May 28, 2004
Styled text in Swing
Just discovered (although it feels that I may have known this before, I've just forgotten about it): how to get colors in your Swing components? Just treat your strings as HTML!
new JTree(new String[]{"<html><font color='red'>O</font><font color='blue'>n</font><font color='green'>e</font></html>", "Two"});gives you
Now ain't that beautiful ?
1K
Yesterday, I was so proud:
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That's right, 1K kilometers on my bike.
This morning, I was up real early (see here), the sun was shining, so I decided to take the touristic route to work. I jumped on my bike and ... I heard "pfpfpfpfff" (or something alike). Flat tire. Damn.
Since this is the first time this happens, I didn't have a spare ready. So I drove to work by car. I'm feeling very weird now: my legs are actually aching from not doing anything this morning. Lunch break will be spent hunting for a new tire.
May 27, 2004
Propaganda
Anybody else who thinks the new FUD is not a mere coincidence when Bush wants to get re-elected in the fall? A very vague warning, with very vague indicators, but scaring the hell out of people and making them stand united behind one person again. Hell, he pulled it of when invading Iraq ("Saddam probably maybe has bombs!"), why shouldn't he try it again?
May 26, 2004
The Turing test
Another complaint about spam. I've been pondering the spam issue under the shower the other day. What we have to do to stop spam, is to select which messages come from humans and which come from machines. Does this ring any bells?
It's the sad truth: we are getting better and better at passing the Turing test. 20 years ago, this was the ultimate dream of everybody even remotely related to IT, including me. As of today, it is our worst nightmare. "Images with foggy text", as one commenter to Matthew suggests, won't help us much longer either, since academics are researching to solve that problem, too. Their goal is, for example, to scan and interpret old manuscripts automatically. A very nobel goal, but the means can be used for spamming as well.
Every tool can be used as a weapon.
May 17, 2004
Religion stops procreation
Childless couple told to try sex. Fanatism is never good, especially not for your offspring ;)
May 13, 2004
Google's blog
Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog: Google's official blog. Nice! Let me grab that RSS feed! Oh no... Atom only.
I use Aaron Schwartz's rss2email. The old version, that worked on Windows too. But that doesn't know about Atom. Now Aaron has done quite some work to rss2email, including adding support for Atom. But somewhere in the process, it all became very Unix-dependent. I tried to get it running on cygwin the other day, but no luck so far.
Does anybody know about a program that
- sends syndication feeds to an email address
- handles all flavors of RSS and Atom
- remembers which items have already been sent
- and runs on Windows without too much fuss?
May 05, 2004
Re: Why software projects fail
Matthew writes about failing software projects, and how that's all the programmer's fault. Easy blame. The way I see it, programmers are the bottom of the food chain when you're searching for a scapegoat. Go blame a sales guy: "I passed it on to the analyst, and he messed up!". The analyst: "I passed it to the architect, and he messed up!" The architect: "I passed it to the programmer, and he messed up!" The programmer: "I passed it to... eeeh... damn!"
Frank commented too. I have a visual representation of his view:
First featured here
The most fine-tuned (how does one say "genuanceerd" in English?) reaction so far here. Waiting for the sequel.
Update: the image is now also visible to IE-users. And "genuanceerd" appears to be "differentiating". Thanks, Tim!
ClearType
Koen writes about ClearType in Windows XP. Since I'm a curious guy, and I got my hands on a Windows XP with an LCD display for the first time 2 months ago, I had already found the option, but I didn't really like the new typesetting after looking at it for 2 seconds. But, since people seem to be very positive about it, and I really was having trouble with the typesetting I was using, I decided to give it a go again. And lo and behold, after 5 minutes now, it seems to grow on me.
Recommended for XP users.