Geeks In Action

Android 2.0 is now available from Google. This puts to bed concerns about Google not releasing the sdk or perhaps being in some kind of exclusivity deal with Verizon around 2.0. The release notes give a nice overview of what is there. Those who already have the SDK can grab the updated tools as SDK components, everyone else will pick up everything when downloading the new SDK.

Well the NetBeans folks are celebrating the NetBeans 10th birthday. One event they are running as part of the celebration is the NetBeans Decathlon which features a set of 10 events that can be used to build up points to get a t-shirt.  There are plenty of other things at the birthday page and I’d encourage any netbeans users to check it out.

If you are a developer that isn’t using NetBeans now – I’d encourage you to check it out.  It has really grown up a lot, especially in the last 2 or 3 years and has really become a top notch IDE. It does so much more than just JAVA and it does all of it very well.  It is also an excellent application platform of its own. There is a lot there. I firmly believe that everyone has to find what works best for them, but I also think that one is really missing out if they don’t give NetBeans a thorough look over.

Netbeans 6.0 is currently in beta. The netbeans.org site says that release is scheduled for next month. There are already some very nice tutorials and documentation up for this new version of netbeans.

I’m already extremely pleased with netbeans. Most of the projects I play with are desktop apps, and I don’t think any java IDE I’ve ever used comes remotely close to netbeans in developing swing apps for the desktop. For evidence I’d like to point out a couple screen casts. This one is and introduction to netbeans 6.0 and this one does a great job of showing the gui builder capabilities.

Netbeans is just not a Java IDE – it can also handle c/c++ and ruby. There may be commercial plugins for other languages, but everything I’ve mentioned thus far is free and open. That is, in my mind, part of what propels this product past visual studio. It has some rather incredible features – and all of it is free and will run on multiple platforms. MS does give away free versions of the visual studio product, but they are severely limited in their feature set. Most of the most desirable features cost money. And then the product is limited to running on Windows. I think that we will see more and more useful plugins for Netbeans and it will continue to be a great tool for the developer.

I made some progress on my Nike+ app today. I finally got my head around exactly what data I am graphing, and I think I’ve found what I’m going to use to display that graph. JChart2D is a minimalistic charting library published under the GPL.

I was able to create a DOM object, pull in the xml file and get the data out into an array. All I need to do is a few calculations and then graph it. I haven’t actually tried the graphing part yet, but the JChart2D site has lots of examples and I think it should work out. If not, there are a bunch of other options.

I still need to get around searching for an ipod when it is connected. Thus far I’ve done everything on my windows laptop that has itunes installed. When I’m looping through the drives on the machine – hitting an empty cd drive causes the program to crash and my catch block doesn’t pick it up. As a very occasional java user – I was a bit taken back by that but there has to be a way around it. I just need to figure it out. I’ll be bugging the java guys at work when I’m ready to tackle it. For now I’ve just set it to the side and worked on other stuff that is key to getting the whole thing to work.

Ultimately though, I just want to be able to fire it up, and have it automatically go out and copy over any new files, without the user needing to tell the program where the ipod is mounted.

My wife liked the stuff I was showing her that I had been collecting on my runs and so I ordered a sensor for her as well. She isn’t sure if she’ll like running with it, so for now we will be using both sensors on my nano. If she really likes running with it, we will order her a nano – but for now I’ll be able to see how the software handles two different sensor ids. I think I know what it will do, but nothing beats finding out for sure. (She doesn’t already own a nano because she

I was digging around again and found someone who has done the same thing in C#. It is so obvious, there are probably more, but this is the first that I’ve seen that runs as a local app. I’ve downloaded the source for it but haven’t opened it up and looked at it yet. It will be interesting to see how someone else has approached the problem.

Oh – and I’ve exercised more recently than shows up in my run data on the side. But in Tampa – I did my work-outs on an elliptical trainer and so it wouldn’t work with the nike+ kit.

This is a quick summary of some work that I did. If you are interested in writing stored procedures for Oracle, using Java you may want to read on past the break. Otherwise, not much to see here.
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A lot of people spend a good amount of time doing office suite type things on their computer. When I did more development at my last job, I did a good amount of work that centered around visual basic creating and/or modifying MS Office documents. Being able to leverage the capabilities of an office suite is very nice for at least two reasons. One is, the office suite may have some built in functionality that can save the programmer a lot of work. A couple examples might be charting through a spreadsheet application or the formatting options available in text or a spread sheet.

Along with that, delivering customers their application or data through an office suite provides them with an interface they already know. A lot of the reporting that I did in the past was delivered as an Excel spreadsheet. Management already knew the interface pretty well, and it also allowed them to do ad hoc analysis and massaging of the data. Pretty nice.

I don’t do that kind of work in my job now that I’m focused on database administration. But I still run across situations on my own, where I think about a tool that I might like to develop for my personal use. If I am doing that, I get to pick the suite and of course that means it will be OpenOffice.org.

Of course, this has already been anticipated and this kind of work, by and large falls under the OpenOffice.org Extensions project. There is an API and many examples. Much of this can be downloaded and installed in a single download by getting the OpenOffice.org Software Development Kit The SDK contains API documentation, code samples in various languages and everything else a developer would need.

I bring up all this because I was quite excited to find recently that another tool that is available is SDK integration with netbeans.

Right now NetBeans is my favorite java ide – and this extension (which is still pretty early on in development) makes it much easier to develop for OpenOffice.org with java. There are 6 project types that will ultimately be available through this tool – so far four of them are available. The four in there now are

• Client Application Project
• Calc Add-In Project
• General UNO Component Project
• Add-On Project

The two that are not in there yet are

• Scripting Project
• API Library API Wrapper Project

I look forward to watching these tools mature. They are really going to help provide the necessary environment for OpenOffice.org to continue to grow.

I’ve been busy. That’s good – but there are things I would like to get documented here. I wrote a java stored procedure for use in Oracle that connects to a MS SQL Server database and brings records over into Oracle. I have started writing up a detailed account of how it was all done – but haven’t had time to finish it. I’ll get to it soon I hope.

My new project is getting a Jesus Film Project database moved onto our RAC cluster. We are going to bring them under our service contract, allowing them to free up those funds for other ministry uses. At the same time they would gain a lot of new functionality they don’t have right now. It’s cool to be involved in something like that.

My brother bought me a Nike+ sport kit a while back. I picked up an iPod Nano with a gift certificate that I had, and this week I just started actually using it. It is pretty sweet, though I’ve only used it twice thus far. I intend to write up my experiences in that regard as well. It has also inspired in me a desire to get at the data in some ways other than the Nike web site. Others have already done a good bit of work in that direction. Hopefully more on that in the future as well.

In the realm of others who have done the work – there is a wordpress plugin that will allow one to show their run stats on their wordpress site. I am conflicted. Would it be a motivator or a discouragement? I will probably give it a try when I’ve got the time to get it set up. It uses the side bar and I’d have to see how it works out with this theme.

Next week I will be taking a class. The week after that I’ll be in another class. Then things will be normal until the last week of April. I will be learning (in this order) Oracle RAC, Oracle database administration II and Peoplesoft installation and administration. Good times.