Dammit Jim!

I use JabRef for BibTeX reference management. It has a handy GUI and a nice web search feature so you don’t have to manually type in entries. But it apparently doesn’t like to work with tiling window managers like xmonad. If you start JabRef in xmonad, you just get a blank white/gray box with only a File > Close menu option and nothing else. This makes it completely unusable.

It took me a while to google up a solution since there were a few false starts with some sort of MToolkit vs XToolkit option in Java but it turns out you can just set the environmental variable _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 and things will start working correctly.

So if jabref is in your path you could make an alias for jabref like:
alias jabref="_JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 jabref"
and then just type jabref and it should work normally.

I was just ordering seeds for the spring season and trying to remember what I had grown in previous years. Seems like I had better write this all down before I totally forget. It’s a couple years later so some of this might be a bit vague.

Garden

The dirt in our yard didn’t seem particularly attractive so we wanted to try some sort of cheap raised beds. Since we needed to improve the soil anyway we figured we’d try straw bale gardening and picked up a truck full of straw. The straw bales worked pretty well except they dry out fairly fast and it was a pretty dry summer so we had to water often. We formed the bales into hollow rectangles so we could fill in the centers with compost.

We picked up a $20 truck full and a bunch of free garbage cans full of compost from the compost center at Fairmount park. It was pretty good compost except you get a fair amount of plastic garbage bits scattered in it and I’m not sure whether or not the wilt problems we ran into came from the compost.

We also tried a little lasagna gardening (throw down newspaper/cardboard over grass, add a bunch of compostable stuff on top) in one bed. We mixed some of the compost with a bunch of old leaves and peat moss and put the plants in directly. It seemed to work quite well; no weeds and the plants were some of our best growers.

Tomato cages seemed expensive so we tried picking up some bamboo off craigslist. Driving home in a rented miniSUV with bamboo sticking 10 feet out the rear window was pretty funny. I used my vaguely remembered lashing and knot skills from Boy Scouts to make up some bamboo and twine trellises and tied off plants to them. It worked well except the bamboo broke a couple times and messed up any plants depending on them for support.

We picked up a few alpine strawberries from the Strawberry Store. The guy running that website has a lot of nice videos and information on alpine strawberries and sold us some really nice plants. The alpine strawberries were pretty cool with some tiny red, white and yellow strawberries. We got maybe a dozen strawberries per day from a handful of alpines (when the birds didn’t eat them). Just enough for a little treat. They seemed to grow really well in pots.

We also impulse purchased a blueberry bush and bought a few more off a farm in New Jersey. We kept them in big pots full of peat moss and pine bark. We got a few berries but the small ones were a bit too small to have many buds and many of the larger one’s berries were eaten by birds.

Seeds

We ordered seeds from Park Seeds a bit too late in the season (and then it took a while for them to be delivered) so we got a bit of a late start. Just to keep a record, the seeds we got were:

Eggplant Hansel Hybrid

Maybe one or two eggplants. Not very successful.

Bean Kentucky Blue

A few beans but I think some critter was eating them because they never seemed to grow many leaves.

Cucumber Alibi

A few cucumbers but not a lot. It seemed like some flowers may not have been getting pollinated.

Squash Summer Medley Hybrid Blend

Got some zucchini from these but mildew killed them off early.

Pumpkin Rumbo Hybrid

This squash made huge vines all over the yard. It waited until the very last to make any fruits but we did end up getting a decent amount of very large squash. The squash lasted very well and we didn’t finish the last one until spring. Very tasty squash.

Organic Chives

Not sure whether the garlic chives or normal chives were successful but one of them gave us a few harvests and overwintered successfully.

Garlic Chives

Not sure whether the garlic chives or normal chives were successful but one of them gave us a few harvests and overwintered successfully.

Cilantro Santo

Very successful. Lots of leaves and lots of seeds. Probably should keep from flowering next year to get more leaves.

Spearmint

Kept these in a pot with the dill. They made lots of leaves and pushed out the dill.

Dill

Grew in a pot with mint since they’re supposed to be fairly invasive. Got a decent amount of dill leaves but no seeds and the mint pushed it out.

Lemon Grass

The grass grew ok in a pot but we never really got any big stalks like in the grocery store. Maybe need a longer growing season? Will try bringing it inside to overwinter next year.

Basil Large Leaf Italian

Lots of basil leaves and lots of basil seeds. Pretty successful.

Lettuce Buttercrunch

Apparently I’m not too good at growing lettuce. Got a few leaves.

Spinach Melody Hybrid

A few leaves but not too successful. Need to try out some other greens varieties.

Tomato Heirloom Rainbow Blend

Heirloom tomatoes sounded cool. We had big tomato plants coming along but then they all got knocked down by diseases and we really didn’t get much from them. Disease-resistant hybrids may be the way to go.

Tomato Park’s Razzleberry Hybrid

Got this one free with the seed order. We got a few tomatoes from it. It was supposed to be disease resistant but still died off from some sort of wilt.

Tomato Chocolate Cherry

We got a decent amount of cherry tomatoes off these but some sort of wilt killed them off from the ground up when there were still many tomatoes growing.

Watermelon Shiny Boy Hybrid

One tennis ball-sized melon that was bored into by bugs before we got to it.

Pepper Fire Mix

We started these a bit late so we didn’t get a ton of peppers. The ones we got were tasty. I didn’t realize you could bring peppers in before the first frost and overwinter them.

Marigold Golden Guardian

These marigolds were amazingly tough and large. They’re supposed to drive off nematodes but I can’t really vouch one way or another for that (our tomatoes had lots of problems but I don’t think nematodes were one of them). These flowers did make giant bushes and tons of seeds for the next year.

Corn Bicolor Mirai 301BC

Our corn was growing well then some sort of beetle bored into the plant halfway up the stalk and they all fell over and died. Corn takes up a ton of space (although it does look cool) so no more corn growing I think.

We also got a few packets from Walmart for around 50 cents each. None really worked.

Summary

For starting late, I think we got our garden going pretty well. We had a fair bit of disease problems so we’ll have to pick more disease-resistant varieties in the future. Also watering so frequently was a bit of a pain. But the fresh vegetables tasted great and the plants were fun to watch grow up so I think we’ll be growing again next year.

In a funny congruence with my post on R progress bars, Mark Heckmann just posted about some wrappers for the apply functions in R. He wrote up some functions that imitate sapply, lapply and apply but automatically add a progress bar so you can monitor the progress. They work very nice since you can just substitute his apply_pb‘s in place of R’s standard apply‘s. He says it’s a bit of a performance drag but after testing a bit it looks like they really shouldn’t add much overhead at all if there’s any major calculations inside the loop. Very handy.

Recently, I’ve had a lot of time consuming tasks running in R where it’s nice to know how the computer is doing. I usually just output the name of the current iteration or a dot or something but I finally decided I should figure out how to make a nice progress bar in R. It turns out it’s really simple since it’s already builtin with the txtProgressBar function. So you can do something like:

[R] numberSteps

That’s good enough for me but there’s also winProgressBar for a fancy Windows progress bar and tkProgressBar (in the tcltk package) if you really want to get fancy.

I was just quickly flipping through code on a terminal and got to thinking that it would be pretty handy to be able to syntax highlight when using head or grep without having to open an editor. Luckily, I remembered Pygmentize was pretty handy when syntax highlighting in LaTeX so I wondered if they had an equivalent output for terminal. It turns out they do (in standard or 256 color no less) so in a couple minutes I had a really short script for highlighting code at the terminal saved it to bin/ccat and was ready to go. Pygmentize really is impressive. Here’s the script if anyone else is looking to do the same: [bash] #!/bin/bash if [ ! -t 0 ];then file=/dev/stdin elif [ -f $1 ];then file=$1 else echo “Usage: $0 code.c” echo “or e.g. head code.c|$0” exit 1 fi pygmentize -f terminal -g $file [/bash] It just looks for stdin and if it doesn’t find it it looks for a file name or takes direct input. Obviously it requires Pygmentize (which is really easy to install if you already have Python).