Kathryn's Comments (Page 16)

Kathryn's Comments

Sea Glass Look and Feel

I’m currently working on getting JTextField to use the client property of “JTextField.variant” equals to “search” to print a rounded search field with an hourglass in it. My outer glow is messed up, but worse, my internal drop shadow is messed up. I’m using the Nimbus Effects

Snow seen from my windows

We had snow last night. It’s not the first snow of the year, that was a few weeks ago, but the first snow was gone in a few hours. This is sticking around. Here are a few pictures from outside my front and back windows. Snow from my front

Comments on cloud computing

Originally, I typed that title as “clound commuting”. Fingers don’t always do the right thing, even on a Dvorak keyboard. Ron Burk has an interesting comment on cloud computing. It pretty much mirrors my thinking on these subjects. Do we really want a vendor to keep our data, or

Sea Glass (alpha) is released

Ken and I have released version 0.1 of the Sea Glass Look and Feel for Java. This is very preliminary. See the project site for more information. In particular, we don’t have good focus indications, some alignment may not be correct, we’re still using Nimbus controls for

Civilization IV considered harmful to productivity

I’ve been playing way too much Civilization IV Beyond the Sword lately rather than coding. The really awful thing is that I don’t even care about any particular game. If I don’t like something that happens I just quit the game and start a new one. My

Another Sea Glass example (tables)

I’ve been working with Laffy, SwingSet3, and some of my own code to check how we’re doing with the Sea Glass L&F. Here’s an example of Laffy’s tables: Should the striping continue across the checkboxes? Nimbus doesn’t do that, but it is probably

The real objection to health insurance reform in America

I was reading Roger Cohen’s New York Times editorial this morning. It made some pretty good points. I particularly liked a point from Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, where he said: “Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities

Sea Glass Laffy example (Linux)

Here’s a screen shot of Laffy running the Sea Glass L&F against my Ubuntu Linux desktop. We may move to a more monochrome titlebar button scheme in the future, but right now we’re using a variation of Nimbus’s buttons.

Against the Singularity

Ray Kurzweil popularized the idea of a “Technological Singularity”, originally proposed by Vernor Vinge, based on ideas from I. J. Good, where the advances in technology and, particularly machine intelligence, will render the future unpredictable. The amusing thing to me is that they then go on to make predictions, usually

Current SF reading

I haven’t been reading as much sf, but I do like some of Charles Stross’s work, especially the first several books of the Merchant Princes series. It’s getting a bit soap opera-ish, and we’ll have to see what happens. I also liked Iron Sunrise quite a