Orchid wreath

This is the wreath I made for our front door while we redid the front yard. I am kind of an orchid fan lately...and the thing is I never liked orchids before. They are amazing "cratures" ( I say creatures, not plants, because for me they always resemble some kind of carnivors :-)

I wanted more "Asian look" to the wreath and I thought that the river stones were a nice addition. And of course I always loved Cardinal birds :-) I hope you like it!

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Lilac

I just adore lilac! One of the flowers I can keep in my home year round without getting bored by the scent! Unfortunately they don't last as long and for some reason I can't seem to be able to grow any in our backyard. A friend of mine gave me some of hers and wanted to "preserve" it somehow, so I decided to paint lilacs as my second painting.

I am not very pleased by the way it turned out. I think I need to take some classes or something. I haven't even read a single book on oil painting and am going just by the huntch how it is supposed to be done. But I am getting restless. I need more...And of course I can't afford to spend a fortune on MFA or MA, but I am thinking very much about it and am sure I'll figure out something. Do you like it?

Udate on the Koi Fish painting

I love this painting! I couldn't wait to hang it on the wall but when I did, my mom reminded me of something I either didn't know at the time, or completely forgot about- in Feng Shui, a white Koi fish with a red dot on the forehead represents bankruptcy. Bummer!



At first I decided to leave it like that, but since all the other "energizing" pictures I hanged worked so surprisingly well, I thought that I can't take the chance.
So what I did was, I painted a dark, almost black color on top of the red dot. I wasn't very fond of the idea of tampering with the original picture, but I kind of like it how it turned out. I even found the perfect spot for it in our living room, next to the front door.

Couple of people asked me, why 2 fish only, since koi fish are painted usually either by 3, 6 or 9? I wanted them to represent the Yin and Yang as well, so I decided to make 2.

Couple of people asked me if I would sell the painting.
I don't know, I've never sold any paintings, in fact this is the first one I've painted with oil paint. But I feel funny about giving it away to somebody, not like with my cakes that I gladly share with other people and don't mind cutting. On the other hand I have no idea how much would one as big as this one cost.
But I am curious to know how much people would pay for one like this one. Any suggestions?

Quickly running a single Grails test in NetBeans

One thing in the current NetBeans Grails project is that out of the box, you can run all tests in the project from the project's context menu but you can't run individual tests. While that is all good and well when you only have a few tests, once the tests are piling up (or you just are interested in how a particular test works), it is much preferable to be able to execute a single test at a time.

There is an existing issue to address this (so, go and vote for the issue if it seems useful, would ya?), but in the meantime, you still need to run your individual tests, right ? So, what should you do ?

The trick is to just use the "Run Grails Command" feature in NetBeans and make it easily accessible so that you can run the test in a heartbeat.

Here's what the feature looks like:

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  Right click on the project and select the "Run Grails Command..." option
  
  


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  In the dialog, type "test-app" in the Filter text box, and then type in "TestName -unit" for unit tests, or "TestName -integration" for integration tests. Note that here "TestName" is the test class name minus the "Tests" suffix for unit tests and minus the "IntegrationTests" for integration tests.
  
  

The good news is that NetBeans remembers the command options from the previous run (not the command though) and if you pull up the dialog you just have to type "test-app" and hit enter and it will execute your previous test class.

Thus, the only thing you have left it to make it easy to call the "Execute Grails Command" - so, we just need to map a shortcut. In order to do that, go to Tools->Options->Key Map tab. In the "Search" box, type "grails", the "Execute Grails Command" action is there, click in the Shortcut column, type in your shortcut (I picked Ctrl+Alt-C) and hit OK.

Now, running your test the first time involves Ctrl-Alt-C, type "test-app", tab, type "FooBar -unit" and hitting enter. Kicking it off subsequently is Ctrl-Alt-C, type "test-app", hit enter and your tests are running !!!

BEAUTY !!!