Since I have had my GMail account, I have noticed that some Emails have gone missing. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. I wrote the problem off as I might have deleted them myself or GMail is still beta.

Today, I went to delete my Sent Items, as I normally do about once a week. When I clicked Send To Trash this time I got a popup message saying that I was about to delete 11 entire conversations. What?

So I actually did delete those messages I thought I was missing. I just didn't realize it. I had probably replied to some of them and in emptying my Sent Items the entire conversation got deleted. I wonder if this is something that will change or if because of the way GMail threads their emails, it's just something we have to be cautious with. Oh well, at least I know what happened now.

Although I did some complaining before about Java and Opengl, I haven't totally given up on it and have been looking on and off for different solutions to the Java/Opengl situation.

A few days ago I started looking back at some Scene Graph implementations. Of course, starting with the notorious Java3D which has been released as open source recently. I have always liked the concept of the Scene Graph for rendering 3D worlds but wondered about performance issues and being too abstracted away from Opengl. I wonder how algorithms have been implemented for different features that can be critical to a well performing 3D application. I wonder how well the Vertices and Matrices calculations have been implemented.

Well, I can wonder and wonder, but I knew that until I got my hands dirty with some coding, I would never really have the answers to any of these issues. And in fact, I still don't. But I do have something...

jME - jMonkey Engine is a scene graph based graphics API. It uses an abstraction layer that allows any rendering system to be plugged in. By rendering system I mean LWJGL or JOGL. LWJGL is the only rendering system supported right now, but they are working on JOGL support. Personally, I find LWJGL to be better than JOGL anyway.

I have only been playing around with the API for a couple of days but getting a grasp of it was relatively simple. I'm not going to go into a lot of the features of jME in this article because you can just read about it on their site. But I have looked at a couple of other similar API's, Xith3D being the most notable, and I believe that jME is better.

Running examples from both API's I beleive jME performs better. I think jME has better documentation. But the main reason I would choose jME over the others? The jME Community. Open Source projects can live or die by the community that supports it. There are some good open source API's out there. And some of them, if I don't have to, I won't use.

The jME developers seem very passionate about their product and it shows. It shows in the way they answer questions on their forums, it shows in how they are contantly trying to improve their documentation. And it shows in how reliable their young API is and how well it performs.

If you are looking for a scene graph graphics API, I would definately recommend taking a look at jME.

I can summarize this review in nine words. If you want to learn PHP, buy this book. But that wouldn’t be much of a review now would it. Jason Gilmore starts this book the way most beginner’s books start; with some history. But hold on tight because it doesn’t take long before your hands start getting dirty.

After the brief history the book jumps right into installing and configuration then blasts right into PHP basic; syntax, tags, data types. Then it’s not long before you are writing functions, using arrays, and then one of the most updated features of PHP 5, OOP. The book keeps moving right along into advanced features like error handling, regular expressions, and networking. And just when you think you have learned it all and you couldn’t possibly think of anything else you could do with PHP, the book throws MySQL into the mix. By the end of this book you should have no problems writing PHP and MySQL enabled web pages and applications.

This book is a perfect mix of what someone new to PHP needs to know as well as providing advanced material and a reference once you have a grasp of the basics. So to summarize, if you want to learn PHP, buy this book.

Simon Brown upgraded Javaranch's Radio this past weekend to Pebble 1.5.1.

I changed my theme to Pebble's default theme because it looks great in the new version. Pebble just continues to get better and better. Kudos Simon on a wonderful blogging app.

I've got 2 GMail invites to give away. You know the drill. The First 2 comments get them. Don't forget to give me an E-mail address to send them to along with your name.

I wonder how much longer GMail is going to be beta? I am running out of people to send invites to.

I guess google lightened up a bit on allowing Weblogs to be approved for AdSense. They finally realized where all the internet traffic is going these days.