andrew.serff.net

You may have been hearing people talking about having an ICE contact in your cell phone following the recent London attacks, but don't know what it means. ICE stands for "In Case of Emergency." Below is a piece of a forward I received that decribes where it comes from and how we should all use it. I'm just trying to pass the word on so as many people know what ICE means and so we all have an ICE contact in our phones.

An ambulance paramedic who found that when they went to the scenes of accidents there were always cell phones but they didn't know which numbers to call and he thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name to file "next of kin" under.

Following the disaster in London . . . the East Anglican Ambulance Service have launched a national "In case of Emergency (ICE)" campaign with the support of Falkland's war hero Simon Weston. The idea is that you store the word " I C E " in your cell phone's Address Book which contains the number of the person you would want to be contacted "In Case of Emergency."

In an emergency situation, ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It's so simple that everyone can do it. Please do.

For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

I hope you will all take this to heart and go put an ICE entry into your phone now. Please pass this info on to as many people as you can. It is a simple thing for everyone to do, but it makes no difference if no one knows what it means.

Posted by Andrew at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sony has released a new firmware for the PSP to bump us up to v2.0. This release includes a slew of new features, but the one I'm most excited about is the included Web Browser! It sounds like there is no Flash support yet (and I haven't heard about javascript), but reports are that people are impressed. I've even heard that it has tabbed browsing. The firmware is only available in Japan right now but it will will on US PSP according to many sources (I haven't tried it yet cause I don't have my cable with me.). You can download the new version from IGN here. Yippie! Now I don't have to buy Wipeout Pure!

Posted by Andrew at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just saw this on the internet today and it was the first I had heard of it, so I thought I would pass it on. A new energy bill has been agreed on to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it by one week to the first Sunday in November. This is supposed to save the electric companies (and us I presume) money. I didn't even know this was being considered, but I don't follow politics...so there you have it. It doesn't look like it has been signed into being yet, but it is getting there. Why don't they get rid of day light savings time instead of making it more complicatied??

Posted by Andrew at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looks like Google and NASA are teaming up now to provide us with a cool map of the moon. You can see the location of the landing sites on the moon and zoom in. If you zoom all the way in, you can see where Wallace and Grommit landed! LOL. Thanks for the laugh google! Actually, I'm sorta disapointed you can't see any trace of the landers at all. Not even the flag....hmmm...Anyway, enjoy!

Posted by Andrew at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was lucky enough to go to the JavaOne conference this year in San Fran and it was a blast. I thought I would post a few of the things I saw that were cool and what is going on in the Java world.

First off, Annotations are the bomb. The future of Java started with J2SE 5.0. Annotations are changing EVERYTHING. EJBs, Persistence, JAX-WS, JAXB, EVERYTHING is now reliant on annotations and it makes our lifes as developers 100% easier! No more descriptor files, no more XML files mapping fields in an object to columns in the DB.

Second, the desktop is getting easier to program for. All that custom code you wrote for Splash Screens, Thread Pools, Tray Icons, etc are all either in the JDK, or are going to be in the Mustang release (Java SE 6...yes, they changed the naming convention again...Java SE 6, Java EE 5, Java ME, etc). Swing supports TRUE double buffering so no more big grey rects on refresh, new modal states that fix that annoying dialog behind you netbeans window preventing you from doing anything but beeping a lot among other things. Check out JavaDesktop for more cool stuff.

Looking Glass 3D is still getting better. I'm thinking about playing with that one myself. They now have a webstart version for all to play with! They also had one of those Sharp Laptops with the 3D screen that was pretty cool, but I think it would drive you a bit nutty after a while.

XQuery is the next big thing in XML and will take us even further into the searching area. It is unbelivable what you can do with XQuery. It is just like SQL for XML. It rocks.

Java is everywhere. It was intresting to see the numbers. There are way more Java enabled devices in the world than PCs (like 2.5x more). Brazil is doing awesome stuff with Java in their health department. Java will be in EVERY BlueRay DVD player (yes, that would include the PS3) and they will ALL have a network connection. The BlueRay standard uses Java for all of it's interactive features like menus, subtitles, etc. It rocks.

The lines were crazy, Dennis Miller was funny, the weather was on and off, but all in all was pretty good. I really hope I'll get to go again next year. It was a great learning experience. The only bad thing is that almost everything you learn about you can't use for another year! Oh well, at least we know what to look forward to. Thanks for a great time Sun!

P.S. If you want to know more, post a comment! Ask questions!

Posted by Andrew at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)