It has been more than a year since I released Cobertura for J2ME 1.1.0 RC2 so it would be legitimate to think this project is dead. As of late I however found some time to look at it again. I am planning to get one more RC version out before freezing 1.1.0. I’ve given myself one month to get RC3 ready and 1.1.0 should follow shortly after. Stay tuned.
Archive for September, 2008
Cobertura for J2ME is not dead!
September 25th, 2008Tropic Thunder
September 23rd, 2008I just came back from seeing Tropic Thunder. It is really funny. Robert Downey Jr. is hilarious pretending to be black. But best of all is Tom Cruise as a bold, chubby and angry producer. It’s not the type of role you see him playing very often. Maybe that’s why it is so great.
Photography Class
September 14th, 2008I just signed up to a photography course which will take place in 2 weeks. It’s a two-day (Sat/Sun) training on the basics of digital photography. I’ve had a DSLR for some time now but I feel that I don’t make the best of it. Hopefully I will learn more about how to use my camera and about photography in general (ISO, colour temperature, white-balance, etc).
Dropbox
September 13th, 2008I just came across this site which offers to “Store, Synch and Share your files online”. There are a few similar services available on the internet but the difference is that Dropbox seamless integration with your desktop (be it on Windows, Mac or Linux). It offers 2GB for free and you can get more storage for a monthly fee. I decided the sign up and give it a whirl.
First impression is very good. The software installed without a glitch on my MBP and Windows Mediacenter. And it worked just as it says on the tin. I was able to copy new files into my Dropbox folder and I would find them available on the other computer There’s also a public folder with allows you to share files online with anyone, not just other Dropbox users. There’s even support for photo slideshows. Overall it does look very good.
New Kit
September 6th, 2008A few months ago I purchased a iomega UltraMax. At the time it seemed like a sensible choice and to be fair it did work as expected. I plugged it to my MM (MacMini) and could back up my MBP (MacBookPro) and MM nicely. Plus I could share my music, videos, etc. to other computers on my network. On top of that it supported RAID-1 so my data could survive a disk failure.
Well, the problem is that about a month ago it suddenly stopped working. It started indicating that both disks had a failure. WHAT??? BOTH DISKS??? I thought I lost all my data (10 years of photos, all my music and personal files). I decided to take a look directly at the disks via a USB enclosing (once I managed to find one). It turned out both disks were just fine (what a relief!!!). It was in fact the UltraMax disk management system which decided to give up all together.
So what was the next move? Well, I decided that a more robust solution was the only way forward so I started looking around for a NAS drive. And at the end of my search I set my sight on the NetGear ReadyNAS NV+.
I’ve had it running for a month and I’m really happy about it. It runs with 4 500GB disks in what NetGear call X-RAID (automatically picks the best RAID configuration based on your disk configuration). It also comes with an iTunes streaming server, BitTorrent client and supports UPnP. That’s really cool because I can then watch videos or listen to music straight from my PS3. It’s obviously more pricey than my old kit but it is definitely worth it.
Pics from Columbia
September 6th, 2008A few pictures from my trip to Columbia (here Tairona)…
