Blog Yellek

Well at least that what is being said by Wally McClure over at MoreWally.com. He’s commenting in his podcast on my post on the O’Reilly Q2 book data and how the -10% for Java books is indicative of the general state of Java. I think though that the following comment from O’Reilly director of research Roger Magoulas in the original post sheds some light on the numbers:

I’ll point out another example of why book results require careful analysis: The new Microsoft products released in Nov 2005, C# 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (I’m skipping Visual Basic 2005 - so far gone it doesn’t register) show big increases in book sales. When we look at the job data we don’t see any corresponding changes. We also don’t see much overlap between Windows and other development environments (e.g., ~14% of Windows .Net oriented job postings also include Java). So, our conclusion is that the new version - the first in five years - generated a lot of developer interest in Windows shops, but doesn’t represent a trend towards increased use of Microsoft products.

The other thing to note is that Java 5, probably the biggest Java release since Java 1.2, had it’s first beta in early February 2004 and it was released in September 2004. This means that book sales for Java 5 would have been going strong in Q2 2005. A year later Java 5 is old news with Java 6 not yet released and so the year on year book sales have declined.

I’m predicting that in Q1or Q2 next year when the Microsoft November 2005 release book bubble has passed that the O’Reilly numbers will show massive declines in .Net book sales prompting predictions of .Net’s demise.

What do they say about statistics?

There is an interesting article over at O’reilly Radar on the State of the Computer Book Market, Q206 which gives some figures on the popularity of various technologies based on the value of books sold in Q2 2006. Along with the analysis there are some really cool treemaps showing the trends.

If the figures are to be believed, Java is down, .Net is up and Ajax technologies are hot, especially Javascript and Ruby. The in depth analysis by O’Reilly suggests that books tend to reflect things that are new better than existing popular technologies so this isn’t a harbinger of a Microsoft slam dunk on the technology front but does shed some light on what you see on bookshelves. Book sales seem to be the opposite of the long tail.

The other interesting trend is the popularity of books on blogging and podcasting, technologies that have been around for a while (this blog has been going for 3 years in one form or another) and yet seem to be undergoing something of a rennaisance in the book world. I’m certainly seeing the shape of blogging changing from some sort of day to day diary to something more serious, maybe because of the podcasts I’m listening to.

As for my own book buying future the next book I have on order is Getting Things Done by David Allen which is an attempt on my part to attack my lack of organization and focus. After that I’m thinking that the new Groovy in Action book is a must have and maybe some books on Javascript or CSS. Now all I have to do is make room in my life to read all these books. Hopefully the GTD book will help with that.

Why is it so hard to get TV episodes in order for Australian TV networks? Surely they come in video cassettes or some such with little numbers on them? 11 comes after 10 and all that? It’s annoying enough with House which at least has the same characters all the way through but when it comes to NCIS where one of the characters died in an earlier episode but keeps popping up due to the ineptitude of channel 10 to get the tapes in order it is beyond a joke. Can’t they employ even a work experience student that can actually count for goodness sake?

Lesley Ey has written a good foundational article about Why go to Church?
that is worth checking out. It goes through a few of the reasons on why finding a church is important as a Christian and there are links to how to find a good one and even how to become a Christian in the first place.

Worth a look.

Today I stumbled upon a really great site called Wikimapia. It’s a mashup based on Google maps that adds the capability to mark places of interest and add text describing each one including tags. You can then filter the list that’s shown on your map by particular tags like golf etc. and do searches. This is really slick piece of work and, judging by the number of places that have been marked already, really popular, particularly in India.

The really compelling feature of this is how easy it is to add a place annotation, you just click in the menu, move the box to where it is needed and fill in the name and other information. Your place then appears right there on the map. I managed to tag 7 or 8 places in Adelaide myself today including the infamous Britannia Roundabout, Paradise Community Church and Pino’s Pizzeria.

Recommended.

Jace Kiran is only one of a number of people blogging about BlogSpot (and other sites) being blocked by Indian ISPs It appears that this is a knee jerk reaction to the Mumbai terrorist bombings designed to show that the government is taking action.

Whilst there are certainly censorship implications on this I think that the real issue here is that governments just don’t understand technology and yet they feel that they need to control it. Whether it is Senator Ted Stephens in the US describing the internet as a collection of tubes or attempts to get my local member to recognize the evils of DRM the level of technical knowledge by politicians is laughable at best and frightening at worst. Look at all the aspects of our lives that are regulated by technology and the importance it has in our society and compare that to the level of understanding by our lawmakers. The disconnect scares me a lot.

We might think that because this is India this will never happen in one of our western democracies but if we don’t do something about the level of ignorance by our politicians similar knee jerk catastrophies or worse could easily happen here.

Update: It appears as if the banning was simply a result of a large number of Indian ISP’s getting it wrong.

I am constantly amazed by the number of people (myself included) that have a negative view of themselves when others around them can clearly see the strengths that they have. Our capacity to overlook our own strengths and focus on our  perceived weaknesses seems to be never ending.

Is it because we just assume that our strengths are average and thus our weaknesses dominate or is it because we have a personal bias towards the negative? How can we have a better appreciation of ourselves?

God’s view of us is positive. He made us a perfect creation and died on the cross to restore us from our fallen state to that perfect state once again so somehow we need to get more of God’s view of us than our negative perceptions.

The opposite is also true, thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to but I don’t see that failing as much.

Paradise Community Church is a place where much is asked of the congregation. We are constantly exhorted to become involved, to do more, to give more, to serve. At every turn it seems that there is more we can do in our Christian lives. We are encouraged to go to church twice on Sunday, to life group every fortnight and 30 Something every 2 weeks. We are asked to read 4 chapters of the bible every day and write about it as well as praying. We are encouraged to give 10% of our income to the church. We are also encouraged to devote time to serving in some area of the church. On top of that there are many courses to help us enrich our spiritual life, conferences and special events to go to as well as prayer and fasting for special needs. All of this can add up to many hours a week.

Why would anyone devote so much time and effort to the church? Is all of that necessary? In looking at that list all together it seems wearying to me and yet I do most if not all of those things every week (and more, leadership brings its own set of expectations) and I do them gladly.

To those outside our church in other Christian denominations this begins to raise some very real questions: Why should a church set the standard of Christianity so high? Didn’t Jesus die on the cross so that we could have free access to salvation? Why then must we do all of these things so that we can be Christians? Who does the church think they are to demand this of us? Can’t we just decide for ourselves what is reasonable for us? So much commitment is unhealthy and I need to look after myself, don’t I know what is best for my life? It’s between me and God. I don’t trust the leadership of this church to look after my welfare, I have to look after myself. Why should I feel a constant sense of guilt at not measuring up when the message of the church is God’s grace and freedom from rules and regulations.

These are good questions. I know of people both within and outside our church who struggle with many of them and I admit to struggling with some of them myself from time to time. At the moment this seems to be a relevant issue to where a number of people I know are at so I’m going to have a go at providing some answer and explanation to them. I’m not going to be able to give a perfect answer so feel free to talk back in the comments so that together we can come to a better understanding.

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Vasanth Dharmaraj has figured out a way to get my favorite feed reader set up as the default in Firefox 2.0.