Get out and vote!

My biggest concern at first was that all that time waiting had cooled my desire to the point where I wouldn’t be really excited about having the iPhone. Fortunately, that turned out to not be the case and I proceeded to spend Saturday afternoon and much of Sunday just playing around with the iPhone. I downloaded a few apps (and discovered that typing my Apple Store password is an interesting challenge on the iPhone keyboard), used said apps, surfed the web, and so on. All in all, the iPhone held up very well to my initial expectations.

After the initial “ZOMG WOW!!” phase wore off (mostly), my iPhone and I settled into a more normal user-gadget relationship. The biggest and most immediate change was the reduction of the number of things in my pockets. I used to carry both my old cell phone and my iPod in my pocket, which ran the danger of one scratching the other in addition to space issues. The iPhone was therefore a nice reduction in things crammed into my pockets, and is in very little danger of scratching itself. The one interesting side-effect of replacing my iPod with my iPhone is that I’ve gone back to listening to the radio when I’m driving (most of the time). This is mostly because I’m worried that the FM adaptor I was using with my iPod is partly responsible for its degraded battery capacity, and not anything specifically wrong with the iPod feature of the iPhone. I have an old cassette adaptor I will be trying once I find it.

As far as being a phone goes, the iPhone works great. I haven’t had any problems with dropped calls (though I don’t make a huge number of calls in the first place). The form factor is quite nice, and I haven’t had any issues with being heard that I know of, which was a concern (due to the non-flip nature of the iPhone, the mic is further from my mouth than it was on my Razr). Most of the problems I have had have been my own fault. The one thing that is an issue is the volume of the speakerphone isn’t enough to carry more than a foot or so. This makes hearing people calling into our daily standups a bit difficult. I did a bit of experimenting, and it seemed that going into speakerphone mode bypasses the headset jack, so plugging a speaker into that jack for increased volume doesn’t look to be an option either. While this is a daily nuisance, knowing about it ahead of time certainly wouldn’t have stopped me from getting the iPhone.

Battery life on the phone is decent. I’m currently charging it every other night (my uncle, who does a fair bit more calling on his iPhone, said he charges his every night). I could probably get more out of the battery, but that would involve having less fun with the phone, so every other night will have to do. =)

I’ve downloaded around a dozen apps for the iPhone now, ranging from from free to cheap (no $999.99 purchases here). The download and upgrade process goes quite smoothly. My only early complaint was that upgraded apps moved to the end of the app list, though the 2.1 update seems to have fixed that issue. I also had an issue where none of the apps would start, which took multiple syncs to fix (removing and then readding the apps to the phone). Most of the apps I’ve downloaded have been of the leisure/entertainment sort, which in conjunction with airplane mode has given me things to do on plane flights. I’ve been trying a few productivity apps, with the idea of making the iPhone a well-rounded PDA.

Overall, I have been extremely pleased with my iPhone it fills the role of phone quite well, and does enough other things that I don’t feel the need to try and add more devices to my pockets. I would definitely recommend the iPhone to anyone who’s looking for a device that can fill a multitude of roles without sacrificing being a phone.

I’ll say up front that I haven’t spent a lot of time working with EJBs. Most of what I’d done prior to this was modifying existing EJBs. The creation and deployment of EJBs was handled by other developers (all of whom had moved on by the time this project began). So I had some learning to do.

Our EJB modules pre-date 3.0 with its annotations, which meant lots of XML wrangling for me. The first thing that came up was that the ejb-jar.xml files were missing local EJB reference definitions. I don’t know if JBoss is more permissive than Glassfish or what, but the JNDI lookup in Glassfish failed without the ejb-local-ref elements. I didn’t discover the verifier tool until later on in the migration, so all the missing local references were found by deploying the EJB apps and uncovering them as I tested the system.

A related problem was also that the string constants used to reference the EJBs were often incorrect. I found this especially odd because we were using XDoclet to dynamically generate the EJB interfaces at compile time, and you think it would have gotten it correct. At any rate, I removed the compile-time generation, checked the interfaces into SVN and went on my way (they don’t really change enough to require compile-time generation).

The other big problem was doing the JNDI lookups for the EJBs. Fortunately, perhaps 80% of our JNDI lookups were handled by a single utility class, and it was easy enough to clean up that single class. The remaining JNDI lookups were scattered throughout the client and server code. And in pretty much every case, the initial context factory was passed to the InitialContext as a constant string (referencing the JBoss context factory, naturally) instead of letting that value be found in the environment. While I don’t expect us to change app servers all that often, letting the environment define as much as it can is certainly better than having lookups fail because they’re statically looking for the wrong classes.

Ultimately, I’d say most of our problems stemmed from an assumption that the app server would never change, or relying on vendor-specific behaviors (no doubt fed by the previous assumption). There are still a few places where we’re doing questionable things (several EJBs read configuration information from files, for example) but I have plans to take care of those.

First, a bit of background. We’ve recently started swapping our backend over to a service-oriented architecture based on RESTful services. All of our recent development has been involved in the creation of new RESTful services, but we still have a lot of legacy code that happens to take the form of EJBs and RPC-based web services. Faced with the need to either upgrade JBoss or switch to Glassfish, we chose the latter (which will probably make a fine post in the future). This meant we had to make changes to all three service types to get them all working in the new app server.

I’m going to start with the RESTful service migration, mostly because they were far and away the easiest part of the migration. So easy, in fact, that there were only two major issues I ran into.

The first came about because we were prepending numbers on the names of our web application archives. This was done for ordering reasons, and in JBoss, the number was ignored for determining things like context root. Glassfish, on the other hand, uses the entire war name. So while the services were working, and deploying correctly, you needed to have the correct number in the URL when accessing the service. Rather than change all the services to include numbers in the URL, I went looking for another solution. Thanks to the java.net forums (which I found to be an excellent resource throughout the project) I discovered that you could set the context root in the sun-web.xml file of the web app (which then sprung into existence for all our services).

A fairly obvious solution, to be sure, but less so when you’re learning.

The second was finding a deployment solution for our JDBC resources (this, of course, covered more than just the RESTful services, as the EJBs also used them, but this was the first area I hit the problem in). Adding and configuring resources via the Glassfish admin console is very easy, and I had no trouble setting up the resources, but navigating a web console isn’t the most friendly method for a more automated install process. The java.net forums once again proved their worth, leading me to the solution. In this case, the solution is the add-resources command that is part of the command line administration tool.

This solution was doubly nice because we already had XML files for defining our resources in JBoss, and the formats were similar enough that creating the new files was mostly a matter of XML wrangling. This solution also nicely covered other resources, such as the few queues and topics we use for communication.

With those two things taken care of the RESTful services happily took up residence in Glassfish. And with the RESTful services out of the way, it was time to tackle the EJBs.

The flight to Houston seemed uneventful. It wasn’t until I’d landed as was waiting to disembark that I learned that we were half an hour late. Fortunately, our arrival gate had been moved to the one right next to my departure gate. I made a quick call to my uncle (who, along with his wife and my grandfather, had the same flight from Houston to San Jose) to confirm that the departure gate was the same, and walked the 100 feet to the gate. Just in time to have my passport double-checked and begin boarding.

Once we arrived, we marshaled our little group together and then proceeded through customs and out into San Jose. We met up with my parents, who had a shuttle to take us to the rental car place. Once there, we waited while my dad got all the paperwork done. I had packed my camera in the checked luggage, so I didn’t get any pictures of the airports, or my first view of San Jose, but I here’s the first picture I did take:

Once the paperwork was out of the way, we packed our Toyota Prado with our luggage and began the drive to the Pacific coast town of Jaco.

I’m going to take a moment now to talk a bit about the geography of Costa Rica. There’s basically this mountain range running down the middle of the country, separating the Gulf coast and plains from the Pacific coast and plains. San Jose is nestled in a large mountain valley, near the center of the country. My dad described the topology of the country looking as if it was made by someone crumpling up aluminum foil and then trying to smooth it out.

All that is just a long way of saying that the drive to Jaco covered some of the craziest twists and turns (and stunning vistas) I’ve ever seen. The trip down to Jaco took us about two hours, and we arrived just past six o’clock. Owing to Costa Rica being in mountain time, it was dark when we arrived. We met the assistant of the condo owner, who gave us a rundown of what we’d need to know. Things like, where to get groceries, where to eat out, and when we had to wear our hard hats.

You see, the condos were still under construction, and said construction could be shut down if an inspector happened by and caught anyone without a hard hat.

We got settled in and then went out to the Wishbone for dinner, a place we would revisit a few more times before the trip was over. The remainder of the evening was spent relaxing and going to bed early.

In the morning, we got up pretty early, and headed to Marea Alta for breakfast. Like most of the restaurants we went to, it had a cozy, open-air eating area where we could enjoy the pleasant morning air. On the way back, we went to a grocery store to stock up on food and alcohol. There we met a new fruit. Called quanabana (though we didn’t discover that until later), it was quite strange looking. As I was in full “tourist carrying his camera everywhere mode” by this point, I snapped a picture:

The rest of the day was uneventful, and the next morning my parents drove back into San Jose to pick up my sister and her boyfriend. When they returned, we lunched at the Wishbone again, and then met the construction foreman, who took us on a tour of the area around Jaco. Our first stop was a turtle preserve. Here, they took the eggs from the nest after they were laid and moved them to a safer area inland a hundred feet or so. Then when they hatched, they let them head for the water long enough for the baby turtles to afix the location of the beach in their heads, and then rounded them up and spread them out further along the beach. Less chance of being eaten.

After that, we stopped by another recently developed area for some drinks and a look out over a marina. We saw a lot of really expensive boats, including one that had a helicopter:

As it turned out, the foreman had a childhood friend who was working as a tour guide. He arranged for us to spend some time with him over the next couple days. Our first trip involved getting up early in the morning (which wasn’t too hard, as the construction crew also got an early start) and heading to a bridge over the Tarcoles River. There we took pictures of the many crocodiles and several birds we saw. From there we headed to Carara National Park for a hike through the forest. There we saw many birds and lizards.

The next day, we were off to Manuel Antonio National Park, which is a couple hours southeast of Jaco, near the town of Quepos. There, the entire group of us took a several mile hike, over what turned out to be very up and down terrain. It was well worth it though, in addition to some stunning views out over the Pacific, we saw monkeys, sloths, more birds and more lizards. We debated going for a swim, but decided it would be better to head to our next destination sooner rather than later.

That destination was Villa Vanilla, a farm that grows vanilla (of course) as well as a host of other spices. There we went on a tour of the farm. The first stop was the drying shed, where we saw real cinnamon, cocoa beans and vanillia beans. After that, it was into the farm itself, where we saw all sorts of plants, and got to sample a few things straight off the vine, so to speak. Let’s just say you haven’t experienced pepper until you’ve had one fresh.

Thursday was a day off, after the long hikes and early mornings of the previous days (though the morning was still pretty early thanks to the sounds of construction). Some people swam, some people read, and a good relaxing time was had by all. Friday we started fairly early again. This time our destination was the town of Tarcoles, on the river of the same name. There we got on a boat for a tour of the Tarcoles River.

We saw countless birds, and innumerable crocodiles, and I finished off my last two rolls of film (more on that in a future post). After that, some of the group did a canopy tour, while the rest took advantage of being on vacation some more. We capped off the evening with a drink at Villa Caletas, which is perched at the top of a mountain. The bar there is built facing west with a open amphitheater looking out across Nicoya Gulf. The sunset there was stunning. As I mentioned, I was out of film at this point, so I’ll have to link you to one of the pictures my father took:

The next morning, I began my trip home. My aunt, uncle and grandfather were leaving an hour or two before I was, so we shared a taxi back to San Jose. After seeing them off, I went to my gate to wait for boarding to being. The flight back was quiet (apparently I missed some excitement by not leaving on the earlier flight), and I arrived in Houston in the mid-evening. As I wasn’t leaving Houston until the morning, I’d reserved a hotel room at the Airport Marriott. There I spent the remainder of the evening watching TV. The next morning, it was back into the airport where I boarded my flight to Cleveland and arrived home.

Be sure to check out the rest of my pictures!

The basic line of my thinking started with the following: I like the idea of a blog, I just haven’t been very good at the execution of a blog. As I thought about it from there, the reasons why I wasn’t very good at writing the blog became apparent.

One reason is best illustrated with an example. I have been sitting on a post about my Costa Rica trip for over a week now. I haven’t published it because I’ve been waiting to get the pictures developed and uploaded to Flickr. My original plan was to make this post after the Costa Rica post was published. But because the Costa Rica post was basically stuck in the unpublished state, this post wasn’t happening either. Normally, the post that’s blocking me from writing anything is all in my head and so nothing ever gets written. This sort of behavior has sentenced many previous post ideas to death.

But the biggest reason is that what I want this blog to be has changed. I’m not really interested in trying to document the things that go on in my life, which is basically what I’d thought of as this blog’s purpose. After thinking things through, I decided it was better to do something else with this blog, something I’d be more interested in writing about. After all, I still like the idea of a blog, and the blog software and domain were already set up, so it seemed a shame to let it languish or to remove it.

And so, I’m making this post to announce that this blog is now going to be a place for me to talk about technology. A pretty open-ended topic, to be sure. But with this change I can cover a lot of ground that I’m actually interested in writing about. For example, there are interesting technological decisions and happenings going on at my job, which are cool and I’d love to share (though obviously there’s some detail that must be omitted). And I can talk about gadgets and such, because I really dig that sort of stuff.

That’s not to say that I will never make non-technology related posts. There’s still cool stuff I occasionally do that I do want to share, like my Costa Rican adventure. And it will likely be better and more interesting than what I was trying to do anyway, because it will be fun and cool stuff that I’ll want to spend time writing about. If you really want to skip out on the tech blather, feel free to point your browsers to this page or your RSS readers to this feed.

Oh, if anyone has a better category name than “Non-Tech”, I’m all ears.

Unsecured wireless networks are as common down here as they are back in the states, it seems.

Though I probably won’t post a lot (big surprise), as I’m on vacation.

Pictures and maybe more posts when I return.

I went to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving. It was pretty nice, and there were some deer outside the window on numerous occasions, so I took a picture of one.

It was nice to visit home, I think it’s been two or three years since I was last there. And boy has the place changed, new interstate interchanges, new shopping areas, more homes in the neighborhood where I grew up, all sorts of things. I spent much of the time relaxing, and eating delicious turkey, and watching some football.

But I had to come home sometime, because those late work nights won’t happen by themselves.