iPhone Tethering with Tether.com
Last night I saw this article on CNET about web based tethering, “Get Web-based iPhone tethering for just $30 yearly”. I was skeptical to say the least, but I am a sucker for this type of stuff. It did not hurt that this is the same group (Tether.com) that somehow got a tethering app through the Apple App Store a few months ago, which was quickly removed by Apple. Plus Tether is offering an introductory price of $15.00 for the first year, so it was worth a try.
I got the service running with my Mac and iPhone 3GS. The connection is not as fast as tethering with the standard iPhone method. Also I could not get any of my VPN connections working. With that in mind, I was able to get 1 Mbps/down and 0.25 Mps/up so it was good enough to check e-mail, surf the net, and telnet to my servers.
Here are a couple of gotchas that the Tether documentation could be been clearer on to save users some potential aggravation.
1.) Every time you run the Tether app on the Mac it creates an ad-hoc network, but you always get a “Connection failed” message after it completes (which does not instill confidence). Press the “Cancel” button because the network has been created successfully, this just seems to be a bug in the software.
2) In order for the tethering to work the iPhone must connect to the Tether Proxy servers which at times can be over loaded preventing the iPhone from tethering. The big thing to remember here is if “Computer Status” is connected and the “Server Status” is not, you are set-up correctly you just need to try it again later. Hopefully Tether will add more servers in the future and this issue will go away.
Crumbs from the Communion Table: The made-up war.
Okay, let’s get this straight, once and for all.
Christians are always going to be at odds with “the world” in certain ways. The Bible calls us to humility, sacrifice, and generosity, and there will always be people who will take advantage of that. There will always be forms of persecution and…
“Today’s Levitation”. Great levitation illusion picture posted everyday.
The photographer is pulling this off by jumping in the air and catching just the right shot.
30 Day Mini Challenges
This is the postmortem on my latest 30 day challenge. Motivated by a pre-summer productivity slump, a recent video I watched from Google I/O 2011 by Matt Cutt’s on 30 day challenges, and the success of my first 30 day challenge it seemed like the time to try again.
Unlike my previous 30 day challenge, I decided to tackle a few smaller challenges. This challenge was made up for 4 mini challenges. These mini challenges consisted of finishing a bunch of half read books, exercising 3 days a week, watching a maximum of 2 hours of TV a week, and learning something new (Google Web Toolkit/GWT). My motivation was to clean up a bunch of half done and never started items before summer started. I usually try and tackle something creative over summer and I did not want these things hanging over me.
I feel like the most effective thing I did this time was to create 4 projects to match the 4 challenges and then add specific To Do items to each project BEFORE I started. This allowed me to look every day at what was ahead of me and how I was doing. It was also very energizing to see all those To Do items getting checked off over the 30 days.
It is really amazing how productive I can be when I clearly define goals and put some time constraints around them. I think for me the key is really the time constraint and that feeling that I should be able to do anything for 30 days. One thing I would do differently next time is post my goals up front, like I did last time. Posting the goals up front adds that extra push to follow through and not drop the ball.
This process also got me thinking of the power of finite goals, the energy created by seeing progress against those goals everyday, and using the web as a multiplier. That small observation might lead to my summer project, but that is another blog post…..
Review of Spring Roo
Let me start by saying this is a very quick dive into Spring Roo. I only spent a week or so of evenings investigating this framework. So these are my initial feelings.
My goal is to find a Java framework which I can develop quickly in and deploy easily to a standard servlet container. Being able to scale to 100’s of thousands of users is much lower on my needs list then the ability to develop apps/prototypes quickly.
I definitely started out with some prejudices about Spring Roo because of my fear that the Spring Framework was to unwieldy for what I was looking for. But in that regard Roo does simplify things with its many add-ons. I also like the “console” approach of Spring.
Being able to type in text commands which generated large chunks of code really clicked with me.
Pros:
- Great documentation at the Spring Roo site.
- I really like that you can write/review code and not have all of the “plumbing” code in the way of your business logic (it gets added automatically at the byte code level).
- Roo gives you access to a lot of what is great about Spring (web flow, security, etc.) very quickly with the built in commands.
- Tight GWT and App Engine integration (though I need to spend more time with it, see below).
- Automatic insertion of coding best practices for the different Spring modules that you plug-in is really nice. Not to mention it gives you a comfort level in trying out new Spring modules.
Cons:
- I never got Eclipse and Spring Roo fully working together because I could not get the Aspect/J plug-in to work. I did download Spring’s version of the Eclipse IDE called Spring STS. This worked but the whole point for me was to get it working in my standard Eclipse instance. (This was obviously user error on my part.)
- As much as I feel that Roo makes using the Spring framework easier, it stills feels like it is a better tool for people that are already invested in Spring and not for someone with no real Spring experience.
- I am not sure how all of this code generation would work with in a team environment (maybe it is not a problem and to be honest I did not test this aspect of the framework very much).
What really got me even looking at Roo was reading about the tight integration with Google’s GWT and App Engine. I had worked with GWT a couple of years ago and App Engine last summer and I really liked both. So I thought Spring Roo might be a good match for those technologies. I still feel like the Spring framework, even with Roo’s help, is a heavier framework then I am looking for. But I plan on diving into GWT (again) next, and then revisiting Roo with my newly expanded knowledge of GWT to see if this all jives better for me then.
Final Thoughts:
I don’t think Spring Roo fits my current narrow needs but 3-4 hours a night for a week and a half is probably not enough time for me to really grok the full benefits of Spring Roo. So I may come back around after I have tested a few more frameworks to see if I appreciate Roo more.
