Recently in Tech Category

Yesterday afternoon I received a text message from Verizon telling me I could update my BlackBerry OS to version 4.5.  I looked and I was on version 4.3.something and decided to give it a try.  For what it's worth, the update can be had at http://vzam.net/blackberry

I searched the web and found positive reviews that talked about HTML email, improved AIM, document viewers and not a whole lot else.  After installing the update here's how I found it affected my (minimal) usage.

• Browser - No noticable difference
• Email - No difference
• Games - My solitaire stats were gone (probably a good thing) and a typing tutor called "Trooper Typing" was installed.  It gets old quick.
• Documents To Go - This was installed but I don't really know what to do with it.  I use Open Office and I imagine this works mostly for Microsoft Office documents.
• UI - I heard there were updates to the themes but I can't find them.  I did notice that the battery icon got smaller but I'm not sure if that's an improvement.
• MP3 Player - This had some slight UI improvements.  The biggest being the addition of a STOP button.  It's still pretty to navigate but it is improvement.

I think I failed to mention that the download (70MB) took 2.5 hours.  That would normally take a few minutes on my connection.  That could be the biggest contributor to my disappointment.

Here's a problem that has bugged me for some time and I just re-stumbled upon the solution.  When I'm running Tomcat or GlassFish inside of Eclipse, I usually like to watch the log output in the console view.  The problem I've had is that right as the good stuff starts to appear in the Console view, the Server view is brought to the forefront so I have to select the Console view with my mouse.  When you're doing a lot of restarts or switching in and out of debug mode, this can be quite irritating.

To fix this, go to the Preferences dialog (Window -> Preferences) and select the top level Server option.  In there you'll see that the only option is "Show Servers view when server state changes."  De-selecting this option solved the problem. 



It would be nice if there were a way to set this preference directly from the Servers view.  I knew there was a way to do it and have done it before but I couldn't remember how.

SFGate.com is the online supplement to the San Francisco Chronicle.  I tend to go to "The Gate" for up to date local news (traffic, earthquakes, etc...) and event information.  When I got my BlackBerry a year ago, I was pretty disappointed to see that the Chronicle was charging a monthly fee to access their mobile edition.  I took it for a free trial spin and couldn't believe anyone would actually pay for it.  The paper isn't really THAT good and their mobile version was just horribly formatted.

Well it seems that they've come to their senses and opened up mobile.sfgate.com, a free mobile version of the paper in a streamlined format. I'm guessing this has been made possible by their recent update of the main website and their accompanying use of stylesheets.  The style appears to be modeled after the New York Times, one of the more usable mobile newspapers.

Congratulations and thanks to the team that worked on this.

I'm happy to announce that I've recently changed jobs and I'm now the Director of Platform Development at The Related Content Database Inc.  I'll be working with a great team to develop tools and infrastructure to support network connected Blu-ray players and BDLive enabled Blu-ray discs. 

I apologize in advance if I start to slack a little on my postings here.  I'll try to do my best to keep up.

I want the headings in my documents to have heading numbers.  That way when I'm speaking to someone on the phone or via email, I can have them quickly navigate the document (e.g. "It's in the first paragraph of section 2.2 on page 14.").  If you're coming from Word, figuring out how to do this in Lotus Symphony isn't necessarily easy but this lesson should show you how.

Set Up
To get started, create a new Symphony Document with a few headings.  As of Beta 4, there are two styles that you'll want to stay away from they are called 1.Heading 1 and 1.Heading 2.  I'm not sure what the intention is with these headings but they'll just confuse things so forget they're even there (you can't delete them).  When you're done creating your document, it should look something like the following.

When you style your Symphony documents you should really use custom styles rather than individually styling your text.  By using styles you can update the look of your document without having to go page by page making changes.  A quick change of the appropriate style will propagate the change throughout your document.

Symphony Documents provides you with an easy way to view all of the styles available in your document.  To view the list go to Layout -> Style List...  This will pop-up a window with the list of all your styles as seen below:

I'm not a huge fan of windows floating around when I'm trying to work on a document.  I prefer to have all my information embedded in my primary window.  Fortunately you can dock the style list.  While holding the control (ctrl) key, double click on the gray area of the Style List.  As the next screen shot shows, this will dock the list on the left hand side of your primary window.
To un-dock the style list, just ctrl double click on the bluish gray area of the Style List.

This doesn't seem to be a great use of screen real estate if you're not using styles frequently or if you don't have that many styles to work with.  It would be great if we could dock the style list in the Text Properties panel on the right side.  I have not found a way of doing that in the current release. 

You can move the Style List so it appears on the right side of your document.  To do this, hold the ctrl key while you click and drag the docked Style list to the right hand side of your document.  The Style List will snap to the right of your document and to the left of the Text Properties pane as seen below.

Lastly, you can also minimize the list without completely closing it.  In the middle of the vertical separator between your document and the Style List there is a small arrow that will contract and expand the list.

Last fall IBM introduced their Lotus Symphony product (re-introduced really).  This time around Symphony is a reworked version of the Open Office suite of business applications (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation) integrated with the Eclipse application framework.  I've been a huge fan of Eclipse since it first appeared as a replacement for the IBM Visual Age development environment.  Eclipse has since grown into a multi-purpose framework for developing cross-platform applications.

So, why am I writing about this?  Well, I've become increasingly frustrated with Microsoft Office and I'm at the point where I think it's time to make a fresh start.  Given the amount of time I have invested in learning Office, that's not a decision made lightly.  Symphony is still in beta release so my hope is that IBM will listen to user feedback and make an office suite that meets my needs.

As I go about my learning process I'm going to post my experiences here.  Hopefully I'll be able to provide some useful information for others making the transition.  Stay tuned...

There are a million applications out here on the internet.  From dancing chickens to naming babies there's something for just about everyone.  Maybe I work too much but I've found that the quiver of sites and applications I use is actually quite small.  One of the applications I use on an almost daily basis is YouMail. 

The best thing about YouMail is I don't really have to do anything for it.  Unlike Facebook or MySpace where I feel like I should be writing on someone's wall or taking a test to see if I'm a vampire, YouMail actually works for me.  It replaces the horrific voicemail service that comes with my Verizon mobile phone account (it works for most other providers too). 

Setting YouMail up is pretty easy.  The site will walk you through all the steps you need to have your missed calls forwarded to a new number.  If you miss a call and someone leaves you a voicemail, you'll receive a SMS message.

Why is it better than Verizon's crappy voicemail (I imagine other cell phone providers are just as bad)? 

• I can record personalized greetings for everyone that calls me.  This may sound trivial but it's a blast.  I haven't done it yet but it seems like an awesome (tongue in cheek) way to break up with somebody.
• When I check my voice mail, I don't have to listen to a long winded speech telling me all about my messages.  I'm sure this is just a ploy by the cell phone companies to get me to burn my minutes and it really ticks me off.  With YouMail, you hear a little chime, a message count and you're off to the races.
• When you get your SMS notification, it has the caller ID information of the caller.  This is great for when you're out of service range and all of a sudden have new voice mail.  You'll know exactly who was calling.  When I was recently in Canada, caller ID would work sporadically but YouMail always told me who left a message.
• You can review your voicemail online and you can have them emailed to you.  I haven't used these features much but I imagine it would be incredibly useful if you're overseas.
  
• It's free!  Well, you get a little ad in your SMS message but it's very acceptable.
• Did I mention you can record personal greetings for your callers?

I've been using this service for about a year now and the only time I missed a message was when I switched from Verizon to AT&T and then back to Verizon.  I have to imagine that was more my fault than theirs.

Check it out, it's fun.

I've re-implemented my contact page here on my new site.  It's been a while since I've programmed anything in PHP so it took me a little longer than I expected. 

I'm using reCaptcha to keep all those filthy spam bots at bay.  I was previously using jCaptcha but reCaptcha is far cooler.  When people use reCaptcha they're contributing to the digitization of books that were printed way before the advent of the computer.  If you're interested, you should check them out.

So go on, send me a message!

Usually the Internet works great and I can get to everything I need to from wherever I may be.  Sometimes, however, I find myself in a network with a firewall that blocks access to something I want.  At times like those I revert to using SSH tunnels.  Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) I don't find myself in those situations often enough to memorize the proper command syntax.  Hopefully this blog entry will save me the hassle of sifting through Google results for the solution.

If you're following along at home, you're going to need a few things to make this work.  First you're going to need an account on a machine that you can SSH into.  That machine will also need access to the service that is currently blocked by a firewall.  Next you'll need an SSH client.  If you're on MacOS X you can probably access SSH from the terminal window.  If you're on a Windows machine, you'll need PuTTY, Cygwin or some other capable client.  If I'm on my own laptop, I usually just use my Cygwin installation.  If I'm on a foreign machine I tend to use the portaPuTTY application on my USB key chain.

For example purposes, let's say we need to access a website that is running on a non-standard port  (e.g. http://www.example.com:8080).  Our top notch IT staff has blocked port 8080 in order to protect the network so we need to create a tunnel.  We just so happen to have an account on the server www.mikedalrymple.com, we can SSH to it, and that server can access www.example.com on port 8080.  Now we just need to tunnel our requests for www.example.com:8080 through www.mikedalrymple.com.  Using a command line SSH utility we can build the tunnel with the following command.

ssh -L 9090:www.example.com:8080 mike@www.mikedalrymple.com

Once I execute that command, I'll need to supply the password for the user mike on the server www.mikedalrymple.com.  After I successfully sign in I should be able to put the URL http://localhost:9090 in my browser and see the contents of http://www.example.com:8080.

Here's what each element of the command means:

• ssh - Use the SSH program.
• -L  - This indicates we're going to set up a tunnel on a local port to a remote destination.
• 9090:www.example.com:8080 - 9090 is the local port number I want to use to access the service, www.example.com is the remote host I'm trying to tunnel to and 8080 is the port on the remote host I'm trying to access.
• mike@www.mikedalrymple.com - mike is the user name for my account on www.mikedalrymple.com which I can ssh to in order to create the tunnel.

If you're using PuTTY (porta or otherwise), you need to setup your tunnel in the UI.  Following the same example, the first step is to create a session for www.mikedalrymple.com, as shown in the following screen grab.

Next you'll need to enter the tunnel information in the Tunnels screen entering your local port number in the "Source port" field and the destination host and port in the "Destination" field as shown below.

Once you click the "Add" button, your entry should show up in the list of "Forwarded ports" as the next image shows.

You'll likely want to save the session if you plan to use it again but all you really need to do is click the "Open" button and then you're caught up to where we were after we executed the command line version.

I used 9090 as my local port number in this example to make this example clearer, I would usually just use 8080 (or whichever port I'm trying to access on the destination server) to keep things clearer in my head.

Usually when I'm doing this I'm having to access something that is on a non-standard port, the only somewhat standard port I regularly use this with is Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection software which uses port 3389.

I hope this helps, let me know if I missed anything.