Java Thinking

I recently bought a Virgin Mobile Broadband (Australia) PrePaid USB modem - a Huawei e160e. I activated it over the phone, and when I plugged it in to my Dell Inspiron 1525 running Ubuntu 9.10, I could see that it was connected to the network (this modem flashes a blue light every 3 seconds when connected to the mobile network). But, try as I might, I couldn't get it connected. Every time I tried, it would just disconnect. Looking in the system logs, I'd see: Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so loaded. Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Using interface ppp0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:43:06 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Modem hangup Jan  6 12:43:06 pa

Right now, I'm trying out EasyPeasy on my laptop - an Ubuntu Netbook based edition optimized for low power consumption and pre-installed with propriety codecs and software. I thought I'd try it out hoping to get more battery life, and also to take the netbook interface for a drive. I figure its got some attractive qualities - it differs in the way you access the system menus and opens applications full screen.

Know of any companies in Sydney that engage in REAL agile projects - properly? Let me know, I'm interested! I had a javascript drop-down menu that youtube video interferred with - when the menu dropped down, the youtube object covered it! I found the answer here -  http://geekswithblogs.net/steveclements/archive/2007/03/03/107839.aspx - where the solution is simple: Add nested element to object tag: <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/> And attribute to embed tag: wmode="transparent" Spending too much time travelling to and from work makes me appreciate the idea of telecommuting. I've noticed that Canonical (Ubuntu) advertises home based jobs, but all companies I know are strongly against it - and although they don't advertise the fact , it is an unspoken policy. Right now, I probably don't have the best home for accommodating telecommunting, but I did come across the OfficePod the other day - a brilliant idea, your office

I've noticed a bunch of websites that just don't pay any attention to detail. Little things: banking sites that don't remember your settings (i.e. for exporting statements) and you have to set them every time you export, for every account log forms you fill it to register, and when you fail validation (like getting the CAPTCHA wrong), some parts of your form are now blank and you have to fill them in again (or you get to the bottom where they ask you to accept the terms and conditions, and when you view them it navigates away from the form you are on) paying for things online is still very difficult! It took me almost an hour to pay for an extension I bought the other day - very confusing paypal process, which I haven't fully researched to know what is going on Maybe these are symptoms of trying to do too much - and never doing anything very well? The banking site in question never seems to change, so perhaps they just aren't in a position where they can make

Looking for some icons? Check out the fantastic work available @ webtoolkit4.me - there are some really good icon sets. I'm always trying to find better ways of doing things and find incredible resistance to even the simplest of improvements - things that I would consider no-brainers end up subjected to business cases and long winded "evaluations of all the options". Well, the Pragmatic Programmers have released a book that might be exactly what I need: Driving Technical Change "Finding cool languages, tools, or development techniques is easy—new ones are popping up every day. Convincing co-workers to adopt them is the hard part. The problem is political, and in political fights, logic doesn’t win for logic’s sake. Hard evidence of a superior solution is not enough. But that reality can be tough for programmers to overcome." Myself and a co-worker have a keen interest in developing our agile skills, and would also like to infect the rest of the team with our en

I've installed WorldCommunityGrid on my media center , which is on 24*7 - may as well use that spare CPU time for good! I've been watching my ranking slowly get better, starting over 300,000 and now after 21 days of run time I'm ranked (by points) in the mid 200,000s. Along comes a friend of mine and in a very short time he's already broken through under 200,000! He has a quad core CPU (mine is a dual core), and I'm assuming thats the reason. I find it strange that developer PCs never seem to get updated unless someone new joins the team - and they only get a new computer if one doesn't exist already. I've never worked anywhere where they've had a policy to update developer machines regularly. I think I'd have a policy of updating them every 12 to 18 months if it was up to me. The older machines can filter down to less power users, or perhaps the developer PCs could be rented. I would love a clean machine with a clean OS every 18 months, and I can h

I finally got a new battery for my laptop - it only took 3 weeks rather than the estimated 6, so finally I'm back online - on the train. It's barely doing the job though, a new battery barely gets me to and from work - I obviously need to work closer to home! I'm running Ubuntu , Netbeans , Grails , and sometimes a 3G internet connection - so I guess it is working hard for what is sometimes more than a 2 hour round trip! It will be interesting to see how the new battery lasts. I'm also thinking about getting a new laptop at the end of the year - my current laptop is over 2 years old, so technology wise it's out of date. The DELL Adamo looks interesting, with a SSD disk - I'd love to see how much difference that makes, otherwise I'd probably get an Inspiron 13z - I'm mainly interested in the smaller lighter models since I'm so mobile. Its nice to see laptops coming without DVD drives now - who needs them? I found an interesting whitepaper on Agile

I've recently made updates to my grails plugins to ensure they work on Grails 1.3. I hadn't touched them for a while, so it took a bit of effort. I haven't had the opportunity to use Grails much lately, so I had to catch up on changes. One issue I have is that its impossible to know if anyone is actually using these plugins, and therefore are they worth maintaining? I recently stumbled across AgileRecord.com - The Magazine for Agile Developers and Agile Testers. This is a downloadable PDF magazine, I think it only requires registration. Very interesting read, I recommend checking it out. Another awesome read is "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" -  http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches - This describes how one team implemented agile and is a fantastic source of information. I've been playing with Joomla lately, and I'm liking it so far. There is a bit of a learning curve, because it has a different paradigm than Wordpress - while Wordp

I spend a lot of time on the train travelling to work. Working from home has not really taken off in this part of the world - so, what better to do with that time than practice my craft? Its not comfortable, its hard to concentrate, but progress can be made. I have successfully used this tool to observe real performance problems, and confirm they've been resolved. JtSysMon is a very simple monitoring tool which will poll resources and time the response. The response time is logged to a database, and from there, you can see which resources are either slow or failing/erroring. I wrote this because I needed a way to make sure that various resources were available and responsive during development, so that we could respond quickly (proactively) to problems and have them fixed before developers or testers noticed or wasted time fault finding. Existing solutions (Nagios, Zenoss etc) seemed too complex for such a simple requirement, with too much of a learning curve and setup requi

Ubuntu 10.04 is here! I've been running Ubuntu exclusively (my wife has the only Windows machine in the house) since (I think) around 6.XX and it just keeps getting better. Last year I converted my parents to Ubuntu 9.10 and every now and then they boot into windows because they don't know how to do something, but thats just because I'm in a different country - otherwise I'd be able to help them a lot more, and show them around. I've got remote control working well now ( Remmina has an option to drop the colours to 256 which means it performs fine across the Tasman) so that means I can show them how to do things easily. I'm looking forward to the new social network aspect of Ubuntu 10, with tight integration into chat and social networks - hopefully this will keep me in touch with my family much more. By the way, I really like Gwibber , and look forward to seeing that evolve. If you like the sound of Linux and/or Ubuntu, I encourage you to try it out. It can m

There is some great new technology coming: Enso Zenpad 5 inches  http://enso-now.com/n/index.php Alex eReader  https://www.springdesign.com/us/index.action And the return of a classic: http://www.commodoreusa.net/index.html I'm back playing with virtual machines, trying to investigate a few products that might result in productivity gains. So, I'm using VirtualBox, and here's a couple of must knows: Bios settings for hardware virtualization  http://www.sevenforums.com/virtualization/20330-how-turn-hardware-virtualization-my-bios.html Networking - the default NAT network setting allows the guest to see the internet, but other machines can't see the guest - not too useful if your guest is a server. Here are some useful references: a)  http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2009/10/28/virtualbox-host-to-guest-networking/ b)  http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/08/virtualbox-windows-xp-guest-in-windows.html c)  http://mydebian.blogdns.org/?p=148 One thing I'm looking

I've just started playing with the  Android platform , getting going by writing a very simple timer application - the kind thats useful when you are exercising, for example when you want to hold the plank for 60 seconds. Why Android? Well, its all so familiar - Eclipse development environment, Java language,  and zero entry cost. I don't have an Android phone itself yet, so I'm just running on the emulator that comes with the  SDK . It only took an hour or so to put together the application, after working through the hello world tutorial.

I've been using Remote Desktop Viewer to administer and set up my parents computer (running Ubuntu 9.10) in another country. Although functional - it's exactly what I want - I've had lots of trouble with usability, most likely attributed to the bandwidth between the 2 locations. The main issue is responsiveness – the mouse movement is terrible, almost unusable, taking ages to accurately position the mouse where you want. I couldn't find much in the way of settings to play with when using the Remote Desktop Viewer that comes installed by default with Ubuntu. But when I installed Remmina Remote Desktop Client , I noticed that there were options for Colour Depth and Quality. Changing the colours to 256 and using poorest quality, I can now control the remote desktop much better. Now it is usable and much less frustrating! I've been working with Netbeans Platform 6.8 , making a desktop GUI for an application I've been working on. I got off to a slow start, but after

So I recently submitted a patch to the NetworkManager component: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731  - but it turns out to be a duplicate because this problem was addressed in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600779 - by default Bugzilla doesn't seem to include 'resolved' defects in the search results. You have to go to advanced search and select all statuses . So, if my patch wasn't needed, and this issue has been resolved, then why doesn't the source code in trunk have this change? Bug 600779 mentions that service providers is deprecated, but by what? Ubuntu 9.10 still uses it, because when I edited /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml it worked fine for me. If service providers is deprecated, then why isn't there something on the homepage? Bugzilla doesn't seem to report which source files were changed in a bug - something I quite like in JIRA. See comment #1 : VirginInternet would still be used for teth

Its been a good week. I got my Virgin Mobile Broadband Prepaid 3G modem working, and learnt a lot in the process, and actually contributed to the GNOME project: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731 As part of this, I installed Pidgin so I could join the IRC channel and talk to developers, but I haven't yet figured out how to view the history for a channel - so I can see what happened while I was offline... It does surprise me though, that the database for mobile broadband providers is specific to the window manager (GNOME) instead of being a system level thing. I'm sure there are good reasons, and it probably doesn't matter, but what do the KDE (and others) users do? Define it all over again? Worse than that though is that Virgin don't seem to make the APN easily available. I found it by searching the web, and finding it in forums, but why isn't it in the FAQ on a Virgin site? I didn't anticipate how much I'd enjoy having access to the internet

I recently bought a Virgin Mobile Broadband (Australia) PrePaid USB modem - a Huawei e160e. I activated it over the phone, and when I plugged it in to my Dell Inspiron 1525 running Ubuntu 9.10, I could see that it was connected to the network (this modem flashes a blue light every 3 seconds when connected to the mobile network). But, try as I might, I couldn't get it connected. Every time I tried, it would just disconnect. Looking in the system logs, I'd see: Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so loaded. Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Using interface ppp0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:43:06 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Modem hangup Jan  6 12:43:06 pa