This is reloaded version of my previous blog - or continuation of the fork.
First thing to start is to explain why did I do something quite contra-productive as relocate the blog and loose all the audience - however small it could have been.
It would seem that I like restarts and things reloaded. I did pick a new country to become new home for me and my family (if emigration is not a restart, what else is ?). Back in 2004 we have started Thinknostic to be "Montage Reloaded" - a new incarnation of the company I worked for before and liked it a lot. The same story repeats with blogging.
This is public answer to all who were asking why is my blog so badly neglected. Short answer is: It is because I am pretty active elsewhere and did not really find any additional time to allocate. If you are busy person, now you know, see ya later. If you are curious what elsewhere means, read on.
Last year and before, blogosphere and this blog was *only* part of the social networking space I was paying attention to. Since about 3-4 months I started to really pay attention to Facebook. I originally joined to find out what my son and couple of friends are up to and somehow I started to see value in this channel of communication. Recently, even my nephews and children of a very good friend that moved from Ottawa to Europe. So Facebook became the "generation bridge" and channel for stuff out of workspace.
Several people asked what is going on with me: no blog posts for almost a month, litlle presence on Gtalk / MSN. It is simpler to answer this way that write same email over and over.
Unfortunately the reason for being quiet is not that I am taking time off and enjoying myself somewhere in Caribbean on a secluded island without internet connection. Those who know me well also know that I would never go somewhere without access to Web for longer period of time than week - and even that would cause serious withdrawal issues. I am in Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere in between - physically or virtually.
Spam has always been a big problem for all blogs. Fortunately, worpress.com provides wonderfull Akismet spam filter which is works amazingly well. I do have switched on moderation for all comments, to make sure no spam gets through, but without Akismet it would be impossible to manage it because of the spam volume. Since I started this blog (August 2006), it caught over 17'000 (yes, seventeen thousands) spam posts. In other words, about 30 spam comments a day or almost 60 spam comments per published post.
I did not even notice that the visit counter left the 16 bit domain sometimes during last few days. Now it shows about 67 000 visits. Honestly, I am pleasantly surprised how many people found this blog worthy their time :-). Thanks to you all ...
Next boundary is of course 128K, 256K, 512K hits and finally a "Megahit". But that's far far away.
One of the most readable, original blogers out there, writing on software development practice and techniques - Joel Spolsky - published an excellent 3 part Talk at Yale: Part1, Part2 and Part3.
You will find out:
- what two computer science courses were most useful in his university studies
(one that was not really a comp-sci and one he decided to drop)
- why is it tough to be an in-house programmer
- why is the quality of many in-house systems so bad
- what is this "quality thing" anyway
- why is specification futile
in case you have not noticed - Interface21 aka SpringSource (great name change, btw) runs a blog with lots of hidden treasures inside.
Recent article describes new addition to Spring portfolio which is territory within my "watched space": enterprise integration. See the blog entry for more.
If you are in corporate space that is keen on "standards", the comparison of Spring vs EJB3 is very good article as well. Not that EJB would matter too much these days (IMHO) - but a nice read nevertheless.
Today is a special day for this blog as two bit boundaries were crossed. This is post number 256, which means that I have used all 8 bit numbers for numbering and jumped into nine bit space. The byte is not enough any more - vive la 0x100.
Another boundary crossed today is number of hits as tracked by Wordpress (which does not count my visits). In this case the number reached and crossed was 0x8000 or 32768 decimal, which brings us to upper half of the 16 bit address space. From today, full 16 bit counter must be used - and it must be even "unsigned short int" :-).
Many good posts about programming, coding, business, aesthetics, with nice touch of wisdom, If you are into programming languages, do not miss this one, this and this. If you are more into process and management, try this and this or this. There also deeper and lighter stuff :-)
As Reg says about popular bloposts
One model for popular writing is that it panders to the reader's prejudices. Plain and simple. People like writing that validates them and especially their ideas.
It is all about deep questions and problems computer science. Including the question whether such thing as computer science actually exists. I thing it does, but have occasional moments of doubts - mostly when I read something related to real science :-).
What does Andreas Zwinkau (it is read as ts-win-cow, my anglophone friends ;-)) think about it, can be found http://focs.wordpress.com/
His comments are amazingly deep for such a young guy. I wish when I was getting my comp-sci degree (1981-1986) we have had the same wonderful things these young fellas have now: ubiquitous internet and really world wide web with Google that actually makes it useful, Linux and many other wonderful open source projects (Apache, Jakarta, Firefox, Eclipse - you name it). Can you imagine studying computer science in a world where the Web does not exist (yet) ?