Blogging Roller

Step off Pilgrim, Ito, Winer, and all of you A-list bloggers 'cause I'm more technoratical than all y'all. I'm #4 in the Technorati 100. Bam! Look at my numbers:

Technorati, for those who know not, is a website that rates the popularity of weblogs based on the number of links to each weblog. My modest little weblog is not very popular, so how did this happen? I assure you, I never intended to scam my way to the top. I was kidding about that secret plan.

Here's the deal. Since time began and before I ever heard of Technorati, I've been putting links to Roller developers Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, and myself in the page templates that ship with Roller. Some folks remove those links, but most don't and so now most every new Roller-based blog boosts our standings on Technorati. As JRoller grew to thousands of users, folks started to notice this. A couple of weeks ago, everybody was amazed to see my modest little weblog hovering around #80.

Recently, a lot of blogs named "My Moblog" started to appear in <a href= "http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Frollerweblogger.org%2Fpage%2Froller"> my Technorati Link Cosmos. Turns out, all of these blogs are running on a Roller based server at 212.180.4.202 which, according to whois, is owned by EasyNet.FR. I'm not sure what they are doing there at EasyNet, but perhaps Minerva, or one of her readers, knows. Minerva's weblog, called Geegaw contains a link to one of those EasyNet blogs with the text Top 100, here I come! See below:

What does she, or one of her readers, know that I don't? Is somebody using Roller to game Technorati and if so, why am I the beneficiary of this scam?

It was a little difficult to return to work today after two weeks off. I enjoy my job, but after two weeks of sleeping late, playing with the kids, and hacking Roller, I felt like a kid going back to school. We've got another release coming up, so I need to get in gear fast. I also need to wrap up hierarchical categories for Roller and finish up the Roller presentation that I hope to present at the February TriJUG meeting.

And welcome to 2004. Here is a thumbnail review of the highs and lows of 2003 from my microcosm:

The growing boy.	The book that almost wasn't.	The cat we lost.
The house that would not sell.	The company that would not fly.	The new employer (that I won't mention).
The school boys.	The cat we found.	The home that we are improving.

David Czarnecki responds in detail to some reader comments in my October 2003 Blojsom vs. Roller post. Things have changed a bit in the months since that post. Roller and Blojsom are becoming more alike in terms of features, but the architectures are still very different. Roller is classic database-driven J2EE webapp with the patterns and the frameworks and the associated warts. Blojsom plays off of the extensible and file-system based Bloxsom architecture. Both of these architectures have strengths and weaknesses.

Instead of donating to me, I urge you to donate to one of these important causes:

• Food Bank of N.C.
• Common Cause
• Doctors Without Borders
• Habitat For Humanity
• Electronic Freedom Foundation

(In other words, I took the Paypal button off of the page.)

If you are considering purchasing a D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus Xtreme wireless networking card for your laptop, make sure you read the <a href= "http://www.zdnet.com.au/supercentre/broadband/reviews/story/0,2000026394,20275642,00.htm">ZDNet review before you buy. I can confirm that, as the graphic at the end of the review shows, the D-Link DWL-G650 is a poor performer. I replaced my D-Link with a Netgear WG511 and now I've got connectivity everywhere in the house.

Peter Norvig: PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

Have a happy and safe holiday.

• Linus' first analysis of SCO's claims against Linux
• Erik's blog pays off bigtime with an exclusive sponsor
• Eclipse 3.0 M6 is out and supports embedded Swing components
• Creator of Jetty Servlet engine says Servlets MUST die! but Ted has mercy.
• Java Server Faces Reference Implementation beta is now available
• James announces Another Groovy beta
• Alex Rupp says it's time to take a step beyond web MVC
• Via Dominic, Microsoft compares <a href= "http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/aspnet-aspnet-j2ee-struts.asp"> ASP.NET and Struts application architectures.

Now it's certainly possible that McClanahan et (Sun ?-) al are
secretly planning for JSF to "replace Struts," i.e. be a complete,
mo', betta' MVC Solution For All Your Web Application Needs(tm), and
this is all part of some elaborate double game. Alternatively, it
seems more reasonable that, longer-term,

* JSF specializes in view-space and supporting Model1- and RAD-ish tooling
* Struts specializes in control foo, e.g. struts-chain, workflow.
* SFIL continues to be maintained
* sane web frameworks specialize and maintain integration interfaces
* developers choose what makes their little hearts go pitter-pat

More reasonable to me, anyway--am I missing something?

Somebody get this Thomas Roche guy a weblog.

I took Linus today, just like last year.

For the past two or three months, a sweet little black and white cat has been visiting us and delighting Leo. The cat would appear in the backyard and Leo would start screaming "ditty! peas, ditty! peas" and running from window to window to catch the cat's every move. At 18 months old, Leo can't really talk yet, but he knows the word please and he uses whenever he asks for anything, so "ditty! peas" translates to "look everybody, there is a cat in the yard, can we please go out and take a closer look?"

Last week we learned that cat was a stray, apparently left behind by an old widower who moved away and into an "assisted living" facility, and so we decided to adopt her. We had her checked out and washed up by the vet and welcomed her into our house. She is black and white like the moon, Leo loves the moon, and Leo loves kitties; so by Andi's feminine logic our new family member is now known as Luna.

Kids bring all sorts of wonderful emotions, joy, and laughter into your life. Like Matt, I never smiled so much and felt so much joy as I do with my three boys. But, before the kids I never got angry and I never yelled at anybody. Just something to keep in mind, Chris. Kids will get you in touch with your emotions and I mean all of your emotions.

Lance, Matt, and I have agreed to serve as judges for the upcoming JRoller Theme Contest. Arjun Ram is coordinating the contest so keep an eye on his blog for further details.

I certainly don't. Groovy is fascinating, fun to play with, and, for a Java developer, much easier to grok than Jython. I've already written a couple of simple Groovy SQL scripts and now I'm trying to wrap my mind around Groovy Markup. What a cool new toy!

Later... Here is one small nit. Groovy could use better error reporting. When an error occurs, you don't always know what line in the script caused the problem.

I added some additional logging to Roller's RefererManagerImpl.java to help track down the dayhit rollover bug, stopped JRoller, was called upstairs to deliver nite-nite hugs and kisses to the kidlets, returned downstairs to find that Andi had queued up the Sopranos DVD, and completely forgot about JRoller for about an hour or so. Rick and Matt restarted the server for me. I know, that sounds completely unprofessional, but this is life. My most sincere apologies to all who were inconvenienced.

Read all about it. I've heard Websphere's eBay customer story, but I would love to see the new JSF features in Websphere Studio. Unfortunately, I'm snowicebound.

Doc Searls provides a list of links to Iraqi weblogs covering or likely to cover the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Edward Tufte's Cognitive Style of PowerPoint made the rounds a number of months ago in blogspace. Now, the $7 article is featured in the NY Times article <a href= "http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14POWER.html?ex=1071982800&en=799ad449b398c2d7&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE"> PowerPoint Makes You Dumb. I'm working on a Roller presentation and I don't want to make anybody dumb, so I just ordered a copy.

I'm spending the weekend with a couple of friends in the mountains just east of Jefferson, North Carolina. Saturday, we went hiking in the Grayson Highlands, accross the Virginia border. It was cold, windy, and in some places the trail was covered with a sheet of ice, but we were rewarded by close encounters with wild ponies and a flock of wild turkeys. I'm sorry that I didn't bring my camera because the ponies were storybook beautiful and the turkeys were quite a colorful sight.

We were hoping to ride the Viginia Creeper Trail today, but we woke up to find a inch of ice covered snow on the drive way. The driveway is long, very steep, and ends about 30 feet from the New River. Obviously, we're not going any where by car today. Luckily, we've got plenty of food, a pool table, and as you can see I have my laptop and a connection.