hi guys -

i'm curious if anyone can advise me on how to increase the heap size for applets.  i'm curious if there is a way to pass this argument to the browser from my applet.  i'm running osx 10.6, and tried adding the runtime parameter: -Xmx256m in my java preferences.  nevertheless, the heap size maximum remains 100 mb for safari....as monitored by VisualVM.

i'd really like a solution that would pass the argument to the browser, so that every user wouldn't need to change their preferences just to use the applet.

any help?

there are some old solutions for ruby-processing, which uses a "java_args.txt" file - but this is useless for me, i'm running normal processsing 0191.  also, the processsing maximum available memory does not carry over to the applet.

a while back, toxi posted a great method for asynchronous media loading: http://processinghacks.com/hacks:dataloadqueue

unfortunately, this code is broken with java 1.6.

PImage will no longer take a BufferedImage, despite the fact that it extends java.awt.Image.  this works for me if i force my Mac to run Java 1.5

here's where the error occurs:
in DataBuffer{}:
public PImage getAsImage() {
    try {
      ByteArrayInputStream bis=new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
      BufferedImage bimg = ImageIO.read(bis);
      return new PImage(bimg);
    }
    catch(Exception e) {
      System.err.println("Can't create image from buffer");
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return null;
}

(bytes is simply the raw byte array)

and here's the console output:
java.lang.ClassCastException: [I cannot be cast to [B

I'm not sure exactly how to convert BufferedImage back to java.awt.Image.  there is some code here, but its from 2002 and i'm not sure how relevant it is: http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/2D-Graphics-GUI/ConvertjavaawtimageBufferedImagetojavaawtImage.htm

Another option might be to completely replace toxi's code with MediaTracker, has anyone had sucess with this in Processing?