Kathryn's Comments

We’re still nowhere close to complete, thus the low version numbers, but this is the first version that looks decent on a non-Mac. The transparency doesn’t seem to work on Linux (at least not on my Ubuntu 9.10 system), but the window corners are rounded on Windows.

We still don’t have our own tabbed panes, various dialog boxes and file choosers and the like. I’m using the Mac internal frames on a Mac because I think they look good. Maybe I’ll rework the internal frames for non-Mac, but maybe not.

We now have a Google Group called sea-glass-look-and-feel@googlegroups.com for discussing the look and feel. We’ll still make announcements on our blogs, but I think discussion will be easier in a group/mailing list format.

I’m currently working on getting JTextField to use the client property of “JTextField.variant” equals to “search” to print a rounded search field with an hourglass in it.

My outer glow is messed up, but worse, my internal drop shadow is messed up.

I’m using the Nimbus Effects classes, which I note that Nimbus itself doesn’t seem to use. Possibly for performance reasons. I could just draw the stuff, but then it wouldn’t necessarily work at higher DPI.

Anyway, there are probably more important things I could be working on in Sea Glass, but this is something I really want.

We had snow last night. It’s not the first snow of the year, that was a few weeks ago, but the first snow was gone in a few hours. This is sticking around.

Here are a few pictures from outside my front and back windows.

snow from my front window

more snow from my front window

snow from my back window

Originally, I typed that title as “clound commuting”. Fingers don’t always do the right thing, even on a Dvorak keyboard.

Ron Burk has an interesting comment on cloud computing.

It pretty much mirrors my thinking on these subjects. Do we really want a vendor to keep our data, or would we rather keep it ourselves?

This is not a new problem, and the answer is, both. I have a copy of my birth certificate in a safe deposit box at a bank. The city in which I was born keeps a copy as well, in both paper form and in computer records.

I don’t think computing changes the situation all that much, except to make it more pervasive.

Update: I should add that I own a Kindle and I always keep copies of everything I purchase on my laptop, which is in turn backed up to an external drive.

Update 2: I should also add that I’ve know Ron Burk for almost 30 years. We were in college together.

Ken and I have released version 0.1 of the Sea Glass Look and Feel for Java.

This is very preliminary.

See the project site for more information.

In particular, we don’t have good focus indications, some alignment may not be correct, we’re still using Nimbus controls for tabbed panes and a few other minor things, and I’m sure there are tons of glitches.

But it’s a start.

Post feedback at Ken’s site, and we’ll give it the consideration it deserves.

I’ve been playing way too much Civilization IV Beyond the Sword lately rather than coding. The really awful thing is that I don’t even care about any particular game. If I don’t like something that happens I just quit the game and start a new one.

My favorite part of the game is the map discovery phase, where I’m exploring, meeting other cultures, and building my initial cities. Once that’s done, I’ll sometimes finish the game, but lots of times I’ll just quit and start another.

Why am I doing this? It’s completely pointless.

Blast you, Sid Meiers and the rest of Firaxis!

I’ve been working with Laffy, SwingSet3, and some of my own code to check how we’re doing with the Sea Glass L&F. Here’s an example of Laffy’s tables:

Should the striping continue across the checkboxes? Nimbus doesn’t do that, but it is probably possible to do.

Comments?

Here’s a screen shot of Laffy running the Sea Glass L&F against my Ubuntu Linux desktop.

We may move to a more monochrome titlebar button scheme in the future, but right now we’re using a variation of Nimbus’s buttons.

Click the image to see it larger.

Ray Kurzweil popularized the idea of a “Technological Singularity”, originally proposed by Vernor Vinge, based on ideas from I. J. Good, where the advances in technology and, particularly machine intelligence, will render the future unpredictable. The amusing thing to me is that they then go on to make predictions, usually having humans merging with artificial intelligences, or having AI take over the world, sometimes not leaving a place for common humans. A bit like the Terminator or Matrix scenarios but usually a bit less violent. I first became aware of this in Vernor Vinge’s novel Marooned in Realtime, which was a sequel to The Peace War, which I enjoyed quite a bit back in 1984.

Greg Bear also said at a Science Fiction convention in the late 1980s that people who think humanity will look the same in a generation are all wrong. I met him at NolaCon II in 1988 and argued with him about this. We did not change each others’ minds. He thought that advances in genetic engineering would lead to people altering either themselves or their children to be different in whatever arbitrary way made a good story. ;-)

Many times, these speculations are combined.

Although these speculations can make good stories about the Human Condition, my argument against all this is:

• Machine intelligence is proving to be a lot harder than people thought back in the day. Computers are better than we are at certain things, like doing numerical calculations accurately, and they can do many things faster than we can, like scanning star patterns for comets and such, but they don’t do the latter better than we do, and we are far better than they are at many other things. I don’t believe that in principle a computer can’t mimic a human mind, or something like one, but that point is a lot farther off than the AI folks like to admit.
• I think Vinge, Kurzweil, and others are confusing the rate of technological change in certain fields in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with a natural law. There is no real reason to assume that the development curve isn’t some sort of sigmoid curve and that we will soon approach the leveling off point.

  As for Greg Bear, the Human Genome Project has rendered some of his more fanciful speculations problematic, in that we appear to have a lot fewer genes than earlier geneticists thought. Actually constructing a gene to make, say, a second thumb on a hand, will likely prove a lot more difficult than he thought it would in New Orleans in 1988.

• My final point concerns attitudes towards the human form.

  I think that humans in general are more reluctant to fiddle around with their general appearance and faculties than a few body modification people would tend to suggest. People who do change their bodies are looked on as freaks by a large majority of the world, if not Americans. And even in North America and Europe, this is not common behavior.

  I don’t think we’ll see people making large changes in large numbers to their forms anytime soon, if ever.