Chris Johnston

I found two new favorite web applications this past week. The first is Bloglines and the second is 43 Things.

Bloglines

Bloglines is the most comprehensive, integrated service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content.

That just about sums up what it does, but it doesn’t tell anything about why I like it. Prior to about 3 days ago I was using SharpReader as my rss reader. However, it had one big draw back: I could not use it effectively on multiple computers. I would have it open all day at work and would follow along with my favorite sites as they updated their content and everything would work great. However, when I got home, I would fire up SharpReader and I would have to sift through all the content I had already read during the day. Weekends were even worse.

Bloglines centralizes everything and allows me to track sites from one location regardless of what computer I am at. This allows me to seemlessly work with rss feeds at work and at home.

In addition, it is fairly simple to use and has a fairly straight forward interface. It is divided into two frames, one frame for your feeds and the other for their content. You can group your feeds into folders and then simply click on a folder to see all the new content. If you want to keep a news item around, then you simply click a little check box and it becomes sticky. The default is to remove any read entries.

Overall, bloglines is the solution that I have been searching for to manage all the rss feads that I like to follow.

43 Things

43 Things is something completely different. At a basic level it is simply an online todo list. It allows you to post the things you are doing or want to do and then share this list with other users. In addition, if you are doing something that someone else is doing, it will show you how many people are doing that same activity.

People have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK. You’ve got space for 43 Things on your list. Not every one of them has to change the world (but save room for the ones that might).

43 Things was created using Ruby on Rails and is usually one of 3 applications used as examples of the power of Rails—the other two are Basecamp and Ta-da List. This app is simply fun. There is no other way to describe it. It is fun to find things that you want to do and that other people are doing, it is fun to see how many other people want to do that thing, and it is fun to add comments to other people’s lists and see what comments get added to your list.

I have added a page to the site that lists my 43 things along with things that I have done or you can check out my list at 43 Things.

I found a very cool little flash application via a link on the RocketBoots website. It is a South Park Studio that lets you create your own character. The app is very simple to use and a lot of fun as well. The only down side to it is that the only way to retain your character is to take a screenshot. There is no way to either save your creation on the site itself or to have a jpg emailed to you.

Here is my little creation:

I just finished going through the todo list tutorial on the Ruby on Rails website. All I can say is Wow!!! I have never created an entire CRUD web application that quickly. I am definitely hooked on Rails. How can I not be, I created an entire (highly simplistic) personal todo list web application in just under an hour and most of that time was spent reading through the tutorial.

However, I do have some complaints with the tutorial. The first is that it is far to simplistic to the point of being trivial. Yes it does a very good job of getting a newbie up and running with the different concepts of Rails, but it only deals with a data model containing one table with three columns. In the real world this would never happen. It really needs to ad a second table.

The second complaint that I have is that it seems that the author gets bored of the writing the tutorial somewhere around the half way point. The beginning is excellent with everything explained, but by half way, the author is simply telling the reader to read through the comments and figure it out for themselves. Now, the code is very simplistic and easy to understand and in sections very well commented, but a certain attitude of boredom seems to come out in the article.

Other than that, it is an excellent tutorial that does an excellent job of introducing the power of Rails.

Not to further the growing tension between Java and Ruby developers, but here is an interesting and mostly centred article comparing the two camps.

I personally found the article to be a fairly level analysis of both sides of the argument with a very definite leaning towards Ruby. Okay, okay, Ruby rules. However, so does Java. There is a use and a place for both in a programmers toolkit. I love Java, I think it is a great language for enterprise applications and desktop apps alike. However, for simple scripting or for building small, self-contained websites (ones that don’t have to interact with legacy systems or other web apps) I would pick Ruby and Rails any day.

Can Ruby scale to the enterprise level, I don’t know, I have never tried. Can Java be used for little programs, yes, but it takes a lot more lines of code then I am willing to write.

What did you do this weekend? I went shopping for a mini dv camera and ended up buying a new bike. I was planning on buying a nice new Canon MiniDV camera. I got all the details for it and was reading to go shopping around for the best price. Then I went into the bike store. What turned into a little visit to check on their tune up prices turned into a 2 hour visit to buy a bike.

In the end, I walked out with a very nice new bike. I purchased the Specialized Hardrock Pro Disc. The thing is huge sitting in my hallway. I had to get the XL frame which is just huge (I would hate to see the guy who rides the XXL bike). The bike has a nice sturdy frame with full front supension and 27 gears. And man is it fast.

I took it for a test ride and tried to ride over just about everything I could find—curbs, snowbanks, pot holes, small cats (just kidding)—and it handled everything in stride. The obstacles were no problems for it.

This is the first bike with front suspension that I have ever owned, so that might take some getting used to, especially on the trails. Speaking of trails, I now have to find some. This middle of the city is not generally a great place for mountain biking.

If anyone is looking to buy a new bike, I highly recommend Sporting Life. They made the entire buying experience a joy and even provided several incentives to buy their (translation, they gave me discount on a new lock and bike stand). The store that I went to only sells bikes and boards and has a very large collection of both.

Stay tuned for more posts about my new life as a rider

Maybe it’s just me, but the more I read on javalobby.org the more I am being turned off of open source software. There are several individuals who are trying to hijack the website to get their message about OSS out. The message they are trying to broadcast to anyone who will, or will not listen, is that OSS is the only kind of software that is worth while using. Rubbish!!!

One prime example is this post regarding helping to test a new plugin for Netbeans that imports Eclipse projects. The first comment blasts Netbeans for not being totally open source:

The Netbeans IDE is not fully open source. The following (which are included in the source download) use the Binary Code License (BCL) which are closed-source licenses:
* XML Parser v.1.1 (jaxp and parser)
* JavaHelp v.2.0
* JavaC Compiler
…
When building from source you must accept these Binary Code Licenses to compile the IDE.

Now thankfully, the author of the comment was properly lambasted. However, the attitude still remains. I have seen this outside of the Java world as well. This religous zealotry that states that only OSS is worth using. If you use anything else then you are somehow less … Less what I am not sure.

I am very tired of this attitude. I am tired of the religion of OSS. I use OSS software. I also use closed source software. I use whatever will get the job done the best. I use Eclipse and Netbeans and if I could afford it, I would also use IntelliJ IDEA. I also own a copy of Visual Studio .NET along with Macromedia Studio MX. Does this somehow make me a bad person? My server runs Mandrake Linux and I am installing Gentoo onto a computer just for fun. However, my main computer runs Windows XP and so does my notebook. Am I somehow a second rate computer user because of this?

One thing I would like to know is how much does this ferver for OSS come from a true desire for all software to be open source or from a simple desire to get high quality free software? I would love to know how many of these zealots have ever contributed to an OSS project, filed a bug report, or written documentation for a project on sourceforge.net?

Open source software is about choice. Well that means that I have the choice to use it or not. I have the choice to use OSS or proprietory software. I still like OSS, hey I like free as much as the next person, but I am going to allow people the choice. After all, its only software.

New Scientist has an article on their website listing 13 things that do not make sense. Included in this list are things like:

• The placebo affect
• Dark Matter
• Tetraneutrons
• Dark energy
• Cold fusion

The article is very well written. It outlines the problem that each thing represents to science and our understanding of the universe and it outlines the scientic principles that are being broken by each problem. And it does all of this in a very easy to understand manner that anyone with a bit of scientific understanding will be able to comprehend.

I liked the article becuase it shows how much we humans do not understand about the universe and the world around us. The article shows that there are still a lot of mysteries left in the universe. We live in an age where we believe that science has everything figured out and this article shows that it does not. The reality is that we are a long ways away from real understanding on a lot of subjects.