I always planned to read The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, now I feel the pressure to read it before seeing the new movie, It is better to read the original than some modern adaptation for the big screen.

I found a copy of it on the Project Gutenberg site. I converted it from HTML to the PDF format (which make easier to reach the last page accessed) in order to read it on my PDA. They are attached to this post:

• "The War of the Worlds" PDF
• "The War of the Worlds" OpenDocument (can be edited with OpenOffice)

Excuses in advance for what i will going to say in Spanish, but I need to write it without mistakes, I promise to translate it when the tide returns to it normals levels

Este blog siempre ha tocado temas técnicos y me disculpan hoy por hablar de algo muy personal, pero necesito desahogarme de alguna manera. Es una historia que cubre muchos años resumida en unas pocas líneas

Hace ya varios años yo daba un curso de Java introductorio, imagínense, desde la época de VisualAge for Java 1.0 y usando OS/2, je bastante tiempo, quedé enamorado de la mirada más hermosa que había visto en mi vida y me dije que esa mirada iba a ser para mi nada más, me costó meses lograrlo, pero fue y sigue siendo el mejor tiempo invertido de mi vida. Esto nos llevó a muchos años de felicidad, los mejores de todos. Lamentablemente siempre llega un momento de problemas profesionales, de trabajo y en esos momentos es cuando las decisiones deben ser bien tomadas. No puedo dar detalle de este punto sin hablar directamenre de esa persona tan especial en mi vida y que no puede expresar su opinión aquí en este momento, y como un caballero no tiene memoria solo puedo decir que tomé una decisión siguiendo lo que mi cerebro calculaba e ignorando lo que el corazón me decía.

A good programmer using Swing knows that long operations must be executed outside the Swing event dispatch thread, and there are many utlities to do that like the SwingWorker class. One of the problems that arises when another thread in opened to do processing is that sometimes is needed to inhibit any input made by the user. One of the solutions is the usage of the glass pane in order to capture input events, adding a mouse listener to the glass pane we can capture all mouse input events in order to block them.

But what about key events? a key listener works, but is required to transfer the focus to the glass pane, and that remove the focus from the current focused component. For this key events problem I take another approach: use the KeyboardFocusManager. This class allows to install a KeyEventDispatcher that is able to route the event to the appropiate component. If a dispatcher is installed that always returns true, no key event will be sent to any component until the dispatcher is removed. See the following example:

First Hitler, now this, you only select the options telling that you like leadership and you are designated as the bad guy

Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you?

Google Maps now is able to show a lot more satellite images of places outside North America and UK. I was able to locate Puerto Cabello (my native city), Valencia, my workplace in Caracas, and my home in the suburbs. The only caveat is that the satellite images do not have a great zoom level like the ones from USA and UK.