Category: Tech

Computers, Software, Programming, anything Electronic

At work, we need to start using JOGL as a dependency of our project, which we build with Maven. JOGL, the Java OpenGL interface, uses platform specific binaries, which introduces some complexity to the build process.

After a brief websearch, I found the appropriately titled using-jogl-as-dependency-in-maven, unfortunately, it appears to be a private blog, so I can’t see if the information is useful or not.

I did find on mvnbrowser.com that jogl-1.1.1-rc6 (as of this writing) is on the dev.java.net Maven2 repository, but I couldn’t find a usage guide.

Oh well, I’ll keep looking. For now its not a hugely pressing issue, so the one developer who is using has just hacked his Eclipse setup.

Since the latest Mac operating system Snow Leopard adds Exchange support to iCal, I thought maybe now I could reach the holy-grail: Syncing my work calendar, in Exchange, to Google Calendar.

This would effectively let me see my business meetings on my Android-based cell phone.

I had tried various tricks and tools before, but nothing ever quite worked. But today I tried BusySync, and it seems to work great.

All you need to do is setup iCal to access your Exchange server, then in BusySync’s Google tab, check the off the calendar you want to upload in the ‘Publish to Google’ list.

There are two problems with this solution however:

1. Changes made to the calendar on Google aren’t synced back to iCal, and worse, they seem to be lost from Google.
2. The calendar name shown in Google is pretty awkward, its currently ‘Calendar[<user@exchangeserver>]’.

I was hoping to try out Spanning Sync and see if it’s similar features would handle Exchange calendars as well, but unfortunately I have tried Spanning Sync in the past, and my trial has expired, so I can’t evaluate its behavior.

I’ve been using Mozy on my Mac for a while, but I’m strongly considering canceling my subscription. It took nearly a month to get the backup complete. Once it was, it ran successfully for about a month, but now I get errors like this in the logs, and the backup never finishes successfully:

2009-07-07 13:26:04.668 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:27:04.736 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:28:06.563 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:29:06.670 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:30:07.005 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked

I found this blog post, but I seem to have a slightly different issue, even though the errors listed are the same. I’m not using any backup sets at all, instead, I’m only having Mozy backup my home-directory (with specific exclusions setup, to avoid backing up a few virtual machines).

Granted, I have 300,000 files totaling over 100 gb to keep backed up, but I don’t modify many files on any given day. If this is too much data for Mozy to handle, the client should let the user know!

Many people don’t realize, but Microsoft Office tracks the history of your documents, and can be configured to store hidden comments and other editing notes. Office documents also track what is called metadata, such as the author and organization where the document was created.

It can sometimes be really embarrassing to share a document with someone, only to have them discover your previous comments.

If you ever want to scrub your documents history, here are a few links that might be helpful:

Try this if you have Office 2003/XP, or this if you have Office 2007.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had to do this with OpenOffice yet, so I’m not sure how to do it there.

Microsoft’s Major Nelson posted an explanation of the problems I (and may other people) have been experiencing with XBox Live and our corrupt Gamertags.

I didn’t post about it when it happened, but MS finally contacted me back a week or so ago, and told me they couldn’t recover my gamertag. In compensation, they gave me 18 months of XBox Live to use. Not great, but at least I’ve got some closure and a few months of comped time. It doesn’t make up for the four years of fees I paid to keep my gamertag active, but its something.

If you’ve been following the drama (and who hasn’t?), you’ll know I’ve been waiting with not-so-baited-breath for Microsoft tech support to get back to me about my Xbox Live account migration problem.

Well, this evening I got a call from Derek, in the XBox Support department of Microsoft Corporate. He said the regular support guys had been trying to get a hold of me for the last few days. That was news to me, since my phone handn’t run and didn’t show any miss calls, but whatever, at least someone finally did call.

Unfortunately, Derek didn’t really have any news, he just told me what I already knew, which is that I probably sometime in the distant past tried to migrate my account via xbox.com and the account got corrupted. He took down all the possible email addresses I might have used as a Live ID, and said someone would get back to me again soon.

So, now I’m left waiting again. Derek did send me an email with his contact information, which I’ll use if I don’t hear anything by the end of the week.