BadMagicNumber

It’s Friday afternoon, so here’s some random stuff:

• We live across the road from a park, and most Saturday mornings some guy rides his bike there to do Yoga. He also brings his pet chicken to the park and lets it run around. (This might be normal behavior in San Fransisco or somewhere, but in suburban Adelaide it is kinda odd)
• Alex is now 2, and doesn’t like sleeping at childcare. Fortunately, they have figured out that letting him sleep with a ladder (yes, a full size, aluminum ladder) will calm him down and get him to sleep.
• Paul Keating – no matter if you loved him or hated him – had a unique way with words. From yesterday’s Financial Review: “When push came to shove, McGuiness’s journalism did not add up to a row of beans. He help more political, philosophic and economic positions than would have the Karma Sutra had it been a philosophic text“.
• If you don’t program, and you write about the meaning of programming APIs then your opinion is moot. This also applies if you try and talk about APIs
• The Moth is a cool boat, but has come a long way since my circa-1970 tunnel hulled version. It’s kind of weird that they banned tunnel hulls, but freaking hydrofoils are okay…

Many Java developers complain about the length of time it takes to deploy their webapps for development, or to start the embedded WebTools server in Eclipse, or to use the mvn jetty:run process with Maven.

At work, we’ve created a solution using class which starts up Jetty and gets it to serve your webapp from within the IDE. This means you have start up times of seconds, and can debug without using remote debugging.

Happily, we’ve been able to open source this, too, so people can try it for themselves rather than just here me talk about it.

The source code is here, but you are probably better off using Maven, adding the following repository to your pom.xml:


<repository>
<id>EdAuUtil</id>
<url>http://maven.uat.educationau.edu.au/EdAuUtil</url>
</repository>


and adding the following dependencies:

<dependency>
<groupId>au.edu.educationau.opensource</groupId>
<artifactId>EdAuUtils</artifactId>
<version>0.9</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-util</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
<artifactId>jasper</artifactId>
<version>6.0.13</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-ant</artifactId>
<version>0.8</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Then you can run the class au.edu.educationau.opensource.devsupport.TestWebServer from your IDE. I need to generate the javadocs and put them up somewhere, but for the moment the code is reasonably well documented.

Last week there was a bit of news traffic about some of the content that is on Ning. Whatever…

I think the really interesting story to come from those Quantcast stats (if you trust them) is the Share of Vists. 86% of the vists to Ning come from regular or addicted visitors?! That’s some pretty good stickiness.

So it turns out that it’s 2008 and the thing to do is to do predictions for the next year. Here’s my 2:

1. Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.
2. Someone will realize that recommendations are the next search. Some company will work out how to do for recommendations what Google did for search: ie, take what is currently an overly commercial medium (eg, Amazon recommendations etc) and turn it into a consumer facing tool which is generally useful. By 2010 what they did will seem obvious, and by 2011 they will be billionaires.

Update – 1 more thing:

OpenSocial will succeed in a big way – not because of support from the big players (Google etc) but because lots of small open source web projects (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc) can easily add support and will finally have a standard way of creating cross-platform compatible software.