Ken Fogel

It is now one week since I upgraded my primary desktop system to Windows 7. I had been an early adopter of Vista and had a number of problems, even an occasional BSOD in the early days. I delayed putting Vista on my school computer because it did not support Novell which is used at Dawson College where I teach. Today I upgraded my school computer and I am fully integrated into the Novell structure. Here is the what and why of what I did, part one. My department at Dawson College subscribes to a program at Microsoft called the MSDNAA that is a subset of the MSDN subscription program for commercial developers. This gave me access to Windows 7 on August 6th. The first decision I had to make was whether to do an upgrade or a clean install. In the days of DOS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 an upgrade involved replacing the hard disk boot code and creating a new directory for the DOS ... (more)

Fall 2009 Java Courses

This coming Fall term I will be teaching two courses at the Concordia University School of Extended Learning or as I like to call it “the department formerly known as Continuing Education”. They are Java Programming Fundamentals on Tuesdays and Web Services and XML Processing on Mondays. The times for both classes are from 6 PM till 10 PM. Java Programming Fundamentals (CEJV419/A1 from 2009-09-15 till 2009-11-17) The objective of this course is to introduce object oriented programming using the Java language to students who have already been exposed to and used another programmin... (more)

Upgrading to Windows 7 – Part Two

With the installation complete it was time to test the critical software I use daily. The first was Microsoft Outlook and as I expected it worked perfectly. So did the rest of the Office suite. Next on my list were the Java environments that I use, Eclipse and NetBeans. First I checked at java.sun.com for newer versions of Java and found a new release 1.6 r15. I downloaded both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. I uninstalled the version I currently had, 1.6 r13, and then installed the new versions. I installed the 32 bit version first followed by the 64 bit version. Going to a com... (more)

My First Week With the Amazon Kindle

Amazon EC2 Session at Cloud Expo New York I received an Amazon Kindle for Xmas. It wasn’t a surprise as I put it on the Xmas list my family insisted I provide. My wife had me order it with her credit card to make sure it was exactly what I wanted. The order was placed at the beginning of December to ensure it would arrive on time. It took just four days to arrive here in Montreal from Amazon in the US. Originally I had the Sony PRS-600 reader on my list. I made the list in mid-November and the Kindle was not available in Canada. But at the end of November Amazon announced it would... (more)

Configuring the PHP Version of Eclipse 3.5 RC4

Step 1: Download and install WampServer Download the latest version of WAMP from here. As of this writing the current version is 2.0h dated 04/16/09 and file you will download is called WampServer2.0h.exe Run the file WampServer2.0h.exe You will be asked to agree to the software license, approve the choice of directory, select the default browser, and decide if you want a desktop and/or quick launch icon. For the directory the default is c:\wamp but you may change to whatever you like. In later steps in this document it will be assumed you selected c:\wamp so change this to your ... (more)