http://philwilson.org/blog a geek commodity Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:42:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Seriously. I really like Java, it’s a fundamentally great language. Verbose at times, but great. However, web application development in Java is painful. Additionally, the compilation and deployment of Java webapps completely suck. I mean, they’re terrible. I dread to think how many frameworks exist in Java to ease web app development – ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/11/java-makes-me-passionate A few weeks ago I went on a tour of Parliament (which lest you should think it boring, is also the Palace of Westminster!). In order to do so you need to contact your MP. I saw the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the monarch's Robing ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/11/a-tour-of-parliament It used to be the case that I pored over Mozilla (and later Firefox) release notes. But I stopped sometime in 2004, around the point when I accepted that XUL development was too hard to be doing in my spare time and yes, Firefox was clearly better than IE at ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/11/keeping-up-with-the-lizards In his latest post, "Anecdotes", Joel tells us to ignore everything he's written because it's a poorly constructed non-scientific opinion based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. Excellent. http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/11/joel-should-stop-blogging So, I finally finished the move from one host to another. It should not have taken as long as it did but after a frustrating night with the nginx config I spent a few days unwinding and catching up with the BBC's new light entertainment series for Saturday nights, Merlin ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/11/mai-blog-it-is-back I've been having some trouble with my server over the last few months so the blog may be up and down over the next few days as I move to a new hosting provider. http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/10/server-woes-likely [caption id="attachment_1350" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Screenshot of ripplerap in action"][/caption] I use a different note-taking tool for almost every conference I attend. I try and use ones which have both off- and on-line components for allowing me to write if there's no connectivity but allowing me to publish easily if ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/10/tiddlywiki-ripplerap-and-confabb This was my first time at FOWA. There were some really good talks, but the focus on "where's the money?" and "how do I monetise that?" was fundamentally depressing. This is a clear indication to me that I am not cut out to be an entrepreneur. I do the job ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/10/fowa-2008-first-reactions People complain a lot that users don't understand about OpenID logins booting them to another website to authenticate. Don't Google already do this with Blogger and Yahoo with Flickr? That is to say: don't tens of millions of people do this regularly already? I mean, what's the big difference? I know there ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/10/openid-usability I tried this a year ago only to experience epic fail. I tried this yesterday and it was a marvellous success. Around this time last year I was locked out of my Google account and decided to move what I could over to my own server (a process I've still not completed!). ... http://philwilson.org/blog/2008/10/importing-blog-posts-and-comments-from-blogger-to-wordpress