May 2004 - The Story of David Kaspar

Gotta love Southpark

Hello J2ME World

With my recent upgrade to SonyEricsson T630, a new geek opportunity presented it self: to develop Java applications for my very own mobile. Priceless.
Because I am fairly familiar with Java and the fantastic, open source, IDE NetBeans it was easy to develop and deploy my first HelloJ2MEWorld application.
NetBeans has an extension module focused on J2ME development. Download it and NetBeans will be able to help you with your Midlets, JARs and obfuscation.
NetBeans is using the Sun J2ME SDK. If you want to be more device specific, I’d recommend you to download an SDK directly from the mobile maker you are interested in. Two obvious choices are SonyEricsson and Nokia.
Try out and debug your application on one of the supplied emulators.
The last step is to transfer your application to your mobile. You have a choice between infrared, bluetooth, USB cable and Over-the-air (OTA). Since I am developing on a IR enabled laptop, ir was the best option for me.
First application that came to mind for developing was of course a mobile blogging tool. A quick search on Google returned the just started open source project MIDLog. So instead of starting from scratch and probably duplicating all work done in MIDLog, I am hoping to contribute to MIDLog.
The J2ME world is crowded with two main MIDP versions, WTK versions and various JSRs (Java Specification Requests). While many exciting features are planned for future version of J2ME, todays devices are very limited.
Example, the T630 supports the “new” multimedia API (MMAPI – JSR 135) but Sony has chosen to support the sound part only. This means that there is no support for image capturing and I suspect this will make it very difficult to develop a mobile blog tool capable of posting images.

Gordon Ramsey (Royal Hospital Road)

This was easily the best gastronomic experience in my life.
The whole party opted for a menu degustation (sample menu) consisting of eight courses. Each dish was an explosion of flavours and textures; often 3 or more per dish. In true degustation fashion each dish is minuscule to give you a chance to get through all of them. Nevertheless, by the 7th dish we were struggling.
Not being accustomed to such a culinary input I quickly lost track of everything being served. There was langoustine tortellini, a white fish on a bed of vegetables, amazing and generous portion of beef, cheeses and 3 deserts in a row.
There was not a single thing to complain about. Each dish was perfection in regards to composition of flavours, preparation and presentation. Not a small feat considering the size of the menu.
If I really had to point out one single imperfection, it would be the langoustine tortellini that was a wee bit over done. On the other hand, since cooking time of pasta is a personal preference one cannot blame the chef for that.
My choice of cheese platter involved a cheese connoisseur turning up with a selection of 40+ cheeses. There was a story about each cheese and he could have been talking about them for the rest of the night had I not interrupted him. A selection of 8 cheeses was served in order from the weakest to the strongest.
The service was impeccable, partly due to the all French staff. Normally I would have been worried about the staff being pretentious but they weren’t at all. They even managed to withstand uncustomary demands like commenting on famous French football players and deciding a bet about the Toyota Cup.

Kill Bill vol. 2

I was like a kid on Christmas waiting to see Kill Bill vol. 2. Volume 1 with its roaring soundtrack and cool characters had left me wanting so much more.
Vol. 2. starts of with a flashback to that interrupted wedding. The various characters are presented in much more detail and more time is spent on each one of them.
We are shown how the bride acquired her skills through some harsh training. She picks up two martial arts techniques that will save her life twice.
The movie has a very slow pace, especially compared to part one. Maybe this is why it was such a disappointment for me. The Japanese influence was replaced with gritty surroundings of some Texas outback.
While I loved the soundtrack in part one, the soundtrack was non-existent in this one.
Some hard core Tarantino fans will argue that the second part was more true to his style; volume one was more a tribute to Asian movie making. I however found volume 2 to be artificially pro-longed.
One special edition I would like to see is one 3 hour movie where volume 2 has been cut down majorly. Just my ¢2.