resistance to persistence

Only in Toronto…I’d actually expect to see this somewhere like L.A. or Hollywood. As I was walking to work, a guy on a bicycle rode up beside me and stopped at the red light. I looked at him and noticed he had a drink strapped to his hip. A little bottle holder, similar to a chalk pouch for any of you rockclimbers out there. And in that bottle holder he had a small bottle of Perrier. If you’re going to get parched biking around the city, you might as well refresh yourself and look stylish doing so.

Panoramas.dk has Quicktime VR panoramas of some very cool stuff. This week’s is an underwater scuba scene. So real you’ll think you’re there. Check out this 4th of July with headphones on and you’ll hear sounds louder in each ear depending on which direction you’re looking.

I just saw a link to some J2ME Ant tasks which included some tasks for setting up a J2ME app to run on PalmOS. It looks like MIDP for PalmOS has been available since April. I’m interested in creating apps for my Palm, but I’m not a GUI developer and it seems like a decent hurdle to get started in setting up the Emulator, getting everything setup in my IDE (IDEA). Does anyone have any suggestions on an easy way to get started? Any walkthrough code sample tutorials that I could actually install on my Palm? What’s the suggested workflow ? code, compile, move to emulator, try to run? Seems like a bit of a nightmare. A few months ago, Motorola had a free download for CodeWarrior Wireless Studio. Is that any easier to do the dev cycle with? I don’t care to create wireless apps (I’ve only got a Palm M505). What’s something I could create and actually use? Hmmm. Any suggestions on how to get started writing demo apps on a palm? Leave a comment.

Resources:

* J2ME Wireless Toolkit

* MIDP for PalmOS download

* MIDP2.0 Reference Implementation

* J2ME Docs

* Palm Emulator

* Using Ant to build MIDP apps

Who knew pirates had a need for keyboards? This one cracked me up. I almost fell of my chair when I saw it and still gets me chuckling when I think about it.

I’ve been trying some things out with Velocity. I’ve got a little tool to track some numbers at work and I was going to slap a jsp frontend on there. I’m glad I stumbled across Velocity just before I got to that stage. It’s so useful and easy. The best thing I find about it is that my code is totally compiled and deployed. I can edit the template and no recompilation of source or bouncing the server is required. As easy as a quick refresh in the browser. All I have to do is get the data to the Context and after that I can then “switch brains” over to web design mode and design the frontend I want, editing layout, formatting all without having to recompile anything. I’m also trying out Resin as well, so if I do need to update my Java src, I can update it and Resin quickly autocompiles it for me when I refresh the browser. This makes for really fast development. Gotta thank Parki for telling me about Resin.

I’ve been doing a little reading about templating. Rather than using jsp, I see templates becoming very popular. I just read some of the WebMacro site. Looks very powerful. I want something that is very simple, and easy to implement. WebMacro seems to fill those needs. What about other templating options like Velocity and others. Got any favorites? Let me know..

I was reading an article on Javaranch by Frank Carver and he has some good ideas on keeping your programming stress free.

I’ve been searching for a decent way to read my RSS feeds on my Palm. I’ve been using iSilo to sync the pages from my local install of flock.. It works alright, but isn’t the greatest solution. Finally, someone created mobilerss. Create an account, you get a personal link to your central page formatted for a mobile device [palm, pocketpc]. Then I just use iSilo to sync to this nicely formatted page. You can look at my page here.

I saw this on my way into work this morning.