November 2007 Archives

Netflix has dominated the internet DVD rental market since its inception and until recently, that has been their only service.  I've had a Netflix account for years now and have been quite satisfied with their service.  I was especially happy when they introduced Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as options.  More recently they have upped the ante with their instant video service, which allows users to start watching a video instantly using a PC.  This review will go over technical problems, selection, video quality and overall user experience with this new Netflix service.

Remember a time when there weren't ads before movies?  It used to be that people were excited just for the previews and previews were all you got.  Times were simpler then.  People actually showed up early to see previews because previews were considered a perk of going to the theater.  After paying $10 per seat and the same for refreshments, most people expect a certain level of comfort and service for their money.  The TV-style ads have been annoying to say the least but recently I hit a new limit.  

I was recently stuck in a situation where I had absolutely no broadband connection or phone line to dial up.  What's a tech-nerd to do when in need of the internet but only able to use a laptop, cellphone and no wires?  Get this - Not only did I get this to work, but I successfully connected to my company's VPN over it and was able to work for the day, slowly but surely over the 115kbps EDGE network.  Just to push the point home, I connected to our mail server via VPN via Internet via EDGE via Cellphone via Bluetooth.  No wires needed.  The sweet part is that it doesn't cost me anything to do this because it's part of my unlimited data plan and uses no minutes.  I use T-Mobile, but will give settings to the best of my knowledge for all the other providers.

Hibernate is an excellent tool which saves many projects from substantial amounts of code.  Gone are the days of writing massive datasource layers full of obnoxious JDBC code.  As gravy you also get simple query objects, caching, connection pooling and countless other great features.  GWT on the other hand provides a robust API using a revolutionary new paradigm for writing javascript and complex dhtml interfaces.  The latest version of Hibernate supports annotations, meaning you can ditch all of the XML that was previously required.  This feature of course requires Java 5 to support annotations.  Unfortunately, as of GWT 1.4, only Java 1.4 is supported on the client-side.  I have created a solution to bridge the Java 1.4 to Java 5.0 gap.