I posted a story to SlashDot about the Panamanian Supreme Courts decisions to block the governments UDP ban.
Wired News: This Laptop's Too Hot to Handle
Julia Scheeres from Wired wrote me and told me she'd corrected the story.
Cool, thanks Julia.
While researching a Panamanian Island called Isla Coiba, I came across this site for a sports fishing outfit called Coiba Adventure Sportfishing
I used to go fishing when I was little, but haven't been for probably close to 20 years. I had no idea that you could even catch fish this big:
infoSync : Newsbits : MMS goes to Brazil
This is cool. Brazillian GSM operator OI have had a MMS system live for about a month know. The interesting thing is that they are getting on average 3 MMS messages per user per day at the moment.
I've always thought that the culture of Latin America would tend well to SMS/MMS applications just like in Japan.
People in Panama are already texting non stop. Let see what happens with the Bell South 1xRTT 3G system.
Wired News: This Laptop's Too Hot to Handle
I shouldnt get annoyed really, but it does annoy me when apparently intelligent people make the same mistake again and again.
Wired.com's article above about the Swedish engineer who got burnt by his laptop is an example of this.
The writer repeatedly claims the engineer was Swiss. The reuters story that she no doubt got this from says Swedish.
I'm Danish and constantly being called Dutch by Anglo's (That is American's, British, Canadians et al). I dont know what the confusion is? Is it because Danish and Dutch both start with a D? Denmark and Netherlands certainly dont sound the same.
Sweden and Switzerland has got a few more phonetical similarities, but still. She must have read Swedish and thought Swiss.
Other popular confusions are:
Austrians!=Australians
Ghanaian!=Guyanese
The next English person who mistakes me for Dutch will receive a barrage of faux interested questions from me about life in Ireland.
Sharp Japan's Zaurus site
I love my Zaurus 5000, even though I've never really managed to synchronize it with my PC.
I mentioned earlier the new Zaurus SL-B5600. Which is a basically a the same as the existing Zaurus, but with most of its problems fixed.
Really though what I want is the SL-C700 pictured above. Click on the picture to see the Animation of how you close and open the keyboard portion.
It also comes with a full VGA size screen. This coupled with the larger keyboard makes this a really cool pda for doing emergency sysadmin work etc. remotely.
They will not be availabe outside of Japan, which sucks. But I probably will be in Japan early next year in which case I might just have to pick one up. I wonder if I can change the language to English on it? There must be some way.
Russel is talking phones. One of my favorite gadget subjects.
So I see on Nokia's web site they have two new 3G phones that will work in Panama on current (soon to come networks).
Number one for Cable and Wireless (Booh!!!) is the new
Nokia 6200
Which is a color GSM/GPRS/EGPRS phone with support for GSM850, 1800 and 1900 bands. Key for Panama of course being GSM850. It has 118KBps data speeds. Java Midlets and a bunch of other cool features, but strangely no bluetooth and the gui is only Series 40. For more see InfoSync.
Next up is the
Nokia 3585i
This is more interesting for me as it's a 1xRTT phone, thus usable on Bell South Panama.
The phone has got your typical 144kbps speed data, GPS and legacy network compatibility. It even has Java Midlet support, but sorry this phone is boring.
No color, no bluetooth, no nothing. It looks like a £30 Pay as you go phone from a British supermarket.
What is wrong with Nokia, I know American's have been slow on going for the advanced phones, but there is a market for them. The Japanese and Koreans have far more cool phones out there for this market and will win it. Read what InfoSync has to say here.
WebGoat
Corporate developers writing internal J2EE web apps are notoriously poort at seeing the reason that you need to code securely.
Enter WebGoat an example application from The Open Web Application Security Project. They have a great guide that every developer working on web apps should read.
Secure
Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO
While I tend to be quite paranoid when I develop my code, some times its
when you're churning out large amounts of code to be complacent.
For a great insight to some do's and donts check out David Wheelers
Secure Programming.
It is mainly concerned with general Linux (C/C++) coding, but the list of
guidelines is invaluable.
For example:
5. Never return a mutable object to potentially
malicious code (since the code may decide to change it). Note that arrays
are mutable (even if the array contents aren't), so don't return a reference
to an internal array with sensitive data.
This is a pet pieve for me with normal java collections. Did I see
Jakarta's Commons Collections having a ReadOnly Decorator??? I just had a
look through their javadocs,
but couldnt find it.
The best implementation of Immutable Collections I've seen is my old
friend Tyler Close's Waterken library, that has recently been reborn as Waterken ADT. He also has
a pretty cool object db based on some of these principles as well.
If you can bear a slightly different syntax his stuff is great.
His collections are completely immutable. If you add something to a set,
you get a completely new immutable set.
my_set = my_set.with("bob");This is of course completely similar to what we do with Strings. It's a bit
different, but really quite cool.
I wrote a fair bit of code around his first rev a couple of years ago. Maybe
I should rediscover it and be more secure.
Ximian : Products : Ximian
Evolution
Just upgraded to 1.2 of Ximian Evolution. I've become very accustomed to
Evolution over the last year and was excited to see the final release of
it.
I was trying to build some of the beta versions of it, but virtually impossible.
Gnome has brought new meaning to the term
DLL hell.
The amount of dependencies I had to sort out made me give up after several
hours wasted.
To Ximian's support, they know this and have got the red-carpet installer
to make it easier. My problemis that I use Linux Mandrake 9.0, which they
don't support.
They did make me happy though by releasing a red-carpet instal of Evolution
only for Mandrake 9.0
I'm sorry, but when it comes to ease of installation, KDE has got gnome beat
hands down.
My biggest pet pieve about Ximian, is their insistance on thinking that PGPMime
is the only way to do PGP.
I use PGP alot, but when I receive an encrypted file in standard PGP ascii
armor, I first have to save it and then run GnuPG on the command line.
Dang, I had hoped they would have fixed this by now. This might actually
make me look at other clients.
It's about time Sun published something like this. Memory and GC setup is one of the most important aspects of tuning production apps and there is not much docs out there about it.
Eclipse
Resin WebWork Hibernate = Sah-WEET!
Just saw this on Paul Snively's weblog. It's his step by step guide to setting
up the perfect web app development environment.
I'm going to try it. Everyone's always talking about WebWork and I've been
wanting to try it for a while.
I'll try to duplicate Paul's setup, except I'll be using IntelliJ and Orion.
Will report back.
Nodo: Cable & Wireless bloqueo 10,000 puertos UDP
Apparently they've now volunteered themselves to block 10,000 UDP ports. All we need is to use IPSec I guess.
According to this post you cant even use ICQ now with C&W. I'm glad I went the Cable Modem route and not the C&W ADSL route.
infoSync : True global roaming from Qualcomm
This sounds soo cool. Its a chpset with CDMA 1x, 1xev-do, GSM/GPRS, Bluetooth, GPS, 2D/3D accelleration, Midi Synth, Camera interface and USB.
They recon phones will be out in a bout a years time.
Nodo: Huelga contra Cable & Wireless
It sounds like Panamanians are starting to have enough of the great British Company.
An email is circulating in Panama to do a half hour boycot of the telephone at 6:30pm Panamanian time.
According to the mail they did that against Telefonica in Spain last year (Russell can you confirm this?) and succeded in lowering tarifs.
Cable & Wireless have $2+pm phone charges to the UK. This is what they are trying to protect by blocking the UDP ports.
In addition Panama is receiving 600 of the 3500 global layoffs at C&W.
In all the British (and former British) islands in the Caribbean Cable & Wireless had a strong monopoly for years. They were real bastards there. They also introduced the port blocking trick in the Caymans and I think a few other places.
An old acquaintance of mine in Jamaica, Patrick Terrelonge who founded InfoChannel the first ISP on the island was a personal victim of C&W's strong hand tactics and became a bit of a folk hero for it.
In the Caribbean people tend to call them "Cable and Wutless" (Worthless)
The best Java IDE in the world has finally been officially released. I've been using the beta's since this summer and the previous ones since spring time and I am impressed.
Congrats on a great job to the guy's at JetBrains.
Bad news though for people who've been relying on the free beta's. Time to buy a license me thinks.
Just found this article:
3G Americas::Unifying the Americas through Wireless Technology
It explains alot of the issues that I guess I didn't really know about. Basically its a cheap way of rolling out 2 and 2.5g technology on top of excisting frequencies.
Just a follow up to yesterdays article:
GSM850 Launch in Panama???
I just talked to a friend of mine from Ericsson, who says that C&W will only launch a GSM 850 network and not a GSM 1900 network. This requires a completely new phone. None of the Triband ones will be working.
Panama is the only place outside the US that is using GSM 850. (I hadn't even heard about untill yesterday) Apparently Cingular uses it in the states.
I just had a quick look at the SonyEricsson web site and I found only one phone the T62u which supports GSM850. It's actually quite cool, because it also supports GSM1900 and TDMA800/1900 so you should have full coverage anywhere in the americas.
I guessing then that, that is the great advantage of GSM850. Easy integration with TDMA???
It's a shame though, because there are so many great benefits of the normal gsm phones.
For one, roaming from anywhere except Cingular will be impossible.
Just saw on SlashDot that Sharp's announced a new updated version of the Zaurus.
I've got one of the original developers versions the SL-5000, which is cool even though I've only gotten it to sync once.
Norwegian site InfoSync as usual has the eral scoop on the new features. Basically 32M SDRAM, 64M Flash and a 400MHz XScale.
Cool. However the real news is linux kernel 2.4.18 (which will make it a lot easier to port stuff to it), a non TCP/IP based USB syncing facility (Yipee) and much more.
Besides that it has proper sound I/O now, Opera 6, Flash, Acrobat, Hancom Office and as before the Jeode Personal JVM.
Comienza Nueva Era para GSM con el Lanzamiento de GSM 850
Apparently Cable & Wireless Panama (who everyone should hate at the moment) are launching a 850MHz GSM/GPRS network with the help of Ericsson.
I checked Ericsson's site and they do have a press release as well.
Concerning Cable & Wireless. I'll write a piece on it in a bit. Lots of people have forwarded me articles about how they've gotten the Panamanian government to block UDP ports.
To me, I'm just glad I'm using Bell South and not Cable & Wireless at the moment.
More on that later. (BTW. Their site seems down at the moment???)
James Strachan's Radio Weblog
Just noticed that James had left a comment for me and also cleared some stuff out for me about using local repositories in Maven.
After I figured out how to do it, I've really gotten in to it. I'm in no way a power user yet. But I do like the way it just does everything for you automagically.
And James, cheers for your code contributions ;-)
I do really need to rewrite it. Currently it seems to canonicalize with me and no one else. My problem is that I hate reading standards docs and I haven't taken the time out to figure out whats happening.
I dont think I'll be able to do it either untill I've finished this contract.
My nice revelation below in:
Talk.org: Cool Looking Hierarchy Browser in IDEA3.0
Is really proof of me never exploring the "View" menu of IDEA. The features are actually there already.
rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes writes that you cant really see all the benefits of IDEA untill you've tried it for a while.
I agree. I discover new stuff everyday. This is the only program where I leave the hints on.
If you're doing Ant files for example it is intelligent enough to mark unknown properties as red. Add a Property tag to import an outside properties file and it picks it up straight away.
The XML editor is also absolutely amazing.
I also only recently discovered the joys of ctrl-clicking, which hyperlinks any identifier and goes to it's source.
At my office here almost everyone is sold on it now and people shout out "Did you know that IDEA can do ..." all the time at the moment.
Whats going on here? They must be fixing some bugs in this or something, because it's not enabled in Build 675. I noticed that it's greyed out in the Window menu.
Russell has a great overview of what it takes to develop for Series 60.
In particular he talks about Midlets, the Java version for mobile phones.
One thing in particular that I was disapointed by, was that it isn't possible to access your contacts from within a MidLets.