Category: Activities

Note to self

If you want to find a picture you saw yesterday, and now the picture has been removed from the web site that you saw it on for copyright reasons, *and* you haven’t exited Firefox in many weeks, *and* you have had a web page open on one page that is constantly showing you different parts of the world in Google Maps in hybrid mode, DO NOT try to find the picture by going to your .mozilla/firefox/*/Cache directory and typing “kuickshow *”.

After my screen filled with several hundred images, mostly Google Map tiles, it started getting really slow. My CPU was pegged, I was swapping heavily, and still images were appearing. The mouse was moving, but nothing was responding to clicks or keyboard presses. I went to another machine, ssh’ed in and did a “killall kuickshow”, but the load average was still over 8. I waited a while for it to drop down to under 1.0, but my display was still unresponsive. Eventually I gave up waiting for it to recover and rebooted.

Of course, my Cache directory is now nearly empty and I’ll never find that picture again.

Splashy fun

There is a member of my flying club who owns a Cessna 172 on straight floats, and a half share of a light sport Legend Cub which spends its winters on skis and its summers on straight floats. Yeah, some people have it tough, right? I’ve been begging him for a ride for over a year now, and yesterday he asked on the club mailing list if anybody wanted to be his safety pilot while he tried out the new Garmin 430 in his Cessna. I think I set a record for speedy replies to that mailing list with my “PICK ME! PICK ME!” response.
Continue reading “Splashy fun”

Browncroft paddle

I did this paddle again, from Browncroft Avenue up to the point where Baycreek puts in for the Ellison Park shuttle. (Actually there is a pretty hefty rapid just upstream from that put-in so I doubt I’ll ever get upstream from there.) I’ve done it before, such as when I wrote about it last August in Rants and Revelations » Today’s paddle. It’s over 90 degrees out today, and the prospect of a shady stream seemed like a great idea.

I’m a little concerned because the little parking spot I park at had new “NO TRESPASSING” signs. The parking spot is in front of a small fenced off area that fences off a small brick structure that belongs to the Monroe Water Authority. I can’t imagine that a service truck from the Monroe Water Authority is going to show up at 4:30pm on a Thursday before a long weekend.

The stream was running extremely fast and high today. In previous paddles, there have been places that required me to push along the bottom and even to get out and drag – those places were deep enough to keep paddling, deeply in some places, and shallowly in the place I’ve had to get out and drag before. It was hard work, and I’m actually surprised I made it all the way to the turn-around point. I felt a bit Damiano Cunego today – in today’s stage of the Giro D’Italia, he kept sliding off the back of the leading group, but catching back up to it again and staying within contact to finish a pretty decent 5th. Or maybe I was more like Mickaël Buffaz who yesterday while on a long solo break-away actually climbed off his bike and tearfully begged his coach to let him quit, but recovered and pedalled well for the rest of the race until he was eventually caught near the end. And I would paddle hard and get tired, then stop for a swig of water, and be ready to paddle some more. Of course, I had the knowledge that it was going to get way easier after I reached the turn-around point.

The wild life was pretty sparse today. A lot of ducks, a pair of grey catbirds, a pair of goldfinches bathing in the stream, mourning doves, swallows. I didn’t see any geese on the way up, but by the time I got back there were a couple of pairs near where I put in, including one that had at least 11 fairly large down covered babies. There were a lot of people out walking their dogs, and I nearly had to repel boarders in the main “dog park” part of Ellison Park.

It was a great paddle, but I worked too hard, and my elbows and shoulders are feeling it.

icewm is not my favourite window manager

Update: I’m a fucking idiot. Turns out I was calling JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true); when I should have been calling JDialog.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true);. All fixed now.

There is a complex interaction between X Windows window managers and Java’s look and feel manager. And it is currently driving me crazy.

Our project choose the “Ice”, aka “icewm” as our window manager. We choose it because

  1. It is very lightweight
  2. It was relatively easy to strip out all the stuff we don’t want
  3. It had translation files so it would automatically display in all the languages we support

On the downside, it also looks very “Windows 3.1″ish, and it’s stupid as hell. The thing that’s currently driving me nuts is that when you use JOptionPane.show.*Dialog to display simple dialogs, Ice insists on putting close and iconify icons on the dialog. Two problems with that

  • The icons overlap the title meaning you can’t read the last word in the title.
  • If you’re dumb enough to actually iconify the dialog, it’s damn near impossible to find it again, and since it is modal, you’re basically stuck until you can figure out where it went.

So here I am trying to figure out how to make JOptionPane tell Ice to stop doing this. JOptionPane.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true) doesn’t seem to do anything. I discovered in my own dialogs that use my own subclass of JDialog, I can achieve something a little less horrible by calling setUndecorated(true); and getRootPane().setWindowDecorationStyle(JRootPane.FRAME); which gets rid of Ice’s title bar and replaces it with a Java-style title bar that only has a close icon on it.

I downloaded the JDK source code to see if there was anyway I could do something similar in JOptionPane. There are a couple of methods in JOptionPane that look promising, but of course Sun made them private so I can’t override them. I could replace JOptionPane entirely, but that’s probably a gross violation of the license that I downloaded the JDK source under.

I’m hoping that next release I can convince the powers that be to switch to XFCE or something else that looks a little more modern and perhaps will listen to the window manager hints from Java.

Sigh.

Flying is about to get a lot more expensive

Over the last couple of years, the membership of the flying club has reduced by 25%. Maintenance is more expensive as ridiculous lawsuits have forced parts manufacturers and mechanics to spend more on lawyers and insurance, and stupid TSA rules have constrained our flying and our access to planes and airports and added expenses. Fuel costs have spiraled higher and higher. And IFR flying we practically requires an approach capable GPS, which we’ve only added to one of our planes. We’ve tried to reduce costs by selling one of our planes.

Also in that time, it’s become more expensive and harder to insure complex six seater aircraft. When this first became and issue, we had 12 people flying our Lance and 3 people considering moving up, and the insurance company only wanted to write a policy with 8 named pilots on it. We decided that the best way to pare that “Lance list” down a bit was to put a small “Lance Surcharge” for the people who wanted to be on the list. Unfortunately, even with the small surcharge we imposed, the list immediately dropped down to 7 people, and over time it’s dropped to 5.

A couple of weeks ago we re-ran the numbers, and the numbers told us two things:

  • The monthly dues needed to be raised
  • The small “Lance Surcharge” is not enough to cover all the expenses of the Lance.

In the past, all members of the club have carried the expenses of all the planes, because the planes were club assets. But with only 5 people allowed to fly the plane, it seems that it’s only fair to put more of the onus on the costs of that plane on those people. And the awful truth is that if you put all the onus on those 5 people, one or more might drop off the Lance list, and then the costs will be spread among 4 people, or 3 people. And then there is the issue of the ancient engine – the Lance’s engine is way over TBO, and will probably need replacing within the year, and that’s going to cost around $35,000.

We haven’t actually figured out what to do, but in the mean time we’ve increased the normal monthly dues by $20 and doubled the Lance Surcharge. And we’re putting the Lance up for sale to see if there is any interest.

Then there is the issue of the other flying club. I wrote about them before. Their current “Lance List” has 5 or 6 people on it, and their monthly fees plus “Lance Surcharge” ends up being double what our current fees are. If we make our Lance Surcharge close to what it would take to actually support the aircraft, it would get pretty close to their total fees. And for our money, we’re getting a worse Lance – theirs has an almost new engine, and a Garmin 530W GPS. If I’m going to pay that sort of money, I want to get the best Lance I can get for the money.

Sigh. I wish good load hauling aircraft weren’t rarer than hens teeth. If only we could get a decent Cherokee 6 for a decent price. The 6 has the roominess and load hauling ability of a Lance, but without retractable gear. That means you lose some speed, but you gain insurability, and lower maintenance costs. Even better, because it would be insurable without a named pilot policy, we wouldn’t need a separate list and surcharge for it. But Piper didn’t make very many of them, and the ones that are out there are selling for $40,000 more than an equivalent Lance for those very reasons.