Internet

If you’re interested in the internet you’ll have heard of Twitter. Well a newer competitor is called Jaiku. It’s different from Twitter in that it is more presence based than being purely a mini blog. With a little client installed on your phone it works out where you are automagically and updates the site when you move locations. It also lets you combine multiple RSS feeds into one, so I’m able to combine, 11tmr, 50WordReview, del.icio.us, Flickr and Defectr all into one lovely big feed which, if you have several sites may be useful for cross-site publicity. It’s quite an interesting concept that I’ll be playing with over the next few weeks. You can see my Jaiku badge on the right at the moment (if you’re reading this in RSS you’ll have to visit the site sorry!). Have a play anyway, my Jaiku name is mattwhite.

If you have ever used public transport in London you’ll recognise that this song is just genius. Definitely not for the easily offended though.

I’ve been a user of MyEclipse for my Java development needs for quite some time now. It is a fully fledged J2EE development environment on a par with Rational or any of the other tools but it only costs $53 per year to run. What I didn’t know is that it also includes a fully fledged Javascript Debugger which knocks anything else I’ve tried, including Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar into a cocked hat.

If you’re a Java or web developer you owe it to yourself to check MyEclipse out.

to learn C#? For me it would be doing a job like this, not much else could tempt me over from good old LotusScript!

If you run any sort of public website (a blog, a corporate site or whatever) I would recommend having a look at Google Webmaster Tools. Basically if you insert a tag in your site’s homepage header as verification that you own it, Google will give you access to a whole bunch of their database stats and information to allow you to see in quite some detail what you are being searched on, which pages are doing well or badly, the pagerank of different pages in your site, errors that Google has encountered while spidering your site and much much more.

Definitely worth a half hour peruse.

Now as well as being the best Java editor out there and the new foundation for the Notes 8 client, Eclipse is going to take over the world of developing AJAX applications as well. Can’t come soon enough in my view.

If you ever start to think that your website is doing well in terms of pageviews, just read this article from the BBC. They have just reached the point where BBC News is serving a billion page views per month. That is simply staggering.

Today is one of those days when even a 5 out of 12 score on the Joel Test looks like a far off utopian dream.

This is massively off topic for me, but this article about road pricing in the UK is a good, if long, read about the way that we are going towards a 24*7 surveillance society. Scary in many ways, but especially the part about enforcing speed limits using satellite surveillance and speed limiters built into new cars.

I’ve been using Protopage as the home page in my internet browser for ages now. It was great because I switch between machines so much (virtual, different boots and physical), all of the links could be kept up on a server and I didn’t need to worry about it. Unfortunately they have decided to upgrade the site this week and add all sorts of bells and whistles. The reason the old version was so good was it was very lightweight, but the new site takes ages to download each time I go to it, it looks awful and the new widgets are of no use ot anyone.

So I’ve migrated everything there across to a new wiki on this site. Of course I’m using DominoWiki. In all it’s taken 30 minutes from creating the database to being done. Wikis are just great.