Java Thinking

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 c...

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...