Listen to music using Windows Remote Desktop

I dont have a mp3 player, except my phone I mentioned in the earlier posts. Sometimes I want to listen to songs not on my phone, there’s a neat way you can do this using windows remote desktop. Assuming you have remote desktop setup on your home computer, you just need to enable this setting (under Local Resources)when connecting to it ..

Now you can play any song on your home computer and listen to it anywhere ..

Stoopid ..

I came across a bug in one of the form handlers and I couldnt figure out why it wasnt working .. I didnt change any code, got a clean copy from CVS but still kept getting the same error .. There is no way the code in CVS was broken as I had tested it a day earlier. Here is the code that was causing me pain:

startDate = Calendar.getInstance();
int startMonthNumber = getMonthNumberForName(fromMonth);
startDate.set(Calendar.MONTH, startMonthNumber);
startDate.set(Calendar.YEAR, Integer.parseInt(fromYear));

What date is it today ?? Its the 31st of March. When this code was run on months that had 30 days on the 31st it would automatically roll over to the next month .. d’oh !!! Therefore I added this right after initializing the calendar object:

startDate.set(Calendar.DATE, 1);

Formula 1: Malaysian GP

There’s something about watching a race LIVE at 3 A.M. on a early sunday morning, especially when your driver wins .

Kimi dominated this race from the moment the lights turned green. Although he was behind Massa for the first stint, he had more fuel which allowed him to out for an extra lap (his Personal Best) and come out in front of Massa. Reminded me of schumacher who he replaced in 2007. Massa on the other hand spun out and beached it in the gravel trying to keep up with Kimi. James Allen said it best ” … ambition got ahead of adhesion for Massa …”. Second race in a row that Massa has spun out on his own.

It is awesome to watch these cars without TC, great battle in the midfield among Webber-Hamilton-Trulli, Webber-Alonso. Cant wait for the next race in Bahrain

It was fun while it lasted

Bell announced it will be throttling torrents in Ontario and Quebec. This will also affect resellers who lease Bell lines, like TekSavvy etc. I have not been throttled yet but we’ll find out by April 7 when Bell completes this process. Here’s a google map to see affected areas.

This is what happens in a monopolistic market, Bell controls phone lines, Rogers controls Cable. They are both throttled along with the resellers.

If I am paying for a 5mbps connection I can do whatever I like with it. With DSL I have a dedicated connection to the CO, its not shared with anyone else in my neighborhood. Unlike cable where a node is shared by a neighborhood. On top of that Bell cant control what its resellers do with the bandwidth, here’s a post by the CEO of TekSavvy:

Based on Laszlo’s comment on the ability to do what they want to the network. This is the exact problem and where Bell doesn’t get it. TekSavvy and all third party ISPs are paying for a “slice” of this network, so no, it’s not Bell’s at that point. They’re paid to make sure the infrastructure remains in good shape, but they’re not paid to police it! The flaw in Bell’s thought is in their not understanding that we’ve paid for the right to this space… We’ve paid for multiple Gig-E connections for the data to flow back to; we’ve paid for the DSL aggregation interface (AHSSPI) and we’re also paying on a per user basis (approx $20/month) to have the data relayed directly back to our main point of Interconnect.

So, in short, no, they don’t have rights to this network segment… An easy analogy would be a landlord, who is managing an apartment, gives himself a key to come in and out as he pleases and on top of that decide which tenants friends they let in! I’m not sure about you, but I’m fairly certain, one; the tenant would call the police, but two; you’d land up with a very big black-eye!

Kind of OT but only ONE GSM provider in Ontario, Rogers (Fido is owned by Rogers now, don’t know why they allowed this). TWO CDMA providers, might be down to one if the merger of Telus and Bell happens. Coincidence that wireless plans here are so damn expensive.

Great article on Steve Jobs

An article about steve jobs and his controversial working ways. Worth a read.

Formula 1: Melbourne GP

What a great start to the season, the ban on Traction Control means more sliding around, mistakes are punished and skills are rewarded. Drivers now just cant floor the throttle coming out of a corner.

Ferrari looked dominant in winter testing but they had a horrible weekend. Kimi had a fuel pickup problem which meant he started 15th, then he got stuck behind barrichello for 20 laps in 8th place. Once past Kimi was up to 3rd right behind Hekki and Lewis because of a Safety Car but then went off the track at T3 trying to overtake Kovalainen. If he wasn’t stuck behind Barrichello for 20 laps it would’ve been a different race. Ferrari has the pace but were unreliable, Kimi stopped with an engine problem and so did Bourdais (Torro Rosso uses Ferrari engines). None of the Ferrari powered cars finished the race.

But it was a better spectacle watching drivers slide around corners. Using tiny little power slides to steer the car with the rear tires. This season looks promising .

Javascript and JSP’s

I spent last week working on some JSP’s. This was my first time using them so I spent sometime doing trial and error. I also used some built-in ATG libraries for formatting content. Overall I found them to be cumbersome compared to View files (.rhtml) in Rails. Maybe this was because the system is old (still on Java 1.3) and I had to use old libraries. I am sure newer Java enterprise web frameworks like Spring make it much easier.

Next I used javascript for some select all and reset selection features. Although a powerful scripting language it can be tricky to debug.

While working with dates I came across the Calendar class in java and I absolutely love it ! You can do all kind of date manipulations, like adding a day or month to a date, comparing two dates etc etc.

Apple iPhone Software Kit

I wasn’t feeling too good at home with a very sore throat and eating antibiotics. But then Miro emailed me a link for apple’s event of iPhone enhancements, I didn’t watch all of it but from what I saw it looks very promising.

• iPhone now hooks up directly with Exchange server using Active Sync. No need for a third party server like Blackberry Enterprise Server. Less dependence on third party servers means better reliability, security and management (remember blackberry blackouts last year).

• And a SDK for building native iPhone application. You have to watch some of the sample applications they created. Great stuff !!

For all the details watch this video.

Damn Flu ..

Got the damn flu on Friday evening and it hit me hard on saturday. But its an awesome excuse to make others work for you .. gotta love the attention