I've moved Helpful Design's blog over to the website so that it's more integrated. I'm still using Blogger, as it's pretty easy to use, although getting it so that it still worked with the different site designs was a bit of a mind bend. I ended up having to using server side includes and an htaccess file that forces all html files to be parsed on the server. Blogger is certainly easier to use using their own hosting.
As part of my regular work I've been migrating some code I wrote a couple of years ago to a new machine. As part of this migration I automatically use the latest versions of software that is required. In this case, I used the very latest version of the J2EE reference implementation, which also uses the latest version of Java, version 1.5. Now there's some new stuff in Java 1.5 that I hadn't known about before called Generics. This is basically an extension of the Java language that provides type checking at compile time. It requires a bit of extra thinking and a bit of extra code (which to my eyes is pretty ugly). The generic system applies mainly to the Collections within the Java framework, such as Lists, ArrayLists, etc. Now, the software I'm migrating is 285 files, nearly every one of them contains at least one Vector, ArrayList, or HashMap. This basically causes immense amounts of work if I want to update the code so that I don't get the "unchecked" warnings - which would be nice so that I can actually easily see the errors produced. As Oates once said, "I may be some time."