Week in Review - 2013-10


  • An Optus representative came knocking the other week, and explained that by having an Optus home phone, broadband and mobile phone (which I have), I'd qualify for a 25% discount and free Fetch TV. Now, this is all GOOD. I had to upgrade my mobile plan from $29 to $30 (for which they wanted a $100 plan change fee), but hopefully my next bill will be 25% smaller (down from $80ish to $60ish). And, I'm currently enjoying the Fetch TV experience. This set-top box has a 1T hard disk, and a pretty good interface for navigating the recordings and (free albeit old) IPTV movies. I'm not saying its the best, but it does have me considering turning off the MythTV media center since it takes care of recording terrestrial TV (but I would need a DNLA alternative or similar for watching audio/video/dvds - maybe a NAS? or XBMC?). See https://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/bundles/85

  • An interesting point to note, now that I have FetchTV I can rent and stream movies for approx $6.50 - the price it used to cost to rent a new release DVD. However, the local video shop now has $1 Tuesdays - so, even though the convenience of streaming is AWESOME, $1 is even more so.

  • I'm working with Griffon on a JavaFX application, and I've been having a bunch of strange, almost random problems. I finally thought I should find out what version of JavaFX I'm using - turns out if was javafx.runtime.version: 2.2.1-ea-b02 - not the latest! I'm running jdk-1.7.0_07, so now I've downloaded the latest jdk-1.7.0_15, and now I have javafx.runtime.version: 2.2.7-b01. To find out what version you have, use System.getProperties().get("javafx.runtime.version"). So far I've found figuring out JavaFX with Griffon quite tedious and I'm considering switching my Griffon app to Swing.


  • It turns out there is a simple way to find out what packages are included in an Ubuntu distribution  that doesn't even require you to be running Ubuntu (i.e. via web browser) - simply point your browser at http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/all/allpackages for a full list (looong page) of Ubuntu 12.10 packages. For other releases, just go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ and pick the version - this will show you package groupings, but at the bottom of the page you'll see a link to 'All packages' and a 'compact compressed textlist'. This makes it real easy to find out - say - what version of Jetty is included.

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