Digital Earth Weblog

While looking for Cameron Purdy’s presentation titled “Top 10 Ways to Botch an Enterprise Java Technology-Based Application” I came across this link in a Google search response:

http://www.dzone.com/links/top_10_ways_to_botch_enterprise_java_applications.html

Which promptly returned:

500 Servlet Exception
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -2
…

In an effort to improve my personal task management and prioritisation I’ve fallen into the GTD (Getting Things Done) tools trap. Several tools have been evaluated, wasting more time than they have saved. Worse, none of them have been satisfactory (for me), but one is close.

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Since moving to Linux on my notebook I have been using a browser-based feed reader application. That has worked well, but the downside has been no ability to read my feeds while commuting. That has just changed because Google Reader can now use Google Gears for offline news reading!

Yesterday I installed the Google Gears extension for Firefox (on Linux and Mac) and have started using Google Reader. When Firefox was starting I was getting:

When I logged in this morning I got the same error. Then, a message appeared at the top of the Google Reader page saying there was a Google Reader update for Gears. I clicked on the Refresh link provided. So far, no more errors. Nice! You’ve gotta love the Web.

Update: An update to the Google Gears Firefox extentsion just got installed (v0.1.47.0).

After upgrading from Google Earth 4.0.something to 4.1.7076.4458 on Ubuntu 7.04, the Fly To address search doesn’t work. I’m assuming this error is particular to Australian users since it returns an error stating:

Unable to perform search Couldn’t resolve host ‘maps.google.au’

Update, 2007-05-18: Just tried a street address search and it worked fine. Thanks for the fix Google.

That should obviously be maps.google.com.au. I searched everywhere obvious to find a likely configuration setting, but alas, not one was found.

Hopefully this value is pulled from Google servers at login (REST style), rather than being baked into compiled code.

The Dell D610 laptop was upgraded from Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake” to 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” over the weekend. It was a two stage process, with 6.10 “Edgy Eft” being intermediate step. Unfortunately, that step didn’t go too well.

Halfway through the upgrade process the user interface stopped responding. Input required to complete the install could not be provided. Rebooting left a lot of broken packages which took several hours to fix, manually. This was also new territory.

The second upgrade, from Edgy to Feisty (the “what the hell, no guts, no glory”, upgrade), went a lot smoother. That was followed by several hours mucking around with ATI graphics drivers to get 3D acceleration working again.

At this point the system is operational. Skype no longer steals 100% of the CPU for 10 seconds when a new message is received. The digital USB headset is still working. The user interface is prettier. Life is good, but more tweaks are still required.

• The touchpad is overly sensitive. Adding Alps touchpad configurations to xorg.conf seems to have helped, but it’s not quite right yet.
• Sound quality on external speakers is worse than it used to be. Strangely, headphones are

VMware Workstation Unsupported

Only after finishing the upgrade was it realised that VMware Workstation 5.5.3 is not supported on either 6.10 Edgy Eft or 7.04 Feisty Fawn as the host operating system. This forum post provided an unsupported workaround. Phew, should have checked that first.

It Should Just Work

Sure, the Ubuntu upgrade wasn’t really necessary, but it’s nice to have the latest versions of OpenOffice, Firefox and friends available via the package manager. It also fixed an annoying horizontal line that kept appearing under the mouse cursor, which much research and tweaking had never managed to eradicate.

Linux is interesting, and is usually rock solid. It’s the less refined stuff around the edges of the operating system that has a negative impact on the user experience. When you need to delve into configuration files, or install dodgy drivers, the result is more browsing of forums (often with conflicting solutions), more tweaking, and no guarantee of a positive result. That’s OK if Linux is a hobby, but for most of us time is money. If you are tweaking Linux you aren’t doing other things.

Linux is getting better, but contrast this experience with the family iMac G5. The operating system has been very low maintenance since we got it over two years ago. A single hardware fault was fixed under warranty. The only issues we’ve had have been with a few third party games.

Apple gear commands a premium price, and the Apple empire also likes to lock you in. If that’s the only price of “it just works” then a MacBook will be a strong contender when the D610 needs replacing. It will also be interesting to see how much Ubuntu has improved at that point in time.

Update: It took another three hours of fiddling to get sound working properly. sigh

Metis Architect is a enterise architecture modelling tool. It is a “thick client” desktop application. When using the application it didn’t take long to see evidence of Web standards.

Metamodelling tools like Metis use an object oriented approach to modelling whatever it is you want to model. The metamodel defines the objects types (classes), and the allowable relationships between object types. You create object instances to represent your domain of interest. All standard stuff in the metamodelling world.

What was interesting is that there were a bunch of W3C and Internet standards in evidence when using the application:

• Metamodels are stored as XML documents that are full of XLink references and other XML goodness.
• URIs are used to identify object types, object instances, and more.
• SVG is used for graphical representation of all object instances.
• WEBDAV is used for simple team sharing of projects (although that seems to be overshadowed by their RDBMS-based repository).

This was the first desktop application, other than a Web browser, that I had seen which makes such overt use of Web technologies.

Using standardised technologies benefits the software developer. They can leverage existing libraries and skills. Open formats are also good for clients, but as a potential end user that wasn’t the interesting part. Being familiar with XML, URIs and object oriented concepts provided an instinctive understanding of what was going on under the hood, and why some things had to be done the way they were. This made the learning curve shallower than it would have been, at least for part of the application.

However, is needing to know the underlying technologies, in order to better understand a software product, a sign that the user interface design could be improved. I suspect it is.

A while ago the wireless signal strength meter on the family iMac G5 started dropping, and sometimes no LAN connection was available after login. Wireless access points had started showing up in the neighbourhood.

Reconfiguring the wireless access point to use channel 12 instead of the default channel 6 fixed the iMac’s LAN issues. But, it killed wireless connectivity on the Dell D610 notebook, which is running Ubuntu Dapper.

This lead to a wild goose chase looking for channel settings in the Network Administration tool. No such animal exists (nor is it needed). Google and the Web to the rescue. This command:

> iwlist eth1 channel

revealed that the wireless card in the notebook only supports channels 01 to 11 in the 2.4 Ghz band. When the access point was configured to use channel 11 both the iMac and Dell notebook worked as expected.

The “lspci” command lists the notebook’s wireless card as:
Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG MiniPCI Adapter (rev 05)

On Windows 2000, I needed to get a list of all files, including their paths, from a directory containing multiple subdirectories. dir /S > /temp/filelist.txt listed each directory and then each file in that directory. I didn’t like the thought of manually removing all the cruft and creating filepath/filename.ext for 999 files, so I installed UnxUtils.

print -l **/*(.) > /temp/filelist.txt was all I needed. Plus, I got a shell with got tab completion, and access to lots of the commonly used Unix tools.

There are other similar free toolsets out there, like UWin, but UnxUtils was simple to install. Just add the wbin directory to your path.

Ironically, a bit more research tonight reveals that dir /S /B > /temp/filelist.txt might do the job (will test it tomorrow), but it’s still nice to have Unix style shell.

Update: dir /S /B > does list the full path to all files within and below the current directory, with no extraneous text. However, it also includes a line for each directory. Close, but not exactly what I wanted.

…is here, but you knew that already. Nice! I think I’ll be switching back to Firefox from Opera.

Update: Interesting how some sites are reporting that it was released a day early. It appeared in Australian mirrors at around 06:30 Eastern Australian Time (GMT +10). The Firefox crew are thinking global, not US-centric.

Spotted while registering on my mobile carrier’s website for online access to my bill:

“There may be technical inaccuracies, typographical errors, programming bugs or computer viruses in this website or its contents.”

Confidence inspiring!