Jef Atwood has discovered the implicit variable type declaration in C#:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(name));

Who came up with this stuff?

Is there really any doubt what type of the variable br is? Does it help anyone, ever, to have another BufferedReader on the front of that line? This has bothered me for years, but it was an itch I just couldn’t scratch. Until now.

Actually, there is a question about the type of br – it could be a BufferedReader or it could be any superclass of BufferedReader and sometimes that distinction is important.  The most common example of this is in the collections API:

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds.

When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works. This leads to much faster sync times but also means that you can’t actually refresh your feeds to find what’s new. All the refresh button does now is check NewsGator and there’s no way to check directly with the site itself.

Kevin Gamble has an excellent post Enterprise 2.0– working in the open:

A week doesn’t go by where I don’t hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, “Then a wiki isn’t for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs.” It’s amazingly common for people to want to work in a private little sandbox until they have everything perfect and then reveal it to the world. The trouble is, this almost entirely eliminates the opportunities for collaboration because people can’t see the content until it’s completed. What’s the value in reviewing and adding to a document that the author already thinks is done?

I got just got home from a very entertaining evening with some folk from the Web Content 2008 conference watching, or rather largely ignoring, an overall boring game of basketball between two teams I didn’t know from a bar of soap (for the record, the Celtics won and were premiers or something). Anyway, I found in my email an entire conversation within Ephox around this article on CMS Wire about the talk I gave today. It’s actually a very good summary of what I said and I hadn’t realized there was anyone from CMS Wire even at the conference (Rachelle, please do say hello tomorrow if you get this, I don’t know what you look like).

I’ve seen in a few places people getting excited about the upcoming support for Google Gears in WordPress as a way to locally cache common files so they don’t have to be downloaded repeatedly. For instance, this article from Geniosity Musings:

But, some of the new features (and features I’ve just started using now that I use the Visual Editor) just aren’t as cool thanks to the not-so-great internet speeds in South Africa.

Kevin Gamble echoes an increasingly common theme at the moment, complaining that some US ISPs are trialling metered internet plans instead of unlimited data:

This is serious stuff. This is an both an economic and freedom issue. Changing the way the Internet works means people will be less likely to share and to try innovative things. If you don’t think this will impact the quality of your Internet experience you are dead wrong. It will make a massive difference in changing people’s online behavior. Here’s the thing though – metered internet plans are not a new idea. They’re not even unusual, they’re just a way of life for a huge number of people, like say pretty much anyone in Australia. You don’t have a civil right to unmetered internet access any more than you do to unmetered electricity.

I’m commuting to work these days since Ephox has a sweet office in Windsor and while I’m there by myself at the moment its still nice to get out of the house. Anyway the point is I now have 30 to 40 minutes each day walking to the train station, waiting for trains or sitting on the train. In the mornings this is the perfect opportunity to review email and feeds but in the afternoon there aren’t many of those so the trip is somewhat boring. Of course this is the perfect use case for audio books an podcasts so I’m going to have to try a few out. Previously I haven’t bothered with podcasts because the information density is too low. Its so much more efficient to read text instead of listening to someone talk. Its rare that emotion and speaking tone really adds anything to technical discussions. If you have spare time sitting on a train though that’s not really a consideration so you may as well cover off that extra content that isn’t provided as text.

More a bookmark for myself than anything – the W3C has published a preliminary guide to differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4. Quite useful for anyone planning to update their products for HTML 5.

I have a very simple benchmark for judging how much emphasis a site puts on people instead of technology – I look at how it identifies those people. Sites that don’t have anything to do with people treat everyone the same and don’t have a name for their users at all. The next step up is sites that let you log in some how and then refer to you by your username or email address. At least you exist, but in a very abstract, computer oriented way. Getting in to the area of treating you like a real person is where the site refers to you by your real name (or the pseudonym you put in the real name box). That’s a really big step towards having people form connections. Where it really makes a giant leap forward though is when you have photos to identify people.

I come from a family of teachers and despite running for the technological hills myself, still wound up marrying a teacher, so I’m surprisingly familiar with schools, teaching and technology in schools. It also helps that I’ve had a couple of jobs running IT in schools and I’ve always kept an interest in how technology is being used to aid teaching.

It should come as no surprise then that I was quite interested in Mark Ahlness’ post about a new WYSIWYG editor being added to the blog software his third grade students have been using. Now firstly, it’s cool that third graders are blogging – it gives them an interesting place to practice writing and by being interesting and novel, hopefully develops an interest in writing. After all, behind most learning there’s fun and passion.

There’s already a lot of stuff written on the internet about how GoDaddy SSL certificates aren’t recognized by Mac but are by Windows, all of it pointing to “a configuration problem”. I’m not sure how we got such special treatment but none of the instructions I’ve seen work in our particular case.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the problem is that on Mac OS X connecting to the site displays a dialog saying that the certificate could not be validated for an unknown reason. Thanks a heap for that OS X… On Windows it works just fine. The problem turns out to be that the server isn’t configured to provide the full issuing certificate chain all the way back to the root SSL certificate (which is in OS X’s set of trusted roots by default). All around the internet you’ll get instructions saying to make sure that the SSLCertificateChainFile is set to point at gd_bundle.crt (available from GoDaddy’s repository). This doesn’t work with our certificate, not sure why.

From Brett, our engineering manager extraordinaire:

With Ephox’s recent sales growth we are expanding the R&D team and are currently looking for two outstanding Java developers to join the team in our Brisbane office.

We develop in both Swing and J2EE using agile techniques and have a set of values based on the XP values. We have a fun workplace and are looking for the right people to join us.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants a fulfilling and rewarding position that takes their careers to the next level.