Dear people who pulled the fire alarm at Angeline’s apartment the other evening, causing the fire department to arrive, sirens a-blaring,
Please wait for warmer, non-rainy weather next time.
Thanks.
I dislike Java.
Dear lazy web,
It would be nice if you could tell me a non-hacky way to do progress dialogs from within the event-dispatch thread in Swing, where all of our application logic happens to reside.
This doesn’t work:
display modal dialog (won’t run because event thread is blocked)
start worker thread
Nor does this:
start worker thread (race condition hiding the dialog)
display modal dialog
Joining in the event thread won’t work because it blocks updates. Using a non-modal dialog and passing the bottom-half of the rest of the event thread to the worker thread to execute at completion will work, but is obscenely messy. Or, one can spin in the beginning of the thread waiting for the modal dialog to appear to avoid the race condition, but that is still gross. One could subclass Dialog and have it also signal a condition variable once it blocks… ugh.
Fusion
As the ticket says, last night we went to the State to catch Al Di Meola, who is touring in support of his new CD Consequences of Chaos. Amazing show replete with Di Meola’s signature blazing-fast yet incredibly clean lines. The Project led off with a few selections from the new CD, then went into Azzura, Fugata, and from there into a rousing rendition of the Santana-like single from the new CD, “Red Moon.” The band took a break and came back with Al playing a few Piazzolla pieces solo on his nylon string guitar, the last teaming up with pianist Mario Parmisano who unfortunately loaded up the bandoneon patch on his keyboard (can’t we pretend those instruments never existed?). After that, Al picked up the PRS again, launched into “Turquoise” off of the new album, then the Chick Corea tune “Senor Mouse.” I can’t remember what finished up the set, but the encores were ambitious: “Race With the Devil” followed by “Egyptian Danza.” The only flaws in the performance lie at the feet of the sound engineers who had problems with feedback in the middle of the show, poor mixes, and a speaker that was picking up a radio station as if it was right out of Spinal Tap.
Denied
I just finished reading Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, a very provocative and damning look at the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq. My take-aways are: Rumsfeld is a jerk, a bunch of PhDs can bollocks things up quite nicely merely by lying, and Colin Powell is an AOLer. Worth a read.
No idea what to be for Halloween this year. I suppose that is okay since I don’t have any plans either. Perhaps I should make another rock-icon-o-lantern?
LX
I’ve been sick the last few days. Meh.
I went down to Georgia last weekend, looking for a soul to steal, as usual. My grandparents have attained their sixtieth year of marriage this year, so I spent 20 hours in the Atlanta suburb in which I once resided.
The lady at the check-in counter told me to have a nice flight, and I said “you too.” I used to enjoy flying, but the soviet checkpoints we must navigate now have really killed it for me. Wearing my EFF shirt, I was surprised to not get the magic SSSes on my boarding pass. The trek through the screening area still sucked, though, even without the special treatment. I expect that for Thanksgiving I’ll be driving my car instead. Thanks, 4th amendment haters.
My grandparents are doing well. My grandfather congratulated me on the engagement news and wished us our own 60 years of bliss. We grandchildren presented them with a scrapbook of various detritus of our lives and toasted their health. Teary tributes were made, and so on. It was a nice visit, if too brief.
Dead literati
Fun fact: F Scott Fitzgerald and family are buried next to the chapel where Ange & I are to be married. Neat.
BTW, if any of my few readers happen to be job hunting, let me know, as our company needs programmers badly.