Movie marathon
Our local video store Jupiter had a big sale on Wednesday. 50% off - I couldn't resist. I bought several movies on average for less then a buck each. And a MP3 CD with some club music. I'm not gonna lie here: high chances these are illigal copies but how can one prove it? And why?
It is very convinient, you know, four movies on one disk. Good quality too, not some MP4 smashed junk. This way I can allow myself to buy many junk movies, which otherwise I would never go out for.
I liked this new movie Constantine. Until it got to his stupid weapon and final talk to the devil. He's not that dumb and simple, you know. Beware.
Resident Evil part two looks cheap. Don't even want to talk about this disappointment. What a downgrade.
Riddick is good. Pitch Black and The Chronicles both are good enough to see. Will they continue?
Have you ever seen Charmed in french or in any other language except english? I have. I don't speak french but was able to understand almost everything. I don't think I would watch it in any language I understand well enough but cracking a new language makes it much more interesting.
Blocking user input
Work sucks.
I want make my application to be able to block user input while some operation is running. It appears not that easy. I came up with two sollutions. First, subclass glass pane in the top frame making it able to countercept all user input. A bad way IMHO. Not always you're allowed to do that and sometime glass pane is already corrupted by someone. Second, use modal dialog. I thought this to be a good idea but got a real problem with that. Operations run in a thread different from input blocker thread, since input blocker needs to be blocked when the dialog is shown. Blocking works fine, but sometimes unblock request comes too fast and the modal dialog is not visible yet. This leads to a zombie dialog hanging over the application and leaving user with no control over the program. There is no way to find out when the dialog is visible and the input blocker thread is in wait state since I used AWT Dialog class and its internals are private. Wanted to try ComponentListener but again need to synchronize three (operation + blocker + AWT) threads to do that. Seems crazy and bugful. Oh, and the blocker may still not be waiting at the moment component event arrives. I guess the best decision here would be to repeat what Dialog.show() does, though it may not work in the future. The source of this method looks like it has been written last minute before the deadline.
I wonder if I could put Java applets on these pages. Is it against the rules? There are so many free Java programs out there which could be useful but people just don't know how to use them. Someone publishes pictures, can't I publish applets?
