This afternoon, as I was driving out to Hamilton Place, I overheard a caller to a talk radio show describe something as being “as phony as a two dollar bill.” Ooops …
Daily Archive for November 17th, 2007
For the last two weeks, I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about whether to stay with Verizon for my cell service or not. Mind you, I’ve still got about six months left in my contract, but I’m seriously tempted to leave them.
You see, my trusty RAZR V3C has been acting flaky recently. It doesn’t let me answer calls sometimes. It doesn’t always notify me of new voicemail messages or text messages. On occasion some (or all) of the keys refuse to work. Etc., etc., etc.
It has been long enough, though, that I can take advantage of their offer to let you get a $100 discount on a phone if you sign your soul over to Satan and extend your contract by one or two years. So, earlier this month I started looking to see if there was something I wanted to replace ye olde RAZR with.
Well, first of all, you can’t get a new RAZR from Verizon any more. Not that I would have been especially happy with that, given the RAZR’s amazing ability to deactivate its ringer after any random object in my pocket bumps the buttons on the outside. I’ve missed countless calls from my wife (and business calls too) because of that little issue.
Next problem … I do want a phone that supports Bluetooth, because I bought a Bluetooth headset, and it’s quite handy at times. That rules out about half the phones.
Of the remaining phones, the majority look like some martian tricorder off of a bad Star Trek ripoff. No thank you.
There are some nice phones in the “smart phone” category, but they are expensive (not to mention, I just panned smartphones a couple of months ago and got myself a separate PDA). Oh yeah … and they are a bit more expensive.
If I went that route, I could get a Blackberry … but I just bought a couple of Win Mobile apps (plus Missing Sync for Win Mobile so I could sync the blasted thing with my Mac), so I’d be throwing that stuff away more or less.
There are some Palm phones, but I’m not going there. Sorry Palm, you lost. Give me a ring when you get your act together … assuming you ever do.
Then there are the Windows Mobile phones. I could get a cheaper one with Win Mobile 5, but I’ve heard that it’s approximately as stable as Win 95 Rev A. Nope. Don’t want that.
The Win Mobile 6 phones are all on the pricier end.
Sigh.
Well, there is the new Verizon iClone Voyager, which actually looks pretty nifty, and will hit the market soon.
Yes, I did say that. Yes, I am a Mac user. Now, I highly doubt it’s as useful as the iPhone, but it would get the job done … and it does have one nifty feature … the full QWERTY keyboard and additional screen you get when you open the little booger up. But again … I lose the investment in the Win Mobile software.
Or … I could switch to AT&T. They still have the RAZR (I assume with its silly auto-off ringer “feature”), along with some cheaper smart phones with Win Mobile 6, and even a couple of nice looking cheaper phones with Bluetooth. Oh yeah, and they don’t cripple their bluetooth phones like the ignorant goons at Verizon.
And … I could use their rollover minutes in such a way as to effectively save myself about $40/month in fees. Right now I keep my Verizon contract at way more minutes than I usually use because every time I change it, my contract is extended by one year from the date I make the change … and about four months out of the year, I need almost all the minutes (or more) that I get in my current plan when I’m traveling.
Oooh … and once the iPhone becomes stable and established, and I lose my animosity towards smart phones (which may happen sooner than I expect) I could just switch to one.
On the down side, if I jump to AT&T now, I’d have to eat about $135 in early termination fees from Verizon. On the other hand, my RAZR might not live to see the new year, and I’d have to replace it if I stick with Verizon … which means buying one outright, or taking their “new every two” ripoff.
Or I could pawn the contract off on some unsuspecting person.
And … I have to admit, Verizon’s coverage really is great. It’s the one redeeming quality about the outfit.
Decisions, decisions …
Note: Even if I drop Verizon for my cell coverage, I’m going to keep their Broadband Access program. It really rocks. Now I can work from pretty much anywhere, with a workably fast net connection …
A few months back, I started to work on a project that I hoped would evolve into a cross-platform management application for a client project. The project in question stored data in the eXist XML database.
Since the app needed to be cross-platform (and I wanted it to be a GUI app) I decided to use REALbasic, which I’ve owned for about six years, despite only developing one (marginally) useful (and very simple) application (at least to completion, anyway). REALbasic is perfect for this, since I can write once and compile for OS X, Windows, and Linux.
There are several ways one can interact with the eXist database … XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST. I’ve not had much luck using REST to work with eXist, so I ruled that out. Of the other two … I’d used both XML-RPC and SOAP to interact with the data before, but REALbasic doesn’t have any sort of XML-RPC client classes that have been updated since Harding’s presidency. That left me with SOAP.
Lucky me, REALbasic has a built-in SOAP client class!
Well, not so lucky. I quickly discovered that their functionality left much to be desired, and that they set a new standard for “worst place.” No matter what I tried, my applications threw an exception with a cryptic error message (”ns1:Client.NoSOAPAction”). Furthermore, there was no way provided for me to access the actual XML data that was being exchanged, nor could I proxy the request and watch what was happening. I was at something of a dead end. Even attempts to get help via the RB mailing list and forum evoked only the sound of crickets in the night.
After much hand-wringing and lack of success with alternative methods of getting things done, I decided to bite the bullet and create my own improved SOAP classes. The result is iSOAP for REALbasic.
Once I’d gotten something working, I posted a response to my query on the RB forums and offered to share my success with anybody who needed it. This past week, I finally got a response, so I created a project site and released version 0.5 on the unsuspecting world.
Now I’ve got something to be proud of. I’ve worked with projects in Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, VB, and now REALbasic. Yay for me!
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