I keep this blog (which I don’t update very often, but that’s another story) and I post both personal and professional (in the sense that it will appreciated by Computer Scientists) content. I would like to import all blog posts automatically from this blog into my facebook and linkedin profiles.

The thing is that I don’t want to post Computer Science related content into facebook and I don’t want to post into my (professional) linkedin profile all kinds of rubbish. I found out that it is easy to selectively syndicate content depending on the tags that I will add to my post.

So I added two tags, an import_facebook for posts that I want to be imported into my facebook profile and an import_linkedin tag for posts that I want to be imported into my linedin profile.

Then I installed the “WordPress” application for linkedin and I set as a feed url of my blog the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_linkedin

I also installed RSS Graffiti for facebook and I set as a url of my feed the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_facebook/feed

From now on any WordPress post I tag as “import_facebook” will be imported into my facebook profile, while every WordPress post I tag as “import_linkedin” will be imported into my linkedin profile. Before installing the WordPress and the RSS Grafiti apps on your linkedin and facebook profiled respectively, you need to have at least one post tagged “import_facebook” and a post tagged as “import_linkedin” for the applications to pick up the links properly.

I have received an Email with the top 50 programming quotes. Here are my favourites:

  • “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.” – Rick Cook
  • “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” – Edward V. Berard
  • “They don’t make bugs like Bunny anymore.” – Olav Mjelde
  • “A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors.” – Waldi Ravens
  • I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
  • “In the one and only true way, the object-oriented version of ‘Spaghetti code’ is, of course, ‘Lasagna code’ (too many layers).” – Roberto Waltman
  • “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.” – Bill Bryson
  • “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.” – Thomas C. Gale
  • “Perfection [in design] is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupry
  • “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.” – Randall E. Stross
  • “To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” – L. Peter Deutsch
  • “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” – Seymour Cray
  • “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.” -Linus Torvalds

And my favourites:

  • “You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.” – Jim McCarthy
  • “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” – Donald E. Knuth
  • “Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Christopher Thompson
  • “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.” – George Carrette
  • “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.” – Alan Kay
  • “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding
  • “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” – C.A.R. Hoare
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
> build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to
> build bigger and better idiots.
> So far, the universe is winning." - Rick Cook

I tried using the Apache XMLConfiguration to save the settings of an application I am developing to XML format. When I used it with Java 1.5 it all worked perfectly; however if I tried using it with Java 1.6 I was getting the following exception.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl.getXmlStandalone()Z
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.setDocumentInfo(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.parse(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.parse(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transformIdentity(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.XMLConfiguration.save(XMLConfiguration.java:880)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration$FileConfigurationDelegate.save(AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.java:454)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:546)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:513)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:491)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:403)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.save(AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.java:199)

After doing some search on google I found that this can be a problem with the xerces XML library (xercesImpl.jar). Checking the 3rd party libraries I am using in my project, I found a library that was using and distributing an earlier version of xercesImpl.jar.

I downloaded the latest version (2.91) of xercesImpl.jar from the Apache xerces project (http://xerces.apache.org/mirrors.cgi#binary) and replaced in the 3rd party library I was using the xercesImpl.jar file with the one I downloaded. Now everything seems to work fine, even in Java 1.6.  🙂