Mokka mit Schlag

Between my eye surgery in March that took 6 months to fully recover from and a major writing commitment that occupied most of my weekends before that, 2015 was not my best birding year. Nonetheless, I did manage trips to Oregon and Hawaii; and some rarities visited my “backyard.”

According to eBird, I added 20 species to my life list in 2015, though many of those are introduced exotics in Hawaii. Hawaii doesn’t seem to have a bird records committee, so there’s no one to rule on which ones “count” and which ones don’t. Clearly native birds like Wedge-tailed Shearwater and Hawaiian Coot count, but what to do about Red-crested Cardinal and Hwamei?
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My latest short story, “Blood Test”, has been published by Dreaming Robot Press in the Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide 2016:

This story offers a somewhat more serious take on the superhero genre than my last story “Pinning Portugal”; and has more than a passing connection to the real world we actually live in.
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Red-tailed Hawk with dead mouse
Brooklyn Botanic Garden native flora garden at noon

Why can’t super-villains cooperate? Find out today in “Pinning Portugal” in Caped: An Anthology of Superhero Tales.

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I need to write some end-to-end tests for a Swing GUI application, likely running on Linux. Note that these are not unit tests. I am not testing through the API. Rather I am launching the application (in this case IntelliJ IDEA with our plugins installed) and select menu items, press buttons, read the screen, and so forth.

What tools are folks using for this? Open source strongly preferred (since the plugins we’re testing are open source) but this is not absolutely required.

I made a few adjustments to this site’s custom theme (the first in years) and Google at least now sees it as mobile friendly. To make it truly mobile friendly, I need to figure out what to about the sidebar.

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