Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 136 of 141 (2815 total posts)

June 2004

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 ...

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[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

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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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 🙂

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.

BlogBridge – coming along!

It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridgewith goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development. Keep those cards and letters coming in!

Best leather cases for Treo 600 and others

Scott Kirsner turned me on to Vaja Leather Products. This outfit supplies what look to be the coolest possible leather cases for Treo 600s, other PDAs, Digital Cameras, Cellphones or what not, that you’d like to attach to your hip. Very cool for the jet-set. Take a look.

BlogBridge – Quiet but Busy!

It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridge with goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development.

Had enough yet?

Hard to believe what we are hearing these days, isn’t it? The link is to an summary about the Prison scandal, with lots of links to other reputable publications, putting the pieces of the puzzle together.