When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · April
· · · · 28 (6 entries)
BlogBridge · I wrote about this feed-reader before way last year, saying it was good but slow. Today, I got a gripe saying there were problems with my Atom feed in BlogBridge, so I downloaded it and it’s still very good and not slow any more. Except for, when I first downloaded it, it wouldn’t work at all; muttered quietly on startup about my previous “Guides” being corrupted, but then sat there sullenly and refused to do much of anything. Not entirely unreasonable, I figured if I wiped out the settings from the previous install I should be fine; but it took me the longest time to figure out they were in
$HOME/.bb as opposed to somewhere under $HOME/Library; harrumph. Anyhow, yes, it’s slick and fast and fun to use and imports OPML just fine and (as it’s Java) runs everywhere; so it’s now replaced Bloglines as my recommended feed-reader for anyone who’s not on a Macintosh and thus can’t use NetNewsWire. And, oh, yes, it’s got a relative-URI bug in its Atom 1.0 handling, a subtle one which most people won’t notice. I filed a bug report, let’s see what happens. [Update: Got a note from Blogbridge saying “Try the weekly” and sure enough, all fixed up. Good stuff.]FSS: The Rim Again · Friday Slide Scan #29 revisits Pacific Rim National Park; if you like these you’ll like the previous visits: #20, #21, and #23. This time we have a storm shot and a sand shot ...
Having Done Java · Here’s an observation: if there’s something you as a programmer want to do (connect to a website, read some XML, walk a filesystem, listen on a socket, whatever) there’ll be a library in whatever language you’re using to do that. I’ve observed that, on average, the quality of the libraries is better in Java than in the competition: Perl, Python, Ruby, whatever. Don’t get upset, those other languages have lots of other advantages and are The Right Tool for lots of jobs. And the delta isn’t universal—there are stinky Java libraries and lovely Ruby ones—but still, I’d say this is true way, way more often than not. This suggests a hypothesis: Having been a Java programmer will make you a better Ruby or Python or whatever programmer. Ooh, are people ever gonna get mad at me.
A Good Anger · I was driving the kid to work this morning, muttering the usual imprecations as I switched from one rock-music station to the next looking for actual music instead of yapping morning-show morons, and Yow! Here was a howling guitar and a keening voice singing about the stinking war and vowing to never kill again and the false faces on TV and that was just perfect, if radio doesn’t have a place for anger-with-a-backbeat well it’s not worth listening to. And you can listen to Neil Young’s Living With War today for free (although it seems like the server is kind of dogging it).
Raintulip · Spring encourages the tulips and then the rain dampens them. Wet or dry they’re fine by me ...
SAML On The March · I tell people I’m a software generalist, but there are lots of holes in my knowledge. One of them is identity and I really must fix that, because it’s a hot pain point both for businesses and individual people. (How many passwords do you have?) Anyhow, our own Eve Maler is one of the people you want to watch in this space, and she’s pointing us at a bunch of action over in SAML-land, here, here, and here. For my money, the hot story is the Danish requirement that if you want to do federation, you should bloody well use SAML. The Danes have had positive experiences with shared standardized XML vocabularies, having scored a big win with UBL. I can’t imagine anything in the short term that would be of greater benefit for everyone than ubiquitous shareable identity services.
