Category: Rant

Wiki currently shut down

My “DAFIF Replacement” Wiki is currently shut down because of a bug that was causing my computer to hit load averages up over 10 every time Google indexed it. My log files were full of lines like:

[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 457.
[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 462.

I hope to have time to upgrade to a newer version of TWiki Wiki one of these days and then I’ll re-open it. Or possibly I’ll just let it die since it wasn’t getting any use anyway.

Side effect, or my imagination?

For two or three weeks I’ve been trying a different pain medication, a NSAID called “relafen”. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but it seemed to me that last weekend when I went flying I was more susceptable to motion sickness than I have been in the past. And yesterday while I was concentrating on something on my screen (ok, it was the live updates from the Giro D’Italia, not work), I suddenly felt like I was going to lose my balance and fall over, which is kind of odd to happen while you’re sitting still. I also seemed to have to remind myself to breathe when I was concentrating – but hey, it was a exciting mountain stage, what can I say? The “hey, I’m losing my balance” feeling just happened again today, even though the Giro stage I was watching work I was doing was pretty unexciting.

One web site listed vertigo as a very rare side effect of relafen. But why now after 3 weeks, and not back when I started?

Oh well, I’m seeing my doctor tomorrow. Maybe he’s got a different medication to try.

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.

Why did we give these bozos money and votes again?

WASHINGTON – Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package Tuesday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

HT: This Space For Rent

Ok, they wouldn’t promise to restore habeus corpus or outlaw torture, they’ve done bugger all on restoring New Orleans and the environment, and now they’re screwing us on their promise to hold Bush’s feet to the fire on Iraq. Idiots.

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.