Techbook

WirelessInternet.net

Imagine the following situation: You have a day job, or perhaps you are a student, and you are applying for some better job or opportunity. You exhaustively search for job openings and aggressively apply to everything available… Now, imagine that one morning you wake up to a new opportunity, and promptly send the employer your resumé and application. Then, you go to work or to class, and by the late afternoon or evening, when you return home and check your email, you see that you are several hours late responding to the employer’s reply; by that point, they have already had conversations with other applicants, and the position is filled. This is a simple example of the potential consequences of not investing in portable, wireless Internet.

In the example illustrated above, the use of wireless Internet could actually get you a job. If, in this situation, you were at work or at school and consistently checking your email via a smart phone, tablet, or laptop, you would theoretically be able to communicate more efficiently with a potential employer. Similar situations exist all over the modern world; you may be expected to have constant Internet access in your work, in your education, and even simply in your social circles. So, if you have not yet looked into wireless coverage, check out a website such as WirelessInternet.net to find out about some of the packages that are available to you.

As you are surely familiar with by now, technological tools such as smart phones, smart tablets, and laptops have become more and more common over the years, as people have gained the ability to get online from just about anywhere. Recently, the most advanced wireless service available was known as 3G, and helped the massive spread of devices such as iPhones and Droid phones. Already, however, the wireless world has advanced, and now the highest standard of wireless service is 4G, which brings wireless connections and download speeds that are estimated to be up to four times faster than those of 3G.

A couple of different companies have emerged as the main competitors in the 4G wireless Internet market: Verizon, which calls its version of 4G “LTE,” and Clear Wireless, which brings us “WiMax” 4G service. If you are just now looking to explore or upgrade wireless service, these are probably the two that you will want to consider, as they are the most advanced in existence today. There are a few differences between the different service packages and payment plans offered by both companies, which can be read about in many places online. But these are some names to start with in your search for fast wireless Internet access.

Boston Hack Day Challenge this weekend

I will be heading to Boston this Friday for the Boston Hack Day Challenge. Getting there early enough though, is my first challenge. Sign-in starts at 5:30pm, and to be there by that time I will have to leave New York by 1:00pm — which is impossible given my deadlines at work.

Still haven’t thought of what I will be working on — I may end up joining another team, or continue with the “audio reviews for the visually impaired” hack that I created during the Yahoo! Open Hack NYC event.

Apache WINK: Issue with Single-Element JSON Array

For the last few weeks, I have been building a RESTful service using the very fine Apache WINK library. When the service is called, the server sends a response in JSON. One of the response elements was an array; in the resulting response, if the array contained a single element I noticed a strange thing:

{
  "success": true,
  "subject": "Some subject",
  "origin": {
    "email": "some@email.example.com",
    "fullname": "Full name"
  },
  "listresult": {
    "r1": "yes",
    "r2": "no",
    "r3": "cancel"
  }
}

The expected response, of course, was for listresult to be as follows:

"listresult": [
    {
    "r1": "yes",
    "r2": "no",
    "r3": "cancel"
    }
  ]

The response class used JAXB annotations to set the element names and all the other good stuff. But for some reason, a single element list resulted in an erroneous response. Now, out-of-the-box, WINK comes configured with JSON4J as the  provider for JSON serialization. This library has an unfortunate side effect where the array serialization shows unexpected behavior: for a single element array, it was simply collapsing the array!

Which led me to this posting on the WINK user forum. The solution was to use an alternative provider. As mentioned in that post, I decided to go ahead with Jackson, available here. I chose the easier route of simply replacing the JSON4J library with Jackson, both in my build environment and in the WEB-INF/lib folder.

This approach worked out fine for my needs. If, however, you have multiple services hosted by the same application and want each of them to have a separate provider, I refer you to this excellent post on IBM developerWorks.

Apache Wink and REST Services in Java

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been evaluating Apache Wink for developing RESTful services in Java. I am very impressed with what it’s capable of. The project is still in ‘incubation’ stage, and implements the JAX-RS v1.1 spec providing both a server component and a client module.

While I haven’t used the client capabilities yet, the server module is pretty feature-rich. I had some issues getting authentication to work, but I think I have mostly figured it out. Will post an update once I run some tests.

You can download Wink from this link: http://incubator.apache.org/wink/

If I could have it, my next phone would be a…

Nokia 5110, no questions asked. Pure phone (the classic Snake game notwithstanding), excellent battery life, no Internet (but would still let me tweet – hey, SMS is all I need!). This was the first mobile phone I ever used, borrowed from my uncle who did not want to use it at the time – this was around 2002.

After that, I moved to a Nokia 3650 – in 2004, and did not look back. Fast forward to 2010 and I am sick of my HTC Android phone’s battery life, call quality (of course, T-Mobile is to blame), sometimes sad UI, and a bunch of other things.

Obligatory post for January 2010

Not much blogging, nor tweeting. Big changes at work which suddenly caught everyone by surprise. More later.

One possible way Square works

Square was launched today. I whipped out a quick diagram (in Dia) of how it might work since it’s not apparent from the website. Correct me if I’m wrong.

This design provides a simple, extensible solution. The key module here is the card reader which plugs in to any device with an audio jack. At present, of course, only the iPhone/iPod touch feature the Square Up application. I am pretty sure it will soon be available for a plethora of smartphones out there.

Square Up

Whoa, didn’t realize November went by

Much was achieved. We launched Call-n-Tweet!

Sony DCR-SR47 HDD Camcorder

I’ve been using a DVD camcorder (Canon DC40) all these years, and while I have been quite happy with it, it’s also annoying to keep track of DVDs, backing them up to a hard disk, re-ordering new ones when they get damaged, etc. I was looking for a HDD-based camcorder and stumbled upon the Sony DCR-SR47 Hard Disk Drive Handycam® Camcorder (Silver) on Amazon.

At least the reviews indicate that it’s a pretty good camcorder. Still not sure if I should go for it.

…followed by a busier September

Sigh. I’ve been tweeting away, though, so if you’re on there, follow @schandur. Thanks.