For those of you with Costco memberships, they have Mac Minis, complete with keyboards, wireless mice and AppleCare for $700. There’s no info on the Costco website, but I know the Chicago location has them.
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After some consideration and feedback from readers, I decided to go with svn-hosting.com for my SCM hosting needs. Michael was kind enough to cut me a 15% discount if I paid for a year in advance. Trac is very nice. I’ve been wanting to try it but was dreading the install process.
Of course, everything has problems. SVN-hosting.com doesn’t allow me to add my own users and repositories. That must be done via email. Generally not a problem, but there can be some lag time. Another issue I’ve had is time to commit and update can be extremely slow. I plan on taking that up with Michael in the coming week.
A number of people suggested CVSdude.com. I reviewed the forums and they seem to have had a number of outages spanning several days earlier in the year.
I’m always looking to outsource my peripheral stuff. Website hosting and email are easy. The last item on my list of tasks to outsource are my Subversion repos. There are quite a few commercial Subversion hosts, but I’d like to know if anybody has opinions on them, or if there’s somebody I missed. Right now I’m leaning towards http://www.svn-hosting.com/ since they aren’t going to charge me extra for multiple users, and Trac is included.
Any opinions on SVN hosting?
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My travel schedule has been full lately, which means I’ve been getting a fair amount of use out of my iPod. Regular iPod headphones don’t really block any outside noise, requiring ear-bleeding volume on an airplane if you want to block out the screaming infant in 19C. Bose headphones are too bulky and ugly to carry, so I needed something similar to earbuds, but with better noise cancellation.
I picked up some the Shure E2c sound isolating earbuds for $99 at BestBuy. While somewhat pricy, these things are excellent. Even sitting on the wing, airplane engine noise is reduced to a minor background hum. Conversations and screaming kids are also eliminated. Since the earbuds act as earplugs, you don’t need excess volume to enjoy your iPod.
If you’re in the market for new earbuds, you could do much worse than the E2c. However, if you’re walking around at night with your iPod (probably not a great idea), these things aren’t for you. You don’t hear ANY outside noise, which raises some safety concerns.
It looks like the problem I’m having with POI’s Excel processing has to do with the Excel version Outlook creates when exporting contacts. It appears to be something like Excel 95, which is currently unsupported by POI. My workaround was to switch to CSV exports. It’s not as flashy for the user, but at least it works.
While working on a feature to allow users to upload their contacts database from Outlook as an Excel document, I’m running into the following exception:
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:494)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.RecordFactory.createRecord(RecordFactory.java:224)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.RecordFactory.createRecords(RecordFactory.java:160)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook.
at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook.
at org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook.
at example.ContactServiceImpl.uploadContacts(ContactServiceImpl.java:146)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 11
at org.apache.poi.util.LittleEndian.getNumber(LittleEndian.java:491)
at org.apache.poi.util.LittleEndian.getInt(LittleEndian.java:139)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.BOFRecord.fillFields(BOFRecord.java:133)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.Record.fillFields(Record.java:90)
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.Record.
at org.apache.poi.hssf.record.BOFRecord.
… 48 more
I could upload the same file 10 times and get this error 3-10 times. It’d be one thing if it occurred each time, but it seems to be random. Has anybody else seen this and come up with a workaround? I’m deploying on Java 1.5.