Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

I’ve implemented a significantly revised theme here on Mokka mit Schlag. The main change was switching to a Holy Grail style of positioning. This works much better on Safari, and somewhat better on Firefox. However the big change was removing the Google adds from the sidebar. They likely will return at some point. However, the revelation that finally enabled me to fix the Safari problems was that it was precisely the AdSense iframe that was getting in my way.
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I’ve decided to shift the preferred font on this site from Helvetica Neue to Jim Lyle’s Bitstream Vera Sans. If you don’t have that font installed, (though you really should, it’s pretty and free) you won’t notice any changes. If you do, please let me know what you think.
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Joel Spolsky has a really funny article about a cell phone Sprint sent him in the hopes he’d blog about it. Well he did, and the results weren’t pretty:
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The server migration at IBiblio broke something I still don’t quite understand. The net effect is that I can’t update anything there or at Cafe con Leche right now. I have a trouble ticket open. Hopefully I’ll get this fixed soon, whatever it is. E-mail does seem to be working, though.

I was fiddling around with my Amazon blog today when I noticed a new link to an RSS feed. This URL now allows you to subscribe to my Amazon feed in your feed reader of choice:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/id/AYXOSXMBUAT1Y/rss.xml

At first glance, this appears to be a full-text feed. There are also Atom 0.3 feeds, though those feeds don’t seem to have anything the RSS feeds don’t. Amazon’s a little behind the curve here. In 2006, I’d suggest going straight to Atom 1.0 and skipping the whole RSS mess.

Here are the feeds for some other authors who blog on Amazon:
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I must be missing something obvious. Is there a method anywhere in the AWT (preferably in Java 1.4 but maybe 1.5) that allows me to determine the z-order, relative or absolute, of free-standing windows such as frames and dialogs? Specifically I need to know which of several dozen frames is on top among that group. To make this trickier:

1. There may be other frames and dialogs that do not count. For instance, if the preferences dialog is really on top, I still need to know which of my application’s document windows is on top among the document windows.
2. I need to know this even when the application is in the background, so that the top window may not be active.

Surely there’s a function for this somewhere? If not, it’s a pretty glaring hole. Do I really have to write code to watch each and every operation that can move a frame to the front, and track the front window manually?