Lake McDonald

WebCam Tracker v0.9.0

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

For whatever reason I wanted to spend a little more time on my WebCam Tracker program by throwing a UI on top of it.  I did and it turned out reasonably well for my first foray into SWT.

3 things I would still like to do:

  1. Thread the image retrieval process.  It’s done but something happens with the output streams on the new thread which causes it to hang when System.out is called.  If I figure that out it’ll be easy to re-implement.
  2. Implement the progress bar at the bottom of the window.  It should be able to track the progress based upon the provided duration easily enough.
  3. Come up with a better widget for picking the duration and delay times.

Since I took a little bit of extra time to glossy it up a bit, there’s no sense in making it go to waste.  I threw the code & the distribution up on Google Code.  You can see it at WebCam Tracker.

Another time-lapse I did using WebCam Tracker.  Kinda neat.

Sunset over Lake McDonald

Let me know what you think, and of course I welcome any comments/feedback about the app.  Not that I’ll necessarily do anything about them… I don’t plan on spending much time on it… but I’d like to know.

http://code.google.com/p/webcam-tracker/

Spokane to Glacier

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

After a good night’s sleep in the worst hotel of the trip so far (seriously! we had to get maintenance to open our door after we left for 30 minutes for breakfast!) we headed out of Spokane, glad to be on the open road again.

Lake McDonald from Hotel RoomThe trip from Spokane to Glacier National Park was relatively uneventful save the giant bug storm we drove through in Montana.  It seemed bugs the size of your fist were hitting the windshield every 5 seconds or so and they definitely left their mark.

After arriving in Glacier we were greeted with a beautiful view of Lake McDonald from our balcony.

The Lake McDonald Lodge was beautiful, and reminded me of a miniaturized version of  the Old Faithful Inn.  I only wish they had these sorts of places in the Adirondacks.  Come to think of it maybe they could trade.  The Adirondacks could use these sorts of structures and the national parks (or at least the Lake McDonald Lodge) could certainly use some Adirondack furniture.  The chairs at the lodge fit in just fine but they’re crazy uncomfortable.

After dinner we just sort of relaxed and went to bed early, ready to take on the park tomorrow.