Top Content 2009

Like last year, I'd like to talk a little bit about my blog's top content of the year 2009, as well as a couple of interesting stats.

Let's start off with some statistics, in particular my blog's page views. They increased by almost 30% compared to last year. I think it's because of posting my blog entries on dzone. It brings a nice stream of visitors for each entry, especially if it's a controversial topic.



Unfortunately, the time which visitors spent reading through my blog entries did not increase significantly. That indicates readers are accessing a particular blog post, skim through it and then leave again. I would have loved, if people find more interesting content on their way reading through a particular entry. Since that isn't the case, I decided to revamp the style of my blog a couple of weeks ago and remove all unnecessary clutter to improve navigation and load time.

Let's get on with my blog's top content of the year 2009. This year's winner is my overview of the proposed JDK 7 language changes. It's not alone though, there is another blog entry in the top 5, which is about the future of Java the language. For me, there's one big surprise in those top 5 blog posts: my sample on JBoss Rules, which was the 3rd most accessed post in 2008 and moved up to the 2nd spot in 2009. The most amazing thing about this blog post is the fact that it was written in 2006. So without further ado, here's the top 5 bog posts:

1. More JDK 7 Language Changes
2. JBoss Rules Example
3. JDK 7 Language Changes Coined
4. Having Fun with JDK's tools.jar
5. Java Runtime.exec Opens Too Many Files

What's coming in 2010? To be honest, I don't really know. The past year I published on a weekly basis, which wasn't really a problem, because I had a lot to say. In 2010 I'm planning to change my personal focus from the Java platform to the iPhone platform, Objective-C and mobile development. There's still gonna be posts on Java, I just don't know how many and how regular.

I hope you enjoyed my regular take on development and Java this year! See you in 2010.

Top 2008 Content

I'm following others and revealing my humble blog stats for the past year. At the bottom there's a list of the top 5 blog posts. For a more detailed view, click on the picture of the Google Analytics report.

To my surprise, the post with the most hits is on a topic, that is very subjective, thus near and dear to my heart: how companies frustrate the heck out of you, if you are trying to be productive.

I wrote that blog post out of deep frustration and it's nice to see that others feel the same way about this topic. On the other hand - that's the downside - it probably means, that people out there experience similar frustrations. I think more people should write about this and thus show companies, that we could be so much more productive, if they'd just give us the chance.

Top 5 blog posts of 2008

1. How Corporations Constrain Productivity

2. JSR 203 More New I/O

3. JBoss Rules Example

4. Java's Runtime.exec() openes too many files

5. Nothing wrong with TDD, right?

Paying for Software

Since a couple of weeks I'm using a desktop application called MarsEdit to write my blog posts. Blogger's editor is pretty okay and I almost never experienced any problems, but it has one drawback: it doesn't let you work offline.

Google is thinking about adding Google Gears support to blogger, but at the moment all you can do is copy your post to a local file and merge it when you are online again. Although I like the simplicity of blogger's editor, I thought I'd give MarsEdit a try. I really liked it from the very beginning. It is simple and easy to use, just as blogger. There was one feature missing though, which was uploading pictures to a specific picasa web album. I decided to post a RFE to their support forum and to my surprise only one day later I got a beta version which let's do exactly what I asked for. MarsEdit is not for free though, you have to pay for it and that's actually wanted to write about in this blog post.

A lot of people, including me a couple of years ago, are not willing to pay for software. They see software as a necessary evil - they can't use their computer without it, so they rather steal it from somewhere than spent money on it. I was so happy in university, that they provided us with free copy of Windows XP. By no means, I would have bought it myself. I would have rather stayed with the previous version. It's not that I didn't have the money back then, it was more of an attitude that software is not worth spending money on.

That attitude change 180° in the last couple of months. Before getting my mac I didn't use any desktop application whatsoever. I used Google Docs for writing my letters and doing my accounting. Gmail served as a mail client and pidigin was my IM application. I didn't need anything else! Getting my mac book pro basically marked "the return to the desktop" for me and with that, happily spending quite some money on applications.

Some of the applications I got were free. However, I still donated a couple of Euros, because I really like them. I don't know where this change of mind comes from, maybe because I'm a software developer. I know how hard it is to develop something sophisticated. Or maybe it's just because it feels good to buy something nice and on a mac everything seems to look nice.

Paradise Lost (Again)

via kopozky.net

Staying On Top Of Things

In fact you don't have to stay on top of things, as 43 folders knows, because:

The world won’t end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.

Java for Project Managers

Jack Bauer

The future is here

James Gosling kinda responed to my "no paper post":

One of the things that's always interesting about visiting Japan is looking at all of their cell phones. I've seen some great things here on this visit. ... You can use your cell phone to book airplane (and train) tickets, and use the cell phone itself as both the ticket and the boarding pass. Zero paper. To check in, you just swipe your phone on a reader as you're dashing to your seat. Very fast and secure.

This reminds me of Singapore, where you can use your mobile phone for virtually everything. You can even use sms to pay for a can of coke at a machine.

I love that idea! I simply want my mobile phone to be an "all-in-one" (Eierlegendewollmilchsau) or "silver bullet" device, which can do everything. As I pointed out, I use my mobile phone to schedule stuff, write down notes, surf the web and write emails. I wanna be able to pay for a cab, get tickets and order seats for a movie.

Unfortunately in Germany that's somehow not possible - for various reasons. One of those reasons is security concerns. Some folks would wack out, if you could pay stuff with your mobile phone. Think of bluetooths hacks, bugging or stealing your identidy!! They are excessively disturbed security freaks preventing innovation!

I know that there are security issues, but I'm sure we could solve them, if we'd just relax a little. I also think we should give everyone a chance to innovate and put his/her's identidy "at risk" if they chose to. Almost everybody is using a wireless network at home and thus already making a choice that they accept the risk of being compromised.

However, there are folks out there, that are not aware of the security problems and I think it's important that the before mentioned security freaks point out those issues for them. What they shouldn't do is create FUD, cause it hinders adoption and thus innovation.

Still using paper?

I try to avoid using paper whenever I can, but at work it's just not possible. Taking notes during a phone call, quickly writing my thoughts down during a meeting - it all happens with paper. Maybe it's because I don't have a laptop or the lack of appropriate tools. The only instance where I really like using paper is when modeling software, but I guess that's also because I have no appropriate tool for that.

In my personal life I completely abandoned paper. Using my mobile phone or Google's notebook to keep track of stuff just works for me. I can search, share and archive all my notes easily - as long as I'm able to get online! But I have to agree that

... paper is the purest and most durable instance of the WYSIWYG interface.

Google Mail 2.0

A couple of weeks ago Google Blogoscoped reported about a new Gmail UI, which improves contact organization. This morning I was surprised to see it enabled in my Gmail account, especially after waiting forever to get IMAP. It looks really slick, especially the new box that pops up when you hover a contact on your chat list.

Hacking 0.1 (german)

Snacks

Me @ friendfeed

On Friday I got an invite to friendfeed, which seems to be similar to jaiku. The difference so far is that friendfeed seems to update, whereas jaiku still shows updates from a couple of days ago. Below is a nice little script that shows your latest feeds.

Me @ Jaiku

Since Jaiku was acquired by Google and my friend Dominik was kind enough to send me an invite, I thought I'd check it out. So far I cannot really say much, except that it shows old entries of the feeds I added. Well, maybe it just the Google effect and Jaiku needs a scalability boost.

Indoor Enthusiast

Arcor in Action

I'm offline for 4 days now after extending my contract with my provider for another two years. What a very warm welcome!

Giacomo in India

Giacomo is in India right now and he regularly uploads fantastic photos of people and places! It's worth a look as you can see.

Tact Filter anyone?

43 Folders' Merlin Mann quoted Jeff Biggler who said:

All people have a “tact filter”, ... “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. ... “Nerds,” have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction.

...

Normal people need to understand, that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn't be taken that way.

This is so true and I consider myself to be a nerd here! Enough said ;-)

Real Life YouTube Comments

via Google Blogoscoped

Fundamental Concepts of Computer Science

Coding Horror has a great blog post on various "computer science puzzles". Some of those are quite famous like the "The Towers of Hanoi" and as well as Jeff I can remember them from my first semester at university. I can remember that I tried to implement the "Eight Queens" problem in Java and as a complete newbie I totally blew it.

The most interesting part about the post is that Jeff thinks it's not useful to ask those puzzle questions in interviews for developer posts. Instead he claims it's more reasonable to let the potential programmer write some code in the real development environment.

I partially agree! I think it's not useful to have a developer solve those mathematical problems, especially under the special circumstances of an interview. At least when he has never heard of the problem. What I think would be useful though, is to let the interviewee describe the concept of a problem. For instance when describing the "Dining Philosophers" problem in computer science terms, I'd expect to hear keywords like concurrence, starvation or deadlock. If the potential developer mention those, in a correct manner of course, you know he will probably be able to map a real world concept to code.

To be honest, I only knew the "Eight Queen" and "Towers of Hanoi" problem of Coding Horror's "greatest hits" back from university. This blog post really got me excited about those puzzles again.