Masdevallia Madness

I'm, at best, a dabbler in growing any one kind of plant.  So, when I saw an unusual orchid on the sale table at the local nursery, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into, "How different could it really be?".  Several months later, I've finally had to admit the answer is "Very".

Orchidus Angrius

All the orchids are watered together - within days, this one resembles a rhododendron in winter; clearly not happy with the humidity levels.  Off to the bookcase to dig out Cullina's Understanding Orchids and look up Masdevallia [Masdevallia Heathii (veitchiana 4N x ignea 4N) to be specific].  This is not going to be easy, but it looks like it will be fun.

But will the locks hold in the orchids?

First step was getting some way to keep the humidity around the orchid at a significantly higher level than I've had it.  Shopping around, I decided to give the Exo Terra 12 x 12 x 18 Vivarium a try.  Too soon to say if it's big enough or the right pick for the job, but I liked a number of features:

• Front access via double doors.
• Good airflow (my thinking is that it will be easier to reduce airflow than to try and give better airflow to a more sealed design).
• Openings at the top back designed for routing wires (should be handy as I add sensors, fans, etc.).
• Water tight base.

Sometimes it turns out a sale isn't really a sale

I use egg crate lighting diffuser trimmed to fit in the water trays for my other orchids.  Turns out that this, plus some PVC pipe as spacers, is a standard solution for lifting plants above the water line in vivariums.  After dumping a couple inches of water into the base and closing the doors, I'm getting humidity in the mid 70s, which is a big improvement.

Next up is getting an arduino doing some monitoring of the environment inside the case.

Solving java.lang.SecurityException when adding Hamcrest in Eclipse

Added the full version of Hamcrest 1.2 to my Eclipse project today and got a java.lang.SecurityException as soon as I tried to run my unit tests:

java.lang.SecurityException: class "org.hamcrest.Matchers"'s signer information does not match signer information of other classes in the same package at java.lang.ClassLoader.checkCerts(ClassLoader.java:807)

After some fruitless googling, I finally came across this post. Don't entirely follow the reference to plugins, but the intent seems pretty clear. After editing my project's build order so Hamcrest is before JUnit4, the problem went away. Definitely looking forward to trying out more Matcher style asserts in my unit tests.

Style a GXT Grid Row Using GridViewConfig

At work, we're using Sencha's Ext GWT library for much of our GWT based application. A few weeks back, I needed to implement some functionality to style rows in the grid based on information in the model data. After struggling through a number of poor approaches, I found GridViewConfig, which sorted things out nicely. While the logic for determining style in our app is more complex, this simple case demonstrates the principle:


Tho I've found the CSS side of things to be more finicky than I would have hoped:

Java Introspection

About two weeks ago at work we got into a classic "works fine in development / doesn't work in staging" situation. I finally tracked it down to the fact that development and staging are running slightly different versions of Java. This surfaces because one of the Struts forms doesn't follow the standard for indexed properties. Evidently, version A of Java 1.3 handles introspection differently than version B. After working this out, I was able to jam the JRE from WebSphere in staging into the appropriate place in WSAD and now development breaks just like staging. Apparently this isn't an uncommon issue in Java 1.3 land, but from newgroups it sounds like it generally surfaces with an InvalidArgumentException rather than silently failing.

Pipes Revisited

Finally put together some working pipes on Yahoo:
Blogspot as an RSS feed
Google Group as an RSS feed

And the two together form:
The Java Posse Tracker :)

The Internet is a Series of... Pipes?

I spent some time playing around with Yahoo Pipes tonight and I have to say it's a blast! I didn't build a particularly revolutionary pipe, but it was fun and intuitive. To Yahoo's credit, they managed to distract me from my GWT experiment :) which is the other technology I'm playing with that is surprisingly fun.