del c:\ /f /s

This is us leaving Omaha. We had a good meeting in the morning, but the afternoon meeting left a little to be desired.

We were in a push to leave our last meeting in Denver and I didn't get to grab the picture I really wanted. Denver has some beautifully, harsh landscapes that seem to call out to even the most cloistered homebody to be out in them. We were sweating a bit when we hit some traffic and packed parking at the airport. There weren't any lines for check in or security so we actually made it without too much trouble. Jetting off to Omaha...

After fighting for a while with JavaFX, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't quite ready for me quite yet. Why? I've grown lazy. The IDE tooling around JavaFX is still very early right now. Heck, even the documentation is still a little lacking around the reference side of things. For instance, that F3Applet class. I couldn't find any documentation on that thing anywhere. Plus, I ended up having to JAD the class just to understand how to configure it. But back to the IDE. I know that content assist should be enough for anyone, but I'm more of the opinion that designing UI should be visual. Visual design cuts down on the time it takes see what a UI is going to look like. You don't have code something, and then compile/run it. You can immediately see what it is going to look like. Sure, you can use JavaFX Pad for some of this, but there isn't any palette of components to draw from in that tool. I have to just "know" what all the com...

Just about to leave on one of the longest trips I've taken in a while. Looking forward to getting this over with. I've got a multi legged trip to Denver, Omaha, and Dallas. I'll be out most of the week and I'm really dreading being away from Therese and the boys. Therese is sick with some kind of cough, and Ian threw up this past weekend. I hate leaving.

I noticed a cool feature of MacOS that automatically enables an external monitor whenever it is connected, and expands the desktop to it. I figured that this had to be possible to do with Linux as well. I'm running Fedora Core 6 on my work laptop, and I built the following brain-dead script from some stuff I found online. This script is very specific to the FGLRX driver and requires the aticonfig utility. This should be able to be adapted pretty easily to other chipsets or video utilities. It currently only works as a script running as the user, but I'm trying to make this work as a startup service as well. Hopefully someone will find this useful: #!/bin/sh # autoEnable.sh is a braindead script to autoenable and disable # the external display and properly set the resolution for an # expanded desktop. # # This script is currently tied to aticonfig, but should be able # to be modified to work with other methods to query/(dis|en)able # the external monitor # CHECK_INTERVAL i...

I saw an example showing how to get JavaFX running in an applet, but I had trouble getting it to work well on Firefox with Java 1.5.0_09 on Linux. After digging around in the javafxrt.jar a bit, I found an F3Applet class that might be helpful. I'm trying that out now.

My father-in-law's brother just got a new laptop computer from a major manufacturer. Said laptop came installed with the new Windows Vista Home Basic edition. The sales person that sold them the laptop also recommended Windows Live OneCare to make sure that the computer's health, security and all that stuff that non-technical folks don't do would be taken care of. This was the first time I've had a chance to see Vista for anything more than a couple minutes in the store, so I was interested to see how much had changed. First off, the interface looked much more stylized than previous windows versions. Certainly not as much as I would imagine Windows Vista Home Premium would be, but the default theme seemed sort of like some of the acrylic coated stuff I'm used to seeing from the Apple side of the house. However, there are zillion icons on the desktop for software or services that I can't believe most people would care about. Also, there are a ton of icon...