The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here's a high level summary of its overall blog health.
Following is my own (very minor!) adaptation of J.R.R.Tolkien's walking poem which I sing to my sons at night. This poem appears in various forms both in The Hobbit and in LOTR. I have not yet committed to memory the version sung by Frodo in the chapter "Three Is Company" — it's stanzas are a different format to those sung/spoken by Bilbo, and do not fit easily to the tune sung by Bilbo in the LOTR movie, nor to the tune sung by The Starlit Jewel which you can find on youtube. I might fiddle with them one day and create my own tune to use as a chorus or a coda.
Anyway, here it is. I have taken both of the versions which Bilbo recites in LOTR and put the stanzas from The Hobbit in the middle. I like how it ends with "My evening-rest and sleep to meet". The boys may get the hint one day...
I Don't Want To Live On The Moon
Written by Jeff Moss
1978 Festival Attractions, Inc. (ASCAP)
sung by Ernie (Jim Henson)
I'm learning a new song to sing to my kids at bedtime
Lately I've been noticing significant DNS latency when visiting certain sites. This is most obvious when my browser spends ages with "Looking up some.web.server.com..." in it's status bar. It's particularly bad at sites like wordpress.com where many pages make reference to sub-domains of wordpress.com and typically also to google.com for analytics or ads.
While my ISP's DNS infrastructure is pretty good, there are a couple of things I can do to improve DNS look-up, which makes page loads a lot quicker.
Older X.org and XFree86 used to have this neat feature where pressing Ctrl+<numpad +> and Ctrl+<numpad -> would cycle through the screen modes defined in your config file in the "Screen" section, effectively switching screen modes on the fly and letting you pan around the full virtual screen size with the mouse.
This was a really useful feature for zooming in on small details, or to blow up videos without incurring high CPU overhead.
But since about X.org 1.7 this feature seems to be missing. I've been researching and discovered why it's missing, and what to do about it.
I've been experimenting with the awesome tiling window manager as a replacement to KDE's kwin, and I've managed to hack together a recipe for getting them up an running. It's surprisingly simple, although the learing curve was a little steep.
This post documents what I've done to get things working nicely with the basic awesome config. No customisations here, see the awesome wiki for some ideas.
There is lots of information on the Web about concurrent programming with Java (or with other languages on the JVM). This post is a list of links I have found helpful and/or interesting.
Okay I'm still on the hunt for the elusive dark colour look-and-feel for NetBeans. I found this site that has great information about the NimROD L&F. This sets the widgets to a dark colour (or you could customise your own colours with NimROD).
Note that this is separate from the NetBeans colour themes which control editor colours. For that, I quite like Twilight and Aloha, although each needs tweaking to fix highlight colours for things such as breakpoints and step colours, or for highlighting code differences. Still, it's a good start.