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.
Why did we give these bozos money and votes again?
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
- It is very lightweight
- It was relatively easy to strip out all the stuff we don’t want
- 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.
Kylie Bax???
I tried this site that attempts to find celebrities who look like you. Most of the ones it found I can find some resemblence, even if it’s only that we both have beards. But who is this Kylie Bax person, and why does this program think I look like her?
