I have to say, I am really impressed by Robert Scoble’s attitude.  Someone rips into him and unsubscribes from his feed in a highly public and critical fashion and he takes it on the chin and points out how good it is that people can do that to him (and in fact to anyone brave enough to publish their thoughts on a blog).

As someone who has ripped into Robert’s comments before (and knowing me, most likely I took the odd cheap shot at him as well in the process) and being someone that disagrees with most of what he has to say, this is why I keep reading “Scobilizer”.  He can take criticism well and actually learns from that feedback.  Sure he mightn’t go so far as coming to his senses and agreeing with me but you can always tell that he’s thought about it instead of just dismissing it off hand.

Byron and I seem to be heading for another round of make it standard or make it work discussion.  In this case, Byron pointed out that pages on this site are served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml.  After some brief investigation, here’s why I’ll be sticking with text/html:

It works.  application/xhtml+xml doesn’t.

Firstly, apparently IE 6 doesn’t support application/xhtml+xml, at least according to http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml.html so I’d have to dynamically detect the browser and change the mime type anyway.  I really must start up my PC and check how the entire site looks on IE for Windows for myself - I haven’t bothered as yet.

If you’re seeing this post, you’ve made it through the maze of redirects to the new home of my blog.  If you normally read via a planet or RSS feed, now would be a good time to head on over to the actual site to check out the new design (featuring the Brisbane skyline courtesy of Iain Robertson).

Apologies if previous entries show up as new, the RDF feed has dates in it so hopefully it won’t cause any problems but changes to blogs almost always seem to cause some problems.

If you are finding that NetNewsWire doesn’t update your feeds like it should be and when you open /Applications/Utilities/Console you see a bunch of lines like:

2005-02-24 15:54:24.679 NetNewsWire Lite[371] HTTP download error -- Domain: POSIX Type: error code: 32 -- URL: http://feedster.com/links.php?url=http://www.intencha.com/adrian/&type=rss

and you’re using Privoxy try changing the proxy settings from using localhost to using 127.0.0.1.  Doing so will also fix a problem where Internet Exploreron OS X can’t connect to any sites despite the fact that Safari can connect successfully.

Iain Robertson and Robert Scoble have commented on Google’s new smart tags feature and while I agree with most of what they said I have to disagree on their views of producers rights.

Iain said:

Admittedly, the main people complaining will be those whose content has been altered, i.e. the producer of a given piece of work, who might find that some people are tracing new and interesting links away from their site. Fair enough that they complain, too — I know the idea of J. Random Company “hijacking” content in my site irritates me somewhat. To that end, I’d hope that Google would use the MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta-tag, and/or a common tag standard can be agreed upon to allow content creators to opt out of the “service.”

A fair while back I commented on a job opening at Microsoft, noting that my blog would probably work against me in that particular case due to it being so critical of Microsoft.  Robert Scoble noted that Microsoft don’t want to hire evangelists that just drink the company Kool-aid and have no credibility.  He’s right of course but slightly missed my original reasoning.  It’s not so much that I’ve made some negative comments about Microsoft – more that I pretty much have never said anything positive about Microsoft on my blog.  I was supportive in my “Missing The Point” entry about Microsoft’s new interoperability initiative and did defend beta releases which were relevant to Microsoft at the time, but that’s about it.  See for yourself.

Gianugo Rabellino has been playing with unit testing in Swing – an area that I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about in the past.  In his particular case he’s trying to send key events to Swing components programmatically so that his JUnit tests can run automatically.  As Gianugo discovered you can’t just create a KeyEvent and send it to Component.dispatchEvent() because it gets rerouted to the focus manager.

Gianugo’s solution was to display the component on screen in a JFrame and make sure it has focus.  However, we can go one better – we can simulate the component having focus.

I’ve set up a blog to keep track of the books I want to read.  This year I want to do a lot more reading, particularly on technical subjects but also just stuff in general.  The most recent entries are syndicated into this blog over on the right hand side of the main page and RSS junkies can grab the feed.

The basic idea of unit tests is that you write them once and run them a lot – you don’t check in your changes unless all the unit tests pass.  This is a great idea.

There is one problem with it – it prevents unit tests from being used as a specification of work to be done later.  I don’t mean it prevents test driven development where the tests are written then the code is to make them pass is added and then the tests and code are checked in.  I mean where a particularly complex piece of functionality is going to be added and the best way to ensure that all the use cases are covered is to write unit tests for them all and let them act as the specification (note: this doesn’t work well if you have a non-technical client, but if you are working on off the shelf software it can be very useful).  You need to plan the set of features to include in a release ahead of time so you wind up with a whole heap of new unit tests which are acting as this specification that at some point in the future you will make pass.  At the moment though, those tests are okay to fail.

I’ve spent a large chunk of this week investigating what the best way to set up continuous integration builds is for our product.  Being a cross platform application we need a continuous integration set up that builds on four different OSs constantly (Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux).  Ideally of course it would do so on all variants of those OSs and at some point that might be possible using vmware of some kind.  For now though, just building and running the automated tests on some version of the OSs we support is a huge improvement.  Fortunately, our build process already uses ant and requires just a single target be achieved.

I noticed today that The Kleptones have released an mp3 version of their broadcast on “The Rinse” entitled “From Detroit To J.A."   It’s not as good as “A Night At The Hip Hopera” but it is definitely enjoyable.  It involves a lot of Motown material but unfortunately they too often took the average lyrics instead of the sensational music.

My pick of the series would have to be “Really Rappin’ Something” mostly for it’s driving baritone sax line.  I must admit though that the use of the music from “Ben” (early Michael Jackson) as the backing for “Revolverlution” was an inspired choice.  I’m not sure where the words over the top came from but they are also brilliant – “The Revolution Will Be Televised”.

Ben Fowler points to AppFuse, a quick way to set up J2EE projects with more buzz words than you can shake a stick at.  Specifically it sets up a Tomcat/MySQL apps that:

Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo’s WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (or Spring MVC)

That’s a huge number of different technologies.  It’s not necessarily bad to use all those technologies together (in fact it’s probably very good) but it’s important to be aware that pragmatic programmers don’t use wizards they don’t understand.