Symphonious

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. These obviously aren't people who check my homepage regularly since they wouldn't know to check the page when I post so they must be RSS readers that have clicked through (BlogBeat doesn't pick up on RSS readership, at least with the way I've set it up).

Perhaps I'd see more readers if I didn't publish full text feeds but I suspect that a great number of people are using their RSS readers to skim posts and pick out the ones they want to read, then those ones get opened in a browser window to be read after all the posts have been skimmed.

Of course to really investigate this I'd need to use something like FeedBurner to track my RSS readership as well and generally I can't be bothered.

On the downside, BlogBeat is pretty clearly showing that my popularity is, to put it politely, pretty good for the long tail. That's okay though, I don't put the effort in to posting regularly and coherently to deserve a big audience - in fact I'm surprised there's this many people paying attention.  It would be interesting to see how many read my blog through the various planets that include my blog as well.

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.  The log file for the workspace is particularly unhelpful just reporting that classes are missing - that's great, where were you expecting to find them though? Which plugin provides that particular class and which plugin is requesting that particular class? Then on a subsequent run it just reports that the plugin is already loaded so it doesn't need to load again - sadly, the plugin isn't loaded and none of the functionality it provides is available.

So I'm downloading the web tools all in one package and hopefully that will work.  Then I've just got to add in the other plugins I use again and hope it still works.

In the mean time, maybe I'll check out IDEA again…

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 1.5, needs to be upgraded to the beta still, but last week was too hectic to be testing browser betas), OmniWeb and IE.

On my windows box at work I think I have Opera, IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7, Netscape 4.8, MyIE 2 and Avant.

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.

You want to see how this ends, what software is going to wind up looking like in the future with graphic designers in charge? Look at the web.  Particularly, look at all those flash sites (no sparkle is not a flash killer, but flash gives designers the power to misbehave much more than HTML does). Have our standards for user interface design become so bad that all we care about is it looking pretty? Do we not care about productivity for users anymore?

Lets put graphic designers back where they belong - in the marketing department - and develop some tools that bring about the rise of the user interface designer.  We'll bring the graphic designers in as consultants to engineering to design logos and icons as required, under the direction of the usability engineers.

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 was in Borders this afternoon and their computer section seems to have dramatically shrunk and now has "feature shelves" where instead of being full of books they feature just two books on the shelf, most likely to cover up the fact that they don't have enough stock to actually fill the shelves.

Considering how annoying it is to get to Borders - it's in the city so you have to pay an arm and half a leg for parking, plus deal with all the traffic - I'm really not that inclined to keep going back considering how rarely I find what I want. I know I could order it in, but why bother doing that when I could just order it from Amazon and have it delivered directly to my door?

I really don't think brick and mortar stores are threatened by online book stores, I think they're threatened by the fact that they don't have what people want often enough.  They'll probably have the best sellers and have the benefit of instant gratification but for anything even a little bit older or less mainstream it seems to get very hit and miss, very quickly.