the webboy

One of the duties of my day job is that of WebSphere administration. I will be posting more on this topic in the future as I see a lack of community information in this area.

I ran across a technote today while attending a WebSphere Support Technical Exchange webcast on Troubleshooting Database and Connection Pooling Problems. Occasionally, with SOX requirements and the like, we are required to change database username/passwords. If you have a lot of datasources setup within Websphere for your applications connecting to such a database, this can become a tedious process. Evidently, for about a year now, you can now change the J2C authentication data at runtime by connecting with wsadmin and using the WebSphere security mBean. Changing the J2C authentication data at runtime will hopefully be a huge help in the future. I have not tested this yet so if anyone gets to it before I do or has used this method in the past, let me know how it works. This is for 5.0.2.11/5.1.1.5 and greater and I’m assuming also included in 6.x.

Adobe has announced that they will be releasing the PDF specification to the AIIM targeting ISO approval which would open the format up and would most likely improve the penetration of the PDF format particularly in government and enterprise organizations. I think this would also increase the amount of tools available that natively support PDF documents. If this shakes out like it looks then I could see myself using PDF more often. In our corporation, I would much rather see documents in PDF format rather than all the Word documents floating around. Probably just a personal opinion though; what about you?

On the flip-side, Google announced that Gmail users can now import both documents and spreadsheets that they receive as attachments straight into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. When you receive an attachment, there will be a link that says, “Open as a Google Document”. Google D&S already supports PDF to some extent. With this announcement by Adobe, might we see automatic imports of PDF to D&S as well? I have been using the D&S platform for a while now and have loved it. With the ability to collaborate and share documents plus the added bonus of being able to publish in PDF format, this could really take off. Definitely holding my breath…

I am a Treo user. I bought a Palm Treo 700wx several months back and entered the smartphone world. After being intimately familiar with a a lot of the technology world, I was surprised at how bad the experience was in this new mobile world. I have been intending to start posting my experiences with the new device and have yet to do so. With the release of the new iPhone a couple days ago, I was initially caught up in the Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field and was immediately impressed with how well this new device addressed all my woes. Well a few days later and many aren’t so sure. Apple has definitely pushed the envelope with the phone’s design but as per the previous post, is still lacking and leaving a lot of unanswered questions.

I hope that Palm will see this as a wake up call and begin work on those little annoyances that really make the experience worthwhile. Let’s jump in and discuss a few of the annoyances particularly focused on Palm-related issues this time around:

1. Battery life. Palm you make a killer phone with a lot of functionality but then don’t give us enough power to use it to the fullest. I still have the stock 1800mAh battery which will not even give me a full day charge with moderate use. If I have heavy use then by mid-day I am desperately needing a power source. Since then I have become aware of the extended batteries, 2400 and 3200mAh, which promise up to 10 hours of talk time. I’m sure I will be testing this soon. All in all, probably not a large fault of Palm except that maybe they could ship a beefier battery.
2. Java support. What’s up with no Java on the Treo? All the cool cats develop in Java right? Some of the latest mobile apps are Java and what’s worse is that there isn’t even a reliable Java engine available to install that works reliably on the device. Launching the new Google Maps and GMail apps is way to hard to make it even useful. Ship the phone with Java support already!
3. Wireless support. Using the Sprint network is a real treat. The EvDO connection is great and lightening fast in the areas that I am in and have traveled to. Where’s the wi-fi? No, an SDIO card is not an option. It won’t even fit in the holster and would probably break off. And saying the phone has bluetooth but you can’t nearly do a thing with it was very disappointing. What’s the point of voice command and bluetooth support if you have to drag out your phone to issue the command? Oh, and let me do phone-as-a-modem over bluetooth please.
4. Overall experience. The phone is big; but I can live with that provided great functionality and a seamless experience. It’s true; software makes most of the experience so Windows Mobile needs step up and bring a real solution. That’s for another day…

The thing that puzzled me when I first was exposed to Palm was that for the level of people they are exposed to in this market they fall very short in communicating in our world. No blogs that I can see from Palm; not even an RSS feed for the website.

Overall I have enjoyed the device but I think there are small improvements that could really take the device across the line.

Apple, Inc. today released a couple new products at Macworld, the Apple TV and the iPhone. After a closer look at these devices, some of the gloss begins to come off and we’re left with a little head-scratching and a lot of questions.

First introduced was the Apple TV (formerly iTV). This device connects to your TV and wirelessly streams media content from iTunes on up to 5 computers and auto-syncs with 1. Let’s take a closer look… Intel processor, 40GB hard drive (that’s all?), 802.11b/g/n, HDMI, component, optical, analog audio. Looks good so far and still syncs with iTunes on Windows. It apparently only outputs 720p making it almost obselete when it hits the market. At least it appears to upscale to 1080i. In my mind this device is a close second behind Netgear’s latest.

Truly the news of the day is the Apple iPhone. A widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet device all in one. It touts a quad-band GSM in a 4 or 8GB model with wi-fi, EDGE and Bluetooth. Runs OS X and is a mere 11.6mm thick. For some reason there is no 3G support and Cingular is the sole network provider. It yet remains to be seen how the device will hold up as far as battery life and heat goes with all that tech crammed into a small space. While it boasts wi-fi and EDGE support, you apparently cannot download your iTunes purchases or sync wirelessly with your computers. Truly innovative in the market with the user interface as is so characteristic of Apple but hopefully before June we’ll get some answers…such as, how are we going to keep that screen clean and scratch-free?

A good portion of the technology industry has been left speechless by the one-two punch by Apple today. At the 2007 Macworld Conference and Expo, Steve Jobs accounced during his keynote speech new products from Apple namely the AppleTV (formerly iTV) and the iPhone. Serious speculation has been running through the tech world for over a year now about widescreen iPods and Apple phones but nothing solid. The major announcement in today’s keynote speech was the introduction of not only a new iPod and a phone but the addition of a 3rd (what apple calls) Internet communicator all in one device. I was not at the keynote speech but kept up with all the live blogging going on. I am getting ready to watch the archived video. More to come in later posts.

Maybe it’s just me but the more I hear about Windows Home Server, the less I like. According to Bill Gates, everyone needs one but can everyone handle one? Now to market this to the average consumer obviously you need a very simplistic device. A headless unit seems right; the plug and go architecture works; auto backups of every PC on your network (Windows Vista PC) is a small score. For some consumers this might be a valid option but wait…no RAID? Can’t stream to Media Center devices or any device from what I’m seeing? Embedded OEM systems only? This machine sounds like nothing more than a glorified NAS box that only works in the Microsoft environment and not a very good one at that. For your money I think there are several better alternatives to hit CES this week that you might want to put your money on. I’ll have to keep watching this…

Watched the live stream of Bill Gates keynote speech at CES last night. Personally for me it was largely a yawn. There were a few new things to look at as well as the whole connected home demos that Bill loves to throw out.

They began with a lot of Vista hype. There were demos of search within Vista (oh sorry it’s not search…it’s finding). There was a demo of Virtual Earth 3D as well as Office 2007 and a few other features but nothing real new and exciting.

From there they introduced a new product Windows Home Server. This is basically a headless box that stores all your media content for connectivity to your PCs, XBox, etc. I hope this is easy to setup and run. It sounds like nothing more than a glorified NAS but we’ll see what happens in the future.

It looks like Microsoft’s big push in the future is in the digital entertainment space and that future seems to revolve around XBox 360. XBox Live continues to experience huge growth (over 5 million members) and it is expanding with over 300 titles this year in gaming. You can already get many movie titles over XBox Live but now is expanding into IPTV. Now gaming, movies, TV are all available through XBox Live and all that is available now through Media Center.

Mark Fields from Ford talked about Sync available on Ford cars this year which will seamlessly integrate your devices all through the audio system using voice recognition for placing phone calls, creating playlists, and sending text messages. Is it to hard to make this an after-market system? Why only just a couple Ford vehicles?

Bill wrapped it up with a demo of the Connected Home. He walked into a bedroom setup with a display covering one whole wall and called it a ‘typical bedroom’. All in all the whole thing looked kind of funny and far-fetched but no doubt has some portents of the future.

I wasn’t expecting anything truly amazing from Microsoft this time and they delivered. As others have said…evolutionary…not revolutionary.

From Google Blogoscoped:

Blogger now supports custom domain names for your blog. Previously, you had to choose between using a *.blogspot.com address or allowing Blogger to FTP-upload to your domain.

Could Blogger be the next app to join Google Apps for Your Domain? For small businesses looking to blog, this would be a nice compliment to Google’s offering allowing a hosted blog platform customized to your domain much like wordpress.com - an area that Google is lagging behind in. I could see this service being much like the calendar application in Google Apps - a blog for each user configured in your organization as well as the ability to create multiple shared blogs.

Hey blogosphere. After working behind the scenes in the web for over 7 years (small change to some of you) I figured it’s time I join the community. I’ve built and maintained blogs, websites, etc for everyone else except myself. I don’t purpose to have any great new view on the tech world but simply to add my voice to the community and participate in this endless conversation taking place without boundaries. So without further ado lets begin this experiment and see where it takes us.