Creating a custom rington for your iphone

I am tired of the default rigntones. Here is a screencast with the steps. I could do without the techno music but it does the job. First custom rigntone, GNR - Sweet Child O' Mine.

Trying Virtual Box for Virtualization

So tonight I decided to give Sun's Virtual Box (free) a try. Installed it on my Vista machine and then proceeded to install Ubuntu 8.10 as the first Guest OS. Screenshot on the left. So now I am having some buyers remorse for spending money on VMWare Workstation. Don't get me wrong, I love VMWare but the Virtual Box experience has been pretty good so far. I am sure I'll find some feature that is missing from Virtual Box that is not in VMWare Workstation. I guess I will find out in due time.

My plans are to setup a pre-configured Java Development Environment that I can give out to my students at UCSD Extension. I'll blog again once I get everything setup.

We the kings

Saw these guys at the UCSD pub one night after teaching my Java class. Just bought their album from Amazon music (IMHO MP3(s) better way to go than ITunes). The whole album is good and "check yes juliet" is a catchy tune. Put it into the category of yet another faux-indie band.

Autoboxing support C# VB (.NET) vs Java

I am currently doing .NET by day but still teaching Java for UCSD by night. During the last lecture, autoboxing came up. So I thought I would do a simple comparison between .NET and Java on how it handles Autoboxing.

// AutoboxTest.cs
using System;

class AutoboxTest
{
 static void Main()
 {
    Console.WriteLine(22.ToString());
 }
}

And like wise in VB

''' AutoboxTest.vb
Module AutoboxTest
 Sub Main()
    Console.WriteLine(22.toString())
 End sub
End Module

So I thought I would give it a try in Java:

public class AutoboxTest
{
 public static void main(String args[])
 {
    System.out.println(((Integer)22).toString());
 }
}

Note: I could not get the simple form "22.toString()" to work unless I cast the literal to an Integer first. Score one for .NET.

No real numbers were harmed in this example. The number 22 was chosen because that is my hockey jersey number and paying tribute to the classic movie Casablanca.

New Music

In the mood for some new music. I found Missy Higgins while listening to an import of Niel Finn Covers. Apparently, this Aussie artist has already made the rounds on the TV show circuit (smallville). Oh well, I've listened to the entire album and it is definitely worth the price of admission. Check it out...



Post dedicated to Donald

F6 equivalent in Safari

Got a new Mac Book for Christmas to do IPhone development. One of my frustrations with Safari is that the F6 key does not high light the address bar to in allow entry of a new URL. Well, it turns out the Safari equivalent is command+L. As a bonus gift, I found you can use command+~ to cycle or command+shift+~ to cycle through opened Safari Windows. Starting to collect quite of few these useful shortcuts for the MAC. I am sure there is already a complete list of these useful shortcuts somewhere.  I'll update this blog post if I find a good one.  

Goals for 2009

It's another year and I thought I kick off the first post of the year with Goals/New Year Resolutions.

• Blog weekly


• Use the advance features of VMWare


• Get an IPhone Web App on the web and an IPhone Native App on the apple store


• Learn to use JSecurity


• Use Python/JPython on a project


• Develop a new class for UCSD Extension on "10 Skills for Staying Employed"


• Develop and deploy an App on App Engine


• Launch Startup Web 2.0 Ideas


• Learn the ways of Software Development on my new Mac Book


• Publish at least one article at a tech site

As with all Americans, I am really hopeful for 2009.

Happy New Year!