In no particular order here is the list of of technology related podcasts that I frequently listen to.

• Cranky Geeks - Not cranky enough, but John C. Dvorak and guest rant on latest technology news.
• Diggnation - A weekly tech/web culture show based on the top stories on Digg.
• Drunk and Retired - They are not as drunk as one would hope, but they do tend to go off on Rails, software development, and zombies.
• Google Developer Podcast - Googlers talking about the latest Google APIs.
• The Java Posse - The seminal Java podcast put out by Google, Sun, and Apple engineers, just hope they never have to pronounce your name.
• .Net Rocks! - A weekly talk show for anyone interested in programming on the Microsoft .NET platform.
• Railscasts - Free, and most importantly frequent, Ruby on Rails screencasts ranging from 5 to 10 minutes covering testing, migrations, controllers, and more.
• WebDevRadio - This podcast covers web development news with the occasional interview with engineers working on projects with .NET, MySQL, PHP, etc.
• Polymorphic Podcast - Insight into software development in the .NET platform along with interviews with industry luminaries.
• Code Sermon - The podast somewhat preaches to the choir. This is a somewhat semi-weekly sermon on the virtues of software development best practices.
• Killer Innovation - A podcast about creativity, innovation, and idea generation. This podcast will present ideas to think outside the box, or IDE.
• Grails Podcast - Keeps you up to date about the latest Grails developments.
• NetBeans Podcast - Hosted by Roman Strobl of Sun, this podcast has the occasional interview with NetBeans developers like Tor Norbye and Geertjan Wielenga.
• Ask A Ninja - Every programmer needs a break between hacking sessions.
• Rails Podcast - News and interviews about the Ruby language and the Rails framework.
• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders - This podcast is put out by the Stanford business school. It usually has business leader share their experience.
• Floss Weekly - Free/Libre Open Source Software might be free, but it is not timely.
• Late Night Cocoa Podcast - Usually has hacking cocoa and API discussions and Cocoa practitioners, currently on summer hiatus.
• TWiT - Leo Laporte and gang talk technology, unless they are reminiscing about their TechTV days or how to monetize ‘netcasts’.
• Scoble Show - Robert Scoble talks with geeks, technologists, and developers.
• GigaOm Show - Om Malik and Joyce Kim talk with entrepreneurs in the valley and run down some of the latest tech news.

If you feel I missed any other developer noteworthy podcast please let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: java, dotnet, .net, twit, cocoa, rails, rubyonrails, ror, oss, entrepreneurial, google, development, podcasts

Like most developers, I like free software and open source software both for it’s freedom and it’s price. But once in a while there are some software you can’t avoid but to pay for. I was involved in a project recently where I had to profile some Java memory leak in a tight deadline. The code base for the project is compiled to Java 1.4 bytecode and the team uses Eclipse 3.1. I don’t know of any good profiler for Eclipse so without skipping a beat or thinking twice about it I downloaded a free 15-day trial version of YourKit Java Profiler.

It was just drop dead simple to manually enable YourKit to profile our JBoss 3.2.x based application even though we highly customized the start batch script. Once profiling is enabled, I was able to connect to our application from YourKit to have it start profiling, monitor, inspecting the leaky architecture in the application.

It took me just a few hours to get familiar with the YourKit screens and memory snapshots views. Within a day I was able to track down a ThreadLocal object that was keeping a HashMap instance that in turn collected a large hierarchy of objects in memory. Clearing the value of the ThreadLocal did the job.

Again, I choose YourKit mostly because of the environment and JVM I was using. I do understand that NetBeans 5.5 has a nice profiler for Java, which I have not tried myself. I would have opted for that if I was already using NetBeans or if it was the first result when I googled ‘java profiler.’ Unfortunately I was not able to find what seemed like a good or reliable profiler for Eclipse. For this reason alone I recommended YouKit Java Profiler to my boss. Although to be completely honest, since YourKit worked so well for me I thought of just getting another trial version next time I am ever in a bind and need to profile a Java application.

Technorati Tags: java, yourkit, profiler, monitor, performance, memory leak, product review, eclipse, netbeans

Earlier this year I wrote about discovering the purpose of the F11 key on OS X. Today I rediscovered how to get a screen shot for a particular application window using the Print Screen key. If you hit the Print Screen you get a screen shot of the whole desktop. If you you hit Alt + Print Screen you get a nicely cropped screen shot of the current application window. Here are other favorite Windows key shortcuts. Hit Alt + Tab to see all icons for all opened applications. To change focus to a different application hit Tab again until the application of interest is highlighted while still holding down the Alt key. Hit Start + D to toggle between the cluttered/clean desktop. Hit Start + E to open a new Windows Explorer. Hit Alt + F4 to exit the current application. Ctrl + F4 usually closes the current application window (I have seen some applications that don’t observe this key combination). Knowing key shortcuts will make you a more productive developer.

Technorati Tags: shortcut, hot key, windows, productivity, lifehack

There is a bit of a flame war unfolding between Javanistas and Rubyists. I could trace this most recent scuffle to an article posted on JavaLobby by Daniel Spiewak about a little Java library called ActiveObjects. The aritcle is promoting this Java-based but Rails inspired Object Relational Mapping library. ActiveObjects is a Java implementation of the Active Record pattern made famous by Ruby on Rails and it’s use of convention over configuration. In touting the benefits of ActiveObjects, Daniel complains and grossly exaggerates that in Hibernate “you have to write more XML than code!”

Gavin King, the founder of Hibernate, responded that XML was soo 1999 and now they overuse annotations. Gavin wrote, “Hibernate Annotations has been around since early 2005 and there is no longer any good reason for people to define mappings in XML.”

Out of the blue and into the blogosphere, Obie Fernandez responded to Gavin’s ‘FUDdly’ remarks with his top 10 rant why Java sucks ass! Basically Obie resorts to fighting FUD with FUD. Obie goes ballistic on compilers, IDEs, frameworks, libraries, High School Musical 2, and Java developers themselves. Obie rants that most Java Programmers are morons. From his writing, it is clear that Obie idol worships DHH as the fucking second coming of the fifth generation computer language era. Obie’s top ten reasons why Java sucks include that the language makes money for vendors. From his Ruby rage you think he hopes to make Java vendor money by writing Ruby books.
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I’ve been reading a lot of articles and viewing many presentations on JavaScript. One of the most prolific writer and presenter on the subject is Yahoo!’s Douglas Crockford. I’ve recently rediscovered Crockford’s classic article on The Elements of JavaScript Style (part 2). Between these two articles Crockford lists 12 key elements of JavaScript style.

• Avoid archaic constructions.
• Always use blocks in structured statements.
• Avoid assignment expressions.
• Use object augmentation.
• Use common libraries.
• Watch out for type coercion when using ==.
• Use the ?: operator to select one of two values.
• Don’t use the ?: operator to select one of two actions.
• Use the || operator to specify a default value.
• Never use implicit global variables.
• global variables are evil.
• Use inner functions to avoid global variables.

Technorati Tags: javascript, yui, elements, style, programming

Do you want to learn JavaScript from the experts? You don’t have to pay over $1000 in conference fees to learn from the best JavaScript developers. Here is large collection of video and slide presentations given by Douglas Crockford, senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!, John Resig, lead developer or jQuery, and a great many other JavaScript developers.

Videos
The JavaScript Programming Language, part 2, 3, 4

JavaScript - The Good Stuff
An Inconvenient API - The Theory of the DOM, part 2, 3
Advanced JavaScript, part 2, 3
Software Quality
Advancing JavaScript with Libraries, part 2
Best Practices in JavaScript Library Design
High-Performance JavaScript - Why everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong
Maintainable JavaScript

Slides
Building a JavaScript Library

Metaprogramming JavaScript Presentation
CSS + JavaScript tips
How To Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting
The Behaviour Layer - Using JavaScript for Good, not Evil
JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web
JavaScript Boot Camp Tutorial

Technorati Tags: javascript, learn, learning, conference, programming, crockford, yui, resig, jquery