Think I have sussed it....

For those of you that follow me on twitter [@spences10] you will know that I have been obsessing [quite possibly needlessly] over the battery life of my HTC Desire Z, when I first got the phone I was quite impressed with the battery life of it but soon after I noticed that I couldn't get through a day without a juice up several times through the day.

I have tried all the usual things recommended like getting juice defender from the market and other things like apn droid again from the market but none of the seemed to make any difference at all I gave juice defender several weeks to give it a good run to no avail.

So I had been using my phone either by disabling the 3g whilst not using the phone but its a bit of a pain having to keep toggling the 3g all the time, I even got tasker but that thing just blows my mind with all the options there are on it so have left that one on the back burner for now.

It wasn't until I cam across this post in the cyanognemod forums which I gave a try this morning and it looks pretty impressive so far.

Take a look at the screenshots for yourself:
Before

After unchecking the first two options here:

Now its just a case of getting faniliar with tasker so that I can disable/enable GPRS/Wireless Networks when app that need to use them are opened. I will post back any details of how to create the tasker profiles when I get it sussed out.

Java and me

Wow, the last few days have been pretty intense learning about java

Well when I say intense the only thing intense is the rate at which we are expected to take in all the information we have just been given and translate that into code.

There were prerequisites for doing the course all of which I had grasp of, I have been a VBA, Excell & Access developer for the past five years or so now so I have an understanding or Object Oriented Programming.

I think my main gripe is that the literature provided doesn't give examples of what needs doing so the time spent in the labs was trying to figure out what you are trying to do without any guidance or solutions so I'm constantly on the back foot trying to catch up.

Apart from that it's been a really interesting few days.

More to that, today I learned all about apache and tomcat - this is some pretty powerful stuff.