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New OS’s in my house

Like I posted a couple of weeks ago, I bought a Windows Vista laptop. The more I use it, the more I’m convinced it ain’t that great. Even friends of mine who are microsoft consultants don’t like it. So the things you read about it are really true 🙂

I have a customer who has a couple of Macs inhouse and they asked me to do something on it. I had never used it before and the first experience was kinda weird. Because you are used to using computers, you can everything rather quickly. But your feel stupid and slow. If somebody would ask me a support question I couldn’t answer it. So I bought myself a MacBook. The smallest cheapest version that’s available. And I have to say it’s actually really nice. It actually feals familiar to my Gnome desktop even thought it is a bit different.

The thing I like the most is the fact that underneath this system, there’s a BSD kernel running. And offcourse the hardware … well what can you say about it. I wish they would produce Linux prebuilt laptops like that. I would buy one immediately. (Although I miss my firefox spelling checker (default on my Ubuntu system) 🙂 )

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Comments

As I don’t check my comments a lot (they are full of spam) I did check them and filtered out the spam. It seems there are people reading my blog \o/ !!!

On my linux PDA phone someone pointed me to http://www.road.de. It does seem like an interesting product. I contacted them asking about compatibility with Belgium and about prices. I hope to get an answer. There os is using a linux 2.6 kernel and QTopia is there GUI framework. Don’t know if QTopia is really fully opensource but its prolly more opensource than the IPhone will ever be 🙂

In another comment someone posted the following:

Linux has broken through ages ago. Only the sheep haven’t noticed yet.

While I consider projects like Ubuntu and GNOME and KDE to be dangerous to the progress of Linux, they do contribute to the success of Linux in that they bring sheep over who will eventually realize the full potential of Linux and start using it normally.

What I meant with my blog entry was if Linux will break through in the mass market desktop space. IMHO it only has when you go into the local computershop or local GB or … and you can buy a computer with a Linux preinstalled. In Belgium I haven’t seen it yet.
Another measurement are the sheep if you say microsoft or windows to a sheep they know what you mean. Many of my friends are sheep and if I talk about Linux they don’t have clue what I’m talking about.

I measure the break throught of linux using these 2 items among us geeks Linux indeed has broken through ages ago (I’m using it +10 years know and you don’t here me complain 🙂 ). And it’s definitely here to stay no question about that, but the general public doesn’t have a clue (yet).

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Linux phone / pda

Does anybody know a Linux based phone that you can actually use to phone,sms and that has a wifi connection? (current openmoko can’t sms yet AFAIK)

The guys over at openmoko are almost there, but they don’t have the wifi support in there current product. The next release should include the wifi connection. I was just wondering if anybody knows such a phone please do let me know?

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Windows vs Linux

I was wondering if Linux finally will break through. Now HP also started offering Linux computers it won’t take long before all major computer vendors all will be offering Linux computers IMHO.

I’m pro Linux and I do think it is a better OS than Windows but I’m just wondering if it will gain more market share. And if it does if the reason will be that it is free,better,… or just because MS dropped the ball with Vista … If you look at the news sites, you get a lot of messages saying people want to downgrade back to XP. I wonder how the IT world will look the next couple of years.

As much as I’m pro Linux I actually don’t hope that MS will get broken down (like SCO). You might think ‘WTF’ but from my point of view MS doesn’t create that bad tools. I for one am pro VS.NET, I really like it as an IDE. In my dayjob I’m a JEE developer but at night I put on my black cape and mask and develop dotnet solutions for customers. You might ask why ? But the answer is actually very very simple. I yet have to find a tool that let’s me create a solution as quick as VS.NET. So if Linux will prevail (I do hope so) I actually also hope MS will become a tools vendor on the Linux platform and make there dotnet environment fully Linux compliant.

In short let’s just all live happily together 😀

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IBM Lotus Symphony

As most people probably know by now, IBM has released Lotus Symphony. But what’s the idea behind it? Okay it’s based on the Eclipse RCP, supports ODF and is free (not sure if it’s opensource). The also announced thy are backing Openoffice but why create a new office suite if you already support one? Why not focus on Openoffice, maybe even create a paid version (like the do with Eclipse and WSAD)? That would make more sense to me … Anybody got some more information on this ?

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Poeff

My server was making a lot of noise, after inspection it seemed the fan on the videocard was making the noise. As it is a headless server that I use as vmware server I thought just unplug the stupid fan you don’t use the graphics card. It booted and noise was gone, whoeray!!
When I came back from our soccer game the server was down. (Not to worry this is an inhouse development server) I tried to reboot but nothing. I unplugged it, replugged it and started it. Sparks were shooting out of my videocard. As I still have an onboard card, I unplugged it and rebooted. Now everything works fine but now I lost one graphics card 🙁

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Alleloeja!!

Hey guys,

I have to admit it’s been a while. But here I am again 😀

Today I saw this post on the serverside. And I have only one word for it Alleloeja.

Just look at this piece of code


import com.jinvoke.JInvoke;
import com.jinvoke.NativeImport;

public class Example {
@NativeImport(library="User32")
public static native int MessageBox(int hwnd, String text, String caption, int type);

public static void main(String[] args) {
JInvoke.initialize();
MessageBox(0, "This MessageBox is a native Win32 MessageBox", "Caption", 0);
}
}

Why did it take this long to actually do this?

In C# you could do this right from the start. Well beter late than never probably?

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Java D&D development

At a customer where I work there is a lot of Powerbuilder Development. Powerbuilder is 4GL development environment, you can quickly create simple CRUD applications with the tool. Every now and then we have discussions on it. It’s really quit funny as you can’t compare client-server development with web development or desktop applications vs web applications. The example that is always given is, how long does it take to create a simple master-detail app. Okay with the new Java web frameworks (or ruby on rails) this is also done very quickly.

With my VS.NET 2005 I have a good competitor for beating them in the client-server development area. Java however didn’t stand a chance. My DAO layer can be generated but for then building a simple Swing app, I would lose by a couple of miles. Recently I noticed the Netbeans 6 M9 however. I gave it a go and I was really amazed. I had my database ready and it took me less than 3 minutes to create a simple Master-detail Swing application. According to the documentation I could create a webstart deployement within a couple of clicks. I would say “GO SUN!!”

I do hope they will extend their default swing components palette. Sorry but the ones that are in there at the moment isn’t sufficient. Common people you don’t even have a default date picker component. Well maybe this is because the default java.util.Date in Java is just broken 🙂 But just fix it, I as developer don’t like it that I have to search for these components. Just put them in their. If you compare the VS.NET 2005 controls that are available by default with the Swing components. I can see why we still aren’t that far on the desktop as on the server.

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Crystal Reports in VS.NET 2005

For a client I had created a couple of records. Problem was that they another company had developed stuff in Access and I had to integrate with that flat file. The Access file was located on a network share. When I developed it was on my local disk and when I deployed my Typed Dataset objects were updated automatically. The crystal reports however didn’t get updated. After a long time I finally found a solution for setting the database location @ runtime.


CrystalReport1 rep = new CrystalReport1();
TableLogOnInfo logOnInfo = new TableLogOnInfo();
logOnInfo =rep.Database.Tables[0].LogOnInfo;
ConnectionInfo connectionInfo = new ConnectionInfo ();
connectionInfo = logOnInfo.ConnectionInfo;
connectionInfo.DatabaseName = "Database";
connectionInfo.ServerName = "Server";
connectionInfo.Password = "pwd";
connectionInfo.UserID = "uid";
rep.Database.Tables [0].ApplyLogOnInfo(logOnInfo);

There’s one stupid thing here. I had made my application so that I gave my report as string param. The application that woud look in the application path for that report. This way I could update my reports without redeploying. Unfortunately if you do it like this I didn’t find a way to access the tables of my report. The reportview seems to not give you the actual CrystalReport object when you load it from a string???

Well in in the end it works, that’s all that matters!

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Bejug ??? Why would I ???

Today I received an email from Javapolis. They were starting advertising the upcoming new Javapolis event. On the site they also mentioned there new Javapolis DVD that was available for purchase. I noticed this was an effort from Bejug. So I got interested as I’m a Java developer 🙂

Now what do you get for paying 100 euro’s to join the Bejug. They have 3 workshops per year and … Well nothing actually. You still have to pay for Javapolis and for SpringOne. Please people explain me, why would I join??? If I compare it to the Linux User Group in Leuven, they have 2 workshops a month and you pay 10 euro’s a month.
I would rather start my own Jug and do the same as the Lug of Leuven. Anybody up for it ?