Huawei e169 HSDPA and Windows 7

A lot of people seem to have problems getting the Huawei e169 modem to work on Windows 7. I have a fairly old version (I got it about a year ago) and did notice that the instructions given for Win XP and Vista didn't work. I got the stick to work without updating the firmware by doing the following in our Acer mini laptop:

1. Boot the laptop without the device attached.
2. Attach the device and wait a bit.
3. Remove the device, wait a few seconds and put it back in. Wait until the device driver has been installed (Win7 said something about this in the lower right hand corner).
   
4. Reboot.
   
5. Win7 again opens the dialog that asks if it should run the autorun program. This time do it. This will install the Mobile Partner.

After this I had to fix some settings in the Mobile Partner to get it to work with my ISP but after that the device worked.

Annoying NetBeans bug

Oh man, what an annoying bug. After I updated the project file from version control, NetBeans suddenly decided it can't find some of the packages that worked perfectly well until then. Main problem was org.jdesktop, but even the main class was missing! I tried running clean several times with no effect and restarting NB.

What helped was to remove the NB cache located in ~/.netbeans/x.x/var/cache (x.x = NB version number). I simply closed down NB and deleted the whole cache dir and after restart everything works!

Addendum: this seems to happen regularily if I work on the same project with versions 6.7.1 and 6.8. Whenever I first edit the files with the older version, the newer version requires me to do this fix. I have no problems doing it the other way around.

Wake up, Google!

I finally decided I need to do something with the fact that since I'm using Ubuntu at work but the email they use is Exchange and I can't be arsed to check my laptop all the time, I keep forgetting appointments because they are only visible in Outlook's calendar.

So I installed Google Calendar Sync and started using Google Calendar on my work box. It works, except for one very annoying thing: Live Meetings are not shown in GC. And it's not like Google doesn't know about it. And it shouldn't be too big an issue to fix, either. So wakey, wakey, Google! It's an annoying bug that affects a lot of people, me included.