Panama City, Panama, 24 May 2004 - Developers put the final touches, this
weekend on the beta version of NeuClear, an open-source payment protocol and infrastructure.  The beta version is on line at http://bux.neuclear.org and the developers are hoping for feedback from the technology community.  Once the beta phase is completed, NeuClear-in cooperation with VERAX Inc.-will deploy their first production services. These will be NeuClear-based systems designed to revolutionize third-world micro-lending projects.  

According to Pelle Braendgaard, NeuClear’s lead developer,

We want NeuClear to be the Skype of payment systems.  NeuClear will change everything from micro-lending to online payments to wire transfers.  We even intend to offer an inexpensive alternative to Western Union and MoneyGram.

NeuClear is an open-source protocol for processing payments, exchanges and other business transactions.  It is intended to replace today’s non-interoperable, proprietary, payment systems.  NeuClear differs radically from these old legacy systems by creating an environment of unprecedented transparency—including the ability to monitor any transaction in real-time and to archive and later audit, every step of every transaction.

The first company to use a NeuClear-based system for commercial transactions will be VERAX Inc.  VERAX will also help NeuClear provide free assistance to micro-lending projects to streamline operations by eliminating
their back offices.  It will also prepare them to participate in VERAX’s
Micro-Exchange, an on-line secondary market where investors can trade micro-loan packages and micro-fund investments.

ABOUT NeuClear - NeuClear was largely developed by Pelle Braendgaard with the help of other dedicated volunteers.  It is released under the Lesser Gnu Public License.  For more information about NeuClear, visit the NeuClear website.

ABOUT VERAX Inc. - VERAX is an alternative secured payment system, primarily intended for use on the Internet, but with the ability to support many other market applications.  Some of its initial applications will be to
provide a stored-value payment system for inexpensive funds transfers,
Internet payments, prepaid telephone and Internet payment cards and brick-and-mortar payment services.   For more information about VERAX, visit the VERAX website.

Just saw Alan’s entry about web start, which pretty much mirrors my experiences. I am developing an IM like end user tool NeuClear Personal Trader for the NeuClear open source clearing system. I’m currently doing many changes to it throughout the day in response to user interactions etc.

As such it is probably one of the most excellent additions to the development cycle of gui apps. Web apps are relatively easy to redeploy, but gui apps have traditionally been a pain in the ass.

Every time I deploy a new change the user just has to restart the application and it’s done.

Using Maven JNLP

I use Maven, which I know many people dislike. For me though it’s great. I was able to start creating Java Web Start apps with only a very slight knowledge of the api. Maven includes the very cool JNLP Plugin. You simply add a few properties to your project.properties. The following are from mine:

maven.jnlp.title=NeuClear Personal Trader
maven.jnlp.vendor=Antilles Software Ventures SA
maven.jnlp.homepage=http://neuclear.org
maven.jnlp.icon=$$context/images/neuclearicon.png
maven.jnlp.icon.splash=$$context/images/neuclearsplash.jpg
maven.jnlp.permission=all
maven.jnlp.http.codebase=$$codebase
maven.jnlp.mainclass = org.neuclear.signers.standalone.QuickStart
maven.jnlp.jardiff=true
maven.jnlp.j2se.version=1.4

and type:

$ maven jnlp

The plugin does the rest.

The wonders of JarDiff

One of the biggest complaints had from users initially was that everytime I made a change to a jar file they had to download the whole jar again. I did some research and discovered Sun’s JNLP Download Servlet.

This does a few clever things with regards to serving web startable apps, but the coolest is the JarDiff functionality.

Lets say the user has already got dom4j version 1.4 installed on their PC and you updated your app to use 1.5. The next time the user goes to start your app, the Web Start client tells the servlet that it already has version 1.4. So the download servlet creates a diff of the two versions. If the difference is less than downloading the new file it provides the client with a patch that it uses to recreate the new version. It works pretty well and for minor changes to your app really speeds up things over downloading a whole new version.

Add JarDiff support to Maven JNLP

The Maven JNLP plugin currently handles the creation of the jnlp file and the version information the download plugin needs wrongly.

The problem is described on the Maven JNLP Jira. I have created a patched version

I am guessing it wont take long for Apple’s infamous legal department to cease and decist this cool PPC emulator, so download it while you can.

PearPC emulates a G3 CPU on an intel complete with expirmental X86 JIT support.

Features

• License: GPL
• Programming language: C++, C and (on x86 platforms) assembler
• Supported platforms: POSIX-X11 (Linux, …), Win32
  
  The following operating systems were tested and run (to some extend) under PearPC:

• Mandrake Linux 9.1 for PPC: Runs very well
• Darwin for PPC: Runs well
• Mac OS X 10.3: Runs well with some caveats
• OpenBSD for PPC: Crashes while booting (accesses PCI in an unsupported way)
• NetBSD for PPC: Crashes while booting
  
  PearPC simulates the following hardware:
• CPU: Sort of G3, no altivec yet. Includes a minimalistic debugger. The CPU is completely deterministic, optimal for OS-development.
• CPU JITC-X86: A very fast CPU for x86 systems that translates the PowerPC code on-the-fly to native code. Still a little bit experimental.
• PCI-Brige: A barebone PCI-Bridge, enough to work with.
• IDE-Controller: Sort of CMD646 with bus-mastering support. You can attach IDE-Harddisk(s) and/or IDE-CDROM (represented through files or devices on the host).
• PIC: A programmable interrupt controller (sort of Heathrow).
• VIA-Cuda: With attached Mouse and Keyboard.
• Network Controller: Emulates a 3COM 3C90x, works currently only on POSIX with /dev/tun support.
• NVRAM: Capable of storing 8KiB non-volatile memory.
• USB: A non-usable USB-hub, but enough to make the OS think that there is an USB-hub.
• PROM: Sort of openfirmware. Ugly and contains a lot of hacks, but enough to support Yaboot and BootX and to boot from HFS/HFS+ partitions.

Lets hope they survive. I cant really see what Apple would have to complain about. It is supposed to be pretty slow. I guess Expose is out of the question? However for us lowly poor (non powerbook enabled) java developers who would like to test our java programs under os/x, it might provide an option.

I have been in Panama roughly 2 years now, and I had never been to see any of the locks on the Panama Canal, before yesterday. You know how a Powerbook or a Thinkpad or a Sony camcorder just fits together perfectly and works beautifully. Well the locks that manage the flow of traffic through the canal are just like that.

I can only imagine part of the awe this must have given the world when they were first built. From what I hear all the enthusiasm from the techno geeks of the day was for the canal. The locks used the largest concentration of electric motors and control circuitry ever deployed at that time. I imagine, when people thought about it back then, it was like when we hear that Google has in excess of 30,000 servers

The doors on the gates in the locks are operated by electric moters and are basically silent. They were designed by General Electric nearly 100 years ago. Some one told me that they were still using the original motors. I’m not sure thats true, but it sounds incredible.

In the above picture you can see a Panamax ship in the locks at Gatun. I couldn’t believe how tight a fit it is. The locks are 110 feet wide and the Panamax ships 106 feet wide. They are guided by electric “mules”, which was another innovation by General Electric back in the day. It’s pretty cool to see them go up and down the tracks.

Have a look at this video clip I took (its roughly 10MB).

If you’re visiting Panama City the closest locks are Miraflores. If you’re on a cruise ship in Colon on the Caribbean take a day trip to Gatun, where I went.

A few more pictures:

The ship we saw in the locks before heading into the Caribbean and most likely towards the US or Europe.

On the Caribbean side the only way to cross the canal is on a single track in front of the last gate.

The mouth of the Chagres river, which was the original trading route to the Pacific. This was taken from Fort San Lorenzo, which was ransacked by Sir Francis Drake.

Click here for more information about the Panama Canal

Important new features are support for Hibernate and Prevayler. We are happy to announce the 0.4 release of NeuClear Ledger. This is a simple framework for creating and maintaining ledgers of transactions. It was designed to support the various book keeping requirements of the NeuClear distributed clearing system.

Major new features are:

• High speed implementation using Prevayler a high  speed non relational database. See Building a Ledger in Prevayler for more info.
• Flexible implementation using Hibernate to support all major RDBMS from Oracle to MySQL
• LedgerBrowserServlet for viewing ledgers over the web

For more info see NeuClear Ledger

For a quick usage introduction see the Busy Developers Guide

The ledger is currenlty in live use at NeuClear Bux which is a demonstration NeuClear based electronic currency system.

Yesterday was election day here in Panama. I am pretty certain that most people associate Panama with Noriega who was a nasty dictator. However that was 15 years ago. Now Panama has a flourishing democracy. Yesterday as well as the whole campaign was proof of this.

I went with my wife to the local high school where she was going to vote and it was a great carnival like experience. Just about everyone went to vote. I believe the turnout was over 80%.

Everyone was laughing and smiling. Boy scouts were helping the elderly get up the steep hill to the school and to their voting booths. The Arnulfistas (set to loose big time) and the PRD (set to win big time) were joking between themselves.

In the end Martin Torrijos from the PRD won by a fairly big margin over Endara. The current presidents party the Arnulfistas were the big looser.

While things arent perfect yet and a democratic tradition will always take a while to get ingrained I would say that Panama can be proud of their election. They have definitely held the last government accountable for what they did wrong.

BTW. Check the jingles on Martin’s web site. We’ve been inflicted with these contantly on the radio over the past months. Some of them are pretty good though. Podemos is by Ruben Blades the famous Panamanian Salsero/Actor. The reggae ones arent bad either.