Technorama

It's that time of year again, time to see if Java has improved enough to be usable. Facebook has a nifty image uploader applet written in Java. So I clicked through the Ubuntu updates to pickup Java Runtime Environment to give it a whirl.

All ok so far, but when I reload Firefox and login to Facebook I get this popup:

This would be expected if I was running in Japanese, but I'm not! This bug was present back in 2001 when I tried Java then. It is ignoring my LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8 and erroneously picking up on my Japanese input setting (LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8). Anyway... I clicked though, as I knew that [はい (Y)] means yes.

Then the directory of images pops up I notice that I can scroll down with my mouse wheel, but not up! and likewise I can click the down arrow on the directory window, but if I click the up arrow nothing! So need to keep dragging the slider up instead.

After painstakingly selecting all my images I click upload, and.... nothing happens.. a little upload popup appears and still nothing... its locked up, and its even crashed Firefox. Task watcher offers to Terminate it as its crashed, then I discover the Java VM crash log in my Home directory:

"An unexpected exception has been detected in native code outside the VM.
Unexpected Signal : 11 occurred at PC=0xAAD65FF5
Function=XFreeFontSet+0x15
Library=/usr/lib/libX11.so.6"

A quick disassemble later and we see the PC is resting on the line after a call:

0001afe0 :
1afe0: 55 push %ebp
1afe1: 89 e5 mov %esp,%ebp
1afe3: 53 push %ebx
1afe4: 83 ec 04 sub $0x4,%esp
1afe7: 8b 45 0c mov 0xc(%ebp),%eax
1afea: e8 78 63 ff ff call 11367 <_xvidtovisual@plt+0xe3>
1afef: 81 c3 19 c2 0a 00 add $0xac219,%ebx

Had a look and Blackdown Java site is down, and Sun's site has no email address to file this info. Looks like Java's not going to be usable for another year then.. They really need automated crash reporting with an email address we can pass feedback to them, so they don't remain where they are now.

Labels: GNU-Linux, Java