as my USBProg (which at the end was really awful due to the lack of  WinUSB32 support under Win7) stopped working completely, I bought a AVR Dragon, which looks like a really great device – and it’s cheap. You can find the features of the Dragon (and there are a lot!) right at Atmel’s homepage: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=3891

Unfortunately, the Dragon is not very well protected against EMV and high current, and it doesn’t ship with a proper casing. Basically, these things should be considered to protect the Dragon:

• Protection against contact with anything that’s conductive.
• Usage of a USB hub which can deliver at least 500mA.
• Do not use the Dragon’s power supply for target board supply. Just don’t.
• Usage of a protection circuit – some guys did develop an output stage called DragonHide and DragonLair which protects the circuit and is not to hard to do on your own.

As I wanted it to fit into my case (from Reichelt, as usual),  and to match my etching skills , I did this “easy-to-etch-and-solder” DragonLair PCB. It is really easy to do at home, as the PCB is one-sided and there’s plenty of space to solder. Download the eagle schematics and board here.

It looks like this:

Enjoy”

Regards,

Daniel

weird, you may be thinking… Happy about a phone and got rid of it a week after. Wonder no longer… I’ll explain to you why I love the phone and still had to bring it back. For this, let’s focus on the main features of the phone – but before I start, I have to say one thing. The  look&feel of the device Samsung Galaxy S I9000 is really gorgeous, especially the screen – but there are still reasons not to own one:

Internet connectivity (mail, websites, social networking, Last.FM, Picasa, etc…)

Internet connectivity is definitely a good invest – but, as we all know, the usability of the net mainly depends on the speed you’re connected with. And guess what, the speed of a connection which jumps between GPRS/EDGE and HSDPA is awful. Using the mobile when wireless is available is real fun, though – but who needs a mobile when there’s wireless?

Outdoors cool stuff like Last.fm, picasa, facebook and all the stuff which, basically involve bigger binary data (pictures, sounds, etc.) to be transmitted, is awfully slow and drives me crazy. Last.fm radio f.e. is impossible to use on the road! Same applies for sharing pictures, etc…

Result: At least in germany, whichever service needs a good connection (so basically everything except mail and the calendar), will not work in a satisfying manner.

GPS (Navigation, Tracking, …)

On android phones you can choose whether to use the network connection or the GPS receiver or both to determine your position. The network only will determine your position very fast but also very inaccurate (100meters to kilometers off spot). GPS on the other hand reached about 5 meters accuracy on my phone but took ages to lock on position. Or you can choose to use both methods in combination.

• Network only is not usable as it is so inaccurate, you can’t use it for navigation or tracking – even “my location” puts my to the next village – completely useless.
• GPS only takes ages to start, so e.g. you wanna take a picture with GPS coordinates attached… Who’s going to wait for a few minutes before you can take a picture? No one.
• In combination the phone’s location is locked in seconds – but this will exhaust the battery in no time. I did a journey about an hour in this mode and – woohoo – the battery was beyond 50% afterwards. In about an hour!! My HTC artemis can take several hours of “GPS punishment” without a problem, and this thing is years old!
• Sometimes the GPS receiver is not started properly, which meant I had to quit the application, stop and start the GPS receiver manually, and then start the app again. Annoying. Really.
• Navigation is only as good as the available software is… and it isn’t to good. Even the commercial soft like Navigon is just not working as it should. First of all there are nearly no settings available, e.g. you can’t see the time to target or distance or anything… No comparison to my goold ol’ TomTom  6. And a very nice thing: if someone phoned while navigation was active, the phone worked great – but the navigation did just stop working until the phone call was over – meant after a 5 minute call I had to do a u-turn.
• The GPS tracking software is really cool – but with the annoying gps receiver and the lack of battery it is pretty useless, because most of the time I do wander around a bit longer than 1-2hours…

MP3, Pictures, Videos

The sound and the mp3 player is really good, better than expected. And there’s plenty of battery for the mp3 player available. If the battery is at 100%, 4 to 5hours of listening is possible. But wait – only if everything else, including the screen is disabled. If WLAN or network connectivity, maybe the GPS and the screen is on for some time, the battery will be exhausted after 2 hours. And it is worse when watching video.

And one more word about pictures – I copied about 5000 pictures to the phone, in about 300  albums… And the gallery app can’t actually sort it or show it in a way, which allows easy and fast access to the pictures. Instead, I had to swap about 60 (!) pages to get to the latest pictures. And, additionally, you can’t have subfolders. This is the 20th century, we LOVE subfolders and structures. So why isn’t this possible?

Summary:

If you look out for a phone with great technical possibilities,  which are all more or less useless due to  a power-leeching hardware, a weak battery, slow internet connectivity in germany, missing usability in the very basic apps, an android mobile will be the right thing for you, especially the the Samsung Galaxy S I9000.

If you can’t stand any of that – do the same thing I’ll do. Buy a cheap 10$ mobile which handles the very basic tasks really great (calls, sms) – or, way better, stick with your current one.

Regards,

Daniel

Watch the comparison to the iPhone 4 – and have a laugh at this guy’s hilarious accent (sorry btw. ):

Regards,
Daniel

did you ever wonder why you have to spend hours installing software? Maybe twice if you have a laptop and a desktop? Or more times because you want to have the same apps at work and at home? And after you reinstalled windows you’ll have to do the same awful lot of work again? Guess what – NO! Not anymore.

Instead have a look at liberkey. Liberkey is a plattform which provides more than 300 small free portable apps which do cover 95% of all tools you can possibly need. All apps are portable, means you can have ‘em installed once on a portable device like an usb-stick, and you can use ‘em everywhere! On every PC! And the best thing – liberkey takes care of necessary updates of each and everyone of the apps. So you are busy just using the applications you need – never care again about installations, updates or backups of your applications. Just use liberkey – my new favourite! It even has all of my essential tools onboard, like freecommander, keepass2, utorrent, 7zip, truecrypt, filezilla, … Check it out!! You’ll love it!!

http://www.liberkey.com/

And while I’ve been testing liberkey, I also found aimp2, which is a really really good replacement for my very slow winamp5. Thumbs up!

Regards,

Daniel

did you ever wonder how to do a simple RS232 levelshifter for your connection between PC and microcontroller? No? Well, don’t wonder no longer.

I did a small layout which contains a two-channel RS232 level shifter with optional hardware handshake connection (CTS/RTS), selectable via jumper. If it is disabled, the RTS will be connected to the CTS which fakes a real hardware handshake. You can grab the complete package here.

Addionally, I finally managed to add some small stuff , so check out the other pages to see what has changed…

Regards,

Daniel

until today I did just write about technical issues – which is and will be the main content of my blog – but today I just have to write a few words about a RPG I’m currently addicted to.

Dragon Age Origins (official homepage).

If you’re a fan of good old RPGs like “Das schwarze Auge”, “Neverwinter Nights”, “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” or even “World Of Warcraft”… Then this is something stunning you just have to play. The great thing about Dragon Age Origins is, it is easy to play right from the start. Previous complex RPGs made it hard to “just game” – you had to know much about stats , spells, weapons and stuff. But in DAO you just start gaming, and as you proceed, you start to learn and understand bit by bit what’s important.

The story of DAO is epic – better then watching Lord of the Rings, I promise. During this game you’ll see amazing locations and experiences loads of different stories, which all together form a mystical world in which you can get lost. And you’ll love the characters – and you’ll hate the decisions you have to make. Help the religious clerics? Or trust witches? Will thiefs and assassins join your party? Will you represent honor and justice?

Whatever you do, in the end you have to defeat the upcoming dark breed at all costs.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars same level as FF VII. Just epic!

Regards,

Daniel

you may or may not have noticed, that I finished a new major version of myTO in the last days. Now I want to share (or at least name) some of the technologies I’ve used for this new release.

LINQ (“SQL-like operations on object collections”):

I’d like to start with the most important one, called “LINQ”. LINQ helped me replacing the horrible dataset intermediate layer I was using to serialize data. By introduction of LINQ, I was able to execute queries against collection of objects, which – at least partly – replaced the features a dataset provided without the flaws. “…Microsoft LINQ defines a set of method names…These can, for example, be used to project and filter data in arrays, enumerable classes, XML (XLINQ), relational database, and third party data sources”

Wikipedia about LINQ

If you wonder how you can dynamically (during application runtime) create LINQ query-statements, describing several conditions which shall be linked by an OR operation, have a look at this:

http://www.rocksthoughts.com/blog/archive/2008/02/27/linq-to-sql-dynamic-queries-2-or-statements.aspx

But another maybe easier way of achieving this is the usage of lambda methods within the query itself. This is one example:

 .Where(x => {
 var result = true;
 if (Object1.Property1 == specialValue)
 result = false;
 ...
 return result;
 })

Now let’s imagine you implemented an object which provides some kind of parent-child relationship. In this case what you want is an implementation for IEnumerable or sth. similar.

One effective method for having this IEnumerable interface implemented can be found here:

http://www.claassen.net/geek/blog/2007/11/searching-tree-of-objects-with-linq.html

CLONING OBJECTS:

From time to time you’ll need to clone/duplicate an object. Well, you can obviously do that by the implementation of the IClonable interface. Nevertheless, you have to do this for each object and adapt the implementation each time you change the class of this object. A better and way faster cloning method is to use IL (intermediate language), as described in this post:

http://whizzodev.blogspot.com/2008/03/object-cloning-using-il-in-c.html

On the same page you can also find how to deep-clone (means cloning the references not as references, but as a clone of the referenced object) object(s):

http://whizzodev.blogspot.com/2008/06/object-deep-cloning-using-il-in-c.html

DATA BINDING:

The standard mechanism of windows forms data binding (>1Mio. hits on google, maybe start with this one: http://www.akadia.com/services/dotnet_databinding.html) is good enough most of the time. Nevertheless, there’s one flaw – whenever one of your object implements a collection interface (IEnumerable,…), data binding treats the object as list of objects. This means you can easily bind the object to a datagridview, which will then show a row per object, but you cannot bind it anymore the object’s properties to simple controls like texboxes and stuff.

My workaround for this problem was not to implement the IEnumerable interface explicitly. Rather than that, I enhanced the class by a new method “AsEnumerable()”, which allowed my to use LINQ statements as well as standard data binding.

public IEnumerable<INode> AsEnumerable(){
 yield return this;
foreach (Node child in Children)
 foreach (var node in child.AsEnumerable())
yield return node;
 }

DATA CONTRACTS (“Transfer objects by disk/network/…”)

As I’ve replaced datasets, I had to cope with the problem of storing objects to disk. Even tough there are several methods available (if interested, google for .NET XML serialization or SOAP), the latest one seems to be very promising. In MSN data contracts are described like this:

“A data contract is a formal agreement between a service and a client that abstractly describes the data to be exchanged. That is, to communicate, the client and the service do not have to share the same types, only the same data contracts. A data contract precisely defines, for each parameter or return type, what data is serialized (turned into XML) to be exchanged.”

Read more about data contracts on MSN.

If you wonder whether you can also store cyclically referenced objects – yes, you can. Here’s a nice article about that:

DataContracts and object references – Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard – Pluralsight Blogs

DRAG’N’DROP:

As one of the key features I wanted drag’n’drop to work (from Outlook to myTO, and later on from other applications, too). Here are a few links to articles about drag’n’drop, including a bug report for Mozilla Thunderbird to support drag’n’drop. J

CodeProject: How to Implement Drag and Drop Between Your Program and Explorer. Free source code and programming help

Drag’n'Drop von Windows Mail (Vista, 7) – coding-board

Bug 227305 – Support drag-drop single message to desktop / file-system window (e.g. Explorer)

These are some of the technologies and techniques I’ve used during the development. If you like any of these, or you maybe have questions regarding them, I’ll try to help…

Happy coding.

Regards,

Daniel

I found a mind-blowing tool for synchronization, even real-time. And it’s for free! Have a look at FreeFileSync, it’s awesome!

let’s look at synchronization tools – all of ‘em from MS, and all are free and very very good:

Microsoft SyncToy (GUI only)

Robocopy (Commandline, additional gui, single threaded copy)

Richcopy (GUI, threaded copy)

SyncToy is the easiest to use and sufficient in 90% of the time… If you want to sync at a defined time. Same for richcopy, which is very performant because you can have multiple threads do the sync. With robocopy you can have an automated synchronziation in nearly realtime (periodically each minute robocopy checks for changes on the source folder and replicates them to the target folder).

Unfortunately, everyone of these tools does not support a real-time two-way synchronization. You don’t think this is necessary? Well – it actually is! And I’ll explain you why…

In my desktop I use a 1000GB drive to store everything – this drive can be called the “lord of data” or simply the master, as all the other drives are just for backup purposes. Okay, lately I bought a external 2.5” 1000GB drive which is connected via USB2. What I want to do now is work on my fast internal 1000GB as usual and – in the background – Iwant to have every change replicated to the USB drive. Well, this is one-way synchronization only, real-time but one-way. Well, you’re right… But I do actually work on files on the USB drive as well, so I do also have to get the changes from the USB drive to the internal one. So – you’ve already guessed it – I need a tool for 2-way real-time synchronization.

And guess what – I think I found one, called Unison. It requires the GTK+ runtime, which you can get here.

I’ll test this in the next weeks and then, maybe, I’m going to write again about it.
Regards,

Daniel

UPDATE: Forget Unison, not usable on Windows. I’m back to SyncToy – which works.

sick of having different content management systems, I merged everything into wordpress and finally achieved the “single source principle” without loosing any pros of a CMS. If you wonder what I’m actually talking about – maybe just have a look at my homepage once. You’ll see my blog and all of my former homepage now in one place. Cool, isn’t it?

I’ve also added a new page, check it out: Games.

Regards,

Daniel

From CACert you can get certificates for your emails, domains, servers (webservers, mail servers,…), etc… For free! What do you have to do to use it, especially with Thunderbird? Well, follow the following instructions:

1. Create an account at CACert

2. Verify your email address

3. Create a certificate for this email address

4. After creation click the link “install certificate” – now the certificates (private key, public key) are stored in the browser cache. If you’re using firefox, you can save those certificates (options -> security -> certificates)…

5. Save the certificates to your harddrive.

6. Save the root certificates of CACert (class 1 and class 3) from this page to your harddrive as well.

7. Open Thunderbird, Menu: Extras -> Settings -> Certificates. Click on the tab certificate authorities, then import both root certificates. Afterwards clock on the tab “your certificates” and import – well, your certificate!

Done!

Now you can sign or|and encrypt emails and 1. you don’t have to use enigmail/opengpg anymore and 2. you are using trusted certificates rather than some pgp key from some pgp server.

Simple ideas well engineered, I guess… But sometimes I wonder why the audience get’s excited about e.g. spelly. I mean… How damn new is this feature? Never seen a spellchecker before?

as I was fed up with never having my emails at my girls place, I decided to migrate from this usual Outlook|.pst  get-mail-from-gmx-via-pop-situation to google mail (gmail) and IMAP.

Google provides a lot of space and – as one of the few providers – it provides full IMAP access for free… Means I can organize my mails as I did in Outlook. Basically the only thing I was worrying about was the fact that Outlook  itself really sucks when in use with IMAP. It’s damn slow! But – one URL away – the solution, called Thunderbird. I was using Thunderbird a lot, but due to syncing issues (ActiveSync with a Windows Mobile Phone) I finally gave up and migrated to Outlook. But now, as sync is working properly with funambol, I finally switched back to Thunderbird. And the lately released version 3 has – guess what – special support for google mail. Great, isn’t it?

Last thing to work out – is it possible to have a local backup…? Oh yes, it is. Basically it’s configurable on a folder basis, so I’ll have my emails available on my local PC even when the internet is broken (as it is sometimes – thanks to my current provider KabelBW) or as soon as I have access to gmail. And with Thunderbird as mail client I can use enigmail like I did a looong time before. Now I everything’s crypted here. Weird.

After I finshed the migration I googled about some enigmail stuff, and I found some guys had already written a good guide how to change to gmail/TB/enigmal…Great stuff… So, rather than writing the same stuff again, have a look at

http://www.rayacayan.com/the-web-mail-migration-project-procedure/

Regards!

for some reasons I decided to crypt all of my stuff (harddrives, usb sticks, operating systems, etc.) using Truecrypt – you may have heard of it.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

It’s good and it’s free. So use it!

You can select which crypting algorithms shall be used within Truecrypt, and I’ve decided to use AES, the “Advanced Encryption Standard” (Wikipedia). The algo itself is called Rijndael (derived from the names of its developers).

A nice stick-figure based comic explaining what AES is and how it works can be found here:

Stick figure guide to AES

Decide yourself whether you need encryption or not.

From my point of view it’s a good thing, because my privacy is ensured and it does not spoil perfomance in any noticable way…

Have a look at:

Robert McCarter about DVCSes

and

my secret shame

I’ll stick with SVN as long as there is no proper replacement, that has reached the same grade of usability and stability, especially for the windows guys.

Regards,

Daniel

has been a while since… But don’t think I’ll revel on this – yes, the blog was down, and yes I was lacy. But I’m back now – the end! Back to topic… JAVA! I’m – maybe you’ve noticed it already – a “pro-microsoft” guy. And there’s a good reason: everything MS does is somehow documented, maintained and – most important – fits into the big picture (at least for a short time). And .NET is great.

Java instead… oh man… 1000 of libraries spread around the net. Some maintained, some not. Some working with the actual JRE, some not. Millions of classes, all having dependencies to different versions of each other. It’s all one big mess. And even the beloved IDE, Eclipse – which I favour to all the other free ones – reminds me of most open source tools.  Look at the homepage for example, http://www.eclipse.org. I guarantee, after 2h of browsing you’re not able to draw the big picture I was talking of above. It’s hard to find out which technology can be used for what, where to search for certain topics,  what all of these modelling stuff is about, which methods/frameworks are already outdated and replaced by a newer better one…

Sounds weird and terrifying, isn’t it? Yes it is! But there’s one thing about this whole Eclipse thing – there’s plenty of documentation available. Even for all the parts which are totally outdated.

So, after babbling about these guys, I’ll return to what I’ve done the last hours… Continue listening to “webinars” and reading “slides”.

Wanna join? Take the first hunk with OSGi:

http://www.eclipse.org/community/training/webinars/080129_OSGi_Webinar.pdf

Cya around!

2 months without a hoster! OMG! At last I managed to find a new one – for free. If you’re interested , have a look ont o www.byethost.com, add-free and very comfortable!

I’ll update my page, the blog and so on during the next 1-2 weeks. So long!

Ok – please don’t think I’m a fool – but… I coded a tool in C# and .NET, although I did write about JAVA being the one and only language one should normally use to code applications. I’m sorry…

But at least in this special case it makes sense to use C# and .NET – I was hoping to achieve a close integration of MS products like Outlook, Excel, etc… So – if you’re interested in a small and lightweight – but still powerful – self-organization tool:

Have a look at myTO

I won’t post news about myTO here, except it is somehow interesting from a technical point of view. So, if you want to be updated regarding myTO, please register at the tools site.

Okay guys, after a hard days night it’s sleeping time…

Nice topic, isn’t it? Sounds more or less like a book title of a self help book…

While I was searching and surfing in the net, looking for new task planing softwares, I read the first time about GTD (Getting Things Done). It’s not really a “change your way of thinking and all daily problems are gone” self help crap, it is more a defined process of “how to handle inputs”.

Well, normally I’m not really a friend of processes, at least I try to keep the ones I create to be AS LEAN AS POSSIBLE and also I try to have AS FEW AS POSSIBLE. Kind of a minimalistic approach (because as we all know processes DO sometimes just waste our time… it all depends on the process and the person following it).

Anyways – GTD seems to be a very minimalistic but also very structured way of keeping the head free for focusing on the current work. I often find myself doing one thing (more or less) and in parallel thinking of the last 5 things I did, whether I missed anything, and about the next 10 things I have to do, private or business, short or long term, doesn’t matter. I might use the term “brainfuck” now, but as it is already used for a coding language…

Conclusion: My brain is sometimes busy with multitasking, I feel stressed, I’m not sure whether I missed anything, and everything is fucked up and impossible. (Beware, exaggeration!)
And this is why I’m going to try this GTD method in my life. I’m not yet sure how to implement it (which tools to use e.g.) – but at least I’m sure I will split the approach into to parts, business and private. The only thing I’m sharing between work and private life is the calendar.

If you’re interested in GTD you can find a hell of a lot blog entries, german as well as english (and possibly every other language spoken).

Have a careless and “mind as water” weekend!

2nd part of my RAID related posts. So, I got rid of my hardware, as I already said in the last post. What to do now in terms of data safety? Well… Here’s my solution:

I made sure all my drives are working perfectly, and I returned the ones which were not (3 years of warranty, so maybe you should check your drives, too!)

Then I connected all of my 1TB drives to the on-board raid controller (it’s a software one, Intel Matrix Raid) and – OH MY GOD – it’s possible to have RAID5 and a SPARE DISK!! So I never had to buy an additional controller. Well… There’s one bad thing about these Intel Matrix Raid controllers – they use the CPU to do the necessary calculations (it’s an XOR bit operation). But – let’s be honest – who cares if the quad core CPU is idling a few percents less than usual…

So now I have my raid drive without any additional hardware (except a good board, mine is an ASUS PQ5 Pro). But how to make sure the most important data (own documents, etc.) is not only depending on the on-board raid controller? Let’s assume I accidentially delete some folders – the raid controller is taking care that it is really deleted… So what to do prevent data loss due to my own foolishness?
I use another single drive and these two tools:

• SyncToy
  
  

  SyncToy Main Dialog

• Rainbow Folders
  
  

  Rainbow Folders Main Dialog

Using these two tools, it’s easy to backup or synchronize data between the RAID drive and my backup drive – only at times when I am sure everything’s fine – , and it’s also easy to see, which folders are involved, because rainbow folders offers the great possibility of having colorized folders. The guy who wrote this tool is a genius!

Hope this will help solve your data organisation and backup problems!

Regards,

Daniel

“long time no post”… But I was damn busy, you know! Some of the things I’ve experienced in the last months are maybe interesting for you, especially if you think of buying a hardware RAID controller.

I’ll tell you ’bout my experiences in a chronological order:

• I bought a used RAID controller (300$) and new cables (30$) from america for my 2nd PC via Ebay. The controller arrived (after trouble with the customs), but didn’t work properly (it didn’t detect hard drives at all). So I sent it back but kept to cables to…
• …buy a new RAID controller from a german adaptec distributor. Great, 450€ invested – and a few weeks afterwards I faced the same shit again. No harddrive dected. Well, great, I talked with the support guys from adaptec and they told me to get new “manufactured by adaptec” cables… *grml*
• Ordered these cables (time until delivery – 5 weeks!). Weeks later I finally managed to have my hard drives recognized by the controller! I was so lucky…
• …for five minutes. Then the raid drive got degraded the first, but certainly not the last time. So I talked with the adaptec guys again, and they told me that I better buy some enterprise class drives. WHAT? Am I mad? These drives are two and a half times more expensive then desktop drives. And they great thing is – the desktop drive I am using (Samsung HD103UJ 1TB) is on the compatibility list! *ARG* Fortunately I got my money back (thanks to the distributor “city-pc”).
• After getting rid of the hardware raid (oh man…) I connected all drives to my on-board SATA controller – after a few runs of hutil (the Samsung tool for hard drive diagnostics) I was sure that 3 of the 4 Samsung drives were screwed. Oh great, so I have to return the drives to Samsung.

Final conclusion regarding hardware RAID – if you want to have on, be prepared to buy much more than just the controller. The controller is a quarter of the price. You also have to buy the cables (the original ones – and buy it from the same guy you buy the controller), a battery pack to use the controller’s write cache (otherwise it will be awfully SLOW!) and enterprise class drives (like the Samsung HE series).

I’m done with hardware raids, that’s  what I can say…

Regards!

I am damn impressed. Bloody hell… A few years ago SUN was nothing else for me than another server hardware distributor, selling a very old and freaky looking OS called Solaris and the corresponding hardware -  and nearly all of my friends didn’t really know about those guys from SUN.

Okay, many many people know Java [now] (yes, it’s SUN’s baby, started 1995!) – but starting from 2000, SUN bought StarDivision (and StarOffice) and released OpenOffice - great piece of open source software! They proceeded to buy more software and hardware development companies (like StorageTek, Tarantella, …). And this year they bought MySQL AB and Innotek, so they also provide a free SQL Server (MySQL) and a free virtual machine (VirtualBox). And they released OpenSolaris.

I wouldn’t wonder about a new one joining the desktop market in the next few years… If SUN is going to do this – oh man, they can count on my being a “nice” customer. These guys deserve it.

everyone who’s involved in the development of Java applications, which need data out of relational databases, should have a look into the following links which all cover the “persistence” topic.

JPA

JPA at Wikipedia:

English:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Persistence_API

German:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Persistence_API

Sun’s introduction to JPA – Java Persistence API:

http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/?wp406143&PersistenceIntro.html#wp78460

JPA is only a specification for a persistence API. Currently, several APIs for persistence do exist. The most popular are hibernate and EclipseLink (formerly TopLink). I chose to use EclipseLink, as Oracle is supporting this project.  TopLink (basis for EclipseLink) development started 12 years ago, so it should be really stable.

EclipseLink

The founding of EclipseLink, the Eclipse Persistence Services Project, signals the inauguration of a new generation of Java persistence where all of the dominant persistence standards are implemented and accessible from a single source.

EclipseLink is composed of a set of separate runtime components that can be used in both clients and servers, and is the first open source project to offer a full suite of persistence technologies. By supporting all of the popular standards, including object-relational mapping using the Java Persistence API (JPA), object-to-XML mapping through the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), and Service Data Objects (SDO) that bridge the relational and XML worlds, EclipseLink provides the most comprehensive persistence platform available. Equally compelling is the fact that these technologies are offered with a rich array of advanced features and high-end performance options.

In this session, attendees will learn what EclipseLink is, the standard technologies it implements, and how these technologies can be used separately or together to meet advanced and diverse application requirements. We will show examples of how to use EclipseLink to map Java objects in object-relational and object-XML contexts, and how it can be used in any runtime environment, including OSGi, Eclipse RCP, Java SE, Java EE, Spring and Tomcat.

Slides about EclipseLink:

OSGI EclipseLink by Mike Keith

EclipseLink at slideshare

Summary of all known presentations about EclipseLink

Regards,

Daniel

usual topic, x-platform GUI development – unusual result. I tried to find a good solution for this cross platform development issue.  And, obviously, I had to have another closer look @ Java. And, well, I found the solution to many of my problems. It’s called SWT.

SWT (Standard Widgets Toolkit) is a wiget toolkit, developed by the Eclipse people. I’m very sure all of you know the Eclipse IDE (which is just ONE out of many projects done by the Eclipse guys) – it looks native on every supported platform. Why? Because the Eclipse IDE uses SWT, which is written partly in Java, partly in native code for several platforms like Windows,  Linux and Unix (GTK, Motif) and MacOS (Carbon). So it feels very integrated and -believe it or not, guys – it is very well integrated into Eclipse IDE, too!

And, there is also a free GUI builder available, called Visual Editor (VE). If you have the Eclipse IDE installed (if you want to develop Java, you should have) use the “Software Update” dialog to install it. VE is in fact not only a GUI builder, but a complete library which can be used to implement GUI builders. And they provide a reference implementation which works just fine..

Additionally, there’s a commercial GUI builder (free for non-commercial purpose) available from Cloud Garden (http://www.cloudgarden.com). Great piece of work.

I played a few days extensively with both builders and SWT, and I am still pleased. Never thought that I’ll find a proper solution for having a great looking, native feeling GUI library for all mention platforms – and SWT is exactly this.

Thank you guys from Eclipse for providing this great library and a first GUI builder.

Regards,

Daniel

Today I want to address another issue that annoyed me a loooon time. But finally, I found a nice decent solution. But let me explain the situation. Facts first… At work I (have to) use Outlook for managing my mails, contacts, tasks and calendar. At home I use thunderbird as a mail and contacts application (for several years now!) and the lightning extension which provides a nice calendar.

Additionally, my mobile phone, which runs windows mobile 6, also provides a calendar, contacts and task list.

Fine. Being an engineer, I was not really satisified with having multiple unsynchronized calendars, contact books and task lists. It’s a pain, I can’t stand it, I HATE IT. So what to do? Well, synchronize! All of them. Unfortunately, this was a real pain. No ActiveSync for linux, no special software for syncing with Mozilla software…

Okay, I think most of you, who wanted to do the same thing, know what I’m talking about. And here’s the solution:

What the hell is FUNAMBOL? Well, I don’t want to recite their complete website (which seems to have been written by a bunch of sales/marketing guys wanting to shock interested people from the start), but here’s the most important part:

The Funambol Mobile Backup & PIM Sync solution supports the synchronization of contacts, calendars, tasks, notes and other data with the widest range of mobile devices on the planet, including

• SyncML-enabled phones, including many models from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericcson, Samsung and others
• Windows Mobile devices
• PCs
• iPods
• Devices such as BlackBerries and Palm Treos via third party and community software

Funambol software ensures that PIM data is up-to-date on every device and server. Whether the data is on mobile phones or in Outlook, webmail, databases, server applications, files or iPods, Funambol can keep it all synchronized.

Funambol is the ultimate low-risk solution:

• Based on SyncML, the industry’s leading standard for mobile data synchronization
• The protection of open source
• Industry’s broadest device compatibility
• Tested by the world’s largest virtual mobile QA team in over 200 countries

Quite some statements, hugh? Believe, took some time to find out what FUNAMBOL really is. It’s a server application, which stores all the data like calendars, contacts, tasks (and more) centrally, and allows clients to synchronize their data with the server’s. The synchronization is a 2-way-synchronization.

Sounds nice! That’s exactly what I wanted. This was the concept I came up with:

sync concept

Guess what – it works. Like a CHARM! I can sync my mobile phone with Outlook at work as usual, using ActiveSync. When I get home I plugin my mobile phone, start Thunderbird (windows or linux, doesn’t matter), press the sync button of the FUNAMBOL plugins and THAT’S IT! It’s so smug. And it’s not only this way I can sync – starting from FUNAMBOL.

And now the best thing – it’s for free. Have a look at my screen, guys (the green one is my mobile phone):

sync tools in action

How To:

Now you want to know if A) this works for you and B) how to get that FUNAMBOL server up, right?

If you want to try the synchronization without having to setup a FUNAMBOL server, you can use their free demo server. Beware, this transfers your data to their server – but if this doesn’t bother you, it’s maybe the easiest and fastest solution.

1.Get a free account

2. Download the plugins for your device(s) and and clients (outlook, thunderbird, iPhone, whatever)

3. Configure the plugins (add the URL of the server, your account name and password) and

4. Press SYNC

If you prefer NOT to use the funambol demo server, for whatever reasons (data security, slow internet connection,…)

1. Download the open source edition of FUNAMBOL to your local PC (about 150MB), install it and configure it as described in the documentation (RTFM, as always).

2.-4. see above (same steps required)

I hope this helps some of you guys out there – I’m pleased, that’s what I can tell…

Regards,

Daniel

forgot one thing – get yourself the free track from the prodigy…

http://www.theprodigytickets.com/download

I’m so looking forward to their new album…

Sometimes I’m really into coding. At least, I have great ideas for great tools and already complex designs in mind. Unfortunately, I always want to make it very right from the beginning, and this is why I always try to start with platform independant code. And normally, this ends after a few days by dropping the complete idea…

You think I’m weird? No. Impatient? Maybe. But, definitely, I’m frustrated. Why? Because there is really NO nice way of developing a graphical tool for Windows, Linux and MacOS. I know, there are many toolkits, frameworks, etc… But, please, believe me – I know all of ‘em. I wrote code in and for each of them. And believe me – each one has it’s own problems:

Let’s start with the selection of programming language. As I want to be productive, I tend to user higher level languages. I tried using C/C++ once, but it’s – compared to C# or VB – just inefficient. So there is C#/VB on the one side, Java on the other side. And there are interpreted languages, too – like python or ruby. On with C#/VB…

.NET / MONO and Windows Forms

One framework available for Windows, Linux and MacOS is Mono, which in it’s latest revision is compliant to the .NET framework revision 2.0. Fine! So why not use windows forms, which is a part of Mono and will work on each OS? Well… Because A) it looks very ugly (alien, like the Mono guys say) on Linux and MacOS and B) it does not integrate very good into non-windows system. Font sizes are messed, controls are overlapping, some parts of the window are hidden, etc… And – be honest – who wants to use a tool that A) features a usability of 0 and B) looks like 1995? I like the clothes I bought 10 years ago – but will I wear them? No.

.NET / MONO and GTK# (GTK sharp)

Nice. Another framework, part of Mono. But let’s imagine I want to develop using – maybe – Visual Studio, for it’s great debugging capabilities? And I – maybe – want to have a good GUI designer like the one for windows forms? Well…

Then I first have to see where I can get a GTK sharp runtime for .NET (there is one on the net, unfortunately it’s rather old and unmaintained – what pisses me off). And, additionally, I need to have Glade (latest version of Glade was released 27.10.2006 – nice, huh?) which is essentially a GUI builder that produces XML files which can be read by GTK (libglade). Oh, but besides GTK# and Glade, I also need a tool that creates all the signals handlers for all the controls of the gui, because I really don’t want to do this manually. So I need another handmade tool called GladeSharper. Finally, some hours of setup later, the first GUI is visible. Very easy and efficient, right…

Who the hell wants to work with open source tools, that have not been touched since 2 years? I honestly see myself coping with unbelievably hard-to-solve tool-issues rather than implementing the tool I had in mind. GTK# may be good in showing unicode, but it’s bad in terms of development supporting tools, especially using windows as development platform.

.NET / MONO and wx .NET

Good old wxWidgets, now for .NET. wxWidgets, formerly called wxWindows, is a GUI toolkit that has a core, supporting each OS natively. Very nice idea. Unfortunately, this makes developing custom widgets/controls/whatever very hard. But, as there are a lot controls already existing (really!), it’s maybe not necessary to add new controls. But… facing the truth, the toolkit is yet quite unstable. Playing around with the demos (which are part of the wx .NET binaries) showed me I think a few hands full of exceptions. Well, wx .NET seems to support unicode languages, it integrates nicely (e.g. drag and drop is supported) but – it’s unstable. Am I going to select an unstable GUI toolkit as a basis for further development? Hell, NO!

If you want to know more, please also have a look at this page: http://mono-project.com/Gui_Toolkits

Eventually, that’s it… .NET/MONO is gone…

JAVA

Java. Hated it during my studies, and never used it again afterwards… But maybe everything is allright now? Maybe the virtual machine is not as slow as a 198x’s gameboy. And maybe the looks are much better now than a few years ago – when Java programs looked like developed for Amiga OS!

Well, let’s see… Now, which IDE to choose for Java development? Easy one, eclipse of course. And… good god! I have never ever faced a decision so complex, like the decision which eclipse framework project module model thingy I have to download to start developing a proper graphical tool. To be honest, I even don’t now this right now! I’ve not really tested Java until now, but I’m fairly sure I will not be satisfied by the final product,  because A) programs coded in Java will still look like Java, B) users have to have java runtime installed (which is a pain, because the version has to match, the download from the sun site is awful,… ) and C) the resulting program will not really integrate into the running OS.

If I am wrong – correct me. Or better – tell me which project and eclipse version I have to use, PLEASE!

Got rid of Java, too. Now what?

Python/Ruby/…

I’ve seen strange constructs, mates… For example TaskCoach, a really cool tool, is written in Python. And it uses a python binding to the wxWidgets library.  And several other python bindings. And is afterwards compiled into an exe-File for usage under Windows. The exe-file and subfolders contain the python interpreter, the bindings and the application itself. Allright. So, am I going to use an interpreting language, which mostly consists of bindings, that have been provided by the community some weeks and years ago? Do I want to have Cygwin installed, so I can use make in a shell for building the application? Which afterwards is packed into an installer by another tools in the chain?… I don’t know, but it does not sound like development to me. Sounds more like “let’s improve the toolchain until the harddrive crashes, then let’s start over again without having written a line of code”.

Don’t like interpreters and mixed-OS toolchains…

Ok, hackers all over the world – if you have any kind of advice, or a good reason for choosing one of the possibilities above, or even a completely new one, please tell me.

I don’t want to spend more days reading, trying, evaluating toolkits. I just want to realize my ideas.

Regards,

Daniel

I’m working in a medium sized business – and the bigger the business is you’re working in, the more tools get invented by either the employees or the tool department, to make your life complicated and dreadful. Nothing new for you guys, right?

So let me list a few daily “use cases” of an employee:

• Self organisation and planing – plan my own tasks
• Effort tracking – log effort for each task (which is mapped to a cost centre)
• Project information – get all necessary information of the projects I and others are currently working on (milestones, changes, discussions, …)
• Planning – Shift tasks, split and assign them to other colleagues and track the progress. Check the workload and availability (some employees do have sth. called holiday or vacation)
• Information exchange – discuss with colleagues about tasks, projects, milestones, …

Do you work using a tool like that every day? Then – please! – contact me.

You can even manage small projects with it. And who knows, maybe someone will code an interface for the tool, so it can be synced with outlook or any other tool, even the “special” ones.

Why a blog? Well – to be honest, I did not support blogging in the last years nor did I say good things about bloggers, because most of the time personal blogs are neither interesting nor useful (Do I have to care about someone having the third daughter? Or why his/her gay sun wants to skip college and become a drug dealer? Honestly said… NO!).  So, why do I start a blog?

I want to share thoughts and ideas with some guys, who maybe spend time on the same things and think the same (or a completely different) way. Everyone who’s really interested in discussions, ideas and information exchange is invited to visit my blog regularly. Warning – if you expect personal things… go search another blog. If, by the time, some personal aspects may come through – sorry, live with it.

So, please stay patient while I’m writing the first “real” post… Looking forward to your comments.

Daniel