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Happy Halloween!

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AlarmsPro

The Anchorage Daily News is running a story in their money section featuring one of the ventures I'm currently involved with, AlarmsPro.

What the article doesn't mention is that the system is entirely written in Java.

The UI components were build using:

• Straight Swing
• The Thinlet Toolkit
• IDEA's GUI Designer

The underlying monitoring system is making use of the following open source APIs:

• Commons Logging, CLI and Net
• J2SSH
• JavaMail
• joeSNMP
• Log4j

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The Pulse

Erik's Pulse has been published.

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Cingular IM & Mail

Cingular introduced a couple of free J2ME clients for Instant Messaging and Mail. I've been playing with them on my RAZR for a bit now. They totally rock.

The IM client is developed by Thumbspeed and supports AOL, Yahoo! and MSN. This thing is a beauty. By far the best J2ME app I've seen in a long, long time. The only drawback is that it is SMS-based.

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Anup Kejriwal emailed me the following: "I just wanted to clarify that the client is actually fully GPRS based and not SMS based. CIR messages come over the SMS channel when the client is not running." — Cool!

The Mail client is developed by OZ Communications and supports Yahoo!, MSN/Hotmail and AOL Mail. A nice app too, but the lack of settings for a custom mail server renders it kinda useless to me.

Right now the list of supported handsets is pretty slim, but it should expand soon.

Tip of the hat to Cingular. For once they picked the right partners.

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Cat Emergency
We just came back from taking our cat, Clem, to the local emergency vet. We've been monitoring/dealing with an urinary track problem for a couple weeks now. He seemed to be doing better in the last few days but last night started to have problem peeing. It all quickly worsen as the evening progressed and we were left with little very alternative than to take him in around 1:30am. The vet had to put him under to insert a catheter in order to "unplug" him. The blood-work and x-rays all looked good, which is promising. He's staying at the clinic for the rest of night, at least until we are able to reach his regular vet. The Pulse Erik's Pulse has been published.

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The Pulse

Erik's Pulse has been published.

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Ning

Congrats to Diego and Co. for finally releasing the next big thing, Ning. A web-based social application builder.

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RAZR I decided to switch to a Cingular Family Plan and grab a couple free phones in the process. Since I didn't really need a new phone, my trusty 6630 is doing just fine; I figured I should look at quad-phones to make things easier when we're in Europe. There aren't much choices as far as quad-phones are concerned. It pretty much came down to the Motorola RAZR or V551 (free after rebates) or spend money on a Blackberry or Treo. I thought about the Blackberry and Treo for a bit, but I really wanted something smaller/lighter than my 6630. The V551 wasn't attractive to me, and I've read of numerous problems with the battery not holding a charge. Even-though Russ recommended against it, I decided on a couple RAZRs. A BLK for me, and V3 for Vicki. I must be crazy. Turns out that I actually like the phone. It certainly doesn't have all the bells and whistles of my 6630, but it has the essentials. Everything is pretty easy to get to. I've only had it for a few days, so I may change my mind. But so far, so good.