Over the last year I have gotten quite a lot of traffic, so I think it is time to create a top ten list of the most successful articles since then.

  1. e – Extract Any Archive – The little program e is an excellent time saver. Whenever you need to extract zip archives in linux, or rar, or rpm, or even cpio or uharc, e knows which program to call to do the trick.

  2. Optimized Exponential Functions for Java – Using some pretty obscure tricks of the internal floating point representation of numbers, it is possible to create very fast approximations for e^x and log(x) amd x^y.

  3. Three Laws of Software Development – The rules every software developer should live by. Print them out and send them to your colleagues. Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s robot laws.

  4. How to Install Anything in Ubuntu Condensed – Ubuntu makes it very easy to install software, but sometimes you need to use something that is not available via apt-get. This is a short reminder of how to cleanly install other package types in Ubuntu.

  5. Secure SSH, CVS, SCP without Password Prompt – How to be able to use SSH without entering a password, and do it in a secure way.

  6. Top 10 Eclipse Hotkeys – Eclipse is an excellent Java development environment with a lot of hotkeys. Many of these are not really necessary in day to day use, but these are the ones I constantly use.

  7. Tracer Bullet Development versus Extreme Programming – A comparsion of the two development methodologies, based on my personal experience.

  8. The Best Educational Videos – Some of the most interesting educational videos found on Google Videos and Youtube.

  9. TextAnalyzer - Automatically Extract Characteristic Words – A simple but powerful text analyzer that can analyze text and find out which words are the most characteristic for the content. The algorithm is very simple, but works quite good. There is also a port to Python available, the original code is written in Ruby.

  10. Pimp My MPlayer – Several tricks to make playback more smooth and a better overall experience.

All these posts have received quite a lot of hits, without me doing any advertising. I believe content is king, and the best way for recognition is writing something that is useful to others. This works very well for the most part, but there are also some article that I think are underrated:

Most Underrated Posts

  • Subversion Guideline – A compact subversion reference card/cheat sheet/guideline. It is no command line reference, but describes a good development style when using Subversion

  • Self-hosting Subversion Configuration – Administrate subversion within subversion itself: This is an excellent and convenient way of managing subversion users and access rights via subversion itself. We are using this for about one year now, and it is a huge time saver.

  • HOWTO Create MANIFEST.MF Classpath From Ant – Using just an ant build.xml it is possible to automatically create MANIFEST.MF file with correct library dependencies for a resulting jar file. No hardcoded libraries any more!

  • Exception Handling versus Logging – A war story about exception handling, the introduction of advanced logging features, and the fallacies of all this.

That’s all for now. Happy browsing.