A little self promotion Back in September last year, Einar Ingebrigtsen interviewed me about Agile, CI and other stuff I’ve been working on at Contiki. You can check out the podcast here: http://www.ingebrigtsen.info/post/2009/01/15/3cAgile-talk-with-Jon-Aril-Tc3b8rresdal-3e.aspx

Thanks Einar for doing this. Was very strange hearing myself talk. Don’t think I’ve done that since elementary school

Update: My link below was wrong, it's now updated.

A few days ago i published a rather long article on my blog about custom actions in WiX which didn’t show up in Google Reader. Are you using Google Reader to subscribe to my feed and are the WiX article above showing up in you reader? Are you using some other RSS reader and received my post (or not)? I appreciate any feedback you have on this. Thanks.

Btw. I’ve tried several other readers and it works fine.

I've updated my DasBlog to version 2.2.8252.15582 and it has OpenID support! If you have an OpenID you can now use that for posting comments to my blog. I'm not taking the same stand as Aaron Hockley though, refusing to comment on blogs without OpenID support (at least not yet...).

So why use OpenID except from identifying yourself on my blog? The number one reason as I see it is that you have one ID to identify yourself across multiple web sites. This will remove the need for "forgot your password?" links, your favorite pet etc. Also that you rely on one provider for your id that you trust (hopefully) and don't have to "give away" passwords, which you probably only have a few of, using them on all the different accounts you're creating around the Internet.

When you sign into a site using OpenID you get redirected to your provider for authentication. Here you can choose how much information you want to submit about yourself to the site you're logging on to. E.g. you may chose to send no information at all, just your name or email etc.

If you want to know more about OpenID and how it works, check out openid.net. Scott Hanselman has a Weekly Source Code edition of OpenID and also a podcast.

Don't have OpenID? I use myOpenId.com where I've also added my domain (torresdal.net), allowing me to use that instead of [myname].myopenid.com. My id is jon.torresdal.net. Another popular way of using your ID is to map it to your web site. Below is an example from my web site using myopenid.com:

    <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://torresdal.myopenid.com/" />
    <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://torresdal.myopenid.com" />
    <link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" 
          content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=torresdal" />

This way I can use blog.torresdal.net as my id. However, one side effect of this is that many blog engines use the name before the dot as your name. If I use my blog url as identifier on e.g. a blog hosted by blogger.com, the comment will say "blog said...", which is not very helpful.

I mentioned myopenid.com, but there are several other suppliers out there. Just Google openid and you'll find many.

PS! All comments to this blog post is expected to use OpenId!

For me that's not many. Right now is a typical example. I started to read a blog post, followed a link or two, found something else that was interesting, stopped thinking, what was I doing again? Ahhh... reading blogs... Ok, back to that... Or maybe not, I'll rather blog about why I'm getting distracted...

No vonder it takes time. According to my Google Reader statistics I subscribe to 133 blogs and I've read 350 posts the last 30 days. But I've been lazy lately though... I have 668 unread items waiting for me now.  It's a fulltime job :) Anyway, back to reading blogs.

When I was at Øredev I wrote two ([1][2]) blog posts about the conference, and these got picket up by Øredev Project Manager Michael Tiberg. Yesterday I found this in my email box:

I really think this is a good way of letting the community know that they listen.

I’ve now blogged for about a year. I started out with the intent to blog about the topics: .Net, architecture and patterns. As it turns out that has not been the case. My blog ended up being less technical (or rather less code) than I imagined from the start. So, after realizing this I’ve changed my way of thinking about topics and have also reflected this in my top header showing a snapshot of my cloud. This does however not mean I will not blog about technical content. It’s just me stating that I have more non-technical stuff to talk about. This also gives me more freedom on what to blog about. I’ve had a bad bit of bad conscience about my blog focus, but by this change I feel more at ease picking topics I'm interested in.

I've been waiting a long time for this. I remember this was one of the things with Google Reader I found annoying. A Google product accessing a lot of data and no search support? Anyway, now it's here, and it works as expected :) First thing I noticed was a search that found 500 items, only showed the first 60. Hmmmm..., that was no fun. No paging or anything. But then I noticed it automatically loaded new items when I scrolled to the bottom. Nice!

Another not so new feature is the increased unread counter. Previously, if you had more than 100 unread items it displayed 100+, now it's increased to 1000 and if exceeded will show 1000+.

At 12:00 CET (after my lunch) I poked around in Google Reader looking for some interesting blog posts. I found some that I wanted to email my friends, but I couldn’t get access to the blogs were they originated. It turns out that FeedBurner was down! Since the urls have a redirect through FeedBurner I couldn't access them. I tried to access the blogs directly and found another weird behavior. Since many bloggers (including myself) access different features from FeedBurner, the blog page only loads the first blog post and waits until the FeedBurner request times out before continuing. This happens to every blog post on the page, which takes a lot of time!

Today when I had my usual rss read-through I came across a different blog post usually not found at a tech blog. Chris Sacca over at Google writes about a shooting incident he witnessed in San Francisco. Read his dramatic blog post here.

When I started blogging and looked at my site statistics for the first time, I didn’t know what to believe.

570 hits today and I only started blogging two weeks ago! That’s amazing! What’s causing all this traffic?

Of course this was only feedreaders, search engines and bots probing my blog, so I came to my senses pretty fast. But this got me thinking; my statistics will be crap if I can’t differentiate between computers and carbon based life forms, and what about my feed readers? Is it possible to capture how many are subscribing to my feeds?

It turns out there is. This is where FeedBurner comes in. They provide you with an approximate number of subscribers to your feed. In order for this to work you need to create an account at www.feedburner.com and redirect your feed(s) to FeedBurner. Here’s what FeedBurner say about their service:

Generally speaking, FeedBurner calculates subscribers by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the polling behavior of a multitude of readers, aggregators, browsers and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

For more information about “How do they do it?”, check this out.

Anyway, I’ve now been blogging since September 2006 and started using FeedBurner in mid January 2007. Here’s a chart showing subscribers for my feed:

There are a lot of variations, but the interesting about this chart is the trend. So for now I probably have somewhere between 20 and 25 subscribers.

And as an experiment to see if these numbers are reliable, I've added a poll where you can tell me if you subscribe to my feed or not :) (PS! It's a Flash thing, so you're unable to vote from your rss reader, you need to visit my site.)

During the last month I’ve seen every living blogger in my rss reader getting tagged. Since I’m quite new to the blogging world I guess I’ll have to start this off myself if it’s ever going to happen. So here it goes; five things you didn’t know about me:

1. I used to have very long hair. On a late Saturday night in a nightclub I was standing in a (dark) corner talking to some of my mates when this guy came over and asked me if I wanted to dance! There was total silence for about 5 seconds before he realized I was a guy. The next day I cut my hair short!
2. I served in the army in north of Norway (Bardufoss) for 2.5 year. One year was mandatory (by law), but I got a job offer after I finished my service, so I stayed. I was an officer driving around in one of these.
3. I didn’t finish my university degree. I hadn’t much left, but the job offers where just too tempting. I even took 6 months off work to study at UTS (University of Technology Sydney), getting a nice tan down under and traveling all of the east coast of Australia. Coming home after that trip, working was much more tempting than studying and my work experience exceeded my education anyway, at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
   
4. From when I was 5-6 years old to I was about 14 I played football (soccer) almost every day. I also played regularly for our local football team. The only problem was that I sucked! I never got any good, not even remotely good, so I gave it all up. The funny thing though is that it took me 9 years to figure it out!
5. My first computer was a Sharp MZ 700 at the age of 9. I remember I got a magazine with some BASIC code and that was my first experience with software development. After that it was C64, Amiga 500, 600, 1200 and quite late in life a PC (300 MHz).

Ok, now I’ll tag Torbjørn Marø, Bård Strøm, Trond Aarø, Per-Ove Joakimsen and Sondre Bjellås.

As one of Microsoft latest publicity efforts they offered Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) and other bloggers a new Ferrari laptop with Windows Vista to keep, in return of his opinion of Windows Vista. They got what they bargained for and a bit more. Check out his latest blog post to get the details.

I must say I admire Joel as one of our best bloggers out there and he really knows how to attract an audience. I’m not sure if I have dared to blog about this in the same way as Joel and I'll give him credit for that, but why on earth did Microsoft offer him this deal if they knew who he was? I’ve read quite a bit of his work including his Joel on Software book and this is not the first time he’s brutally honest about these things. I remember quite a few references back to the Excel team where he once worked at Microsoft. Very interesting reading.

Anyway my humble opinion is that this happens all the time and I guess it’s up the each and every one of us to decide for our self what to do. I agree with Joel in great extent, but as I said I don’t think I would have blogged about it. But that’s probably why he has a trillion readers and I have 7. But at least I got a brand new hot tub 6 months ago… Still waiting for that Ferrari though... Yeah, in my dreams!!