Walking the Garmin Plank

Many months ago I purchased the Garmin FR60 for my triathlon training. It turns out that if you do not want GPS this is the perfect watch for you. It has everything a triathlete needs to train (when not in the water). It a has heart rate monitor, can connect to a cadence monitor (it effectively can serve as your bike computer), pacing capabilities, and can connect to a foot pod. See the Garmin site for more information. I, of course, decided that GPS is a must have.

Since I have already bought Garmin compatible add ons I will be sticking to Garmin. After weighing in on everything I wanted the choices came down to the Garmin 310XT and the Garmin 305. The main difference between the two watches is that the 310XT is water proof and is supposed to be able to be used on the swim. After reading many complaints about how this capability just does not work as advertised I decided to hold off on this technology until it matures (especially since the 310 XT is $350 and the 305 if $127 on Amazon.com).

Both watches are extremely large. I happened to be in Best Buy and saw a 305. You will not be winning any fashion contests wearing either watch. Swimming with one on your wrist seems like it would be annoying. Nearly settling for the 305 I looked at the FR410 and the FR405CX. Both are much smaller and would be the perfect GPS watch for a Triathlete. There is nothing different between the two outside of color and a slight price difference. Both have all of the same capabilities as the FR60 plus GPS and some other fancy pants features (such as Waypoints, "workouts", and custom courses) that you will likely never use. That being said I would still go for one of the GPS watches right off the bat.

In the end it turns out that I really wanted a GPS for my bike so I decided to get a bike specific computer instead. Which one? It is most likely going to be the Garmin Edge 500.

Running an Eclipse application on Snow Leopard

Today I was trying to run the Eclipse RCP "Hello World" application with a view on my Mac. I was getting the following stack trace when trying to run the app:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load 32-bit SWT libraries on 64-bit JVM
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:182)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:159)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.C.(C.java:21)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.createDisplay(Display.java:973)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.create(Display.java:967)
at org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Device.(Device.java:125)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:775)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:766)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createDisplay(Workbench.java:532)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createDisplay(PlatformUI.java:161)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.createDisplay(IDEApplication.java:143)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:88)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:194)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:368)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:559)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:514)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1311)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1287)

I turns out that the Eclipse SWT libraries will not run with a 64 bit jvm. I came across this blog which explained how to fix. The short and sweet answer is to add the -d32 as a vm arg in the run configuration.

President-Elect Barack Obama on Election Night

I love this speech. Obama is one of the best motivators this country has ever seen.

Laughing Baby

Laughing Baby
Originally uploaded by tamcknight

This is a video of my son Brady at the age of 9 months. This makes me
smile every time I see it. Our dog, Bailey, is great with the kids.

More Multitouch Devices

The multitouch revolution continues as the cell phone has become the killer application that brings multitouch to the mainstream. The iPhone was the first followed by many imitators that have not faired so well. Now Blackberry has stepped up with the Blackberry Thunder. This will probably become the first feel head to head competitor to the iPhone given the amount of corporate users of Blackberrys.

Mutlitouch's place in the everyday lives of people is still unknown. It is not the silver bullet that many tout it to be. On home pc's it may not replace the mouse like I one thought it would. As I type this is sit about 2 feet from my mac. If my monitor were multitouch I would be sitting much closer to my monitor or have to stretch over to move the cursor. Future state may be that the mouse does not go away, but multitouch is just an added feature.

The areas that come to mind where I see it being used sooner rather than later is design and when people have to browse something. It is nice just to flip through pictures as if it were pages in a book. In the area of design there are efficiency gains when you are able to move design features. Would it be easier to shape playdoh with your hands of with a mouse on a computer?