The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Twelve percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, according to a Pew survey from November 2006. As more and more public media are using podcasts to make audio and video available over the Internet, the need for a decent podcast client (a.k.a. "podcatcher") increases. I have been carefully monitoring this market for at least a year - and I must admit that it has been a frustrating time. But, I think I finally found an application that has what it takes. I have been looking for a native Windows application to fit my needs, with features like: Automatic downloading of audio and video files to a specified folder. Light on system resources and not interfering with other processes. Free. Stable. Configurable. Intuitive GUI. To my great surprise there haven't been any decent choices out there for the longest time now. I have been trying all of the products out there only to uninstall them again shortly afterwards. To get a glimpse of which clients are popular, let'...

Are you being swamped with RSS content? Me too, and while waiting for mainstream feed readers to include built-in filtering support I am going to tell you how I deal with it. I am using 2 approaches for streamlining my Google Reader experience: one for removing the irrelevant posts from a feed, and another for prioritizing my subscriptions. Removing uninteresting posts When subscribing to a feed, your best option will be to find one that only contains the posts you are interested in. This blog, for example, provides individual feeds for each tag or label. If you are only interested to read new posts about .NET you should subscribe to http://jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/.NET . You are not always lucky enough to have your favorite web sites return a relevantly filtered feed for you. But don't despair, the solution is just a click away: FeedRinse provides a free RSS filtering service where you can set up rules based on titles and content. I have been using thei...

After months of stressful job hunting I am happy to say that I have found a new professional home at Mainsoft . Beside being the main contributor of the Mono project, their product family enable .NET code to run on any Java-enabled platform. In the end I chose Mainsoft for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I believe in their products; second, I enjoyed the interview process with a lot of people who are sharp, but still humble; third, they are working with wikis, blogs and are responsive to their end-users. My search for a new job was a long process and it took me to a lot of different places, mostly because I wasn't in any hurry to leave my previous job as integration manager at ECI Telecom , where I was a part of a great team. I had the time to wait until I found something I felt was just right. The problem with job hunting in Israel is that most hiring is done via recruitment agencies. That means that you can't really browse from a wide selection of employers, but you ...

After blogging for almost a year using Thingamablog, I have decided to switch blog platforms. While Thingamablog is a great idea in theory it doesn't work out that well in practice - at least not for me. The basic idea of Thingamablog is that there is no server software required - all HTML is generated on the client and then uploaded to the web directory of your choice using FTP. I carried around my blog database on a flash drive in my pocket at all times and could blog both from home and my office. The problem was that the FTP upload became slower and slower as the database grew in size. Because I run the database from my removable drive I once did the mistake of removing it too early from the computer with a corrupted database as result. Of course there were no backups. I decided to do away with my web page as well and merge the information into the blog instead. Of course I still want to be able to blog from any location I want, and avoid ads. And get it for free. Blogger.com is...

Like many non-Americans I have a strange attraction to the United States. Having neither the means nor the time to explore this vast continent on my own I am looking for substitutes to get intimately familiar with the different corners of America. This is what I was hoping to find in Torre B Isaksen's "America: A Love Story". The author, Mr. Isaksen, a Norwegian-born sea captain, spent half a year traveling from Alaska to Florida, using his car. His travels took him through many states and he writes about the people and places he saw. Quite a few exciting events happened to him during the trip, but that is not what makes this book interesting. Where Mr. Isaksen really shines is in his narrative of all the original people he met on his travels, sometimes old friends, but most of the time just random encounters on his journey. As the book title hints, Mr. Isaksen's unrelenting love for the US is ever-present throughout the pag...

I just had a large backlog of e-mails delivered to me. They were all addressed to any of the e-mail addresses in my feedjournal.com domain. There were e-mails all the way back from the end of August until today. Of course, this is an extremely costly thing to have happen to an µ-ISV and especially at a time around a product launch. I have been speaking to both my domain name registrar and my hosting provider and problem is now solved once and for all. You should all feel free to safely use the feedjournal.com addresses for contacting me in the future. I am terribly sorry for everyone who tried to contact me during this time (31st Aug - today) and never received a reply. I am now starting to process the e-mail backlog and reply to each and everyone of you.

After a few sabbatical months in the aftermath of the Made In Express Contest, it is finally time for FeedJournal v2.0 to see the light of day. Functionality-wise there are no major differences between v1.0 and v2.0 - all the changes have occurred behind the scenes. The database is now using on a much leaner engine, considerably speeding up the download size and installation process. On top of this, the new version is going shareware, with a 30-day trial version without any limitations. The price for a single computer license is $39.95, but during 2006 there is an introductory offer of $29.95.