Friday, August 27, 2010

"Will work for Droid X"


Damn, I was almost going to pimp myself out on the street with a sign like that. That's how hard to get one of those these days. Droid X went on sale since July 15th and I wonder how many have actually got it? I figured it's not a "new" smartphone anymore so it shouldn't be that hard to pick up one. Well, not so fast, Bob. I first put in an order on Amazon Wireless on Aug. 25th, since they priced it $20 below Verizon. Boy was I surprised to see the estimated delivery date: Oct. 8th.

There's no way I can wait that long. So I went to talk to a Verizon store, hoping to get one quickly from the source. The friendly guy there said their shipping date is much closer, but... still at Sep. 10th. Droid 2 and HTC Incredible are definitely in better shape, available the same day.

I guess depending on who you're asking, Verizon/Motorola has either never learned from Apple's lesson, or just taken a page right out of Apple's playbook. In any case, I'm definitely not the only drooling customer out there.

With this piece of empirical evidence, now it's pretty easy to see the strength of the Android platform.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Force.com Migration Tool on Ubuntu (Lucid)

Since the tool is based on Ant, I apt-get the ant package. The Guide on the tool talked about putting the jar file into the lib directory of ANT_HOME. Well, I don't know where the ANT_HOME (not found in env), let alone locating its lib. Eventually I found the lib dir with some Googling. It's /usr/share/ant/lib - well, should be obvious enough to me... With the jar file in place and config files done (build.xml, build.properties, package.xml), the tool did run successfully to do the things I needed.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Excel WebApp: 0, Google Docs: 1+

Tried to use a .xls file in Excel WebApp on Sky Drive, and I got "Unable to load the requested workbook". It's a very simple file, a few columns of numbers and texts, nothing big.

Google Docs, with its minimalist interface, worked this one fine - just like so many others I've done.

Cloud is a killer, isn't it?

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Apex Explorer for Force.com: using newer API

It's a handy tool but the newest version available uses API 8.0. Can't remember when that one came out. :) So I tried to change the Options to use newer APIs. The newest version I can get to is 16.0. Beyond that it pops a "null reference" error and is unable to retrieve object list. So there's no change for anything new in API 17, 18, and 19, and I suspect a lot of things in versions after 8 don't get used either.