Tasty and del.icio.us

I'm riding a wave of hipness as I have switched my bookmarks to del.icio.us. I looked at del.icio.us before, but couldn't make the switch from my Yahoo! bookmarks. One of the things that made the difference this time was the Firefox add-on that replaces Firefox's bookmarking with del.icio.us. The add-on comes with a handy toolbar that provides me quick access to my bookmarks. You can organize by bookmark (most recent or most used) or tags. I like using the tags. Here are my shared bookmarks...

jrehfeld's bookmarks on del.icio.us

Almost as cool as a Mac user...

Because I now own a Nintendo Wii, I feel like I am so counter-culture. PS3? Bleh! XBOX 360? Pweh! My son and I were 48th of 69 in line at Super Target at 6:30 Sunday morning. By 8:42 am, we were proud owners of a Wii, and we spent the next 10+ hours playing tennis, bowling, and fishing (Zelda).

So my coolness factor increased, in my mind, to a level below a Mac user, in his mind.

Sticking it to the Man!

The client I am at blocks all IM and external email so staying in touch with friends and family is quite difficult, considering I don't like talking on the phone. Google Talk worked for a while, but was recently shut down (I cried myself to sleep that night).

In my constant fight for human (IMing) rights, I am resorting to using a shared Google document (i.e., Writely). This solution cannot be declared a success yet as the adoption rate from my friends is quite minimal. Ok, its zero.

By the way, I wrote this blog entry using Google Docs. The shared features are "pretty slick" as Brian commented. Give it a try ==> Google Docs

Java build scripts to build Java?

Dr. Dobb's Java Blog had a post about a Java-based approach to Ant build scripts. The author suggests that writing Ant scripts in XML is too challenging and complicated since XML isn't really a programming language, but the example in the post of the Java programmed scripts seems much, much harder to read.

Personally, I like the declarative nature of XML Ant scripts, and writing build scripts in Java seems over-engineered. However, I am open to alternatives to using XML for scripting, and a true scripting language may be better suited.

One of the comments mentions using Groovy for build scripts, which seems interesting, and needs more investigation.