			}
		});
	}

	/**
	 * Create the application.
	 */
	public TableTestWindow() {
		initialize();
	}

	/**
	 * Initialize the contents of the frame.
	 */
	private void initialize() {
		frame = new JFrame();
		frame.setBounds(100, 100, 525, 520);
		frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
		frame.getContentPane().setLayout(null);

		JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane();
		scrollPane.setBounds(12, 12, 460, 440);
		frame.getContentPane().add(scrollPane);

		table = new JTable();
		table.setFillsViewportHeight(true);
		scrollPane.setViewportView(table);
		table.setRowSelectionAllowed(false);
		table.setColumnSelectionAllowed(true);
		table.setModel(new DefaultTableModel(
			new Object[][] {
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
				{null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null},
			},
			new String[] {
				"A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z"
			}
		) {
			/**
			 * Java coughs up warnings if we dont do this
			 */
			private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

			public Class getColumnClass(int columnIndex) {
				return String.class;
			}

			public boolean isCellEditable(int row, int column) {
				return false;
			}
		});

		for(int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
			table.getColumnModel().getColumn(i).setResizable(false);
			table.getColumnModel().getColumn(i).setPreferredWidth(20);
		}

	}
}

Introducing BigInteger

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Most ordinary-scale programs don’t use very large numbers, but today I’ll show you how to use Java to do some more serious calculating, with the Fibonacci numbers as an example:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, …

The numbers in this sequence always get larger, so you don’t need to be a software engineer to see that int and long wont be big enough. Just to highlight the problem, here is a naive approach to listing the Fibonacci numbers:

class FibonacciLong {
	static long solutions = 0;

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		long num1 = 0;
		long num2 = 1;
		long tmp;
		solution(num1);
		solution(num2);
		while(true) {
			tmp = num1 + num2;
			solution(tmp);
			num1 = num2;
			num2 = tmp;
		}
	}

	static void solution(long number) {
		solutions++;
		System.out.println(solutions + "t" + number);
	}
}

The output of this program overflows after the 93rd term. Java only uses signed integer types, so we end up with a negative number:

1	0
2	1
3	1
4	2
5	3
6	5
....
92	4660046610375530309
93	7540113804746346429
94	-6246583658587674878

To find larger values, we can use the BigInteger class, under java.math. They are constructed like this:

BigInteger num1 = new BigInteger("0");

They don’t really work like the primitive types. They are manipulated with methods like .add() and .subtract(), rather than the operators that we are accustomed to: + - * / %.

The below code has been written with BigInteger instead of long. It will return the nth term of the Fibonacci sequence, or enumerate solutions until the cows come home.

import java.math.BigInteger;

class FibonacciBigInteger {
	static long solutions = 0;
	static long find = 0;

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		if(args.length >= 1) {
			find = Long.parseLong(args[0]);
		}
		BigInteger num1 = new BigInteger("0");
		BigInteger num2 = new BigInteger("1");
		BigInteger tmp;
		solution(num1);
		solution(num2);

		while(true) {
			tmp = num1.add(num2);
			solution(tmp);
			num1 = num2;
			num2 = tmp;
		}
	}

	static void solution(BigInteger number) {
		solutions++;
		if(find == 0 || solutions == find) {
			System.out.println(number.toString());
			if(find != 0) { System.exit(0); }
		}
	}
}

The good news is that this program is now capable of working with numbers too large to say aloud. So today is a good day to start using Unix’s wc program to appreciate how big these numbers actually are:

mike~$ java FibonacciBigInteger 420000 | wc -m
87776

Subtract one character because there is an end-of-line in the output— and this means that the 420,000th Fibonacci number is 8775 digits long. We have discovered a new fact!

Note: There is still one variable in the program above that will overflow eventually, so you should also convert that to a BigInteger if you are hoping to calculate past about the nine quintillionth Fibonacci number (which you would be crazy to do with this method).

Palindromes

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This is a highly miscellaneous Java snippet to find palindromes.

It will read stdin line-by-line and spit back the palindromes it finds.

import java.io.*;

class Palindrome {
	/* Return palindromes from a given list of words read from stdin */

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		boolean okay;
		String line;
		BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
		do {
			try {
				/* Read a line, and spit it back again it if is a palindrome */
				line = input.readLine();
				if(isPalindrome(line)) {
					System.out.println(line);
				}
				okay = true;
			} catch (Exception e) {
				/* Exception will be raised after end-of-file */
				okay = false;
			}
		} while(okay);
	}

	static boolean isPalindrome(String test) {
		/* Return true if a string is palindromic, false otherwise */
		int len = test.length();
		if(len <= 1) {
			/* Disallow null / single-char palindromes */
			return false;
		}

		for(int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
			/* Compare first and last, second and second-last, etc) */
			if(test.charAt(i) != test.charAt(len - 1 - i)) {
				/* Found different letters, stopping. */
				return false;
			}
		}
		return true;
	}
}

On UNIX, you could feed it a dictionary to list all of the palindromes:

java Palindrome < /etc/dictionaries-common/words

On my computer that returns 57 palindromes made from ordinary words:

aha	bib	bob
boob	civic	dad
deed	deified	did
dud	eke	ere
eve	ewe	eye
gag	gig	hah
huh	kayak	kook
level	ma'am	madam
MGM	minim	mom
mum	non	noon
nun	oho	pap
peep	pep	pip
poop	pop	pup
radar	redder	refer
rotor	sagas	sees
seres	sexes	shahs
sis	solos	stats
tat	tenet	tit
toot	tot	wow

There are certainly more if we allow 1-letter words or case-insensitive matching (allowing all sorts of proper nouns), but I really don't think they count.

Finding prime numbers

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It’s not so hard to calculate small-ish primes. The below method is called a prime sieve, and can be done manually:

Take two, the smallest prime number.
We know that no multiples of two are prime (4, 6, 8, 10, 12 etc), so we can cross them off our list and just print two.
Then we go to 3. 3 is prime. But 6, 9, 12 and 15 can’t be, so we print 3 and cross those multiples off.
4 has been marked as not prime, so we skip it.
5 is prime, so we cross off 10, 15, 20.
so on and so forth

Computers are much better at this than humans though, so I wrote this algorithm up in java. You can find all primes up to n fairly quickly (for small values of n).

class Primes {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		int searchMax = 16777216;
		if(args.length == 1) {
			/* Allow over-riding the maximum */
			searchMax = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
		}
		boolean[] isprime = new boolean[searchMax];

		int i, tmp, count = 0;

		/* Initialise */
		isprime[0] = isprime[1] = false;
		for(i = 2; i < searchMax; i++) {
			isprime[i] = true;
		}

		/* Main loop */
		for(i = 2; i < searchMax; i++) {
			if(isprime[i]) {
				System.out.println(i);
				count++;
				tmp = i * 2;
				while(tmp < searchMax) {
					isprime[tmp] = false;
					tmp += i;
				}
			}
		}
		System.err.println("Found " + count + " primes between 1 and " + searchMax + " non-inclusive");
	}
}

Of course, the limitation of this is that java isn’t terribly good at handling larger arrays, so I wouldn’t expect more than a few million primes from this code.

Update: The above code was tested for finding the first 7 million prime numbers.

Gettting lost with depth-first search

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I was thinking about how to make mazes, and ended up making a maze generator.

It’s based on ‘depth-first search’, a recursive algorithm to make a spanning tree. Example output below:

Unfortunately for us, java doesn’t particularly like deep recursion, so this generator will fizzle out with an error on really big mazes. On the other hand, it can produce output as HTML:

You can download the maze generator here:

It’s a command line program. From the terminal, the usage is like this:

java -jar MazeGenerator.jar [width] [height] [formatting]

Width/height will change the size of your maze. You can set the format to ‘html’, or type in a character for the filled-in blocks to be. (The default is u2588 ‘Solid block’).

Solving the eight queens puzzle

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In the eight queens puzzle, you need to place eight queens on a chessboard so that they aren’t attacking eachother. It has 92 solutions.

I implemented one method for solving the problem. It works for any nxn chessboard, but it’s not so fast with large boards.

You can invoke this with java -jar Queens.jar for an 8×8 board, or java -jar Queens.jar n for an nxn board with n queens.

It works by processing the board in vertical strips, first placing a queen in the top-right, and then attempting to place a queen in the second column at the first available space. Once it crosses the board like this, it has found a solution, but it goes through plenty of bad combinations first.

Update: online solution-viewer is now running to make that command-line output more useful.