Election Dance!

November 5, 2000 4:47 AM

Election Dance! The Electoral College meets the Hamster Dance. Look at those swing states bounce to and fro!
posted by youhas (11 comments total)

(I apologize for the self-linkage, but I figured that this was substantive enough to share. I'll be in the corner awaiting my stoning, just in case.)
posted by youhas at 4:50 AM on November 5, 2000

that damn music!

i had to shut down my browser to get it to shut off...
posted by o2b at 8:42 AM on November 5, 2000

That's pretty scary. Now I wonder whether I should have (absentee) voted for the Vice President from Tennessee.
posted by EngineBeak at 9:19 AM on November 5, 2000

Instead of Nader, that is.
posted by EngineBeak at 9:20 AM on November 5, 2000

Make the music stop! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
posted by dogwelder at 9:28 AM on November 5, 2000

Must be a bug in the JRE.
posted by waxpancake at 10:07 AM on November 5, 2000

It's more likely to be a poorly written Java applet. If the programmer doesn't kill the thread playing the sound file when the page is exited, it will continue until the browser is closed.
posted by rcade at 1:46 PM on November 5, 2000

Codewise, the audio clip was stopped and the thread containing it was stopped - don't know why it botched the job so badly in practice. Problem should be fixed now; deepest apologies all around.
posted by youhas at 4:41 PM on November 5, 2000

Youhas ... I didn't realize it was your applet. Did you call stop() to kill the thread? I used to have terrible luck with that technique.
posted by rcade at 4:08 PM on November 6, 2000

Did everything I damn well could: called .stop() on the audio clip, called .stop() on the thread, switched over to my own thread-interruption method that should've stopped it - all to no avail. [shrug] Gave up and used the dreaded HTML EMBED tags - at least it's not raking anyone's browsers over the coals anymore.
posted by youhas at 5:50 PM on November 6, 2000

Thread.stop() was deprecated after the initial release of Java 1.0. The preferred technique is to set the thread object to null when you're done with it, and test the thread's object with Thread.currentThread() in its main loop. I've had pretty good luck doing this.
posted by rcade at 9:05 AM on November 7, 2000