I always find it interesting to watch the 4x100m Sprint Relay at the Olympics and Track and Field Championships. It’s the fastest and most technically difficult of all the relays. Demonstrating true synergy, a well executed relay transports the baton around the track faster than the sum of the individual personal best 100m times. Synergy is usually defined as the interaction or cooperation of two or more agents to produce a combined...

We are really lucky, to experience another technological revolution. After the Personal Computer and the Internet, the Smart-Phone as a front-end for Cloud-Computing seems to be the next radical alteration, once again saving the tech industry, not just in the Valley, but in every other related  tech center around the country. It always needs at least two players to have a game and Android and the iPhone seem to be those players this time...

“That wizard is just a crazy old man. Now, tomorrow I want you to take that R2 unit to Anchorhead and have it’s memory erased. That’ll be the end of it. It belongs to us now.” After seeing the Nexus-One receiving the Android 2.2 a.k.a FroYo update last week, I decided to not wait for Motorola and Verizon any longer and take matters into my own hands, upgrading the Motorola Droid to FroYo. But before going into...

Tomcat 7 is the first Apache Tomcat release to support the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2 specifications. Please note that Tomcat 7 requires Java 1.6 or better, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you are running OS X 10.5 or 10.6. Here are the easy to follow steps to get it up and running on your Mac Download a binary distribution of the core module: apache-tomcat-7.0.0.tar.gz from here. Opening/unarchiving the archive will create...

Every couple of years my personal web presence gets a major overhaul. This time it took a little longer, meaning wolfpaulus.com had the same look and feel for quite some time now and I had to use WayBack machine at http://web.archive.org/ to find out for how long … This time to focus of the upgrade was mainly to make content creation and syndication easier but it also resulted in what I think is great look and feel. If you happen to...

“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” Because of annotation incompatibilities, Android cannot be built with Java 6.0 but requires the older Java SE 5.0. Kind of shameful, considering that J2SE 5.0 reached its end of service life (EOSL) on November 3, 2009, which is the date of the final publicly available...

…but only for a short time ( Updated for AppleTV 3.0.2 ) Hello AppleTV, sometimes someone will find you annoying because you happen to do something … or more likely, because you don’t. I don’t want you to change something about yourself just because, and you know, we are all annoying at times, and some people are too quick to criticize. Oh, forget about it, enough is enough … you will get hacked again, NOW! I...

We were looking for a small, inexpensive, and eco-friendly headless Linux server that would support some low traffic services like providing a Maven Repository (Nexus), a Source Code Repository like GIT or SubVersion, etc. The MSI Nettop 100 Barebone System seemed to be a close to perfect match, for what we had in mind, especially when considering that the missing pieces like memory and harddrive could be found in our scrap box. The MSI...

Virtual Private Network Being born and raised in Germany, most of my extended family lives over there and even after all these years, a simple phone call easily reconnects me with family and friends. Almost like a secret handshake, dialing a number and hearing each others voice makes me part of their networkover there. With a little bit of work, the same can be had for your computer. Even if you travel, being away from home for an extended...

“There was nothing you could have done, Luke, had you been there. You’d have been killed too, and the droids would now be in the hands of the Empire.” While the Android SDK comes with a complete set of javadocs, the source code of the SDK is missing in the SDK distribution. This is very unfortunate, since you cannot easily debug into SDK methods (at least not without running into de-compiled code) nor can you see how...

The Nook Has Arrived 1st impressions of Barnes & Noble’s new ebook reader After being delayed twice, today the nook, Barnes & Nobles eBook reader finally arrived at my doorstep, (literally). The nook came nicely packaged and wrapped, almost iPod-style. After unwrapping it, it took only about an hour to complete charge the already about 70% charged battery. Hooking it up to a WIFI router was extremely easily. The nook...

“After suffering a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of General Grievous, the Republic’s foothold in the Outer Rim is in jeopardy. Commissioned to protect the strategic world of Bothawui, Anakin Skywalker and his weary battle group are all that stands between the system and domination by the droid army…” I have probably never prepared harder for a talk and still felt completely unprepared when presenting  at...

Way back in fall 2002, I had discovered Thinlets, which I liked for its lean approach. However, because it lacked tools and extensibility, I couldn’t really use it for more serious projects. Still, the concept was intriguing, and while reimplementing it in a more object-oriented and extensible fashing wasn’t an option, the least I could do, was to write an editor .. meet Theodore. After I had written Theodore 1.0, I was even...

Code Camp is not just for geeks, hackers, and code monkeys; and while you may find some of them at the University of Southern California on November 21 and 22, Code Camp is first and foremost a place for software developers to come together, share ideas and experiences, and learn from their peers. This will be my 2nd LA Code Camp, which compared to the Code Camp up North at Cal State Fullerton, seems more focused on Microsoft and .net...

“I would much rather have gone with Master Luke than stay here with you. I don’t know what all this trouble is about, but I’m sure it must be your fault.” The Motorola droid is probably the first 2nd generation Android phone and after playing the the HTC Hero and Motorola Cliq, I now had the chance to take a much closer look at the Motorola Droid. Connectivity There are two sockets on the droid, a standard headphone...

Tom’s LEGO NXT 2.0 based Home Explorer uses ultrasound to detect and bypass obstacles. When driving, the NXT scans the surrounding using its ultrasound sensor. In case it gets too close to an obstacles, the NXT stops, backs-up a little, and makes a random turn (in a pre-defined range), before moving on. Enjoy the movie, including cool onboard...

TiffanyScreens is a presentation tool that continuously captures the content of the presenter’s screen and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. Best of all, any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable. The User Interface has been refined and many new features like password protected screen-sharing or refresh-rate regulation have recently...

Make Java 1.5 (or later) the default JRE Get the core distribution from http://tomcat.apache.org/ At the time of this writing that would be: apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz Unpacking will create a apache-tomcat-6.0.20 folder, probably on your desktop. Move this folder into /usr/local, like this:sudo mv ~/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.20 /usr/local/ To make it easy to replace this release with future releases, we are going to create a symbolic...

La Fonera 2.0 FON 2202 g RedBoot details and booting into OpenWrt 8.09.1 Kamikaze Like previously mentioned, the Fonera 2.0g (FON 2202) became available in Europe (on April 21st) and an all new 2.0n (with 802.11 N support) is expected to arrive in Europe as well as here in the US (US$ 99) in October, once again, making this the perfect time for a discovery mission into the Fonera FON 2202, which just like the FON 2100, isn’t a...

La Fonera 2.0 FON 2100 a/b/c RedBoot details and booting into OpenWrt 8.09.1 Kamikaze Some blog post take a little longer to write and this was certainly one of those. It wasn’t so much the writing but the building of the tools and tool-chain, running all the tests and scripts, and just to get things right. The Fonera 2.0g (FON 2202) became available in Europe (on April 21st) and an all new 2.0n (with 802.11 N support) is expected...

Originally I was just looking for a decent Webcam for a Linux project, but since almost all computers in my house run OS X, I thought it would be nice to find one that could be use on a MacMini as well. Fortunately, there is a growing list of UVC compatible devices available, some of which have been tested to work on a Mac out-of-the-box, i.e. without the need to install additional drivers. Considering Linux and Mac compatibility,...

Growing up in Germany means being exposed to different foods than kids here in America. I still remember the jelly, my grandmother used to make from homegrown raspberries, we helped her pick in the garden. Kids in Europe usually don’t know much about peanut butter and grow up on hazelnut spread instead. There are different brands, all with subtle flavor differences, featuring either a more nutty or more chocolaty taste....

La Fonera 2.0 Preview The Fonera 2.0 just became available in Europe (on April 21st) and is expected to arrive here in the US in May, making this the perfect time for taking a first look at the new 2.0 software. I had gotten my hands on the La Fonera 2.0 beta hardware back in December 2008 and had deployed an OpenWrt 8.09 RC release soon there after, which was still on there. This meant that I needed to somehow reflash the router with...

Doubling the Arduino Flash Memory once again Times really flys when you’re having fun – it has been more two years since I posted this journal entry about how to double the Arduino board’s Flash memory by replacing the ATmega8 with an ATmega168 microcontroller. Lots has changed since then, e.g. the Arduino project now includes several board designs and layouts, most of which feature the ATmega168. For the last couple of...

It’s Code Camp time again in Southern California and lots of Coders, Programers, Engineers, Geeks, and Hackers will meet at the California State University Fullerton this coming Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 25. Code Camp is a community driven event for developers of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines – well that’s the idea at least. Looking at the session table, one cannot shake the feeling...

A few days ago, I wrote here about how the PhoneME JavaVM can be built with and integrated into OpenWrt, the Linux distribution optimized for WiFi routers or any device that connects over Wifi. However, even with a powerful Java runtime environment available on the target hardware platform, we still need to develop and simulate/test on a development workstation, which may very well be a Mac. Developing for the PhoneME JavaVM becomes much...

QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) are two dimensional bar codes, developed back in 1994 by Denso-Wave, and are currently very popular in Japan, mostly used for marketing. With more mobile phones are now equipped with a reasonably good digital camera, QR Codes are used for storing addresses and URLs (known as mobile tagging), allowing mobile phone users to easily and virtually error free bookmark and/or launch URLs in a mobile...

While Apache Maven, our favorite software project management and comprehension tool, is already installed on OS X, as with so many other great open source tools on the Mac, they aren’t really kept up to date. However, installing Maven 2.0.9 isn’t a big deal and you even have several options. wpbook:~ wolf$ mvn -version Maven version: 2.0.6 wpbook:~ wolf$ One way to get an up-to-date Maven version on your Mac would be to use...

OpenWrt: Post Kernel System Initialization on the Fonera FON Flashing the Fonera Router with a default distribution of OpenWrt requires two files, the kernel image (openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma 704 KB) and the root file system (openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs 1.2 MB). Like previously mentioned, using a TFTP Server on a host machine and standard RedBoot commands on the Fonera might be the easiest way to write the root file system and the...

La Fonera 2.0 (FON 2202) Hacking, Cleaning House The La Fonera 2.0 (FON 2202) comes with ssh enabled, which isn’t a big surprise since it’s still in beta and developers are encouraged to develop plugins for the Fonera platform. Even with ssh enabled though, the best way to hack the Fonera, i.e., to replace the currently deployed (very customized) linux distribution with something like DD-WRT or OpenWrt, still is directly...

La Fonera 2.0 (FON2202) Hardware Details On October 18, Jordi Vallejo, CTO of FON, introduced the new La Fonera 2.0 (beta/developers edition) – watch it here on YouTube, and I finally received my FON 2202 yesterday. Fonera 2.0 come with a bigger footprint but also more capabilities, compared to the previous version (FON 2100). Compared to the La Fonera+ (FON 2200), the La Fonera 2.0 now comes an USB-port, which can be used to...

PhoneME, a JavaVM for the Fonera FON Router OpenWRT is a Linux distribution optimized especially for embedded devices and also builds the starting point for many popular RouterOS distributions, like DD-WRT, FreeWRT, or X-Wrt. Wikipedia has details on all those project, a good starting point would be here. Since OpenWrt is optimized for embedded systems, it doesn’t come as a surprise that features like a read-only Flash memory...

Just a couple days ago, Jordi Vallejo, CTO of FON, introduced the new La Fonera 2.0 (beta/developers edition) – watch it here on YouTube, which now comes with a 2nd ethernet port and a USB port. While we all wait for the Fonera 2.0 to arrive at our doorsteps, lets take another closer and more detailed look at the La Fonera 1.0 (2100) hardware. Power (socket for SK1) A drop-down regulator (AME1117), drops the input voltage from...

“FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Community members, known as ‘Foneros’, share some of their home Internet connection and in return gain access to free Wifi worldwide.” The device that is used to provide the connectivity is the La Fonera (a.k.a. FON), a single Ethernet Port Wireless router with a standard range between 10-50 meters depending on the environment. The FON is a relatively simple and...

This weekend an era came to an end, at least in my house. The last PC, dedicated to run a Microsoft OS got dismantled and put to rest for good. The year was 1982 or 1983, when I brought my first computer home, a Triumph-Adler Intel 8085A based Alphatronic with two disk-drives and 48KB RAM. The Alphatronic was not CP/M compatible but used the MOS operating system instead and came with BASIC, Fortran and Pascal compilers. Just like the...

I was in NYC, seeing the long lines going around the block the 5th Ave. Apple store, when the iPhone was launched in June 2007. People couldn’t wait, getting their hands on the beautiful mobile phone, the one with the best user interface, and the only one with a useable Web browser. This year I was in San Fran. at Apple’s worldwide developers conference, WWDC 2008, when the iPhone 3G was announced. In 2007 Apple launched a new...

Sitting in a hotel, downtown San Fran., after day one of Apple’s WWDC 2008, where some news were announced today. I guess, when it comes to evaluating today’s day, it all depends on where you stay and what your focus is. If you were looking for a 2nd generation iPhone, then maybe the announced, $199 8GB iPhone 2.0 was the most important news of the day. However, I don’t think you will saving any money. ATT is subsidizing...

Getting the pre-complied PHP Apache Module from Marc Liyanage’s site was always the preferred way to get a fresh PHP distribution on your Mac. However, creating 4-way binaries (32- and 64-bit versions for G4/G5 and Intel CoreDuo / Core-2-Duo processors) seems to be broken and if Apache is running in the more efficient 64-bit mode, installing the PHP module not only doesn’t work, it will also break Apache. However, there is an...

Using your Home Router as a Secure Socket Proxy f you use your Laptop computer at the local coffee shop, in a hotel while traveling, or at any location where you expect your online privacyat risk, you may want to consider some extra steps to protect your electronic mail and Web browsing behavior from those nosy prying eyes. Using your computer in the above-mentioned places allows at least everyone with administrator-access to the local...

Mac OS X 10.5 Server comes with the MySQL pre-installed. However, the database server doesn’t ship with the client version of OS X 10.5 Leopard, which most of us Mac users run. Here are the notes I took, putting MySQL 5.1 on a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo based iMac (none 64 bit) running OS X 10.5.2 (Client) Installing MySQL 5.1 On OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Client Download the pre-compiled module package in form of a diskimage (dmg), available...

A couple days back, I had the chance to talk to the senior director of software development of one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. Offering Software as a Service, the company uses lots of libraries but mainly MySQL and Java on the back-end and Apache and PHP to generate the presentation, nothing really surprising or out of the ordinary, I guess. The conversation was kind of boring until the senior director suddenly...

Replacing the PowerMac G5 with a Mac Mini (Core-2-Duo) has worked out great so far; I really do enjoy this small, fast, and quiet computer. However, to put Mac OS X Leopard’s new integrated backup program a.k.a Time Machine to work, requires a 2nd harddrive. Luckily, I had removed the secondary harddrive, which we had added just a couple months ago, from the PowerMac, before selling it and finding a nice external enclosure for the...

Even before writable mini disks, the 8-centimeter in diameter small CDs and DVDs (a.k.a Pocket-CD), became available/affordable, I really liked that small form-factor. Today you find mini disks included with some computer accessories, used as a cheap way to include drivers and other software. Some video cameras use writable mini DVDs for content recording. However, I don’t think those small silver optical disk became very popular...

Back in 1996, when leading the development of a Deutsche Bank retail banking project, a software solution allowing the bank’s customers to maintain checking, saving, and investment accounts from their home PCs, I became aware of Multi-factor Authentication. An authentication factor is something that’s used to authenticate a person’s identity and multi-factor authentication is a system, using different methods for...

Hard to believe – I know. However, it really was not planned and merely a coincidence, but on June 29, 2007, the day Apple launched the iPhone we were there, at Apple’s flagship store in New York City. The media was all over the place, interested only in interviewing people who stood in line to eventually sell their spot. I guess that makes a better story than taking about the new phone or why not only geeks would be waiting in...

Arguably, we are buying not all that much hardware components and gadgets, still considering all the memory modules, hard-drives, USB-Flash drives, SD-Cards, Arduino Boards, routers, etc. it surely adds up. Frys is still a place I really enjoy going to but most of the above-mentioned things are purchased from online e-commerce companies such as buy.com, newegg.com, mwave.com etc., among which I had always favorednewegg – until...

Auto-mount Network Shares at Mac OSX startup, or even simpler at login Assuming you wanted to mount a share named ‘Devel’ on a Windows box named ‘denali’, like cifs://denali/Devel. You would first test this via Cmd-K and then open NetInfo Manager, which lives in Application/Utilities click the lock to be able to make changes click on mounts click on New in the Toolbar click on the entry in the lower frame and...

Final Thoughts, and Open Questions After four exhausting but inspiring days at JavaOne 2007 it’s good to be back in San Diego. I flew out of SFO Friday evening, still thinking about the final general session, hosted by James Gosling early Friday morning. Gosling had the pleasure to show all kinds of cool projects, gadgets, and devices, like small and also not so small robots, all featuring Java of course. However, I couldn’t...

Most programmers, coders, hackers, Software Engineers, call them like you see them, don’t eat healthy. There is just no time to leave the keyboard for having a healthy meal and instead we prefer a quick snack or a beer, depending of the location and time of the day maybe. Despite the popularity of the well-marketed low-carbohydrate diets, a.k.a.Atkins Diet, the Carpentaria, CA based Balance Bar Food Company (bought by Kraft Foods in...

Since a while back, I’m using a tool to store all my passwords, website logins, program serial numbers etc. all RC4-encrypted and password-protected. Currently, the password tool (Pastor) and the data file are located on my Power Mac G5, which of course is a problem when I need to lookup a password when away from the G5, like at work for instance. Putting everything on a USB Flash Drives may be a good solution but I’m just...

Prevent OSX’s .DS_Store file creation over network connections and other useful defaults .DS_Store This will affect the your interactions with SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV servers: Open the Terminal. Enter: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true Press Return. Restart the computer. Tweak Safari Don’t have Safari display PDF documents, rather have them downloaded instead: Open the...

Is enthusiasm, energy, and creativity enough to catch up to competitors who may not have the same level of compassion but instead have a strong commercial interest? Spending two days at the Desktop Matters conference, sharing ideas and experiencing a newly re-energized group of hardcore Java Desktop developers first hand was truly outstanding. Java luminary Ben Galbraith had organized this small but very intense 2-day conference under the...

Writing a Swixml declaration file is not that hard, if you know your javax.swing components. However, getting a little support from your XML-Editor or IDE certainly doesn’t hurt. Getting IntelliSense help sometimes doesn’t require much more than pointing your editor to a DTD or XML Schema to pop-up element and attribute names as needed; or simply adding an xsi:schemaLocation attribute to the root element might do the...

It’s Code Camp time again in Southern California and lots of Coders, Programers, Engineers, etc will meet at the Cal State Fullerton Campus this coming Saturday and Sunday, January 27 and 28. Code Camp is a community driven event for developers of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines – well that’s the idea at least. Looking atsession table, one cannot shake the feeling that .net seems a little over...

You may already have heard about or even used TiffanyScreens, the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer’s screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations, or in fact for sharing any screen content at interactive group meetings. Jeffrey Peacock of the Orange County Embedded Java Users’ Group for...

Booting a Mac Hold down the C key at startup to boot from a CD. Hold down the T key at startup to boot current Mac as a firewire drive on another Mac. Called Firewire Target Disk Mode. Command-S boots into Single-User mode. Command-V boots into Verbose mode, displaying all startup text. To be verbose at every bootup: $ sudo nvram boot-args="-v" To turn it off: $ sudo nvram boot-args="" Hold down the Shift key to boot into Safe Mode...

ATmega 8 / 168 internal clock and fuse settings Considering the already low price of the Arduino board, building an Arduino-like board yourself probably doesn’t save you any money but is certainly a fun and education project to do. I tried to make the simple board even simpler, by using a Serial instead of an USB Port, the ATmega’s internal clock instead of an external crystal, and requiring 5 VDC instead of providing any kind...

I have been playing with Arduino for one week now and really enjoyed the simplicity with which Wiring allows access to I/O ports. The comprehensible but mandatory structure of a program works really well as long as things are kept simple, while somewhat more advanced programs could certainly benefit from access to interrupts. However, before making things more complicated on the Software side, I wanted to replace Arduino’s...

Taking advantage of strong disagreements inside Germany, the Italian feudatories rebelled and, in 1002, elected Arduino, Marquess of Ivrea, king of Italy. He distinguished himself particularly because of his fights against the Bishop of Ivrea. Today, Arduino distinguishes itself in price, capability, openness, and ease of use – but first things first. Arduino is an open-source computing platform based on a simple board, and a...

Later this week, I’ll be at the OCEJUG, Orange County Embedded Java Users’ Group, to give a presentation titled: Innovate – Tweak, Hack, and Bend Technology, showing how a small device, about the size of an iPod Shuffle, but capable of executing Java-Byte-Code, is turned into a Web server. After taking a very close look inside the workings of a digital toy camera, we will connect it to the embedded device, creating a...

TIVO and ReplayTV introduced us to a new way of watching television, conveniently time-shifted watching. A disposable recording of previously selected content allowed us to consume the TV broadcast whenever we wanted; maybe just 15 minutes delayed, to skip over commercials, the next day, or whenever we felt was a good time to watch it. Anyway, time-shifted watching has changed the way we watch TV today and with the exception of sporting...

San Diego’s Diggnation fans were in for a treat this Friday, when Diggnation Episode 55 was taped in front of a live audience at the La Jolla Brew House. Thanks to the Comic-Con Convention, which is also happening his weekend at the San Diego Convention Center, the whole crew, including Kevin Rose, Alex Albrecht, Keith Harrison, David Prager, and Jay Adelson showed up. Taping took place in a back room at the brew-house, in...

When it comes to file transfer over your local area network, Wifi and Bluetooth win hands down, when only “coolness” is considered. Obviously, the laptops at my house share files using their built-in Airport Extreme cards, but all other computers are connected through a“legacy” 100 Mbit Ethernet Switch (DLink DSS5+) and that is also the case for Tom’s Mac Mini. It would take some serious work to convince him...

If you have a router to connect multiple computers to your high-speed Broadband Internet connection, your certainly have configured the router’s DHCP and NAT settings, using a networked computer’s Web Browser. On a LinkSys router for instance, this is done by browsing tohttp://192.168.1.1. You can also use your Web browser to find out how good your cable connection is. The magic address for most cable modems...

Accessing your Mac remotely isn’t really that difficult, if it weren’t for your resident IT-Department. You could simply open System Preferences / Sharing, enable ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and check the VNC viewer checkbox. By doing so, your Mac starts listing on port 5900 and you could access it via any VNC viewer, like Chicken of the VNC (for the Mac), or RealVnc, or TightVnc (on Windows). VNC is one of the very few...

We got two new tech pets over the holidays, two iDogs. These cool little toys look very Apple-style but were originally made by SEGA and are now distributed by Hasbro and others. You could use an iDog simply as a speaker for you iPod (or any other MP3-player – in case there are still other players out there) but it is so much...

Finally, Sun posted PDF formatted session documentation of all JavaOne 2005 sessions here: http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2005/ Even if you went to JavaOne, you probably missed Hans Muller’s Defining Swing GUIs Declaratively session and his take on Swixml. The PDF version of his slides is now available...

Last week, I sent the following brain teaser: public class Foo { private int secret = 47; public Foo() { new Hacker().hack(this); } public String tellSecret() { return String.valueOf(secret); } public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println(''How secret are private members? ..''); System.out.println(''Psst: '' + new Foo().tellSecret(); } } Can you write a void hack(Object obj) method that would change foo’s private member...

This obviously rhetorical question was asked by Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon‘s CEO. During a short trip to San Francisco last week, I stayed at the stunning Hyatt Regency San Francisco (thanks to a great deal I got on HotWire). The biz section of the morning newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle had an interview with Verizon’s CEO that I found rather interesting. Seidenberg seriously complained about his customers’...

Current weather conditions here in Southern California made me buy a wetsuit for the PowerBook. We had more than enough of rain during the last couple of weeks and carrying an unprotected PowerBook outside, even for just the short distance between the office building and the car, was sometimes not an option. Finding a suitable bag for the huge 17″ model is not that easy but once I saw the Tucano Second Skin folder; there was no way...

Flying to Sunnyvale, meeting up with developer peers is fun, wouldn’t there be the flight. Seems like I’m unable to have an ordinary uneventful trip and it wasn’t any different this time around. Due to a deadly traffic accident on the I5, driving the 30 miles from Carlsbad to airport in San Diego took me over 3 hours. Usually, I would have considered this 3 hours wasted but not this time. A couple weeks ago I bought an...

Over the last year or two I have blogged a couple times about the late-night classes I was taking at UCSD Extension here in San Diego. Some of related work I did is documented in the Embedded Systems Projects area of my site. Most classes were tought by Ken Arnold, president of HiTech Equipment Corporation and author of Embedded Controller Hardware Design and like I have said before, the speed he is going through the 1st three or four...

I recently got the chance to participate in another code inspection, in which among other things, the following line of code was heavily criticized for using String concatenation on constants and not using a StringBuffer object for the string operation in general. FindFile.FindFileInClasspath( kPropFilePrefix + "*"+ kPropFileSuffix + kKeyProperties, vPropFiles ); This is from a J2EE project and the code is used in a background thread and...