The Daily Telegraph has some RSS 2.0 feeds available, so go forth and aggregate.
Dan is making posts via a neighbours wireless network, who seems to have no idea what’s going on. This scares me. I think I’ll hold off going wireless for the moment.
When attempting to understand a new concept, for most of us there comes that moment of clarity where the new concept just ‘clicks’. We go from a muddled understanding of a new idea granted by wading through manuals, listening to explanations or even banging our heads against a brick wall, to getting to an underlying clear realisation of what the thing actually is. I still remember back at university when I first understood how the command-listener pattern worked (and at the time how patterns as a whole were useful), or the watershed moment when sed’s regular expressions looked less like hieroglyphics and more like the answer to so many prayers.
More recently I’ve been searching for the same level of understanding with a few topics, however I’ve only been partially successful. My “Hibernate”:http://www.hibernate.org/ application works perfectly, and I am happy to carry on developing it, but a underlying knowledge of how Hibernate itself works still escapes me (this is mostly due to laziness however – Hibernate just works so I lack the desire to dig any deeper). Things with the “Spring Framework”:http://www.springframework.org/ in some regards has gone a little better, however the MVC web framework still seems overly complicated and at times a little muddled (although this could be down to my years of Struts use). Finally, my dabbling with CSS has resulted in some nice results, however most of this has be achieved by hacking other peoples code around – half the time I don’t really know what I’m doing with it. I’m starting to worry that as I get older my ability (and to some extent desire) to properly understand new concepts is diminishing. Either that or I’m just lacking the time to properly put in to these new projects – most of this has been done in my spare time.
Come the New Year, I think I’m going to have to think more deeply about what I actually want to do with myself – work hasn’t raised a new challenge for me in months and I’m worried that my brain is starting to atrophy. In the meantime lots of new technology is being released and is passing me by – but I suspect I’m not the only person in this situation.
Right now, I am supposed to be on my way to seeing the “Flaming Lips”:http://www.flaminglips.com/main.php, one of the best live bands on the planet, at the “Hammersmith Apollo”:http://www.carlinglive.com/venue_content/carling_hammersmith_apolo.html. Instead, I am trying to work out why one of our warehouse management systems stopped working, and why even after I’ve cobbled together a fix for a problem I don’t understand won’t it accept a file its been accepting quite happily for the last couple of months. An even bigger problem is that I don’t have the file the file in question to hand – its being emailed to me as we speak. So I’m just sitting around, waiting for the ruddy file to arrive, which inevitably will of been mangled by someone at the warehouse…oh well…
_Updated 7:29pm_: Well, finally got the email at the second attempt, everythings sorted so now its time for a mad dash across London to try and get to the concert in time….who wants a bet that the underground will get flooded or something?
Bram has hit the nail “right on the head”:http://advogato.org/person/Bram/diary.html?start=97when he says that what users actually want in software and what they actually ask for can often be two completely different things. Most of us who have developed software have probably come across various forms of user driven software design. The central principal behind such development processes is to sit down with your prospective user and work out what they want, such requirements being detailed as Use Cases, or Stories (in XP parlance) or whatever. What people commonly forget is that recording what the user says they want is not really the job, its about working out what they actually want and helping them understand this. Never let your marketing department gather user requirements – you’ll end up attempting to deliver a product too soon packed with fancy features that don’t actually address what the users real requirements are. Don’t let your manager do it either – every added layer of communication between the developer and a user is an opportunity for miscommunication. I know it can be a drag, but making the effort to develop a meaningful business relationship with your user can drastically reduce the chances of feature creep and can help produce software that the user really loves. And a happy user is more likely to be a repeat customer after all…
For a while now some colleagues have been raving about XPath, but I must admit its something I’ve never really looked into. In a brief post Simon has managed to not only explain what XPath is, but also why its so damn handy. I would quote from his post, but its some concise there isn’t any real point – go read it for yourselves! He goes on to mention that those of us with valid XHTML markup (I knew there was a reason I did it) can use XPath queries to search our websites, and the search engine on Sam Ruby’s blog allows you to do just that.
Jeremy Zawodny is “fighting back( Jeremy Zawodny’s blog- Cheap Viagra, Vicodin, Xanax, Prescription Drugs, and Penis Enlargement Pills!!!)”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001002.html, by trying to beat the spammers at their own game. Comment spammers are trying to make sure that search phrases such as those mentioned in this posts title will match their site. They’re doing this by posting links to their websites with the phrases thereby warping Goggle’s page rank. Jeremy is hoping his post will get enough Trackbacks (like the one I’m sending) so that his post will actually come out top and annoy all those spammers. Lets see what happens…
The secret of good UI design (well, one of them anyway) is knowing how you work and helping you do just that. The RSS feed aggregator “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp is a case in point. As I have said before, I think FeedDemon is fantastic, this opinion being reinforced by something I noticed today. I was looking at a blog in Firebird and decided to add it to FeedDemon (it was actually “Small Values of Cool”:http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/, which for some reason I’ve been reading for ages via a browser rather than an aggregator). So I clicked the syndicate link, copied the link and went to FeedDemon. Clicking the “Add Feed” button and I found that it automatically got the URL from the clipboard! A very small and simple thing, but one that really works, and works well.
Another secret of good UI design? Well, that would be changing the way you work to make you work more efficiently, all the while making the transition between working practises as seamless as possible. Something else FeedDemon has done for me.
Shirley E. Kaiser’s very good “Brainstorms and Raves”:http://brainstormsandraves.com/ has been on my blog roll since I started reading blogs regularly. It was therefore a little distressing to see that a web-hosting company has “stolen over 2,400 resources(Brainstorms & Raves – Stealing My Content… Again)”:http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/09/25/stealing/ of Shirley’s and passed them off as their own. The web-hosting company in question is “Cheetah Solutions”:http://cheetahsolutions.com/, who deserve a damn good kicking if you ask me.
Some tard is at it again. This time however the comment was not a piece of spam trying to sell herbal Viagra. I include my response to this person in full:
Dear Mishka,
Contrary to your comments on my blog concerning the post “Another Blog tool –
w.bloggar”:“Mishka rules !”
I will think you’ll find that you do not in fact “rule” in any shape or form. I
would go as far to say that you do in fact “suck” for your blatant spam tactics
in using my blog as a way of advertising your own website which is little more
that an under construction page, and a bad one at that.Don’t do it again.
It won’t surprise any of you that this person had an AOL mail account.
_Updated: 26/09/2003 11:01AM_: Naturally the email address given was fake – so I have sent the email on to the one given on his website.
magpiebrain 