The BileBlog

As a result of the JBoss expose here and elsewhere, various trade rags have picked up the story. It made it onto slashdot. The comments there of course are equally hilarious and depressing. Amazing how many people fail to grasp the difference between an anonymous post and a fake persona post. Still, that’s to be expected from a bunch of spotty gentoo tuggers anyway.

Next up we have eweek, which ran a very professional sounding story which managed to put JBoss in a hilariously bad light. The best quote of course had to be the ‘so-called professional’ line. Delicious.

Not to be outdone, JDJ had to jump in the fray. Needless to say, I strongly approve of their article. I’m hopelessly biased against JBoss so that couldn’t possibly surprise anyone. Cameron buying me so many drinks has also clearly affected my judgement, but oh well.

However, the real fun starts if one were to look at what else is going on at JDJ now. On the one hand we have a sane sensible article about happy community building and a mild waggle of the finger in the general direction of JBoss, and on the other hand we have….immature BEA bashing.

This farce started a couple of days ago, when JDJ ran an article about BEA ‘firing’ sys-con and electing to go with another publisher for an ‘official’ Weblogic magazine. BEA pointed out that sys-con’s Weblogic magazine is unaffiliated with them and suchlike and so forth.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that various head honchos at sys-con all simultaneously soiled their panties and suffered a fairly embarrassing bout of serious backdoor leakage. What follows is an amateur campaign of insults that would be quite newsworthy if it wasn’t trumped so thoroughly by those JBoss tards.

JDJ is now merrily in the process of running at least one or two disparaging BEA articles a day. These articles are hilarious. It’s like watching a three year old spastic child shaking his fists and expressing his anger by leaking from all orifices. Pretty it is not.

The contrast makes the whole thing very funny. On one hand, a sane article that doesn’t make the reader squirm and feel mildly embarrassed (unless said reader is JBoss employee, of course), and on the other hand we have petty vindictive jabs. Far be it from me to tell you how to run your business but…oh fine, I’ll tell you, since you asshats don’t seem to know. Have the right hand have a little chat with the left, and decide once and for all, are you to remain the object of mockery, or should people actually start taking you seriously?

Does the fun ever stop with these guys? It turns out that theserverside.com forums now has an interesting new feature that many of you might not be aware of. If you click on a particular user, you will see all the other users that have logged in from the same IP.

Obviously, this method is not foolproof, and can be easily misinterpreted to mean that two people behind the same proxy are indeed one and the same.

Having said that though, it is with immense glee that I see that once and for all, the JBoss wankstains can be seen for the hypocritical, conniving, underhanded, petty and insecure little fuckwits that they are.

So, let’s pick a user at random! Say..ohhh I dunno…Marc Fleury. Who else does the slimy little fleury have hidden away in this too-large-for-one-person personality of his? Why, none other than our friend Arun Patel! Arun, for those of you unfamiliar with TSS, posts incredibly offensive polemics that happen to exactly mirror the unspoken thoughts of a certain JBoss cult. To be fair, many of the posts are too eloquent to be His Royal Garlicness, what with his penchant for multiple exclamation marks, rambling sentences, and all round freakish usage of full stops.

So, who else posts from that IP? Well, we have James Hardy. James’ posts are often of the ‘I’m sane but lets face it, JBoss rule’ variety, as opposed to another on that list of deranged psychopaths, Chip Tyler. Chippie here will eagerly pipe in in any number of threads to say how much CDN suck, as well as how every move JBoss makes is intelligent and wise. There are literally dozens of other accounts that show how widespread this behaviour is. The only thing they have in common is a surprising love and admiration for all things JBossy, and disdain and abuse for all things non-JBossy.

Needless to say, Ben Sabrin and the majority of the JBoss folks are all on the trail too. So while it’s impossible to actually draw lines between the fakes and their puppetmasters, it’s very very easy to spot the group of nefarious rumprangers who have embarked on this laughably incompetent marketing exercise. Having said that, some of the linkages are very clear and easy to follow to individuals who happen to not work in the same turdfactory as the fleurys do. Bill Burke has the highly dubious honour of also being Joe Murray, famous for making noises to the effect of ‘Mike Spille doesn’t exist!’. Let’s see you uuhmm and err your way out of this one Billy! Marc’ll have you back in that gimp suit pretty sharpish if you keep being this sloppy.

The saddest part about all this is that the most likely outcome is for these posters to now ensure they use a different IP when posting, to disguise the trail more effectively. I’m sure the very notion of ‘gosh, maybe we should let our software do the talking instead of using underhanded tactics like these’ is heretical in that camp.

So, the next time you see someone posting anything positive about JBoss, rest assured that it’s just another one of their employees desperate to justify their pathetic existence.

UPDATE: Removed Corby Page’s name since he is real. Sorry Corby, the ONE name I didn’t bother double checking turned out to be real, pah!

UPDATE 2

: More dups! You can actually find which employees work at the ‘office’ and which work remotely. Juha-P Lindfors is also Thomas Mattson (a VERY prolific JBoss wanker), C R, and Cam Teegar. Even that fat fuck Andy Oliver seems to join in on the fun (which makes his innocent ‘why must you all hate us!’ mewling all the more hilarious), either masquerading as or living in sin with Steve Lewis.

One thing that struck me at TSSS when talking to ‘normal’ people was how many were using EJBs, running in lard-ass containers, no less. Everyone was excited about spring, hibernate, and whatnot, but very few non-adventurous types were actually using them. I heard more than one person complain about the fact that all this opensource fappery was nothing they could actually use in their enterprise environment, and thus somewhat irrelevant from a practical perspective.

The people actually using this cutting edge type stuff were often those who had their own blogs, weren’t afraid of joining mailing lists, and were pretty much part of a disgusting incestuous java community that has long since swapped common sense and practical results for feeble genitalia tugging.

The problem arises of course when this tugging of unmentionables is lauded and admired and viewed as some kind of astounding achievement. Even worse, those who do not indulge in this filthy habit are mocked and taunted and looked down on. The whole thing of course is reinforced by the fact that most are happily shielded from interacting with the ‘normal’ people, they’re able to simply dismiss all their fellow employees as ‘idiots’. It’s no coincidence that most of these tuggers will almost uniformly state that ‘my entire team is a bunch of idiots! I’m the only smart guy!’.

Of course, human psychology dictates that we must always clearly establish superiority over anything ‘different’. We’ve been doing it for millennia. So the genitalia obsessed for example won’t think ‘My job is terminally boring so I try to spice it up with dumb shit that others are too old to be amused by’, instead they’ll think ‘they’re all dummies!’.

Another requirement for this filthy circlejerk club is to have the memory of a guppy. You must, under no circumstances, learn from your mistakes. Instead, the self respecting java circlejerker will build hacks around the mistake to try and paper over the gaping holes and herculean logic flaws. In any other language, open source products are allowed to die the miserable death they so richly deserve. In the java world, nothing dies, it just gets refactored.

So look around, do you consider yourself in the smart minority in your team? Do you think it’s a matter of time before everyone else realises your genius and adopts your ways? If the answer is yes, then it’s time to get up, slowly pull the thumb out of your anus, and casually let go of the nearest guy’s penis, and perhaps, with truly open eyes, look around.

The third day (yes yes, I’m a day late posting about it) was a bit of a non-event, as far as I was concerned. Unlike the evil supermen who conspired to keep me up for obscene numbers of hours on all previous nights, I turned out to be some freaky mixture of mortal and zombie for the third day.

Needless to say, I missed all the morning sessions. I did however make it to the Eclipse tools session. The session was great, really really useful for me personally. The presenter’s voice was a soothing monotone that seemed almost engineered to put one to sleep. Needless to say, I was powerless against this astounding weapon and promptly fell asleep in my chair for the entirety of the session.

What DID wake me up however was Sam Pullara, managing to ask yet another awkward question. Sam has this disturbing ability to ask very innocent sounding questions that invariably most presenters either don’t understand or look foolish answering (usually the latter). I thought it was accidental until I realised he specifically came in to this session to harpoon the poor guy. The question (heavily paraphrased, needless to say, Sam is too polite and accurate for his own good) was if Eclipse had any plans to switch from SWT to Swing now that Swing beats the living poo out of SWT, and that Swing evolves much faster and gets much better with every release, whereas SWT is essentially a dinosaur idea that has far surpassed its extinct-by date. The answer consisting of the usual shuffling about, some feeble arm waving gestures, which I think pretty much anyone could have reduced to ‘umm, no. We’re sticking with swt, we’re screwed’.

The next session I went to was Scott Ambler’s Agile database stuff. Scott is by far the slickest speaker I’ve seen in this conference. It’s not all smoke and mirrors though as he clearly knows his stuff and manages to bridge the gap between the app guys and the data guys very well. His ‘agile’ talk though just ended up making the Thoughtworks guys look like a bunch of young boys staring down at a small protrusion between their legs and giggling at the fact that if they paw at it in an appropriate manner, they can illicit some sort of reaction.

So, onto the Symposium aftermath. Here’s a rough guide to it all:

Here we go, Marc Fleury is about to wow us with his genius. We’re finally going to find out what those ten million dollars buy.

Well, it doesn’t look like they got much value for money, to be honest. It seems to have bought them a few ludicrous constumes and some bad face makeup. Marc’s Joker smile looks more like a Vegas hooker’s lipstick on a Sunday morning than Jack Nicholson’s thespian perfection. Marc indulged in a few foolish leaps. On stage though (sans costume, but still clothed, thankfully) is Bill Burke, merrily giggling to himself (no doubt interjecting the peels of laughter with the regular spate of uhms and errs that seem to accompany him whenever he sees a stage).

Our friend starts off with some feeble joke directly at yours truly (sadly, he pretty much mumbles it out so I have no ideas if it was actually funny). This was followed by an enema reference from the Batman movie, likely a branching out from a homoerotic obsession with the caped crusader and his sidekick Bill^H^H^HRobin.

The JBoss propaganda machine is in full force. Marc is clearly derisive of the crazy AOP people, or the academic aspect people. Nono, JBoss does it differently, it uses…AO! Yes folks, the P has been unceremoniously ditched. They probably found out that they only own 66% of AOP so dropping the P seems like a good investment, as it allows them to own 100% of AO!

Next up we have a nice little blurb about how great EJB3 is. As expected, he has a competition with himself to see how many times he can say JBoss and EJB in the same sentence.

The obligatory ‘arm waving’ joke is tossed out (sorry Marc, Gregor did it with infinitely more panache and style), and for some bizarre reason, our new fearless leader chooses to insult Sun by being very dismissive and vague towards the JBI spec.

Next up we have possibly the worst diagram I’ve seen in the last two days. Trust me, I’ve seen a LOT of bad diagrams the last couple of days. This one has a dazzling array of circles, with various blocks, cylinders, and lines tossed in for visual effect.

More tired analogies of better moustraps, the usual adulation directed at Microsoft, Marc is still a good speaker, he just says such ludicrous things with amazing disregard to content and reality.

In turns out that the new version of JBoss, the one that’ll take everyone to the stratosphere of application development, is going to be an orgy of aspects (sorry, AO) that makes all current aspectfests seem like a bunch of servlet weenies.

It turns out that to do this, the JBoss group now, in its entirely, all now THINK IN AOP! Presumabely a few pressed of Marc’s control device and the appropriate instructions were beamed into the brains of such hapless victims as one Gavin Fleury.

It is now time to reveal a dirty secret. AO is, apparently, not new at all to the JBoss camp. JBoss 3.0 and JBoss 2.0 both included AO! That’s right, JBoss is not jumping on the AO bandwagon for cheap PR – they’re driving it and have been at the wheel for years, behind the scenes, scheming away in some private cvs tree (yay open source!) that has to this day remained hidden. Mike Spille is familiar with this tree, I’m sure.

What aspects have they been using? Simple you fool – the logging aspect! Yes – the feature that sets JBoss apart from those silly fools from BEA and those suited morons at IBM is the 90 pages of logging that JBoss spews out when starting, some call it logging, but to them, it’s a logging aspect.

OH HORROR OF HORRORS! There’s a huge error on one slide! True to JBoss style, sloppiness rules the day, and this slide has, emblazoned on the top, almost taunting poor Bill Burke (who is still looking uncomfortable) with those three letters, A O P. That P! How dare it! Out damn P out!

Setting aside the usual slipshod crap they’re throwing up, we are also presented with some ideas of highly dubious merit. For example, the whole concept of a web request in its entirety being in a transaction. Gosh, I’ve always wanted to roll back my transaction after returning a result page telling them everything worked. If JBoss has learnt anything, it’s the importance of a false sense of security to give to everyone they deal with. Credit though for not only applying that approach to their marketing, presentations, talks, and posts, but to the very code itself!

The slides really are the gift that keeps on giving. They’re degenerated to such an extent that the current one actually says ‘FAST TIME TO MARKET’. There also seems to be a bit of an obsession with things of 3. We have titles like ‘etc etc etc’, ‘simplification simplification simplification’, ‘simple simple simple’.

There’s also a continuing battle of wills between Marc and Bill to determine which one actually wears the pants in this presentation. Bill gets up, sits down, Marc accosts him to explain something, Bill gets up, shuffles about, demands Marc explain something. Perhaps a few rounds of practice might have paid off.

At this point, something seems to have gone horribly wrong as Marc resorts to making…..fart noises. Yes folks, the man who just managed to scam a VC out of ten million dollars is up on stage, with cheap lipstick, making fart noises. There is something sick yet fascinating about this.

Finally, we’re regaled with JBoss’ stunning success, with pictures of bigger and bigger circles denoting increasingly amazing things. The next logical step would simply be for them to delcare JBoss an independent country.

We’re finally at the end, and nobody has any questions. Marc clearly wanted to say something about open sourcing java but I think he badly miscalculated when most people responded that they do NOT think that Java should be open sourced. His feeble recovery effort was nothing more than a whimper, “I know what that means. OK, I don’t know what that means.”.

That’s that folks, an entertaining keynote, albeit not deliberately so. At least, not in the manner it came across. I’d also like to think the 5 other mean horrible people who contributed insults through the wonderful magic of Rendezvous (a group bile, if you will). Most importantly, I’d like to thank the genius nearby who realised I ran out of battery power and rapidly whipped out a spare and handed it to me. Now THIS is a Java community!

Mark Hapner is pretty much an old school guy. He’s boring, he’s a techie, and he generally knows whereof he speaks, he also doesn’t seem to be the sort to resort to cheap circus tricks when presenting (ie, it’s boring as fuck to watch this).

The real trouble with this talk is that it’s so very…abstract. There’s absolutely nothing accessible in the whole idea. If anything, the expert group seems to be struggling to actually pin down what SOA actually entails in a ‘real’ sense, instead of the furious flapping as trademarked by the likes of Gartner.

Even setting aside the abstract nature of the concept as a whole, every one of the little (!) components are equally ambigious and fluffy. For example, you have stuff like ‘integration brokers’ and ‘policy directories’ and other such ideas. The JBI (Java Business Integration) spec wants to provide SPI’s for all these guys. Worst of all, Mark keeps saying ‘wizdle’ and ‘bepple’ instead of ‘W S D L’ and ‘B P E L’, and it’s hugely distracting. In time though I suppose it’ll provide a lot more amusmenet: ‘if you don’t stop investigating your unmentionables I’m going to have to bepple your wizdle in front of everyone’.

One note of personal interest for me was the general discomfort directed at BPEL. I’ve always vaguely considered spending some effort at it for the sake of OSWorkflow, but the general concensus is that BPEL is just too complex and unwieldly and uncomfortable to use in javaland.

Verdict? SOA is very, very boring, and it’s hard to find two people to agree what it actually is in non-arm-flapping terms.

I’m using SubEthaEdit to write biles. This means that anyone with an OSX machine can download it and run it, and join the edit session to see biles being written ‘live’. It might be an interesting experiment anyway, and needless to say that if people misbehave or cheat or do anything that I deem to be uncool they’ll be turfed off. So, download it, run it, click rendezvous, and you should see an edit session for ‘bile.txt’ by me, if you’re a sensible distance away (I just tried it with jiramike and he’s in a different room in another session).