Why RSS is good for you

RSS as a Competative Analysis Tool. Track your competition and find out what bloggers are saying about them, and you.

This is a follow up to RSS for the insanely busy executive. An executive summary about what RSS is, and why you should care. Which I recommend if you are not familiar with RSS, or how to set it up.

On a personal note; since I've started surfing with RSS I am far more efficient in keeping up-to-date about what is going on in the business/technical areas I am interested in. It is a valuable tool for filtering the over-abundance of information that is the internet.

Google's open source application deployer explained

Google talks about Slack at the Australian Unix Users Group in Oct, 2006.

From the article: "Slack is a source deployment system and it's the way we install applications on servers," Still said, adding Slack is based around a centralized configuration repository which is then deployed onto selected machines in a "pull" method. Each of the "worker" machines asks for its new configuration regularly or when a manual command is run.

[slashdot.org]

Great resource of how-to business guides

Work.com has a great list of how-to guides to help with your small business needs. Unfortunately no RSS - so you have to check back regularly. [del.icio.us]

How to get into management, and what to do when you get there.

Like many of you I am looking at the next step in your careers. I'm an experienced developer, with leadership experience with small teams. I want to be more leader and less developer. So I'm asking the question everyone should be asking about their career aspirations

How do I get there from here?

I came upon these articles from Monster while surfing around for advice for myself, I hope they help you too.

How do I get into management? [monster.com]
Advice for New Managers [monster.com]

Yahoo! vs Google Financial Comparison

An interesting comparison of the Earnings of Yahoo! and Google. [digg]

Science Roundup - Radiation eating bugs and the one pixel camera

Scientists discover bacteria that sustains itself from Radioactive Uranium? [slashdot.org] microgodzilla?

The One Pixel Camera [slashdot.org]
That's right, One (1) pixel. This camera uses a series of mirrors to capture and optimize the image before trying to save it to memory. Obviously not ready for production with the poor resolution shown in the picture and the 15 minute processing time, but an interesting first step that may help future camera designs get even better images.

IE7 vs Firefox 2, Google Website Optimizer and an interesting JavaScript tooltip example

IE7 vs Firefox 2: memory usage showdown. [lifehacker.com]

Google launches Website Optimizer [slashdot.org]

Example: Lightweight JavaScript tooltip [del.icio.us]

UML cheat sheet

Building Rich Internet Applications with JavaScript

When I see the words Rich Internet Application, I tend to think of interactive Flash Movies, java Applets and downloadable clients that interact using proprietary protocols or web services.

Recently Google has released 2 applications that show the capabilities of JavaScript in this space. Gmail and Google Maps both make use of JavaScript in a subtle way to improve the experience of the applications be not requiring page reloads to update the information.

Frameworks like AJAX and JavaScript libraries like providing capabilities reload information without requiring the user to reload the whole page. Here are some Ajax examples.

Other Javascript libraries like those from walterzorn.com enable drawing, drag-and-drop, tracking mouse events, and in screen editing capability.

JavaScript can even be used to make great arcade style games like triglav.

Why did it take this long? Perhaps it has to do with the browser wars; perhaps it has to do with web standards. Whatever the cause, expect to see more JavaScript based rich internet applications.

Gathering Web Statistics

I recently posted an article that included a link to an article on how to integrate JavaScript and ActionScript on a Mac. That and my passion for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) led me to look for other great JavaScript links.

I find it is good practice to look at alternatives before settling on a decision. In my case - what language do I write my applications in has led me to ask - what are the choices?

According to macromedia, the Flash is the most popular RIA language client. Their stats are heavily in their favour.

Macromedia also posts a country specific macromedia install census

What other statistics are there?

Looking from the other direction - survey websites to see what technology is embedded in web sites may imply how popular a particular technology is.

Some independent sites will post statistics like flash player access of their visitors. But how confident can you be in these statistics? The sample size is not listed, and it is very likely biased towards some segment of the web population - is it the segment that interests you?

Sample size is not a problem for Google. Browser statistics according to Google is a little old, but still very interesting.

Since we're on the topic of statistics, and you're probably reading this via an RSS feed, you might be interested in the results of an independent RSS browser statistics census

Once you have all of these statistics, you need to apply them in a meaningful way. Depending on your need, basing decisions on internet census data may also be flawed if you do not take into account internet use by region (USA)

If you're interested in more statistics and how to use them to promote your site, ClickZ has a large list of valuable internet marketing statistics and related information.

enjoy

Java Aspect Oriented Programming with AspectJ

The Vancouver Software Developers Meetup Group had a great meeting tonight. Dr. Gregor Kiczales of UBC's Software Practices Lab talked about his work on AspectJ. For most people this was an introduction to AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming).

AOP is a very hot term, at least in the Java world right now. I've heard the term batted around for the last couple years now, but I've never gotten around to actually finding out what it really was. All I knew was that Aspects were the next big thing. AOP is supposed to be the biggest revolution in software development practice since the adoption of Object Oriented Programming over Procedural Programming languages. Still - very few people know what it really is.

Dr. Kiczales opened my eyes. Aspects really are a different way of thinking of programming. What they are not is a replacement for Object Oriented Programming. Objects co-exist quite well with AOP.

Also, at theserverside.com there is a link to video of the Aspect Oriented Conference Keynote for more news on what the status of AOP is and where it's going.