Barren to Beautiful in One Hour
We recently moved, from our 4th story apartment in the center of town to a 2nd story apartment just out of the CBD. Our old place was great because of excellent ventilation and an absolute lack of the typical “Hamilton Swamp Damp” that has inflicted itself on use in almost every house prior.
Our new place, while having newer and more opulent fittings, is situated above a business that tends to use some rather harsh chemicals on occasion. This, combined with a general lack of windows ( it has skylights and one wall that opens almost completely – but no windows ) means that the air quality isn’t the greatest.
Enter Google, and I find found a few sites listing plants that have been shown to filter various harmful toxins from the air and generally improve air quality – Clean Air Gardening and Fine Art ‘n Tips. For a much more in-depth discussion of the plants and their properties, check those links out! A quick trip to a garden center and viola – our pristine ( but barren ) apartment is now littered with various houseplants!
I’ve no idea how I’m going to be able to tell if they “work”, but they have definitely made the place more visually attractive! So much so that I’ve gone out of my way to find empty places that could accommodate a plant or two, even which type of plant should be used.
Thanks Internet!
Monsters ( 2010 )
Just finished watching the second half of this movie. Here is opinion:
Long. Dark. Boring.
The occasions we were allowed to actually see the monsters, the did look good. The special effects were good – but there wasn’t much.
I think the monsters were visible 2, maybe 3 times – the final viewing was the longest and most clear, but disappointing in that it was within 3 minutes of the end, so we knew nothing interesting was going to happen.
For a movie with the setup it has – a NASA probe breaks up over Mexico, seeding vast tracts of land with a virulent and massive alien life form – Monster fails rather spectacularly to deliver.
Overview: movie opens to a black screen with “this is a true story-esque” text outlining the situation. Situation: Mexico is covered in massive aliens.
Next scene was promising – a solider-cam view of the US army facing off against one of them. It left us thinking that there would be much more action.
The rest of the movie consisted of two people we had no emotional connection to wandering aimlessly across “The Infected Zone”, with very little intensity or anxiety, considering the environment.
The end left me wishing I’d never started watching at all.
Fail.
Facelift!
Yesterday, on my day off I found my hands refused to quit typing code. Not wanting to get overloaded with work programming, I thought I’d give my own site some much-needed attention. After installing all the crap I use to “make updating my site easier” /sarcasm, I found that sometime between now and the last update ( Jan 2010 ) I had lost the template files for the site. This was a big deal, because without the template files, there is no way for me to make minor changes.
After sobbing and rocking in the corner for an hour or so, it occurred to me that I should not ignore the idea that I could instead make major changes to the site. So I did.
I hunted around the ‘net to find a suitably awesome theme – I don’t have time to hand-code this site like I would when I’m on the job. I found one at NCD Themes – N Spire. I’ve modified it a little, both to make it work well with WP-Blog, and because there were a few niggly things I didn’t like. I feel the end result is very pleasing on the eye. Thanks Nick!
On a somewhat amusing note, one of the things that most attracted me to this theme was the massive background image and the potential for me to use my own images in place of the stock pictures supplied. After toying around with my own images for some time, I found that they suck in comparison. In my defense, I lost most of the pictures I took in Hong Kong after we got our new camera, some of them would have been perfect *sob*.
Lesson #1: InvalidDnDOperationException Ruins Sanity
A friend with whom I am currently working on a programming contract called me today to tell me that the latest build wasn’t working. At all.
This irritated and confused me, as I hadn’t worked on that particular project for a week or so, and couldn’t remember having any issues with it.
I booted into Windows (I use Linux mostly), downloaded Eclipse and imported the project.
Sure enough:
java.awt.dnd.InvalidDnDOperationException: Drag and drop in progress at sun.awt.dnd.SunDragSourceContextPeer.setDragDropInProgress(Unknown Source) at java.awt.dnd.DragSource.startDrag(Unknown Source) |
This error had attacked me before, but a quick investigation revealed that the issue was different this time. Joyous news.
I poked about in the (too many) classes that make up this project, but discovered nothing of use.
After some fruitless Googling, it occurred to me that during the great Refactoring Storm of August, I may have changed some of the DragGestureRecognizers’ DnDConstants to ACTION_COPY instead of ACTION_COPY_OR_MOVE.
A short, smaller storm of refactoring esued, during which all ACTION_COPY_OR_MOVE DnDConstants were changed to ACTION_COPY.
Why was this an issue at all? I was using evt.acceptDrop(DnDConstants.ACTION_COPY_OR_MOVE); to accept the drops, which I guess I must have assumed would accept an ACTION_COPY drop. Seemed to in Ubuntu, anyway. Maybe the Windows JRE is more strict (re: mental)?
Why this issue hid itself until now, I don’t know. Perhaps Ubuntu just likes me more.
Lesson: test software on the target system BEFORE giving it to your team-members.
Gmail Usage Caveat
Quite some time ago I awoke to an inbox full of messages from friends, associates and family (everyone in my Gmail address book) why I thought they’d be interested in purchasing “cheap good goods from convenient service import site”. My Gmail account had been hacked – I even had an auto-responder set up – also advertising the same site.
