2009-12-17-1328Z


Freaked out when a Java applet I'm developing suddenly died with a netscape.javascript.JSException: Native Windows is destroyed error.Reverted to a known-good edit with bzr, same problem. Because of aggressive caching of applets by default, the error hadn't shown up right away, and a Java auto-update to version 6 update 16 had intervened. That of course was the problem, and apparently lots of people were having problems with it, because I went to Sun's website and there was update 17. Installed it, and my applet works again. Phew.

The applet is an interesting project, using Griaule's SDKs to implement a timeclock. The customer had already set up most of it, but was having problems with getting the actual fingerprint scan; I haven't yet received the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader I bought on eBay, but I've started to code what I can, and see why he might be having difficulty. Griaule's installation instructions suck. I had to manually copy their DLLs to \Windows\System32\, and extract their jarfile into the web directory, to get the applet working. And I don't know that I'm out of the woods yet, but the applet at least can fill in the password of the login form with biometric data, assuming it can extract same from the fingerprint reader.

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last updated 2009-12-17 08:45:48. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com