[GEEK] Ever get confused about logging.properties formats?
I know I do! Here’s a very concise summary of the syntax that will jog your memory when it needs to be jogged! Syntax for Log4j Cheat Sheet
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
Page 136 of 142 (2821 total posts)
June 2004
BlogBridge beta is ON!
Here’s the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂 “Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going: This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us! One of our expectations of you...
Read more →Cross Platform, for real!
We are busy getting BlogBridgeready for beta (send email if you want to participate.) I hope we are only days away. But in doing that, and updating the web site, I thought this might be of interest… Java really works! Here are three screen shots of BlogBridge, on ...
Read more →RSS not yet mainstream?
Another article in the New York Times about RSS: “Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings” You know we are not yet mainstream when the abbreviation periods are included in the name R.S.S. I mean when’s the last time you saw H.T.M.L. or for that matter I.B.M?
What’s a beta, anyway?
BlogBridgeis getting ready to go into a limited beta test. The purpose is to get some early feedback on the basic User Interface model and the overall product vision. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to email@blogbridge.com. Doing a beta when...
Read more →BlogBridge beta update
The beta test is almost ready to go. The plan is that it will start very small, with only a few users, and then based on feedback and results we will expand it as we release revisions and updates. If you are interested in joining up, send me email at beta@blogbridge.com.
Pop!Tech Ticket!
Pop!Tech is one of my all time favorite conferences. So favorite that I bought a ticket for this year’s event way in advance. I have hit an insurmountable schedule problem and so I have to miss it this year. So, I have a ticket that I can’t use, they won’t refund (the X*&!@(#&!@#’s) but I can transfer. And it is substantially cheaper than what they are charging now because of when I bought it. If you are interested please contact me directly by email.
May 2004
[Geek] Getting ftp task to work in Ant / Eclipse
Note to self: The FTP task in Ant relies on the library: commons-net.jar from Apache. Be not confused, this is different from the library: ant-commons-net.jar, which I believe is the Ant interface to commons-net.jar. In other words, you need them both, in ant_homelib. If they are not both there you can a ridiculously cryptic error message. ** p.s. Didn’t I say “GEEK” ?**Dave, thanks for the words of encouragement.
Musings on Open Source licensing
As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I’d try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I’ve been working on and which is soon ...
Read more →[Geek] Debugging focus problems
Struggling with debugging hairy focus and other UI problems in Swing (Java)? Here’s a handy little tip that I just found out about: When running a Java application, type Ctrl-Shift-F1 and the VM will dump the components hierarchy into standard output. p.s. Editorial comment: I question whether I should enter these super-geeky-limited-interest notes here. In the end, as I am using this blog as my personal lab notebook I decided that it’s ok even though it might put some people off. My new standard is that I will precede the title with [geek] to give early warning and allow people to skip it.
Funny American Idol commentary
Yes, I guess some of you have never seen American Idol, so you wouldn’t appreciate this ironic and funny commentary: “Finally, following a sax rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by a former idol, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and John Kerry could stand up, holding hands, trembling but beaming encouragement to each other, as Ryan announced our next American president. “ In ‘American Idol’ Democracy, Fantasia Wins
Spam now two thirds of all email!
It’s even worse than you thought: “E-mail security firm MessageLabs’ filtering statistics for April, which were published on Monday, show that 67.6 percent of all global e-mail traffic is spam.” See: Spam Now two thirds of email
Discovering RSS feed URLs
Scoblebemoans the fact that folks aren’t all using the XML Icon, and he cites Random Bytes. (Lucky Random Bytes for being mentioned by Scoble. As they say in Holleywood, you can say anything you like about me, just as long as you spell my ...
Read more →Fair Use of Share-your-OPML?
One of the core goals of BlogBridgeis to give a newbie a quick and delicious taste of the world of blogs. One of the very first steps of course is to decide what feeds to follow. Other blog readers come with an initial set of feeds built in or offer the user to pick fro...
Read more →Words do matter, Part Deux
I don’t know, this seems to be a topic near and dear to my heart! Thanks to Eric Heelsfor pointing to this classic Dilbert: 
BlogBridge – Major progress!
This is getting interesting. In the last few weeks we’ve added a bunch of new features and we are now in the final stabilization of this release to make it suitable as a beta. While it is still way less featurefull than for example FeedDemon, we do have some very neat wrinkles that others don’t have. Try it!
Words DO matter
I was scanning Jon Udell’s blog and came across the following: “Plog is a brand-new word that’s even uglier (if possible) than blog. But the words don’t matter*. What’s striking is how the art of storytelling — our instinctive human way of mak...
Read more →Still can learn more,,,
If you are doing Java programming, check out Hardcore Java by Robert Simmon Jr. It’s a idiosyncratic tour through many very interesting advanced Java topics. My wife who sees another Java book sprout on my table every week wonders why it’s taking me so long to learn this “Java” thing 🙂
Opera and RSS
Various peopleare saying that Opera, with it’s new release, is the first email client to integrate RSS access. Not true. Oddpost, a very nice and unique web-based mail client has had this for a while. I recommend it.
Moving from Radio to Movable Type
I’ve seen some discussionon the issues related to changingblog infrastructure from one system to another. In my case, I moved from Radio to Movable Type. My experience is that is was pretty easy to move the data (no data lock in) but the problem was the urls. Even if you take steps to make sure that the root url doesn’t change, the individual post and archive urls will probably change which means that anyone linked to your blog before will stay linked to your old blog and so you will experience a disruption in your traffic.