I think one of my best purchases in a long while has been my fancy new iPhone. It was originally a major splurge just because it was cool but it’s so functional and easy to use that I’m using it constantly and looking for ways to get everything on the iPhone. My email has always been IMAP so that got on there pretty quickly and it didn’t take too long to find newsgator’s iPhone rss reader that syncs with NetNewsWire so now my feeds are on it as well. Most recently I’ve found a wordpress plugin that optimizes the admin interface for iPhone. As such I’m happily blogging from my iPhone and there’s one less reason to get out of bed… Of course I suspect the formattingof this post is going to go haywire as various plugins interfere with each other but once I see what happens it should be easy enough to fix. The big downside I’ve found is that while you can add a site to your home screen, whenever you tap it a new safari tab is opened so I wind up with a heap I newsgator tabs left open. It would also be nice to have an icon badge with the number of unread items. The HTML only API is so close to being all you need but not quite. Once you’re in the app it really does feel lie a native iPhone app. I’ve seen a number of sites detect the iPhone and you simply forget you’re still in the browser. The only other gripe I’ve got is that newsgator doesnt remember your login which is stupid and very annoying. That’s not something the iPhone can really control though.

Great notes on some common mistakes Java developers make from Christopher Owen at Atlassian. I know I’ve explained most of these to a number of new developers – well worth a read even if you’ve been coding in Java for a number of years you may easily have not learned these important lessons.

Ephox folk – we learn a lot of interesting tidbits like this both on coding and on XP and development processes and tools – could we take a little time to share them with the world and each other more often?  Ta.

Going through the process of setting up a new apartment in the UK, I’ve found myself Googling a whole bunch of things that normally I wouldn’t need to. For instance, where can I find a desk and chair to set up a home office? Back in Australia I know of a bunch of different stores that would have that kind of thing so I wouldn’t bother searching for it. Here though, I wind up searching for “home office furniture” and get a whole bunch of online only retailers of widely varying reliability. Even if they’re all completely legit – why doesn’t something like IKEA turn up when that’s what all the locals recommended (somewhat grudgingly admittedly)?

After much hassle with getting proof of address and what not, I’ve finally managed to get a mobile broadband deal through 3 in the UK and I’m very impressed. It helps that my house is within a HSDPA area so we’re getting the fastest possible speeds but even when that drops out and we just get 3G connectivity it’s quite usable. At £15/month for 3Gb/month it’s actually quite affordable too. I can see it getting a lot of use on the train and places like that so I don’t wind up wasting huge amounts of time travelling.

Some time ago, Jeff Atwood posed the question: How Should We Teach Computer Science? In the article, he laments the fact that formal education doesn’t teach students about deployment issues or source control:

 And yet, as Greg notes, existing software engineering textbooks give this crucial topic only cursory treatment. Along the same lines, a few weeks ago, a younger coworker noted to me in passing that he never learned anything about source control in any of his computer science classes. How could that be? Source control is the very bedrock of software engineering.

Here’s a tip for all those intrepid conference organizers – in certain situations when there really is no point in scheduling a session. To help identify these here are some key warning signs:

• The session is from 7am to 8am
  • Double points if breakfast is also 7am to 8am.
  • Triple points if the session is in a different hotel to breakfast.
• It’s the last day of the conference
  • Double points if the conference party is the night before
• The session isn’t listed in the handy access program guide
  • Triple points if it also isn’t listed in the full program guide

If the session meets any of these warning signs you probably should just cancel it. If, as was the case with my BoF at Lotusphere, the session meets all the criteria the facilitator probably should just not bother turning up. Security was certainly surprised when I did.

My previous post, Atom is the New JCR, sparked some interesting conversations, firstly from Lars Trieloff via private e-mail (with a option of spilling over into a pub if we ever wind up in the same town…) and now from Dan Diephouse. Both Lars and Dan made a really good point – that JCR needs to find ways to work together well.

I completely agree that JCR isn’t very worthwhile as something that will break down content silos. It does have value as an API to work with data though. Atom is quite limited in the granularity it can work with data (which coincidentally is one of the reasons Web3S exists as well). And you still need to store your data somewhere.

It seems I’ll be heading to Boston in June to speak at the Web Content 2008 conference. The full session details are available, but the brief version is that I’ll be talking about making people important in web content management systems instead of just focussing on content and control. By letting the people who create content actually show through in the system and improve the personal connections, people work together a lot more and are more inclined to actually use the system.

So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don’t bother checking back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they’ve already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn’t know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.

A couple of days ago we had an issue where a new test I’d checked in passed locally but failed on the build machine and I didn’t get a build failure notification. Everyone who did get a build notification thought I was working on it and the build stayed broken overnight. Clearly, we need a really obvious way of reporting build failures that everyone notices and continues to notice until the build is fixed again.

Can anyone provide pointers to who the reliable mobile phone and broadband internet providers in the UK (Slough area particularly) would be?  In Australia there are a number of smaller providers (but significantly bigger than mum & pop shops) that give better deals than the major providers but I’m not sure if that’s true in the UK or how I’d find such second-tier providers anyway.

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that’s mostly where things stopped – the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I’ve seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort. There are a few CMSs around that do have good JCR support – Alfresco for example – but they’re few and far between and even with that, there isn’t a lot of people taking advantage of that support and the standardization of the repository interface.