Stephen's Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Programmer/Web Geek working in the defense industry

This week I'm having to finally end my use of two web applications from major vendors. Bloglines had several of my feeds not update properly from June 3 through June 17th. I still haven't received any follow-up e-mail regarding the issue. Besides, for a feed-reading application, you'd think Bloglines could manage to communicate to its users through, I don't know, some kind of syndicated XML feed? On the 16th I was fed up with the lack of a fix, and the lack of a response, so I switched over to Google Reader. Sure, on the 17th Bloglines finally fixed the issue, but it was way too late by then. Getting my 309 feeds into Google Reader went fairly smoothly; a few folders weren't created so I had make the folders and place the feeds back into them. I'll miss Bloglines true "keep unread" or "pinning" feature, as well as the ability to group posts by the feed when reading a folder. But I'll get used to Google Reader's way of doing things if it means a reliable service that doesn't feel abandoned, despite its ownership by Ask.com. Plus I'll also get a better feed sharing mechanism, and finally have a Feed Search that works (despite Bloglines being owned by a search company, there's was never helpful).

The same basic experience repeated itself this week, this time from Yahoo. While the majority of people use del.icio.us for online bookmarking, I'd jumped on Yahoo's other service: My Web, mostly because it saved the page contents for you to search through in addition to the page title and tagging. However, a month or so ago, the RSS feed for my public bookmarks started showing junk. That was fixed within a week, but it started happening again this week. Now I can't even log in to the site. I filled out some tech support form I found on Yahoo (not that easy to find), but I've gotten no response. I've been able to access the bookmarks through another view (Yahoo's "My Bookmarks"), exported them, and am now importing them to del.icio.us. Hopefully Yahoo will maintain that a little better.

I guess in once sense this is same feeling everyone who bet on one of several competing technologies and lost feels. There were real benefits that led me to pick the apps I did, but the world didn't agree, and now I've paid the price for sticking with losers too long. Luckily some level of data portability has made that price a lot lower than it could have been.

Update: There are two new feeds you might want to track due to this change:

1. My del.icio.us bookmarks
2. My Google Reader shared items

Labels: web

You know my blog's neglected when I don't even think to announce a change of job until the weekend after starting at the new place. On Monday I started working at Cormine Intelligent Data.

I just watched Definitely, Maybe with Diane as our Valentine's day thing. It was fantastically cute and sweet. Ryan Reynolds was funny and charming, as usual. Isla Fischer was very likeable and adorable. Abigail Breslin, however, stole the show as the precocious and completely sweet daughter. I found the movie very enjoyable, though I am a total sucker for all forms of romantic comedies.

The main changes from 1.0 are:

• Ability to match against an object
• Static matcher methods are renamed to propEq

Labels: programming

Due to significant decreases in productivity, the United Nations announced today that it was banning April Fool's Day. They also cited human rights violations, stating that the shame felt by those who were fooled infringed upon the inherent dignity of all human beings. A follow-up proposal to categorize all practical jokes as torture under the Geneva Convention is still under deliberation.

Labels: humor

I've released EasyMock-PropertyUtils 1.0, and it's available in the Maven repository. If you have issues, post them at the Google Code site. If you use it, just post a comment here to let me know.

Labels: programming

While I've been frustrated by Bledsoe's consistency, I was never among the Dallas Cowboy fans that was calling for Tony Romo to replace Bledsoe. I didn't think an unproven quarterback could make much difference. But the drive I just watched Tony Romo lead was very impressive. No matter how tonight's game finishes, I see Romo as the quarterback for the Cowboys for the rest of the season. The biggest benefit: it looks like Dallas games will be more exciting on the offensive end.

Update: Well, Romo made enough mistakes to make my prediction that he will be the QB the rest of the season questionable. I think I'd still prefer Romo, but I'm not sure if Bill Parcells will agree.

Labels: sports

I've recently finished reading all of Steve Yegge's blog-rants. The overarching theme is Steve searching for ways to do better at software development. For instance, Being the Averagest on why many programmers aren't trying to get better, and Practicing Programming on how to get better for those who listened and decided they want to try. He also chronicles his search for a better programming language. I suggest reading all of the essays; hopefully they'll inspire you to be a better programmer, and you can take advantage of the work "Stevey" has done to guide you down the path of improvement. Stevey wrote all these articles why'll working at Amazon; make sure to also check out his current blog now that he works at Google.

Labels: programming

My brother, Scott, just got married last night. Congratulations Scott and Dana!

Labels: personal, pictures

I'm looking for feedback on my XPath Replacement Maven Plugin. It's barebones right now; please send me any ideas you have on how to make it better, or just let me know if you'r even interested in it. The goal of the plugin is to allow you to do configuration (similar to normal Ant/Maven filtering), but without requiring placeholders so that your source version has a valid value that let's a developer get going straight from source.

I also updated the EasyMock Property Utilities site to include the example posted here on the blog.

Labels: programming

Here's the promised example of how to use my EasyMock-PropertyUtils library. It's a TestNG test class with two test methods. The first, testSayHelloTo() uses the single-property matcher test. The second, testSay() uses the multiple-property matcher test by supplying a Map of property names to property values. If you haven't used EasyMock before, this should also serve as an example of how EasyMock can allow you to unit test in isolation a method that interacts with another class. Check out the EasyMock Documentation for more information.

Labels: programming

I've created a new open-source project: EasyMock-PropertyUtils. Basically, this library allows you to use JavaBeans-style property matching for arguments when using EasyMock. I plan to add some end-user documentation and blog some more about both EasyMock and this project soon. This is being done separately from EasyMock because it's use of non-refactoring safe strings doesn't fit the philosophy of EasyMock. The project is quite small, and I have no idea what the interest-level will be, so I'm just hosting it alongside the rest of my personal projects on my Google Code Hosting site. Hopefully there isn't something like this already out there that I missed.

Labels: programming

Michael J. Totten is a fantastic independent journalist. He's currently in Isreal. Check out his latest piece on Gaza. Or this piece from the Israel-Lebanon border. Hopefully from there you'll want to read everything he's been writing. If, like me, you find that Michael is providing valuable information in a direct fashion you can't get elsewhere, then make sure to donate some money to him so he can keep reporting from the Middle East.

Labels: politics

A new version of Blogger is in beta now that appears to have the features I've been wanting. Now if only I could get in on the beta...

Update: How will the new dynamic architecture impact those of us using the static FTP-to-my-server functionality?

Labels: blogger, web

I've created a project on Google Code Hosting. It's really just a place for me to put code I'm playing with so that it's version-controlled and accessible anywhere. Right now it has a simple command-line draw-the-high-card game that I'm using to try to learn Ruby.

While there may be valid reasons that Google Code Hosting isn't good enough to really compete for hosting real open-source projects, for my needs nothing beats the no-barrier-to-entry factor here. If nothing else, it's nice to have a proper SVN repository available to me for free.

Labels: programming