My MiniPauker application is now feature complete for its future stable release.

You ask what MiniPauker is all about? Here it is:
MiniPauker is a flash card based learning application for mobile devices and handhelds. It is based on the leitner cardfile system and is compatible with Pauker (http://pauker.sf.net, the desktop version of this software). MiniPauker uses a combination of ultra-shortterm, shortterm, and longterm memory. You can use it to learn all the things you never want to forget any more, like vocabulary, capitals, and important dates.

Following changes were incorporated:
Cards can now be drawn randomly. Cards which are not learned in “ultrashort-term” go back to be relearned immediately in the next round. UTF-8 was fixed (for Sony Ericsson). The progress bar was fixed. Exception handling in background tasks was fixed. Umlauts were fixed. The code was cleaned up. The UI was polished. Import/Export works now – hopefully – on all devices which support the file connection API JSR-75; exception are those (stupid) mobiles which need a code signing certificate *AAAAAAArgh*. If JSR-75 is not available on a particular phone the im-/export functionality is disabled completely which is not misleading users.

My personal summary of J2ME:
J2ME alone is very very limited in general, but this is on purpose; we shouldn’t forget that it was designed for very limited (mobile) devices. J2ME-Polish helps to improve J2ME significantly and at the end of the day you can do some useful stuff in the way you want it.

Personally the most annoying and frustrating “ISSUE” with J2ME is that it behaves differently amongst various devices. It almost always works in the way you want it in the SUN WTK emulator, it also works great in the IBM J9 implementations for Palm and Pocket PCs … but for the rest of the world it is a lot of trouble. The last weekend I managed to fix some more bugs which only (!) occurred on Sony Ericsson phones, and I am sure there are some more bugs with other brands too. It seems the specifications are not always implemented correctly – and this makes live different – at least if you are used to work with SUNs well behaved standard SDK :)

Anyway … I will continue maintaining the MiniPauker application. I quite like it these days. It does its job nicely and it seems people out there like it as well. If you want to provide feedback, please feel free! Thanks!

Great news – at least they are great for me: I am a solo pilot again :)

In the last 3 month I had something like 8 hours flight with instructors. I was not pushing things to become solo; sometimes we had a great soaring day so I simply improved my thermalling skills and enjoyed to see the world from a birds perspective (rather than training starts and landings in particular – which is the thing which stops you to solo at some point).

Resume of the last month: The Cambridge (University) Gliding Club is an excellent place! ALL instructors I flew with were absolutely amazing! A BIG thank you! I think I flew with 10 different instructors (out of 30 or 40) and they after every day I though: WOW ;) They have a lot of very very good people there. Many are top people on the BGA ladder or even world champions! The general atmosphere at the club is great, helpful and I always enjoy my time there.