You're my favorite (Java) mistake

The most stupid mistake in Java I made (at least for this year):

Reading a (URLConnection) stream using a BufferedReader while it is ready(), instead of until readLine() returns null.

I wonder what led me to it...
Well, it is a bad idea - very bad, indeed.
Especially a Reader from a 3MB URLConnection is more !ready() then ready(), so it quite frequently terminated (silently) before its time.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, ...

Sun Weblog Publisher - waiting, waiting

There is still no news about a Sun Weblog Publisher that works with (the new) blogger, aka blogger2.

Please !!!

My first glimpse at Thunderbird2

I just downloaded the Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 rc2 to take a look on whats ahead.

One really neat feature I was craving for is the Advanced Folder View, i.e. in the folder pane you can now select which folders you want to see:

• all
• favorite
• Unread
• Recent (i.e. Most resently used)

This comes quite close to what I was used from Microsoft Outlook with the favorite's pane to the left. Granted, I haven't been using Outlook for the last 4 years now, but I still was missing the favorite folder pane from it.

Having all the unread folders in one list is quite handy when you have multiple accounts, news-groups and RSS feeds to look at.

Another cool feature is the promotion of labels from earlier versions to Tags. With labels you couldn't really do a lot... but now you can create any custom tag and assign any number of tags to a message. Of course you can search and filter by tags...

TB2 also supports Google Mail, just give your (real) name and gmail account – and that's it. Sadly, it's just pop3, so any additional info in gmail, e.g. tags are not visible to TB2...

While setting up gmail I noticed that the New Mail Notification alert/popup has now a lot more information... comes with Sender and Subject.

You can now Find text within the message just like in Firefox..

Also it seems to run quite stable... no problem encountered so far.

On the downside, none of my Extensions work with TB2... I guess most of them just don't declare TB2 support instead of having a real technically issue.

Making Firefox more del.icio.us

del.icio.us: making Firefox more del.icio.us.
del.icio.us released a new Firefox extension (oops: add-on of course, since FF2) which is now a lot more interactive and bookmark like.

Wifi Router replacement

I finally replaced my broken Netgear with a Linksys WRT54GL...
Works great so far.
Well, once I remembered that my DSL provider (AON) is not using PPPoE but PPTP...

Wow - there is something Google does NOT know.

I logged into my Google Docs & Spreadsheets again this morning, and look what I found:

Well of course the hint is very helpful... my last use of Google docs it really has been a couple of weeks ago...
and it is totally nice of them to
a) hide old documents and
b) tell me where to find them again.


BUT...

How come Google does not know that it "has been more than a month"... they know everything about me, but not when I last used on of their (major) applications ?

Come on...

This should actually read: "It has been more than a month, so please check ...." and not be phrased as a question.

Great SOA vendor review

Well, one might still argue about the term "SOA vendor" ... but here's an excellent rating
Service Architecture - SOA: SOA Vendor Ratings - Q1 2007

(and it is an excellent blog, btw)

My readership

This is the geo-map of you (as in Time's definition of it) from last December until today. According to Google Analytics.

Yes, there is quite high a concentration in (and around) my hometown, Vienna, Austria, but otherwise quite international, I'd say.

So thanks to all of you out there

Apple's Boot Camp 1.2 supports Windows Vista - Engadget

I guess it's time for me to finally get my Mac...

Apple's Boot Camp 1.2 supports Windows Vista - Engadget

Engadget: mobile phone brands

Don't look now, but that Nokia in your pocket means you're over the hill - Engadget:

Nokia: Family-minded, middle aged managers, balance seekers, health conscious

Motorola: Fashion conscious, under 24, fun seekers, individualistic

Sony Ericsson: Ambitious young men, professionals, success driven, individualistic

LG: Favorite of mums, stay-at-home parents, success driven, harmony seekers

Samsung: Young women, career focused, success driven, fun seekers

Although from down under, it's not that different here in Austria
(No Australia - Austria jokes, please)

What a non-event...

CXOtoday.com > News > Business > BEA, CA Ally for IAM: "BEA Systems, Inc. and CA, Inc. have announced a partnership for identity and access management (IAM) across the enterprise."

so what...

Scott Rosenberg: Dreaming in Code

I just finished reading Scott Rosenberg's very insightul journal-like book about the opensource Chandler project:

Dreaming in Code

Excellent book; a must (just like Joel Spolsky's writings) for everyone responsible for SW development.

Frankly, I sometimes had the feeling he was not too sure about how familiar his (intended) audience is about development.

But boy, it does good to be reminded of Brooks again (and again).

URLFixer update for Austria needed

I just notices that URLFixer converts .gv.at to .gov.at, which is wrong...
I hope Christopher Finke will change it.

displaytag library fix details

I noticed some interest in my post about the fix in the displaytag libarary and have recently also been asked to post the fix:
here's what I did to the org.displaytag.decorator.TotalTableDecorator.java file:

public final String finishRow()
{
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer(1000);

// Grand totals...
Object decoratedObject = getDecoratedObject();
int decObjSize=0;

if (decoratedObject instanceof Collection)
{
decObjSize = ((Collection)decoratedObject).size();
}
else
{
if (decoratedObject instanceof SortedMap[] )
{
decObjSize = ((Object[])decoratedObject).length;
}
}

if (getViewIndex() == (decObjSize - 1))
{
if (groupPropertyName != null)
{
buffer.append(createTotalRow(false));
}
buffer.append(createTotalRow(true));
}
return buffer.toString();
}

the main thing is that I also accept Arrays and not only Lists (as in the original code)

Engadget: Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things

The funny thing about Google is, that every single aspect of their datacenters (n.b. the plural here) is a large enough sample for statistics.

No surprise therefore, that statistcs like the following can be release:
Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things - Engadget

URLFixer update for Austria

Chris fixed URLFixer to not-rewrite orf.at. Thanks
Sorry, Austria :: Now I Have a Blog Too

New Flickr Feature

A great new feature that make flickr even more collaborative/social/linked/... as reported on FlickrBlog:

"Invite a Photo
You're surfing through the Flickrverse and you find a photo that would be perfect for your group. This new feature will allow an administrator to invite that particular photo to their group without membership requirement. You'll see a new link under the comment box that says ‘Invite this photo to...’

The Human Clock

There are a couple of sites on the web (1.0, 2.0, whatever, I don't really care), where you can really get lost following the links - in a positive way.
E.g. imdb, partly wikipedia, and also flickr.

While "surfing flickr" I stumbled upon this nice web-site:
The Human Clock™ - A Clock Photo for Every Minute of the Day
There is a different picture for each minute of the day showing the current time of day.
Actually for most of the "minutes" there is more than just one picture, which makes it a lot more fun to watch the time go by.

Totally cool idea and well done.

DSL flat rate - finally

Finally in Austria broadband providers are moving to true flat-rates, i.e. without any fair use clause.

Mine, too.

So from 15GB fair use a month, I'm now on a true flat-rate.

Love it.

Of course, this renders my Google-Desktop-Gadget that shows my current DSL usage totally useless, not only because without limit I don't care about the usage, but also because the use statistics of my provider no longer shows any volume.

As a side note to flat-rates:
There is currently a lot of stir in the mobile arena in Austria, because what some mobile operators advertised as a free flat-rate - of course - turned out to have a fair use clause, and they started to threat the users who were above the limit. Lawyers and courts are already employed, and operators have changed the small print to some larger font in the mean time.
The main problem was that they advertised free off-net calls including mobile to fixed-line, which in turn are not free to the operator, because they have to pay interconnection and of course they have limited intentions to pay for that endlessly...

Well, there is no free lunch, how often do we have to repeat that...

Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 Released

My TB has just been updated to 1.5.0.10.
The fix I'm particularly interested in is:

• Fixed: 363113 - Thunderbird autocomplete freezes up to 1 minute after typing one or two characters of an email address

I was suffering from this one several times a day... I hope this is really gone now.