System Mobile, Inc

Matt is reporting that Wordpress has been metioned in this month’s issue of Popular Science. This is great exposure for both Matt and Wordpress.

Congrats Matt!

nick Uncategorized

From Macworld:

Apple on Wednesday announced lower prices for its line of flat panel Cinema Displays. The 20-inch model is now US$799; the 23-inch “HD” model costs $1,499 — lower prices of $200 and $300, respectively. The 30-inch Cinema HD Display remains priced at $2,999.

I’ve been considering getting a dual G5 with a 23″ display. With the price reduction and this update, I may have to do it.

nick Uncategorized

My mobile service since moving to Chicago has been horrible, and it’s gotten worse since AT&T Wireless was purchased by Cingular. After months of replacing phones, I’ve finally switched to Verizon. The service is great, which is surprising for a CDMA network in the city. Maybe Cingular needs to change their GSM frequency or something. Training their stuff on customer service wouldn’t hurt either.

The phone I got is nothing special, but it works. I picked up the Samsung a670. It’s not a PDA or anything - just a phone. I’ve ditched my various PDAs for a Moleskine and a few pens.

At least if I drop the Moleskine, I’m not out a few hundred dollars.

nick Uncategorized

The BBC is running a story about Apple’s Manhattan store, and the products sold there. It also covers the cultish behavior of Mac users. The best part has to be the comments from Umberto Eco:

Macs, Umberto Eco opined, were “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory,” traits he associated with Catholicism. More to the point, though, their way of operating was different from Microsoft’s, giving more guidance to users.

Macs would, as Umberto Eco put it, “tell the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed”.

nick Uncategorized

Two companies recently asked me to evaluate how their Hibernate implementations. The first company’s implementation had horrible performance. The second company wasn’t sure they should continue replacing their homegrown JDBC persistence layer with Hibernate.

The performance problems encountered by the first company were caused by a handful of problems, including:

• Inexperienced Java developers. Not inexperienced with Hibernate, although they were, but inexperienced in every way. The team they assembled was so green, they needed to be mowed.
• Difficult legacy database. Okay, I know you can integrate Hibernate with just about any database, especially with H3, but some legacy schemas are more difficult that others. The database they were working with was designed without any consideration of what the application was actually going to be doing with the data.
• Retrieving complete objects. This is one problem I see often. Many developers don’t realize that you don’t have to retrieve complete objects when you only need a few fields.

The second company, on the other hand, started implementing Hibernate for new features of their core application and got interested in using it for the rest of the app. They knew what needed to be done, just not how to go about doing it. Other than the need to refactor their database schema, the second company doesn’t have the problems of the first. (The database needs to be refactored for reasons other than Hibernate.) Granted, no real problems here. They just wanted a professional opinion.

If you’re having problems implementing Hibernate as your persistence solution, the cause may be something else in your project.

nick Uncategorized

The BBC is reporting another critical Microsoft flaw. How much of it is real and how much is sensationalism has yet to be seen, but it certainly sounds bad.

Most of the critical bugs involve weaknesses that, if exploited, would allow attackers to run their own code remotely on a target machine.

Read the article.

nick Uncategorized

Looks like OS X 10.4 is going to be released on 29 April. But will it include Java 5? The OS X developer page says:

Built in to Mac OS X Tiger is the latest, certified release of the Java 2 Platform.

Does this mean JDK 1.5? It would be nice, but at this point, I’d happily take a fixed 1.4.2.

nick Uncategorized

It seems that IDEA is a victim of another obscure bug when debugging web applications and using a mouse with a scroll wheel. I’ve run across this problem frequently and I’m surprised that this is the cause. The entire thread can be found here.

nick Uncategorized

After two warranty replacements, I’ve finally replaced my Motorola V600 with the V551. Motorola phones are generally garbage, but I didn’t feel like replacing the various chargers and accessories purchased for the V600. So far I’m digging the V551; it’s what the V600 should have been.

nick Uncategorized

One of the improvements in Hibernate 3 is the inclusion of a new AST parser. The nice thing about the parser is it should make adding features to HQL easier. The problem I have with it is some old queries simply don’t work anymore. For example, the following snippet of HQL results in “unexpected token: :” (That’s a colon.):

So the new parser dies on “:startTime” where the old parser happily worked. (It’s possible the AST parser is too smart.) The easiest way to work around problems with the new parser is to use the old one. This doesn’t exactly resolve the problem, however.

nick Uncategorized