Hassle free contacts.

I've just received my beta invite for Soocialand have been playing around with it a bit.

It looks so far like the perfect application for syncing contacts between your macs/gmail/phones etc. It's very slick. Of course, my crappy £5 Sagem 'pay as you go' phone isn't supported, so I could just use .mac (or me.com as they call it) and hack the Leopard Address book to sync with GMail (which was my previous setup). However, I'm interested in a couple of things;

1. Smoothness of operation - .mac had an annoying tendency to sync things at seemingly random times and was quite obtrusive when it did so. Soocial may even run alongside .mac syncing in the future, they advise turning this off for now however.

2. Cost - The beta is free and I've no idea if Soocial will start charging for their service later (I was too lazy to read all the details), but it could potentially replace my .mac account as I don't really use many of its other features.

3. Support - I know at least one person who'd love it if this synced with windows PCs as well, probably with Outlook (or wherever you store contacts on a PC). It seems to me that Soocial have the advantage here as, in theory, they can build in support for almost anything they can be bothered to. I suspect .mac will stick to iPhones and Macs for the foreseeable future.

Travel Tips: Getting a cheap internet connection in Malaysia.

I'm currently out in Sarawak (Borneo) and spent some time searching for a cheap dial up ISP in Malaysia.

I couldn't find any obvious candidates that didn't involve some sort of dodgy download dialer.exe thing (that wouldn't work on a mac anyway).

So, when I got here I relied on stumbling across open wi-fi connections which seem fairly widespread, but this approach doesn't always guarantee you'll be able to connect.

Anyway, it turns out that Telekom Malaysia offer a dial-up ISP service that requires no registration. It costs 4 Sen per minute (less than 1 pence UK) and all you need to do is dial 1315 (no username or password required).

Of course, if you've got a recent-ish mac you'll need to buy/bring a USB modem as well :)

Enable hidden Skype (2.7 Beta) Emoticons in OS X

I discovered today that there are a bunch of hidden, amusing and animated emoticons in Skype 2.7 Beta (and possibly other versions) on OS X (and possibly other OSs).

They look like this :



So, being a geeky sort I knocked up a quick one liner to enable them all in OS X.

This bit of copypasta can be run in the Terminal and it assumes that you've installed Skype in the default location (/Applications)

perl -p -i -e 's/<true\/>/<false\/>/g' \
/Applications/Skype.app/Contents/Resources/Emoticons/\
Animated\ Emoticons.SkypeEmoticonset/Emoticons.plist

Hah

I've blogged about Twitter before, but this made me laugh :)

http://www.brianalvey.com/news/2008/05/25/twitters-business-model/

Oh lordy...

The uk gvt wants to store details of every phone call made, email sent and minute spent on the internet by the public.


Let's hope they sign a contract with Microsoft for an improved version of Access.

Who on earth (or in the UK) could honestly think that this is a good idea?

Great spam subject lines...

I just received a spam email (rarely happens these days) with the following subject line.

Set your wife on fire

Now, perhaps it's just me but I thought bloody hell that's a bit harsh.

On further reading it appears that I will be more 'manly' if I do...

Things to think about...

I've been using restlet on a couple of client projects recently and you could say that it's piqued my interest in Java web frameworks and more.

I had been using 'proper' J2EE frameworks for what seems like forever now and this came up as a refreshing change, I loved the whole 'non-app serverness' of it all :)

So my explorations have taken me to Wicket, probably most pure 'java' web framework I've looked at. It's kind of neat, but takes a bit of getting your head around the way it models certain components. I very much liked the way the templates are pure xhtml and contain no crazy scripting or embedded markup (and therefore can be edited by designers with no knowledge of strange JSF components). Like Restlet, Wicket uses Jetty as the webserver by default (although it's not mandatory) and means I can bundle up my apps into a single .jar file for distribution.

However, my most surprising find (as a die hard EJB user - yeah, even since back when it really sucked) has been Active Objects. Ok, this wasn't really a 'find' I've known about it for a while and I know the guy who wrote it, but I've never played with it. But playing with new frameworks made me want to find a quick and simple persistence mechanism that didn't really involve setting anything up.

Again, Active Objects seems very Java-y. It doesn't require any configuration (other than the datasource) and unlike JPA/Hibernate it uses Interfaces rather than POJOs. However, I found that despite the lack of documentation I had everything I needed up and running for a simple data model within the first hour of playing with it - including the databse.

I'm aware that there are a few bits of esoteric stuff Active Objects won't do (distributed transactions, for example) but it covers most bases more than adequately, including cacheing. It's strength, however, is it's simplicy and light weight approach. The API makes a kind of immediate sense, especially if you've used other ORM solutions and I've found it a pleasure to work with.

I'm looking forward to using it on some 'real' projects in the near-future.