sean reilly

I’ve picked some some really great music lately… not necessarily new releases, but great stuff that is worth checking out:

Kinky -

There is

There are a number of great points in this article. I don’t agree with everything the author says, but for the most part he is spot on, as in this quote:

If I could do one massive experiment on the whole US I would take away TV for a month. Once a chunk of the population survived the mind-poison withdrawal I bet great things would start to happen. People would shop less, exercise more, talk to their neighbors, maybe even, dare I say, read a book or plant a garden. You can bet the social and political landscape of the US would look mighty different. The status quo assumes we need a lot of energy for a good quality of life. On the contrary, we have too much energy now and our use of it has damaged our quality of life and the environment as well, which is inextricably linked with our quality of life.

I hear a lot of java programmers complaining about the complexity of GridBagLayout. The GridBagLayout is a bit complicated, but it is also the most flexible layout manager I’ve used in any language. With the aid of a simple utility class it is also the easiest. GridC subclasses GridBagConstraints and provides an easy and concise way to assign properties to components that are added to a GridBagLayout-managed container. Here’s an example:

JPanel p = new JPanel(new GridBagLayout());
p.add(label1, GridC.getc(0,0).label());
p.add(field1, GridC.getc(1,0).field().colspan(2));
p.add(label2, GridC.getc(0,1).label());
p.add(field2, GridC.getc(1,1).field());
p.add(button2, GridC.getc(1,2));


GridC objects have methods for setting virtually every layout property you can think of: column/row spanning, insets, alignment, resize weight along each axis, fill along each axis. Each method returns the same GridC object so that you can chain the calls. For example, the following call puts the component (comp) in location (x,y), spanning two columns, filling along the y axis and aligned to the northEast corner:

p.add(comp, GridC.getc(x, y).colspan(2).filly().northEast())


Please take the GridC code, use it in your projects and rid yourself of GridBagLayout headaches forever.

The gay bomb

Came across an interesting comment in response to an article about becoming a vegetarian on Scott Young’s blog:

I always thought it is perfectly ok to be a meat eater if you can say in a calm, confident and relaxed tone: “I’m perfectly ok with the slaughter of living creatures in order to fill up my belly.” … make your decision consciously!

Men such as Ben Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci and former Mr. Olympia Bill Pearl were vegetarians.

The NY Times and a lot of blogs are reporting on an

Just saw an article at the Get Rich Slowly blog that talks about how to stay warm in a drafty old house. Moving to Scotland has been a learning experience in this area - our flat was built in 1824 and still has the original windows and drafty floorboards. The nice thing about city living is that our downstairs neighbor does a nice job of sending most of their heat up through our floor. The downside is that most of our heat goes right up to the person above us. The people at the top floor probably don’t even have to turn on their heat, but that’s their reward for having to walk up so many stairs every day.

The solution to energy conservation that most Edinburghers seem to use is to turn their heat off completely at night and put a hot water bottle in their bed. When we first heard about this it sounded old fashioned and inconvenient but we thought we’d give it a shot. For a couple of months now (in the coldest part of winter) we’ve been turning our heat completely off at night, with the exception of India’s room where we keep her radiator on since she’s too young for a bottle (or even blankets). Rather than being inconvenient it has been a real treat to jump into bed with a piping hot water bottle that actually stays hot and warms the entire bed all the way until morning. It is certainly warmer than if we had kept the heat in the whole house blasting all night. The result is that the radiators in the bedroom and the rooms that we don’t usually use (guest room, second bathroom) are never turned on, and the drawing room, kitchen and bathroom are only heated during the day and we’re still completely confortable. What a great way to save energy but still stay toasty warm!

Here’s a full length HBO documentary describing some of the problems that have many computer scientists (including myself) freaking out. If you can watch the last 15 minutes and still trust computerized voting systems then you need to watch it again.

2212 days… over 6 years of uninterrupted use, often under heavy loads.