I’ve been a long term fan of RSS feeds. It’s ideal when following tech news. In the past I used to read my feeds on a computer - using a mail client - but nowadays I prefer my iPad.

The following screenshot from Google Reader shows my addiction over the past year. 

Hmmm a little over 7 tech articles/blogs a day, that sounds about right. Although… this doesn’t include my reads on Hacker News. Perhaps it’s more serious than I thought ;)

Cross posted to http://blog.avisi.nl/2012/01/13/healthy-rss-addiction/

I was looking at the JSON Activity Stream specification today. Facebook is listed as one of the parties to support this format. Indeed I’ve found a blog post written in April 2009 that confirms Facebook has implemented JSON activity streams. Facebook calls it Open Streams.

In the meantime all references to the Open Streams developer documentation have been removed. Looking at the current Graph API it doesn’t seem to conform to the JSON activity stream 1.0 format. Did Facebook (silently) stopped supporting this format?

Currently I’m using the build-in HTTP server in Java 6 for (integration) testing RESTful services. Although this has the advantage of adding zero dependencies, the API of REST-assured looks cleaner. Something to keep in mind when you need to test (many) services.

This book is available for free online under the Creative Commons license.

Playing an agile learning game during scrum training (inspired by the XP game). It looks a bit like a kids party considering all the balloons and colored paper :). Useful exercise nonetheless, reminds me a bit about the software process course I attended while in university.

Like my colleagues at Avisi I’m an avid OSX user. One of the reasons I like OSX is it gives you the power of Unix right under your fingertips while still providing a nice user interface. 

Now suppose you’re working on RESTful services and you need to verify or debug some JSON output. Digging through an unformatted JSON string can be a real pain. To make a JSON string human readable open up the Terminal and type:

cat unformatted.json | python -m json.tool > formatted.json

This will pretty-print the contents of “unformatted.json” to a new file called “formatted.json”. For this to work you need to have at least Python 2.6 installed. Which is the case when your running Snow Leopard or higher.

The above command assumes you have a file containing the JSON content. When you’re debugging it’s more likely you copied a JSON string to your clipboard from a (remote) log file. To pretty-print the JSON content on your clipboard type:

pbpaste | python -m json.tool > formatted.json

Likewise when you’re dealing with XML instead of JSON type in:

pbpaste | xmllint --format - > formatted.xml

The xmllint program is part of libxml2 and installed by default on OSX.

Happing pretty-printing!

Update: Hacker News thread