I said I couldn’t be bothered setting up my feeds to use FeedBurner. I lied, curiosity got the better of me and my feeds to go through FeedBurner. The URLs haven’t changed, there’s just a redirect in place that flicks things over to FeedBurner. If for some reason you have trouble with my feeds please let me know and if you really object I can give you the non-redirected feed URL that FeedBurner uses to get my feed.

I’ve been playing with the new BlogBeat beta (as best I can tell, you get invited to the beta by complaining that you’re not in the beta) and it’s interesting to see the traffic patterns with my current very sporadic posting schedule. The big thing I notice is that pretty much every time I write a post, despite the fact that I publish full text feeds, I see a big boost to my readership.

At some point Eclipse seems to have decided that I shouldn’t be doing J2EE development and randomly turned off some of it’s J2EE related features like being able to Run as server or create a new Webapp project. I suspect a software update went bad and it’s screwed over it’s configuration. Sadly, with the massive number of plugins and crap that makes up an Eclipse install it’s nearly impossible to sort out if one particular plugin got corrupted, if it’s a configuration setting some that got corrupted or if the whole thing is foobar.

It’s a little bit scary to look at the number of browsers I have in my dock and regularly use. Mostly this comes about because of the need to test on all the different browsers but still. I have a similar range of browsers on my Windows box at work (it adds Mozilla and Opera to the mix but obviously takes out Camino, Safari and OmniWeb). In case you don’t recognize the icons, the browsers pictured from top to bottom are: Camino, Safari, Safari (built from CVS), Firefox, Deer Park (Alpha of Firefox 1.

There’s a lot of talk going around about Sparkle, Microsoft’s new UI design tool set, but I’ve been scared that this is the end of good user interface design since the second paragraph I read about it: It’s the rise of the graphic designer! (from Scoble’s blog) At which point in time did we start letting graphic designers design user interfaces? What happened to all the user interface designers? You know, the ones that think about how to make software intuitive and user friendly, efficient and productive as opposed to flashy and cool looking.

I’ve really come to hate bookstores. I don’t want to buy books online because I like to peruse them a little before I fork out a hundred bucks to make sure it’s really want I want. The back cover blurb is only accurate on the good books so you’ve got no idea whether you should trust it or not. When I walk into a brick and mortar book store though they never have what I want.

I’m with Geek News – PDC has been a big build up for an average set of announcements. I’ve got to stop reading Scoble’s blog, he over hypes everything and then the actual announcements disappoint. Here’s Scoble’s summary of the announcements: Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and new UI. Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar. LINQ (Language INtegrated Query).

If you’re looking for a job in sunny Brisbane, Australia, and the job description below sounds appealing, send me a resume at adrian@ephox.com. Position Description Title Senior Software Engineer Description Ephox, a world-leading, content-authoring software provider seeks to employ a Senior Software Engineer for its Paddington office in Brisbane. The position responsibilities include writing technical specifications, collaborate in design/architectural recommendations of overall systems, implement software QA practices and be the technical lead in the Ephox development team.

About 5 years ago while I was doing some part time work for my university one of my lecturers walked by, looked at the program I was developing and asked: “You’re using antlr or something like it to generate your parser aren’t you?”. I wasn’t, I’d written the parser by hand in an hour or two and it worked exactly as I wanted so I saw no need to go back and rewrite it.

Brian McCallister gives a brief synopsis of Microsoft’s 2005 financial statement. I think it pretty clearly shows why people dislike Microsoft: Regarding Windows sales and profits: Well, we see a pretty nice top line revenue of $12.2 billion. The fun part of that is that the operating income (profit before taxes and interest) is a tidy $9.4 billion. It is awfully nice to pull a 77% operating margin (profit before taxes, hereafter referred to as “profit”).

In the comments for my post Ant Is Cool, Erik Hatcher points out that Groovy has ant support (see http://groovy.codehaus.org/Ant+Scripting). While that’s cool and all, I really don’t want to add a new language into the mix just to call out to Ant so not a great option for my case, but useful to know. What is more useful however is knowing that you can embed Groovy in ant scripts using the Groovy ant task (also via the ant script task since 1.

Scoble pointed to this article by Ben Askins comparing Google’s customized homepage and Microsoft’s Start.com. Unfortunately the comparison was overly complex and missed some critical criteria, so I thought I’d do my own. I’ll be using a very simple set of criteria, one criterion in fact. Does it work? First up, Google. As the screen shot below shows, it works. Now here’s how Start.com looks: A nice clean search engine interface, but unfortunately no customization options.