Blogs

South Coast bikes have an interesting article about cheap bikes bought on the internet. It seems, with bikes, you get what you pay for.

I noticed recently that Warren Smith has an interesting page on skiing. He talks about how biomechanics and psychology are not always taken into account by ski teachers and can contribute to skiers remaining at an intermediate level for longer. He lists some typical but not exhaustive issues that can be solved with more awareness: giving tips on diagnosis and remedies.

Want to quickly learn a language?

I've just read an interesting article in the Guardian in which the travel journalist Emily Baker puts some social networking sites for tourists through their paces: Going local. She gives a run-down of the social networking sites at the end of the article, here is some of it:

For meeting someone on a flight

• Flight-club.org
• triplife.com

Since the Hamcrest matching library has been taken out of jmock and placed in its own package it looks to be generally useful for the application developer.  Hamcrest support has now gone into the new version of junit4.4, along with some other interesting features. 

The assertThat assertion now takes a matcher which provides a better alternative to assertTrue improving the error report when a test does fail.  Here are some examples:

What is it with some politicians?  They see a problem, often a small one, and think up a broad law without sparing a thought for judges or the police.  Creating laws that are difficult, costly or even impossible to enforce.  One area which seems to be attracting these mad bureaucrats is the internet.  What on earth makes lawmakers think that they  can stop music downloading by threatening ISPs or bill website owners for anon

I read in the news today that Microsoft has made a beta release of Internet Explorer 8.  They also announced that the new browser works better with web applications like Facebook as well as fully conforming to web standards by passing the ACID tests.  This quick release has people thinking that Firefox is posing a threat to Internet Explorer's market share.  But it may be that the two browsers are beginning to notice Flock<