Oculus Go

I confess, I've always been a big fan of VR ever since I tested a unit in the mid 90's. Those unit were big, heavy and bulky, the gfx were not that impressive and rather rudimentary 3D vectors. Still, it left my young self very impressed.

Ofcourse, back then, nobody could buy a VR set, the computers needed to power the whole thing were gigantic. In recent years there has been a VR revolution, the Valve Vive series is probably the most advanced unit available, but i still find it rather expensive. Then there are those goggles you need to slide your smartphone in, those are at the bottom level of VR, they are cheap and not very good.

One company, started through crowdfunding, is Oculus (now owned by facebook :( ). The promised an affordable headset. They more or less succeeded in their mission, however with the release of the Oculus Go they had something special. An affordable stand-alone unit.

Now the have released the Oculus Quest, the next step in stand-alone VR. And a lot of people are now dumping their Go for cheap, so if you ever wanted to get your feet wet into VR, this is the time.

Queue my Go 64GB, bought second hand for €100.

All I can say is that for that price it is an unbelievable piece of kit. I can fully recommend it to anybody interested in VR. With the Go you don't get 6DOF, so you will not be able to move your body (only your head), but it is still a good experience. What amazed me the most is the controller, which has very good tracking in VR space, apparently without all the sensors you need with other headsets. You do only get one controller, but so far, for most applications on the GO, I haven't missed a second controller. The display has a great, crisp quality with vibrant colours. Sound works well without headphones, having the benefit you can still hear your surroundings (like screaming wife/kids :P ), but it is possible to connect a headphone if you truly want to immerse yourself in VR environments.

What are the bad points? The Field of View is not that great. As long as you don't move your eyes, this is not a problem, but this is easier said then done (instead of moving your eyes, just turn/move your head). Battery life appears not to be that great, so far I haven't been able to get more then two hours of use out of it. Besides that, I don't have much to complain about.

All in all, if you want to try out VR, a second hand Oculus Go might be the best option yet.

Eclipse - Import cannot be resolved

After a much needed cleanup of my java project in Eclipse, it suddenly returned a massive amount of 'Import cannot be resolved' errors for classes in the same package. If you are using Maven, you can do the following to get it resolved;

Right click the project > Maven > Update Project

This arrived last friday, it's great. The steam controller is amazing, but you wil have to put a lot of time into it. It is not a pick up an play kind of thing at the moment. Might improve over time as developers are adapting the controller. One of the best uses is in 'Portal 2', or so they say (haven't tried it yet), since it is the first and only game to native support the controller. The steam link is an interesting little device, it is in fact nothing more then a chromecast with more options to connect HID devices. It mirrors the screen of your steam machine (or a pc running steam) and nothing else. Your steam machine is not free for use by others when you play on it with through the steam link, something to keep in mind. Also it doesn't work well if both your steam machine and steam link are on wifi. After putting an ethernet in the steam link the streaming was much better. There are still some sound hickups sometimes and some games simply refuse to work (Broderlands 2).

In the meantime, steam link already is being hacked on and you can enable ssh access.

Apache Camel is a great project i've been using for creating real great integrations with. The online documentation is fairly good, but as with many projects it's missing some updates. I hit a problem with using Camel and CDI. I couldn't get any of the examples for the ProducerTemplate to work, that's because the documentation uses Spring DI instead of the Java EE CDI implementation. I couldn't find anything on the Camel site that explains how to do it with CDI, so if you're having the same problems (NPE will be thrown each time your producer is used), the following works:

    @Inject
    @Uri("mock:ToAnEndPoint")
    ProducerTemplate producer;

Retro find: NES (EU+US)

Doing my sunday morning market shopping at my local town, i stumbled upon this really mint looking NES packaging including two extra games (Ikari Warriors & Bionic Commando). I wasn't expecting much on a reasonable price since the whole kit was in such a great condition, but out of curiosity i asked anyway.
The seller asked 5 euro, couldn't find the money fast enough! This Nintendo Entertainment System is originally a EU-PAL system, but it has a switch fitted to also accept and play US-NTSC cartridges. It's the 'Action Set' which includes the light gun and probably the most known double game cartridge on the system with the original 'Super Mario Bros' and 'Duck Hunt' on them.
What i also love about it, is that the original price tag is still attached, back then ofcourse in old 5.995 BEF, which is about 150 euro in todays money.

Using an old instance of JBoss (version 7) i found it littered the log files with cookie informational entries, like the following:

2015-04-02 11:46:18,714 INFO  [org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Cookies] (http--0.0.0.0-8080-15) Cookies: Invalid cookie. Value not a token or quoted value

To avoid this add the following option when starting:

-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.ALLOW_HTTP_SEPARATORS_IN_V0=true

When programming in Java and using Apache Maven, you might get the following warning, which does no harm but clutters up the output;

[WARNING] Using platform encoding (UTF-8 actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!

The solution is to add the desired platform encoding in your pom.xml file by adding it to 'project.build.sourceEncoding' section of the properties (if you don't have properties, you will need to add them first).