When I went to bookmark www.digg.com on del.icio.us, I noticed that the majority of the recommended tags were related to the technologies that Digg is built upon, and only a few were related to what values and services the site actually provides. This is most likely because the majority of the del.icio.us userbase is Web-savvy techno-types who have particular interest in the underlying technologies.
There is a divide in the way that different people value technology. Technical people analyze and evaluate technonlogy based on how it is built. …

My parents recently went to a wedding in Canada and borrowed my camcorder to take some video. They wanted us to mail the video to them, but I had other things on the tape (and frankly I don’t trust snail-mail enough to send my only copy of something to somebody in a different country).
I got a firewire cable and downloaded the video off of my miniDV camcorder in the highest quality (the DV NTSC format, which is an AVI file). Unfortunately, the file was about 4 GB.
I didn’t want to …

I didn’t realize that my site feed was no longer available on my sidebar. It must have been removed when I was editing my blog template. I’m not sure how long it’s been gone. Anyways, for those who are interested in subscribing to my blog, the link to the feed is available again. I use an Atom feed because blogger.com generates the Atom feed for me automatically. Atom works well with bloglines.com, my aggregator of choice.

My new DevX article introduces JavaServer Faces (JSF). Here’s an excerpt:
“JavaServer Faces provides an alternative to Struts or Spring MVC for those who want a Web application framework that manages UI events in a Java Web application. JSF is now a standard part of the J2EE specification and provides a viable alternative to non-standard Web frameworks.”
“If you’ve worked on more than one Web application with different teams, you’ve probably worked with more than one Web application framework. J2EE always provided Web technologies, but never defined a Web application framework …

I have a suggestion for syndicated blogs and news sources: don’t use banner ads in your feeds, people will likely just block or ignore them.
It is fairly simple to block images from a particular site or URL pattern, and I know many people that do this, including myself. I use Bloglines, a Web-based feed reader, and Firefox as my Web browser. I block images using a Firefox plugin called Adblock. I block banner ads on all of the blogs that I subscribe to fairly easily using Adblock. For example, …

It’s important to realize that Agile is not a single methodology or process. Agile is an umbrella term that describes a group of processes that share a common set of ideals. These processes include eXtreme Programming, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Scrum, etc.
This site gives you a summary of what Agile is, has links to all the methodologies that fall under the Agile umbrella, and list several tools that are used in the agile suite of methodologies.
Each methodology has a set of tools that they use or favor. Some are more …

When you go to delete a method signature off of an interface, you have to be careful. If you delete the method signature, the compiler will notify you of any references to the method on the interface. After resolving those, the compiler will be happy. But, you may still have implementations of the method on classes that implemented the interface. This is, of course, because classes can provide methods in addition to what is on their interface. You may also have references to the methods by code that had references …

Working on several software development projects, both agile and non-agile, I’ve realized a few things:
- Non-agile teams favor isolated development practices- Isolated practices are generally pessimistic- Agile teams favor collaboration- Higher collaboration seems to (naturally) require more optimism
Non-agile teams favor isolation
Most of the non-agile teams that I’ve worked for (including those who thought they were agile, but really weren’t) have generally favored isolated development practices. For example, developers take on different tasks and develop them in isolation. Developers have ownership of segments of code and take it very personally if …

My name literally means ever-lasting in Farsi.
It is officially pronounced: JAW-veed. The JAW is the strong sound and is pronouned just like the body part, and veed rhymes with weed.
Growing up, American friends / teachers always pronounced it: JAV-id, where JAV sounds like the first part of java and id sounds like the first part of idiom. Growing up, I never really bothered correcting people, and I eventually got used to this pronunciation. This is still how I introduce myself to American people.
There are also about 10 other …

I’ve been looking into home theater PC (HTPC) software lately and I’m very impressed with some of the packages available. HTPC software is essentially a digital video recorder (DVR) on steroids. You can use it not only to record live television, but also to provide access to all of your stored media content (mp3s, ‘ripped’ dvds, mpeg, game emulators, etc).
Some HTPC software packages provide RSS aggregators (feed readers). You can use this to read the news through your HTPC, but you can also use it with feeds that provide bittorrent …