As you might have noticed (or heard), the Chicago area has had a bit of snow recently.
Lots of people are off work because the the streets are impassible.
Ginny’s home, there’s just no way she could have gotten to her office.
Due to this contraption they call “The Internet”, and an invention called “VPN“, I have no excuse to not work.
In fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone in our office right now.
I recently signed up with a new VOIP service for my home phone.
I’m using VOIPo … so far I’m really impressed.
The call quality is great, it’s got a lot of nice features, and the rates can’t be beat. For a 2 year contract, the price is only $7.50 / month with free hardware & setup.
I’m going to give it a few more days before I start the process of porting my 2nd phone number from Vonage to VOIPo.
I’m in the process of updating the help text for my RCP and have found that some of the dialogs that I’m invoking don’t have the ability to directly add help context id’s.
After a bit of digging, I found it’s not that difficult to add help to an object that extends Dialog.
For this example, I’m going to add a help id to the InputDialog class.
Lots of people are clamoring about the fact that Verizon is going to offer the iPhone.
There are a lot of good reasons to get an iPhone from Verizon … better network, better packages, tethering, etc.
One significant reason NOT to get the Verizon iPhone is: It doesn’t work in the UK and Europe.
The UK and Europe use the GSM system for cell phones … and the Verizon iPhone doesn’t support that. It uses CDMA.
I know from personal experience that the AT&T iPhone does work fine in the UK (although it’s pricey).
I’ve also seen comments mentioning that the CDMA can’t handle data connections at the same time as voice connections.
So if you travel to the UK or Europe much, think twice about getting the Verizon iPhone.
I did see a rumor that Apple is going to offer a “World phone” that will, theoretically, have CDMA and GSM capabilities.
We still have a number of months left on our AT&T contract … so I’m going to hold off on jumping over to Verizon. Ginny & I travel a fair amount and really like the UK & Europe.
One of the goals I have for the new system is to replace the two existing servers.
My current plan is to do this via virtualization.
There are a number of virtualization options available … each with advantages & disadvantages.
The virtualization products I’m currently consider are:
(Read this entire post, as there is a very weird problem described later)
It’s been quite a while since I upgraded the hardware that runs this (and others) web site.
The warranty on the systems either will be expiring soon or has already expired.
So I bit the bullet and ordered a new Dell PowerEdge T310 server. The pertinent specs are:
The system arrived last week and I got it set up immediately.
I actually ordered the system with only one 250gb hard drive and 4gb of RAM … and upgraded it myself.
A few things annoyed me out of the gate …
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I’ve got a slightly new policy when it comes to spam.
If given the option, I’m going to change my email address in the spammers database to spam@uce.gov.
So the next time the spammer tries to send ME junk, they will be reporting themselves to the Federal Trade Commission.
Yeah, I know, it won’t do a LOT of good … but it makes me laugh.
One my gripes about the Eclipse framework is the general lack of standardized interfaces & inheritance.
For instance: a TreeColumn & TableColumn both have a lot of attributes in common … width, alignment, movability, sortability, resizeability, etc.
But since they don’t share an interface or a common ancestor, you can’t handle them with common code.
Similarly widgets like the ComboBox and a Text field share a lot of attributes … they can hold text, they can be changed, etc, but you can’t access those attributes with a common interface.
Sadly most Eclipse widgets explicitly forbid subclassing … so I can’t subclass the various types and add my own interfaces. The following is a direct quote from the TableColumn javadocs …
IMPORTANT: This class is not intended to be subclassed.
And, unfortunately, they enforce this in code.
Weird … I just tried to build my RCP application and the ant script blew up.
It seems like there’s some kind of interference caused by the addition to Buckminster to my Eclipse install.
My build should not be referencing any buckminster functionality at all.
Unfortunately I don’t have the time to dig into the problem.
One of the things I needed to support in my RCP is the ability to prevent multiple copies (instances) of the application from running at the same time.
The solution is surprisingly easy … although, as with many things, not especially well documented.
In your Application class (that implements IApplication) you need to create a lock file in the application’s instance location.
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