Great notes on some common mistakes Java developers make from Christopher Owen at Atlassian. I know I’ve explained most of these to a number of new developers – well worth a read even if you’ve been coding in Java for a number of years you may easily have not learned these important lessons. Ephox folk – we learn a lot of interesting tidbits like this both on coding and on XP and development processes and tools – could we take a little time to share them with the world and each other more often?

Going through the process of setting up a new apartment in the UK, I’ve found myself Googling a whole bunch of things that normally I wouldn’t need to. For instance, where can I find a desk and chair to set up a home office? Back in Australia I know of a bunch of different stores that would have that kind of thing so I wouldn’t bother searching for it. Here though, I wind up searching for “home office furniture” and get a whole bunch of online only retailers of widely varying reliability.

After much hassle with getting proof of address and what not, I’ve finally managed to get a mobile broadband deal through 3 in the UK and I’m very impressed. It helps that my house is within a HSDPA area so we’re getting the fastest possible speeds but even when that drops out and we just get 3G connectivity it’s quite usable. At £15/month for 3Gb/month it’s actually quite affordable too. I can see it getting a lot of use on the train and places like that so I don’t wind up wasting huge amounts of time travelling.

Some time ago, Jeff Atwood posed the question: How Should We Teach Computer Science? In the article, he laments the fact that formal education doesn’t teach students about deployment issues or source control: And yet, as Greg notes, existing software engineering textbooks give this crucial topic only cursory treatment. Along the same lines, a few weeks ago, a younger coworker noted to me in passing that he never learned anything about source control in any of his computer science classes.

Here’s a tip for all those intrepid conference organizers – in certain situations when there really is no point in scheduling a session. To help identify these here are some key warning signs: The session is from 7am to 8am Double points if breakfast is also 7am to 8am. Triple points if the session is in a different hotel to breakfast. It’s the last day of the conference Double points if the conference party is the night before The session isn’t listed in the handy access program guide Triple points if it also isn’t listed in the full program guide If the session meets any of these warning signs you probably should just cancel it.

My previous post, Atom is the New JCR, sparked some interesting conversations, firstly from Lars Trieloff via private e-mail (with a option of spilling over into a pub if we ever wind up in the same town…) and now from Dan Diephouse. Both Lars and Dan made a really good point – that JCR needs to find ways to work together well. I completely agree that JCR isn’t very worthwhile as something that will break down content silos.

It seems I’ll be heading to Boston in June to speak at the Web Content 2008 conference. The full session details are available, but the brief version is that I’ll be talking about making people important in web content management systems instead of just focussing on content and control. By letting the people who create content actually show through in the system and improve the personal connections, people work together a lot more and are more inclined to actually use the system.

So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don’t bother checking back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they’ve already subscribed.

A couple of days ago we had an issue where a new test I’d checked in passed locally but failed on the build machine and I didn’t get a build failure notification. Everyone who did get a build notification thought I was working on it and the build stayed broken overnight. Clearly, we need a really obvious way of reporting build failures that everyone notices and continues to notice until the build is fixed again.

Can anyone provide pointers to who the reliable mobile phone and broadband internet providers in the UK (Slough area particularly) would be? In Australia there are a number of smaller providers (but significantly bigger than mum & pop shops) that give better deals than the major providers but I’m not sure if that’s true in the UK or how I’d find such second-tier providers anyway.

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that’s mostly where things stopped – the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I’ve seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort.

I’m setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I’ll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled “Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management”. Sadly it’s been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you’re around I’d really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it’s not an empty room.