I don’t care for anything Apple, but relented and allowed my wife and daughter to get iPhones. Feeling out of the picture, I decided it was finally time to upgrade. I’ve been holding out for the latest Google Nexus, but the cost factor pointed me to the Motorola Atrix running Android on AT&T’s “4G” network. It is a pretty slick phone with powerful hardware and the community is anxiously awaiting updates to a newer version of android and unlocking of other capabilities.

I’ve got everything I need on this phone but a Sonos controller. I installed andronos but am still waiting on the official Sonos release which has been delayed until “April”.

Words with Friends people – I’m struggling to get up to speed so take it easy on me.

I spent a while researching and decided to update the firmware to the latest version. After the update I was able to view Inglourious Basterds.

For any of you Panasonic BD-60 people out there with troubles – update your firmware either via the internet or burn a CD with the file from Panasonic support on it.

Fast forward three years and i have since ditched the bug laden Omnifi. However – the open source simplecenter that powered the interface to the PC is awesome…perusing the source made me very happy to see their technology choices. The replacement? A Sonos system! Since seeing this incredible whole home audio system in action at the owner of my company’s house i had to have one.

Now that I’ve got a system that is totally bug free and supports lossless audio formats I’m rethinking my decision to go with the uberstandard. Now that hard drive space is ubiquitous and my player supports it FLAC with its own DAC has peaked my interest.

What say you audiophiles? FLAC or go home?

A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.

Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.

I’m lazy. Any advantage an IDE has to offer me, I’ll try and oblige them the opportunity. At my last company I did an experiment with our service oriented architecture to utilize the IDE to do most of the wiring for me from the data access to the visual representation by working with typed datasets returned from web services and presenting them via data grids. This was excellent as the IDE was able to save me many lines of code. Based on that success, I’ve tried to let IDE’s do things for me that I could normally do on my own. The attractive part of this type of functionality is that it saves you time and handles the plumbing portion for you.

Enter eclipse, spring and hibernate. Currently I’m working with a team to port over a MicroStrategy driven reporting application to an open source alternative utilizing Postgresql and linux based servers. I gave eclipse and some its plug-ins a shot at handling the wire up of spring, hibernate and postgres using it’s wizard driven configuration. It worked as advertised for standard persistence operations of stuffing our POJO’s into postgresql. However, we needed to access the underlying JDBC connection contained in spring/hibernate’s session to kick off an Extraction, Transformation and Load operation after the persistence of a certain object For whatever reason – hibernate would not commit the operation of the ETL process.

The eclipse plugin configured spring’s applicationContext.xml file and a hibernate.cfg.xml file for storing the hibernate properties and wiring spring to hibernate. As a last ditch effort after wasting two days trouble shooting why the ETL wasn’t committing to the db, I scratched the generated configuration and hand wrote the applicationContext.xml and skipped the hibernate config file as I put that information in the spring context file. And as Dog the Bounty Hunter would say, “BLAM”! It worked as expected and the ETL processed perfectly.

The moral of the story is that while IDE’s have made great advances and help save you lots of time – be weary of them at the same time. It’s that whole Brave New World thing – if we could manufacture a breed of superior people to do task based jobs – what use would we be? Just because some tool can do something for you, doesn’t mean it does it better.

I still couldn’t get outlook to connect to exchange outside my LAN. What good does that do me? Not much which is the whole reason I wanted to get exchange running over http. Outlook would fire up and eventually prompt me for a login (good.) However it would never fully connect. The problem: SSL certificates. I haven’t paid for an SSL cert yet so I use my own certificate authority to grant the certificate. Ok, all set. Nope. I had to make sure the certificate had the FQDN of the exchange server in it and also import that certificate into my trusted authorities in IE. Presto! Now we have connectivity.

Daniel Petri advises that most if not all of the connectivity issues are related to certificate issues. Make sure you check your certs and if possible, buy one from an online vendor so you don’t have to import anything.

Fun!

Additionally, I am able to help out a friend that faced the same dilemma I did and am now hosting his sites. I’m not able to offer the same SLA’s as a hosting provider, but it is something I was willing to do to help him out and am happy he obliged my offer. Here’s to hoping my cable connection is as steady as it has been in the past. Cheers!