Andrej Koelewijn

Windows XP Bedevils Wi-Fi Users (Wired) describes how Windows XP users are having problems with their wireless conections. For no apparent reason their connections seem to drop. I’ve experienced the same problem. Half a year ago, when there were just 2 access points in my neightborhood, I had no problems. Today however, there are 6 access points, and i think this confuses windows xp. My connection stays up for about 1 minute, then it drops, and 10 seconds later windows xp reports that it has found some usable access points, and i have to select which one i want to use.

I’ve found a workaround though. I run netstumbler all the time. Netstumbler disables the windows xp wireless zero configuration. No more dropped connections!

Denim seems like a nice tool to use when investigating the requirements for a new website. Especially during an interactive session with the client in the room. I already have a graphire pad, finally something that makes it usefull…

Usually when i want to create a diagram that displays the pages in a web application and the links that allow you to navigate from one page to another I use the UML statechart diagram. I don’t think statecharts where intended for this purpose but it works in communication with clients and other developers. Are you also using this or are you using something else?
I haven’t looked at the upcoming UML 2.0 yet, are there any new diagrams for this purpose?

Joseph thinks AOP is inobvious and makes it hard for the programmer to understand what is going on. I don’t understand why he says that. The first time I read about AOP I was thinking, this is so obvious, why didn’t i think of that before. Just put related code together, with a specification of where and when it should be executed. So clean, so obvious and so easy to understand.
In Joseph’s security example, I would say that AOP makes it all so much easier to understand for the programmer. AOP is great to achieve simple solutions.

TheServerSide has a matrix of most j2ee application servers, listing all the standards they support. The list is bigger than i thought.

Geoff is talking about ways to communicate within development teams. I really like IM. In my current project we are using sametime. The reason i like it, is that during a meeting (usually phone meetings, as our project is working from different locations) you can communicate with some participants without the others noticing, and agree upon some point before bringing it up in the meeting. Also, it allows you to get some real communication done during boring meetings…

This was the big question in a discussion i had yesterday with an IT manager working for vodafone-live. He gave a presentation about the j2ee intrastructure used for vodafone-live at an IT-eye seminar yesterday. Vodafone-live is a portal for internet phones, and he demoed it on a panasonic gprs phone. This panasonic phone is a small clamshell phone, with a tiny color screen, just big enough to do some basic web browsing. Info about trafic jams, restaurants etc. His vision for the future was something called a PAP, personal access point. PAP phones would be as small as possible, i.e., smaller than the panasonic he demoed, and for people requiring a larger screen, public screens will be available everywhere. All your data and applications would be available through this phone. Sounds like a miniature x-terminal.

My reaction was, why not pda sized? I’ve tried one of those new sony clie’s, with the 320×320 color screen, and that’s a lot better than the tiny phone screen. So i’m waiting for sony to integrate a phone into their newest pda, you know the one with a keyboard, 480×320 screen, 2 megapixel camera. Seems like the perfect combination of usable screen size and portability. I really don’t like the idea of having to find a public screen when i need more screen real estate. Feels like a return to the kermit phones (anybody in the netherlands remember?). This was a mobile phone system, where you had network access only on certain points near an antenna. Big mistake.

And with the power of todays pda’s (400 Mhz) i feel it’s almost time to throw out the notebook. Just take your pda to work, plugin it into a docking-station, connect it to a screen and keyboard, and you don’t need a real pc or laptop anymore.

Another interesting thing mentioned yesterday was that j2me is really doing well on mobile phones. Guess it’s time to try it out. The big hit now is a formula one racing game. Total size 37Kb. About the size of the old commodore 64 games. Maybe we can convert all those to j2me. Any takers for hero and delta?