March 18, 2007
As I mentioned my post about Guice, I’m finally motivated to start playing with code again.
Based on how cool Guice seemed, I figured I should finally take a look at GWT and see what it was all about. First, it is certainly different from writing any other web application. There is some very cool stuff. You can very quickly and easily write JavaScript style logic in actual Java. That is a great improvement over anything else.
March 16, 2007
In my day job my coding time has become pretty limited. I’ve also recently been pretty uninterested in ‘The Newest Thing’.
That all changed (for an hour) today as I downloaded and began to play with Guice. Guice is a dependency injection framework (similar in concept to part of Spring) from Google. It allows you to write self contained modular code that is easy to unit test, and ‘clean’.
I found an hour or so to play with Guice yesterday to read through the user’s guide and build a quick prototype. As I found myself working through the features, I had an overwhelming desire to go build something with it. It rekindled a fire.
March 9, 2007
Matt Cutts has a great post about how Google doesn’t trap a user’s data.
I think this is part of what makes Google so attractive. If you contrast this post with the ongoing tussle over office document formats (ODS versus Microsoft’s Open XML). Part of Microsoft Office’s dominance has been their ownership of the default format.
Microsoft isn’t the only (or even worst) offender here. I’ve been recently frustrated by the closed data system of Adobe Elements, and the lack of a document tagging/category system in general. Vista has gotten some heat (I think Jon is correct that there isn’t an obvious right/wrong) about how Vista has ‘corrupted’ some image files by writing tag data into their meta data.
March 8, 2007
I recently bought a D-Link DSM-320 media player. The device plugs into your TV/Stereo and streams music, video, and pictures from another PC. Overall, it works reasonably well. My first step was to remove the default server software and install the open source TVersity server. This software allowed me much better control over what media to share and seemed to support a lot more formats.
I unplugged my Airport Express that I had been using to serve music, since the DSM-320 provide that and more.
March 2, 2007
One of the issues I struggle with is how to manage all of our digital photographs. I really like to have all of my stuff organized and I currently use Photoshop Elements to manage our digital pictures.
The problem I have is that this is installed on our desktop computer (with the BIG hard drive). All of our pictures and digital video are stored, organized, and edited here. However, my wife also likes to have a copy of the pictures, and often downloads them to her computer, and adds her own organization. However, her laptop hard drive won’t scale, and I don’t really want to have two separate organizational methods.
March 1, 2007
I released a new version of my iTunes Export utility.
iTunes Export exports your iTunes playslists as M3U or WPL files, allowing you to setup playlists in iTunes and use them with other software or devices.
This release adds the ability to export playlists as WPL files, and now handles playlist folders. Thanks to Rishi Dhupar for helping with both of these features.
http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/
I have received several new feature requests and bug reports recently and I plan on getting to them soon. Don’t be afraid to ask for new features (eric@ericdaugherty.com).
February 24, 2007
The net has been buzzing recently about Google’s announcement of Google Apps Premier Edition. I’ve heard a lot of talk, mostly how this is the Microsoft killer, or that the apps are useless and humble in comparison to Microsoft Office.
I think these are both true, to a degree. I have used Google Docs and Spreadsheets (as well as Reader, Adsense, Blogger, Gmail, Search, and probably others, so maybe I’m just a Google fanboy) and I think it does an excellent job at what it is.
February 24, 2007
This past Wednesday was Chief Illiniwek’s last dance at the final home game this season for the University of Illinois men’s basketball team.
The battle over the chief has been long and the best the ‘Save the Chief’ side can ever really manage is status quo. It does appear though that the battle is over, so we may as well enjoy the last dance.
The beginning is a montage of the history, and his actual last dance starts about the 2 minute mark.
February 19, 2007
As I run through my feeds in Google Reader today, I find that my prediction from my last post rings true (well, close enough) for more than just my own blog. Every post I’ve read today that mentions new subscriber numbers from Google Reader show huge increases. Here is a quick rundown:
Parent Hacks - 60% EricDaugherty.com - 43% John Battelle’s Searchblog - 42% CrazyBob.org - 34% AllThingsFinancial - 33% Tim Bray - ~30%
I’m sure the blogs with the biggest jumps are more prone to report this news, but if this is representative of the average blog, Google Reader looks to own at least 30% of the feed reader market.
February 16, 2007
This is a bit of an ‘inside baseball’ post, but…
Online feed readers, such as Bloglines, Google Reader, etc. allow many people to subscribe to a single feed without actually querying the feed for each user. This means that tools such as FeedBurner are unable to track the number of subscribers accurately unless the tools report the number of readers. Bloglines has done this for a while, but today Google announced that they are now reporting the number as well. Finally.