Handstream

I attended Scotch On The Road last week. A Coldfusion conference held throughout Europe and managed like a rock tour. It was a good day and I reacquainted myself with ex-colleagues from 3 different companies I have worked for. So it was nice to catch up with all. The session over the day were pretty specialist but a lot devoted to CF9, Adobe's new CFML server. Glad to say it's pretty good and a reasonable advance from CF8. I also won the raffle and have just finished choosing my $2000 worth of software, which will fit nicely onto the Macbook Pro.

I was at my friends house this week when her daughter, who is 11 years old and quite tech savvy, asked me about Skype. Her friend has it and would like to set it up on her mobile (she is on her third handset). I set an account up for her and ran through the basics. She was positively surprised that she has this free phone network within a network and of course her network '3' (not '3G' as every single mobile phone shop worker seems to think it is) allows free Skype calls over their network on their handsets. Even on pay as you go. Actually the Acceptable Usage Policy is 4000 minutes per month. My really poor maths tells me that's about 133 minutes over 30 days. I have never heard of anyone being notified of using the service too much either. After the obligatory 'test' phase where I made a few random calls to 'check it works' , I got into thinking, After a reasonably aggressive campaign to promote Skype, why are youngsters not informed? I have...

I've just been reading about that profits are up for Apple and down for Microsoft. This for me signals the shift in power away from Win32 to OS-X. I'm not surprised and pretty glad to have contributed to Apple's good fortune. I'm also predicting a huge backlash against the 'new fabulous' Windows7. From using it via Virtualbox 's virtual machine, I'm sad to say there's not much to get my juices flowing, suffice to say 'There's nothing to see here, move along'. With the imminent release of Google's Chrome OS it can only spell bad news for Bill and his friends.

It's happened. I am finally free of all things Microsoft. Secretly since Windows Vista I have been disappointed with the operating systems coming out of Redmond. At work I have been using Ubuntu and things are fine but not entirely happy with the interface and in a quest for something different I have purchased a Macbook Pro. I won't bore you with the details suffice to say, It's a whopper fully loaded and the O/S is 64bit. I have set up more or less everything I need to develop on this machine and working on it is a joy. Today I configured Coldfusion9 to connect to a free tiny sql database named Sqlite3. Now I can ditch my Virtualbox virtual machine running Window7. After seeing how little progress has been made with Windows7 I'm glad I made the jump. It still feels like windows 95 and until Microsoft get brave and roll out an O/S that doesn't have to be backwardly compatible (or for that matter using compatibility modes) then I am embracing the Mac and all the cul...

After a long spell of busy development work I am glad to announce I'm back. I have had the google g1 for 5 months now and its been a good journey. The greatest thing about this phone is the Android Market. This place keeps the momentum of a new toy to play with perpetual. I want to talk about some of the discoveries I have found, starting off with a quick look at Tricorder by Moonblink. http://www.androlib.com/android.developer.moonblink-Et.aspx What does it do? I don't have a clue. But it sounds and I presume displays just as a 'real one'. There are some instructions and some of the screens I believe are functioning in some way measuring something. Why do I like it? Its simple old school graphics appear to have been crafted by a Star Trek anorak probably reproducing faithfully every detail only the hardest of hard core trekkie geek could labour. Its attention span is very low but like me you will just open the app just to hear the noises and marvel at what the d...

Android has a pretty neat development environment utilising java as it's main base with a few quirky bits thrown in for good measure. I found similar to my earlier attempts at programming for mobile devices you have to turn the good practices of programming upside down to exploit the small memory and power of devices. The syntax for programming for Android is slightly familiar to me and it's all coming back quite nicely. Today I decided to do an hour or so on my Android project. It's a location thingy and that's all I'm saying for now. It allows a simple sign up and a very thin social network model. I have created the user input for creating an account with validation and was at the stage of needing net connection to send the sign up information. After five minutes of searching I found an example which detailed exactly how easy it is to do these complex tasks in Android / Java. I'm glad to say I will be moving on to JSON formatted data posts in my next encounte...

If you have been here before you will have seen a blog that was dedicated to all things windows mobile. Over time I became frustrated with Microsoft's failure to move with the times and update their O/S. So I have switched phone and now this blog will be featuring my adventures with Google's Android technology and the G1 phone from T-Mobile. I have been programming and generally getting immersed in the Android developer world and I am happy to report it's a refreshing and inspiring world indeed. There will be more blog posts, detailing the cool stuff I have found to do with Android. Also will be developer chat and example code. So if you were expecting windows mobile stuff I'm sorry, Windows has been eaten by an Android.