I've been noticing way too many issues with Bloglines lately so its time to try some other aggregators out there. The most annoying issue is that it seems to be loosing track of what I've read and I'm constantly having to figure out if I've read something already or figure out half way through reading something that it isn't deja vu but actually that I've read this before. Also, some feeds seem to contain many many duplicate entries and then other feeds just don't display the latest entries. I have no idea if these are feed related issues or not but I'd bet they are Bloglines specific.

I guess it was just a matter of time that Bloglines would get very little attention while they try to figure out how they fit into Ask Jeeves. Surprised it took this long.

As per usual another excellent article by Joel Spolsky:

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

When I went to University, we were never taught a language. We were expected to already know it or learn it overnight to do an assignment. Depending on what theories they were teaching we'd use any number of languages like Cobol (maybe one assignment), Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, Ada, and "C" (I'm probably missing a few). Of course anything serious in later years was programmed in "C" (with Assembler where required).

This next paragraph from Joel brings back just way too many memories. I wouldn't want to try and figure out how many hours in my University life were spent chasing down the all too familiar "segmentation fault":

The lucky kids of JavaSchools are never going to get weird segfaults trying to implement pointer-based hash tables. They're never going to go stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits. They'll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

We're getting closer to bookmarking and annotation of webpages getting into the 21st century. I've been waiting many years for something useful that I would actually use. Not sure if these are it yet but I'll likely be checking them out in more detail soon.

See this TechCrunch article.

Back in November of 2004 while Adam Curry was looking for a way of receiving audio blog comments I messed around with exactly what Gabcast is doing. Basically using Asterisk and a call-in number to record audio for blog posts.

Just found the email threads Adam and I had regarding this but I didn't take it any further than a very simple prototype and it died due to lack of interest I suppose on both ends. Too bad we didn't take it further but nice to see that someone did.

I don't normally post poker related stuff here but I was one of the lucky 250 people invited to hear what Daniel (Kid Poker) Negreanu is going to announce tomorrow night at the Hard Rock Cafe Club 279.

There is all kind of speculation about what he is going to announce. My guess, is that he is forming a new online poker site or something that will bring the WPT or WSOP to Toronto/Canada.

I've met Daniel a number of times this year and have played in a tourney against him (he busted before I had a chance to take his chips!!!). He is certainly a class act and a real down to earth guy.

I'll update this post with details after the party.

Update: Well, the announcement was the launch (or re-launch) of his new website and poker room Full Contact Poker. But more importantly it was the annoucement of Daniel Negreanu's Protege.

Here is what Negreanu sent out by email: "The first big FCP online-poker promotion is called Daniel Negreanu's Protege. When the final winner of this promotion is declared in about four months, I want to teach my protege everything I know about poker and then bankroll him/her in tournaments. I sincerely believe that I can help someone become a great poker player. How do you become Daniel Negreanu's Protege? Ultimately by winning a live 10-player final table tournament...and to earn one of these final table seats, there are ten unique qualifying paths (most of which are played at the new FullContactPoker.com)."

The great Toronto Maple Leaf players Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour were in attendance. Gilmour pulled a fast one on Daniel when he hugged him and stole his chips behind his back!

I have to agree with Dave here. Although Wikipedia is a great resource I think we all have to take it with a grain of salt. Anyone can add anything to this thing which is the beauty of it but also the beast.

Little known I'm guessing among non-geeks is that everything edited in Wikipedia is recorded by revisions so at the very least there is a trail here. If there wasn't I think Wikipedia would be dead at this point.

I'd have to agree with this and it shows I might just have been right here. You have to wonder how eBay can innovate or even exist for much longer making decisions like this and totally throwing unbelievable amounts of dough down the drain.

From Techdirt:

Back when eBay bought Skype for $2.6 (potentially $4.1 billion), the company tried to justify the decision with a variety of vague statements. However, two specific rationales stood out: (1) it would be easier for eBay buyers and sellers to talk to each other (2) Skype was huge in China, where eBay had very little presence. The China story didn't make much sense. First off, as had been announced before the acquisition even occurred, Chinese telcos were looking at ways to block Skype, a process that has continued to move forward. However, even without that, it was never clear why someone who used a free VoIP system would then turn around and start using an online auction, just because it was the same company. The first point, about eBay buyers and sellers talking, didn't make much sense either. As we noted at the time, it's extremely rare that a voice conversation is needed in an eBay transaction. Turns out that we weren't alone in feeling that way. The executive director of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, a group that apparently represents the top sellers on the site, says that most of the group's members have no interest in Skype, and prefer to discuss auction results via email as they've always done. So, we've now crossed off the two big reasons why the company was worth buying at all (neither of which explained the price tag, either). What else is there?

I like the idea of presenting bookmarked (tagged) search results higher up above the normal search results. I'm not entirely interested in entering a bunch of metadata in Wink but rather like the approach Jookster is taking with its degree of separation concept.

See comparing Jookster to Wink here.

I wonder how long it will be before Google and Yahoo add this functionality making both these search engines likely irrelevant!!

I don't even know what this colour is but it certainly isn't "manly". Who wants to be in public reading a very "manly" book that looks like a romance novel?