I Knew It!

God currently only works on Linux, BSD, and Darwin systems. No support for Windows is planned.

As documented here.

Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails

My Firefox Add-ons

I hate having to find all these again every time I move to a new machine. So here they are. Have any favorites of your own to share?

• Adblock Plus
• BugMeNot
• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Firebug
• Greasemonkey
• Searchbar Autosizer
• Stop-or-Reload Button
• Tiny Menu

Don't Over-Work Your Swing Thread

I know at least three different teams that I've worked with in the past that screw up Swing thread handling. Frankly, they should all know better. People, there is no such thing as a single-threaded Java Swing application. Fortunately, the Java 6 standard library is getting an addition that should help developers with this problem: the SwingWorker API.

One common mistake of desktop application programmers is misusing the Swing event dispatch thread (EDT). They either unknowingly access user interface (UI) components from non-UI threads or simply disregard the consequences. The result is that applications become unresponsive or sluggish because they perform long-running tasks on the EDT instead of on separate worker threads. Long-running computations or input/output (I/O) bound tasks should never run on the Swing EDT. Finding problematic code may not always be simple, but the Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6) makes it easier to fix such code by providing the javax.swing.SwingWorker class.

One of the reasons I tend to prefer SWT over Swing is that it seems to be better about throwing nasty exceptions when you try and step over the UI thread. Neither is perfect, but I tend to get more exceptions when I do stupid stuff in SWT. If I do something stupid in Swing, I get a grey box and a frozen UI.

Are Soldiers not Human?

From this article on a special RFID tattoo ink:

The ink also could be used to track and rescue soldiers, Pydynowski said.

"It could help identify friends or foes, prevent friendly fire, and help save soldiers' lives," he said. "It's a very scary proposition when you're dealing with humans, but with military personnel, we're talking about saving soldiers' lives and it may be something worthwhile."

Excuse me? Did that person just imply that soldiers aren't human? I can't believe someone is considering tagging soldiers like livestock.

Via Bruce Schneier.

Elsewhere, apparently I'm not grateful enough. I suppose that's true; I'll have to work on that.

You're Right, Pachelbel Should Sue

When I read about this video over on the always entertaining Wondermark, I thought it was in reference to the cellular ring-tone. It turns out that cell phones are not the only place where Pachelbel's Canon in D has infected our lives.

This Rob Paravonian fellow reminds me of Wally Pleasant. I like him.