Month: May 2006

Is this it?

I am convinced that one of these days, my pain will just get to the point where I can’t stand it any more. Having to give up anything that requires mobility, like kayaking, is bad enough. But I worry that I’ll end up having to medicate beyond what is legal for flying, and lose even that outlet. Or worse, I’ll be unable to even think straight, either from the pain or the medication. I don’t know what I’ll do at that point, because my life as a relatively happy and productive member of society will be over. I’ve thought that day was just around the corner for 25 years now, but so far it has been gradual enough that I’ve been able to make adjustments.

But right now my elbows are killing me. On top of my usual knee and hip pain, my elbows have been so sore I haven’t been sleeping well, and I can barely concentrate when I’m awake. And it has been like this since Monday. If it had happened as a result of Friday’s kayaking, I could understand, but I didn’t do anything exceptional on Sunday or Monday that could have triggered this.

Of course, watching the recent episode of “House, M.D.” didn’t help, where the stuff happening in the guy’s brain was putting him in so much pain that even putting him in a coma wasn’t helping. I felt like I was watching my future.

I hope this isn’t it. I’m 45 years old, and I’ve been in near constant pain for 30 years. I just want it to stop.

Further proof that the US patent system is totally broken:

I now have my name on a second patent. 7,034,916 is basically our old patent 6,812,994 with a few little changes to incorporate some changes we (I) made to indicate whether the feature is ready to play or not.

Take a look at the list of inventors. Curtis is the only other programmer on that list, and he left the company last year before we did this change. Everybody else is middle management and the guy from Corporate Design and Usability whose sole contribution to this change from the old one was to say that we should use blue rather than green to indicate the “ready to play” status. The guys responsible for the code that sends up the information from the feature player as to whether the status is good or not aren’t mentioned on the patent, just me because I take that information and change the colour of the blob of colour on the screen and provide a tooltip. But the guy who signs my timesheet is. That doesn’t seem fair to me.

Sometimes, Java isn’t my favourite language

I have an AbstractDocument in a JTextArea in a JScrollPane. I’m writing to the AbstractDocument from a thread that watches a log file – basically doing the equivalent of a “tail -f”. So far, so good.

Here’s the part that isn’t my favourite thing in the world: If I want the JScrollPane to automatically scroll to the bottom of the file when I write to it, I have to do my AbstractDocument.insertText in the event queue thread (using SwingUtilities.invokeLater), but if I don’t want it to scroll to the bottom, I have to do the insertString in a different thread. Is this fucking stupid, or what? Wouldn’t you expect “Scroll to the bottom on input” to be a property somewhere?

So I’ve got a flag for whether I want it to scroll to the bottom or not, and when it’s true, I use SwingUtilities.invokeLater and when it’s false I call insertString directly.

According to the Java bug parade, people want this property, but even when it’s available, they want the current behaviour to remain the default because so many of us have had to write code this way.

WTF?

I clicked on a Slashdot banner ad. I got:

Using Apache Tomcat but need to do more?

We’re sorry, but due to restrictions placed by US law, we are unable to offer you the opportunity to download WebSphere at this time due to your country of origin. If you believe that this was in error, please contact SF.net with your IP address (165.170.128.66).

I don’t know if SourceForge knows how to do a “whois”, but that IP belongs to Kodak, a company based in Rochester, NY, USA. I very much doubt that US law would prohibit the export of certain software to Rochester, NY, in spite of the fact that we elected Hillary Clinton.

Update:
It gets better – if you click the “please contact SF.net”, it’s a mailto, but when you send the email, it bounces with

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<support @sourceforge.net>
(reason: 550 Unrouteable address)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to mail.sourceforge.net.:

>>>>>> RCPT To:<support@sourceforge.net>

< << 550 Unrouteable address 550 5.1.1 <support@sourceforge.net>... User unknown

If I was IBM, I wouldn’t be trusting my important products to these ass-clowns.