Sunday, January 21, 2007

Managing Quartz from a Web App continued...

My previous post mentioned this quartz based web app...

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23781&package_id=99269

I'm finding it quite buggy, but far enough along where I believe I can throw a few improvements into the app. Basic functionality seems to be there, but it needs some validation of forms to keep invalid states from occuring. Updates will follow..

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Friday, January 5, 2007

Microsoft's Coup d’état of My Living Room

OK, I don't think I am typically paranoid, but after the latest Windows Vista release with the Windows media center, I am beginning to see the well laid designs that Microsoft has on my living space.

Let me give some reasons why...

1.) Microsoft has become the major player in designing the OS and software for the IPTV set top boxes. Very few other companies have made the inroads that MS has made over the last couple of years in this area.

2.) IPTV will be the future method of video delivery no matter what broadband service is used.

3.) The number of deals made by Microsoft to push their IPTV solution has been going on for years...
and my favorite the Swisstel "Bluwin" service not to be confused with the "Blue Screen" we all knew in previous MS OS versions

(these are only a few)

4.) The XBox which contains a "Media Center Extender". Wow! How convenient another outlet that allows me to use a Microsoft product.

5.) Vista! Yet another way I can use Microsoft's media center.

Once you put all these together you have the video, gaming, computing, communications, and Internet all potentially managed by one version or another of a Microsoft product. As they say where I am from, that is "purty smart".

Thursday, January 4, 2007

Managing Quartz from a Web App

After working on message driven bean last night, I was trying to understand how to implement/package/manage a Quartz scheduler to run the client for the message bean.

Before I could start coding, I saw a quick and dirty web app on one of the Quartz users' forum. After loading it up locally on JBoss, I was able to navigate around and execute scheduled tasks w/o any issues.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23781&package_id=99269

I did need to remove the log4j lib due to a dependency issue to run this on the latest JBoss, but hey what a great and easy way to manage scheduled tasks.

TOAD data modelling

Well I finally downloaded the TOAD data modeller after years of using the data tool. Thumbs up so far... the tool supports Oracle 10g, visual data modelling, and sql generation. The freeware version of course is difficult to find, but for anyone interested:

http://www.casestudio.com/enu/features.aspx

There's an red and a blue button. I chose the blue button. I guess I'll get my invite into the Matrix another day.