Meme time, via Bill:

history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

Hmm…

'history' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

C:\Users\Eric>

After writing Best. Comment. Ever., I realized comment permalinks were not working on my blog. Clicking the link brought up the page, but failed to scroll to the comment.

Jörg offers this advice:

Firefox does right, and so does safari: You anchors name (”…#comment-7155″) contains a “-”, which is an invalid name. Try something like “#comment7155″, it will work.

While his suggestion served as a catalyst for me to finally investigate the problem, I was not convinced “-” was the cause. So I researched the HTML specification, which has this to say:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens (”-”), underscores (”_”), colons (”:”), and periods (”.”)

Dashes are frequently used in URLs, so this cannot be the problem.

The Solution

While my heavily customized WordPress theme defined links, it failed to define anchors or IDs. So the links were going nowhere. I had to edit comments.php and add this ID to a <div> tag:

<div id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" class="comment">

And that fixed the problem. I also re-learned some things about HTML that I probably knew at one point, but forgot:

• On the receiving end of an anchor-type link, you omit the # character
• You don’t have to link to <a name=”something”>. As my theme shows, you can link to <div id=”something”>

I suspect WordPress works fine out of the box, but I must have screwed it up when creating this theme.

Here are some of the more popular comics from my blog…or maybe not so popular, but some of my favorites:

• James Brings Closure to the Debate
• Java is the New COBOL
• Scala Will Do (this one pissed off a lot of people, beware…)
• Java Upgrade Hammer
• In the Zone
• Comic Tribute to Java Versus Ruby
• Wide Stanced Programming (my favorite)

All of my comics are tagged, also. You’ll have to keep clicking the Previous Entries link to see everything.

Least Successful Shirt Design

It is done.

I deleted my blog. From java.blogs. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all of the traffic they provide, but by actively pushing my blog to their service, I give up a little bit of freedom.

Specifically, I lose the freedom to say:

If you don’t like what I say, feel free to go away.

And I can follow up with a little smiley, which makes everything all better:

See? You feel better already!

Plus, I’m writing less and less about Java, which makes me feel guilty for posting to java.blogs. Here is some Ruby code Mark and I worked on yesterday:

require 'rexml/document'

# This returns a normalized version of a given XML string.
def normalize(xml_str)
  # Convert the XML string to a Document object and back to a string
  # to normalize it. This changes single quotes around attribute values
  # to double quotes and sorts the attributes within each element.
  normalized_str = REXML::Document.new(xml_str).to_s

  # Remove ignorable whitespace and carriage returns
  # from each line in the XML string.
  s = ""
  normalized_str.split("\n").each { |line| s << line.strip }
  s
end

I used this in some unit tests to compare some expected XML to the actual XML produced by a Ruby class, ignoring insignificant whitespace.

Blog On…

And there you have it. I am not forcing you to read this. These are just my opinions, and you are free to subscribe or unsubscribe at will. (unless you live in North Korea, where you probably don’t have the freedom to subscribe…sorry!)

And unless you drop the F bomb or are a blatant spammer, I’ll let you leave comments all day long. You don’t even have to give your real name.

My comic So Long, Chet crossed the line. In particular, I do not wish to make personal attacks. Although that was not my intent, it certainly gave that impression (how could it not?) and I am sorry.

Let’s Try it Again…

Here is another attempt, hopefully funny without being insulting:

Enough with the link blogs already!

OK, nobody’s figured it out yet. Hints so far:

• Hint 1
• Hint 2
• Hint 3

When you figure it out, post the answer here. I will continue the puzzle once someone demonstrates they have it figured out up to this point. Some people are really close…but I think they’re looking at entire words. Think more fine-grained than that.

Bonus question: What’s the weirdest thing you purchased online? I just ordered a 12″ diameter steel hemisphere.

Remember the good ol’ days when Java Developer’s Journal was an actual printed magazine? Wow, have things ever changed at “The World’s Leading Java Resource”:

Although not shown here, when you first visit the page, a giant Flash advertisement obscures most of the screen. Then, after you close that ad, the video on the right starts playing — with sound. It’s like a horrible MySpace page. And I thought blogs were bad.

I’m probably being too generous by saying there are “only” 8 ads…those three links above Ad #3 are probably paid links, as two of the three take you to sites that require registration before you can view the content. Making paid ads look like legitimate content is a dirty trick.

The question is…do all of these advertisements work? Am I stupid for limiting my blog to a single ad? Could I double…triple…quadruple my money?

Check out my blog on Safari: (made possible by browsershots.org, thanks Alex!)

See the little blue “RSS” icon? That’s fascinating, because my blog does not have RSS.

Why not use the feed icon like everybody else?

Calling my Atom feed “RSS” is just plain dumb.

Shout out to Carlos Vella for showing how to change the blog title in WordPress. Here is my new code in header.php:

<title><?php if (is_home()) {
  bloginfo('name');
} else {
  wp_title('');
}?></title>

Ahh…that’s one less piece of clutter in my theme.