Three till Seven

I got an iPhone 4S today after my AT&T contact expired yesterday. I’m excited to be on Verizon now and will hopefully experience fewer dropped calls. I was with AT&T for seven years, since they were Cingular back in the day, and I finally got tired of the crappy cell service. It was always the most frustrating around UK’s campus, when I would have to try multiple times to even get a call to dial out. It tended to say “call failed” immediately, not even ringing. I’m expecting to like Verizon’s service better, and I’m certainly liking the iPhone 4S over my ancient iPhone 3G. I was surprised to be able to trade in my old 3G for $65; there’s still a demand for them?

I had the idea earlier of displaying a pie chart of my blog’s categories, but didn’t see any WordPress plugins out there to do that. “Well, fine, I’ll write my own!” I thought — so I did. I submitted it for review to be listed on the WordPress plugins site but while it’s under review, you can download it from my Github page.

I’m back from my week and a half in Jersey, helping with requirements gathering for a new project at work. We were originally supposed to have to go back next week for a couple of days, but our project manager was able to push through all the functionality we needed to cover, and he’s satisfied we got what we needed. I’m glad, because I was not looking forward to more indirect flights and getting up at 6 every morning. Our flight home last night involved a layover in Atlanta, which is the silliest thing when traveling from NJ to KY, but there are just no direct flights from Philly to Lexington.

I started playing a new game of Dragon Age 2 last night after about five months of not playing it. As I play through it again, I can’t help but get frustrated all over again with the laziness shown in the game. I thought the game was okay, but like many fans of Dragon Age Origins, DA2 didn’t feel like a proper sequel. There are so many little details that add up to make it seem like the developers were either incredibly rushed or thought the fans were idiots. Lots of things in the game give the feeling of rushing you along, instead of making you want to pay attention to detail and immerse yourself. The lack of item descriptions, for example, along with boring item names. You find dozens of Rings, Belts, and Long Swords, items with completely generic names like that, and items in DA2 have no description, unlike in Origins, so I tend to disregard them as soon as I get them. In Origins, even if I got a plain amulet or a wimpy mace, it had a bit of descriptive text that I wanted to read. “This mace is deceptively heavier than it looks”, something like that, so that even everyday items encouraged a second look before confining them to the junk heap.

I’m going to New Jersey for the first time for work, and I’ll be up there about two and a half weeks. I was asked last week if I’d come along to help with the requirements gathering process for a new project, and I agreed, though I may freeze my tail off. There’s a lot of flying involved because we’ll be coming back to Lexington over the weekends, and we’ll be flying out of Cincinnati instead of Lexington. I’m borrowing a huge suitcase from a coworker since my one medium-sized suitcase won’t cut it for a week-long stay–you can tell I don’t travel much. I doubt I’ll have much time for sight-seeing since we’re doing eight-hour work days, but we’ll probably get to try some good Jersey food: we’ll do lunches with the client and I’ll get dinner with my coworkers.

Recently at work I was tasked with creating a customized Portal theme based on the new 7.0.0.2 theme, which uses Dojo 1.6 and thus supports IE9. I followed all of IBM’s steps for making a copy of the 7.0.0.2 theme’s static files (the non-JSP stuff that you can access via WebDAV), but still my custom 7.0.0.2 wouldn’t load for me. I didn’t modify anything in my copy from the original except the metadata to change the theme name. When I would select my copy as a page’s theme or the Portal default theme, I would just get a white page with a snippet of XML up top, sometimes including an error message. When I checked the Portal logs, I saw error messages pertaining to PageBuilder2–what? PageBuilder2 is the old Portal theme, and the new 7.0.0.2 theme didn’t seem to mention PageBuilder2 anywhere. If you’re experiencing this, here’s what I did to fix it.

I hassled with trying to install the IBM WebSphere Portal Mobile Experience, following the instructions on IBM’s web site, but the theme never showed up on my Portal site. Turns out you need to go into your IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/theme directory and edit components.properties. There should be one line in there: