The BileBlog

Yes folks it’s that time again, the weekly handing out of the village idiot hat ceremony. As expected, Fred Grott didn’t quite manage to hold onto his hat. In fact, his competition was so stiff he wasn’t even in the running this week.

First a clarification or two. Andrew C. Oliver pointed out (author of America’s blog, king of blogging, hahaha, just the title is winceworthy) a bunch of technical reasons refuting my cruel and heartless POI bashing. He acknowledges that having write support means that your performance will be much slower than if it were a read-only API (which is why my API trumps his, performance-wise), which is a fair point that I will concede. He also mentions that the author of jExcelAPI often uses POI as a source reference and steals from it, which is also a fair point, and that providing write support is orders of magnitude more complex than read-only (I agree). Credit to Andy for doing all the hard work there.

I emailed Andy shortly after he pointed out those facts, telling him I will post corrections in the next weekly update. Last night I received his response…sort of. His response consisted of nothing more than a link to a url with a picture of a man with his head placed firmly in his bottom. I am unsure of what to make of this, perhaps it’s a self portrait? Perhaps he was trying to say a thousand words and thought a picture would provide more value for money? Perhaps he was dumbstruck and rather than risk a Grottism, thought a url would be safest. Very bizarre.

Another worthy mention (for entirely different reasons, alas) is Mr Ryan Ackley. Coincidentally I’m sure, another POI committer. Ryan is fond of depositing random irrelevant posts in various places denouncing me and all that I stand for. Perhaps it’s part of the criteria for an apache.org address (or POI committerhood?), you get a sense of humour test at the door, and if one is detected your application is refused until you can modify that personal flaw.

Also disturbing is some guy who pointed out in a comment that he once defecated in his bathtub then proceeded to ingest it. Interesting behaviour and certainly worth pointing out, but somewhat offtopic I feel.

For those who keep insisting that my style is incredibly annoying to read, believe it or not, I agree. I find this style very irritating during reading, sadly for you though it’s very enjoyable to write in, so, well, hard luck.

The funniest responses by far have been on the JBoss TSS thread. I laughed, I cried (tears of laughter), I cackled, and snickered aplenty. I was mildly irritated to see them link to what is pretty much a personal rant against the general feel and attitude of JBoss, specifically WITHOUT any technical merit. Linking to the second JBoss entry would have been marginally more TSSworthy perhaps. I’d like to apologise to Rickard though, he is naive enough to think that a logical rational argument is the appropriate tack to take with JBoss zealots. Still, they taught him a good lesson there, so hopefully he won’t be making that mistake again. Trust me Rickard, the only way to deal with them is to fight fire with fire.

Someone suggested that instead of being a JBoss zealot, I’m wasting my time being a JBoss basher. Fascinating that those are the only possible modes of existence, and that the former is a perfectly sensible and productive use of one’s time. Apparently I also work at either IBM or BEA, because nobody else could possibly have another bad thing to say about JBoss. Notice that once the anti-JBoss people left the discussion, the JBoss folks kept spasming uncontrollably and posting to one another, in a big mutual circlejerk to get back that ‘we’re all in this together and believe in the One True Cause’ feeling they are breastfed from the JBoss Group’s teats.

So it was indeed very difficult picking a winner for this week’s much coveted (apparently) village idiot of the week hat from that illustrious crowd. However, there can be only one, and that one is…Thomas Mattson! Thomas was a late bloomer in the thread. He possibly had some work to do earlier in the day so didn’t manage to get in on the initial rush. However, once he found the thread, he twitched his way into an orgy of posting. First he pointed out that JBoss detractors are clearly jealous (come on folks, the ‘you’re jealous’ tactic went out of fashion in debate circles at least a decade ago). He then proceeds to point out that as long as his app works on JBoss (he clearly doesn’t use anything else), then that is sufficient for him to call it j2ee complaint (both server and app). This is followed by a number of angry threats and proclamations, ranging from never using SwingMQ again (no idea why), to the holiness of JBoss’ release strategy, while visiting Rickard’s inability to produce any code (!!) in the interim. By himself he’s responsible for almost 10% of all posts on that incredibly long (and useless) thread. So Mr Mattson, here’s your crown. Guard it closely while you can!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2003 at 5:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.