Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, died last week, aged 83. Credited with bringing home computing to the masses, during it’s lifetime the Commodore 64 sold somewhere in the order of 17 million units.
Best Buy closing stores
After their bodged holiday season and inability to fulfill online orders, there was speculation that Best Buy was in trouble. They’ve just announced that they’re closing 50 stores across the US and there will be layoffs too, so looks like early indications were true.
Mapping JodaTime properties using JPA and custom UserTypes
JPA does not natively support mapping custom types to table columns. If you’re using Hibernate as your JPA provider then it does support custom UserTypes to provide mappings beyond the normal String to varchar, and other simple types.
For using the JodaTime’s DateTime, there’s a couple of options:
- Joda Time Hibernate is a Hibernate contributed library (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/contrib/hibernate/index.html)
- UserType for Hibernate looks like it is an updated version of Joda Time Hibernate, adds support for JSR310 (the new JDK Date implementation based on JodaTime), while also keeping backwards compatibility with Joda Time Hibernate
I tried UserType for Hibernate first, but got errors on a Roo generated @RooEntity:
@Type(type="org.joda.time.contrib.hibernate.PersistentDateTime") private DateTime testDate;
I got this trying to persist:
java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.jadira.usertype.dateandtime.joda.PersistentDateTime.nullSafeSet(Ljava/sql/PreparedStatement;Ljava/lang/Object;I)V at org.hibernate.type.CustomType.nullSafeSet(CustomType.java:140)
I’m not sure what this is about so switched the type to the Joda Time Hibernate library, and got it to work as expected straight away:
@Type(type="org.joda.time.contrib.hibernate.PersistentDateTime") private DateTime testDate;
Apple sued over false advertising for Siri
About time. I’ve seen people trying to use Siri to get it to do things just like in the tv ads, and 9 times out of 10 it never works as you’d expect. Gives comic relief as everyone sniggers while said user is repeating themselves in a variety of different ways trying unsuccessfully to get it to work just like the ads and then giving up, yes, but working as in the tv ads? No. Far from it.
Android has always had support for voice actions, and while it’s more simple in that it uses simple recognized commands (‘navigate to [place name]’), and least it works the majority of the time.