Personal

VerifyError in OpenJPA Enhancer problem

I just got a VerifyError exception when OpenJPA 1.2.2 was enhancing my classes. The stack trace was saving a VerifyError exception because of an IllegalInstruction at offset 0. This turned out to be because the getter/setter methods were marked as final on my entity class. Removing final, fixes this problem.

Using TomTom for the iPhone review

I purchased tomtom yesterday and have been using it around town with my iPhone 3gs. So far, it's as good as our garmin dedicated unit. The maps are downloaded to the phone so it will work even with no signal. I've had no gps problems and the gps works well no matter where I place the phone in the car.
Directions are pretty clear and I haven't found any problems except battery life. This thing will eat your batteries alive. So you will need a car charger to use this.

GOGII Text+ not so impressive

We've been trying out alternatives to a unlimited text plan for our mobile phones. We tried Text+, an iPhone application but it's a little hard to use. Basically, there is no way for someone else to text you as you don't have a # until you initiate the conversation.

What I've done now is to use Google voice. This works better. First, you have a real phone # which you can forward to your cell or home # when someone calls. Next, people can SMS that google voice # and you can forward them to email (like gmail). If you use the exchange connector on the iPhone for your gmail account then you get instant notifications of texts.

The email is very painless. The email address is key. It consists of the other parties #, your google # and a session id so it looks like: 15075551234.15075554321.assdfasdad@text.google.com. Responding to a SMS means just reply to the email and google is smart enough to just pick up the sentence you typed without the signature and other stuff. It works very well.

So, this looks the ticket for us, google voice in combination with gmail means you can get by without a texting plan. It works very well on an iPod Touch also.