Android: Budget Droid Pro

Budget Droid Professional is now available on the Android Market under Applications and Finance. It includes charts, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly budgets, password protection, and much more.

Fedora: Commons Pool

If you're ever installing Fedora and it crashes during start, citing (in the fedora.log):

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/collections/CursorableLinkedList

You'll need to install the Apache Commons Pool:

commons.apache.org

Extract the archive and copy the jars to your Tomcat libs directory.

Restart Tomcat and you should be good to go... unless you're having additional issues.

Android: My Next Phone

I do believe I've found my next phone.

Hopefully it's GSM and works (without issue) on T-Mobile.

M&Ms: Survival of the Fittest

Someone posted this today on a forum I hang out at:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

Source

It made me laugh, and so I share it with you all.

Android: Budget Droid 2.0 Update

Progress is going well on Budget Droid 2.0. I expect to have it released late September or early October.

I'm hoping to have it translated into several languages, and really, much of the time it will take to finish the app hinges on that.

Android: Budget Droid 2.0

As of today, I've officially started work on Budget Droid 2.0. When I wrote Budget Droid 1.0, I had very little experience with both Android and Java, meaning that there are quite a few things that I now realize I could have done much better. Plus, I made both the database and the code very inflexible, meaning that when it came to writing updates, I found myself really working uphill. As a result, Budget Droid 2.0 will be built on a completely different code base. Plus, I only have evenings and weekends to work on this (I'm not a company... just a solo developer), meaning that this certainly won't be out next week. In fact, as far as release date is concerned, the only answer is that I don't have a release date. I want to do it right (though some time mid-fall is my goal).

At present, I'm just working on my feature list. Luckily, thanks to user input, I have a very good idea of what a lot of these features will be.

I'll try and post more information here as I continue to work on this project. Feel free to post suggestions in this thread. There's no guarantee that I'll be able to implement everything users have suggested, but I hope this version will be a significant improvement over the previous.

Android: Two New Apps

It's now possible to download limited versions of my Wine Diary and Beer Journal applications from the Android Market. These are already available for $.99, but the limited versions exclude the ability to upload recommendations (you can view only) and include ads.

More information:

• Beer Journal


• Wine Diary