Mobile wifi

I use one of those 3G datasticks (mines a t-mobile) one, but alas its a usb one so i cant share it with multiple people at once, it also does not officially support linux and the best hack requires that you have to have it plugged in before you turn the laptop on or it wont work (and some programs can be a bit picky about it), so when the first “mifi” portable hot spot providers came out i thought they would be fab, the early ones are a bit picky on their compatibility, but the latest ones such as the Novatel 2325 look perfect and have very good reviews (‘3’ also do a mifi but it does not look as good), so off i tootle to try and get one (im well out of contract),

To cut a long story short, it turns out that i cant (well not for free anyway), because my data plan is ranked as “un-upgradable”, (well thats not how it was explained to me by t-mobile) I finally got this info from a sane man at carphone warehouse (god i love independent shops), who explained that as i had got my data plan when they were first introducing them, i got a REALLY good deal (10Gig per month for £44, where as 5Gig for £30 is the highest they will go nowadays and they its charges charges charges ), and in this situation he would buy one direct ( Amazon does them for £209) as it would be cheaper in the long run, but that’s a bit steep, but again the internet comes to my rescue in the shape of JoikuSpot which allows you to use a 3G capable phone for the exactly the same thing, back home i dig up my old N81 (they have a full list of compatable phones and there is always ebay) jam in my 3G sim card, and for the princely price of 9Euro i get an amazing bit of software that does the job perfectly (in fact better as it has a great “link status” page that tells you what’s going on your connection)

there is always a way.

Sometimes I miss Domino Designer

NOTE: Java people if your having SQL JPA TIMESTAMP issues skip to the end im just having a rant first.

People give Domino and Domino Designer a hard time because some of its components are not the latest release (say Java or dojo), we tut and say things like “this makes domino look old” etc etc

Well suck it up party people, because they do it to stop you having the kind of problem i had a couple of days ago,

Like most of us notes people now, i am really trying to use eclipse as my IDE, more specifically i use MyEclipse, which is bloody marvellous, now i also use the Adobe FLEX plug in for Eclipse, but due to compatibility issues, i have to use MyEclipse v6.6 because the FLEX 3 plug in wont install on a more modern version.

All is huncky dory and fine (let’s face it im not the worlds most advanced Java developer), but roll forward to one of the latest projects, a FLEX front end onto JBoss webservices and Business logic (well that’s what my client calls it), then on to MS SQL in the back-end, I’m connecting to the SQL box via JPA on hibernate (i will do a couple of articles on that soon, but its not bad at all),

but I’m having a beggar of a time with the time section of date/time data, it put it into flex, web service it up, then save it to the SQL db and the time is always coming out 00:00:00…grrrrrrrr, now given Java’s history of naffness on the old date/time front and the fact that this code is got both US and UK dates in it i assume it down to my crud code…..several hours pass with much swearing (and the occasional chuckle from the evil Poole )

Then i find this it turns out that when you use the JPA reverse engineering wizard on a Microsoft data base with a column type of DATETIME it only returns DATE…..oh C***, its fixed in version 7, happily i have 2 versions of MyEclipse installed, so i go into the new one (7.5), do the reverse generation, then copy the code via CVS back into my 6.6 one…and it all suddenly works, but.. what.. a.. pain.

So next time you grumble at notes IDE not being all cutting edge, maybe they have just saved you from sheding some tears (and blood)..

JAVA People: so basically if you using JPA Wizards on MS SQL server on MyEclipse versions older than 7.0GA, Tough!!!, manual hack or upgrade

Hair Shirt Project Part1

Inspired by this cartoon by KXCD i have determined to get the MIMO UM-740 working properly on linux on both 9.10 (the newest version at time of writing) and the current Long term support version 8.04

Its not gonna be easy, no one seems to have done it fully, as it is a DisplayLink driven monitor, with touchscreen, web cam and USB mic, but hey-ho that the joy of linux (or as Matt White says “that linux is crap”), i not going to do a full write-up to its all done, but will point out sights along the way.

First step is the monitor, this uses Display link which quite frankly is an abomination as far as drivers go.

Thankfully following most of the instructions shown here for a similar item, we have the driver working (this can be told by the screen flashing green on login) and the monitor being used by the frame buffer, this was only necessary on the 8.04 computer the 9.10 sees to already have the display link drivers built in.

Next stop an xsession 🙂

Laptop keyboard cleaning

My laptop gets grubby and the keyboard is horrible, tried cleaning it, but it was surface only and even the spray cleaners are naff (and cost a bomb),was in a new shop in angel today and saw this stuff called cyber clean,

Cost about £6 and its just like a soft playdou that you press on the keyboard,it gets into all the nooks and cracks, sticks to the gunk then you just peal it off, it has a chart with it to tell you when to chuck it away (i reckon it will do about 3-4 keyboards judging by the amount it changed colour doing mine), and it works like a CHARM, pleasantly surprised