Ethan Nicholas's Blog: All about intern()

A nice input on intern()ing Strings in Java.
Ethan Nicholas's Blog: All about intern().

Make sure to read the comments section regarding caveats in respect to gc.

I share my OPML

I now share my OPML at share.opml.org.

People finally getting RSS

... and with RSS I mean the mechanism, not the specific protocol or version (so this stands for RSS 0.x, 2.x and Atom as well).
Apart from RSS as a feed mechanism for news and blog sites, there are some nice RSS "applications" that provide a feed into a "personalized query" (for lack of other words).

Take flickr for example: they provide (among others) an RSS feed for "Comments you made" (see my comments here.

Or openBC: there you have a feed for e.g. "Members who have recently visited my contact page" or "Contacts of mine whose company or position has recently changed".

Very useful.

Open Source Portlet Repository Project

on java.net: Open Source Portlet Repository Project

Get a Mac - TV Ads

There's a gazillion of reasons to buy a Mac (at least now), but the current TV ads are the best...
watch them here.
Apple - Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads

And then buy one - I will.

Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet

Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet

jMaki - AJAX for JSP

Just announced/released on ajax.dev.java.net with a nice democast.

Finally a neat JSP AJAX integration.

Seems like there finally is a reason to switch to JavaEE5 and Netbeans5.5.

EJB 3.0 sessions in 2006 JavaOne

Wonseok Kim lists the JavaOne sessions from this years JavaOne in his post.

Here (PDF) is a great intro/motivation presentation he points to.

Ray Ozzie on Composite Apps

or rather mesh ups... but whats the difference anyway.
Listen to this on the conversations network.

OpenOffice Calc Tips

Nice collection of OOo/Calc tips can be found here

Nicholas Negroponte

In his Pop!Tech 2005 speech Nicholas Negroponte says:

People who write software get basically remunerated for writing more software and what they are doing is writing more features.
If you just paid people for every line of code they removed instead of add you would have a much better software world.

Listen to it on the conversations network.

Scoble to leave Microsoft

more details here

Google spreadsheets

Finally logged into Google spreadsheets yesterday... Why don't they support the OpenDocument format resp. OOo format?
Do we really need just another Excel?

Cool Mozilla hacks

A friend just pointed out the marvelous combination of Conquery and the mycroft.
The perfect example (quite local to him and me):
define the vienna city map search in mycroft and then mark an adress and go for it.

Cool.
mesh-up-y.

JBoss to join NetBeans

According to Sun and Infoworld, NetBeans has enlisted JBoss to its community.

Cool.
netbeans++;

Search engine optimisation ??

I just received an invitation to a search engine optimisation conference.

Hey, I thought we were already in 2006 ... who is still interested in
this ???

Google spreadsheets

one more step in Google's way to the (web) office space: Google Spreadsheets - after they acquired Writely a couple of weeks ago for web-based text processing.

Some JavaScript enlightenment

Dean Edwards posted the "Levels of JavaScript Knowledge".
Working comfortable on level 5, I have to admit, I didn't even know there was something like level 6...

Flickr

Flickr is usually traded as one of the signposts towards Web 2.0. And there's nothing to disagree with, since Web 2.0 is defined through examples like Flickr and GMail and Google Maps and so on.

Having played around with flickr for some time now, I have to admit its one of the best applications (or probably better: services) on the Web.

• It serves a clear purpose, and (more important) does this perfectly
• it is driven by its users resp. the community (uploading, comments, tagging, groups, ...)
  
• it interoperates with various other services (e.g. blogging interface to all major blogging sites/types)
• it offers its own services to other services
• its user interface is just perfect, and I'm not (only) talking about its dynamic AJAX style, but also the way they guide a user and how you do configure your settings; they don't confront the user with tech terms, but mainly ask questions.
  
  

Take a look at their account settings page here... and compare this to other settings/preferences dialogs.


So, yes, flickr is pretty cool; if the web is really heading that way, I'll be glad to follow.

Less is more - heresy ???

Listen to this interesting speech by Jason Fried at the Web 2.0 conference 2005.
Less is more ... heresy or true ?
I don't know, but I like the way he thinks...