Blog Yellek

For a while now I have been lamenting the lack of a trackback feature for anyone using blogger.com as their blogging software. It was one of the primary reasons for me moving from blogger to Wordpress. Since I have moved over to Wordpress I am liking it very much, I don’t think I have begun to explore all the possibilities yet but I must say I love what I can do already.

For people still on blogger though there is a solution of sorts: the backlinks feature. Backlinks work by doing a blog search for the URL of the post and then appending the link of the person who has linked to you on the bottom of your post. The help page has more details and describes how to turn backlinks on (under the settings | comments tab), the template changes that might be required for older templates to incorporate backlinks and how backlinks can be turned off for individual posts.

I know some of my regular readers use Blogger.com so I thought I would point them to this little tip so that they can get notification when I comment on their blogs. Of course if you want full trackback and commenting support on blogger or other blogging software that doesn’t support trackbacks there is always Haloscan’s free trackback service.

Really good discussion on code unit testing by Cedric Beust on his blog. It is worth reading through the comments on the bottom of the post too to get the different opinions expressed. A really good discussion of the pros and cons of automated unit testing and coverage. I particularly liked the comment by Neil Bartlett:

Half of the time I spend writing JUnit tests is wasted. Unfortunately I don’t know which half.

I just wish that the coding practices at my daytime place of employment had reached the level of maturity that is taken for granted by many of the people commenting on this post.

David Goodman has come up with a new analogy to explain RSS in his post Newbie to Ninja 3 - Beginners Guide to RSS and Bloglines where he compares RSS to someone trying to check all the odds at different bookies at a race track. I also did a post trying to explain RSS to someone who hasn’t seen it before but this is a really great analogy too.

Clifton Craig has started an interesting series over on his blog called Groovy Invaders where he is attempting to write a space invaders game in Groovy using JOGL for the graphics routines.

I know I don’t have time to follow this but it is interesting to see the diversification of what people are doing with Groovy and the increasing usage of the language in new and interesting areas. I’ve already blogged on what I think of Grails which seems to me to offer all of the advantages of Ruby On Rails but with application server support and a smaller learning curve for Java programmers.

We are also using Groovy at work in a limited way to provide us some functionality in our ant build environment.

Groovy is one of those languages that when you “get” it makes you wonder why you were doing things any other way.

Just saw an interesting article on the Blog adoption process describing how people adopt the blog culture. An interesting sequence of steps (even if there are 2 step number 4’s).

I’m not sure that most of my family (read “distance friends” from the original post) other than my brother “get” blogging yet but I’m working on them

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.

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.