The BileBlog

Why is there no public outcry at the blatant, cruel, and inconsiderate hijacking of this word by a bunch of ruthless good for nothing loosely typed limp wristed pyrubyites?

I mean, it’s one thing to come up with new scripting language and proclaim it to be the best thing since internet porn. In that same vein, even the breathtaking audacity of trying to whore it via the auspices of the JCP can be dismissed as a severe case of mass insanity. However, to do all that AND hijack a perfectly legitimate word is beyond the pale.

Just think of all the poor bastards everywhere who think that they can enrich their lives and maybe even make a bit of money by learning java. They pick up the basics. They pick the clique they want to be part of, they start a blog and unwrap their disused genitalia and prepare for a good few years of furious and misguided tugging. After all that, what do they find? Well, they’ll find that doing all that means a reduction in their vocabulary. They will have a word cruelly stolen from them. They will gnash their teeth and tear at their hair when they realise that if they ever want to say ‘groovy’ again, it had better be yet another hilarious joke about James Strachan’s latest illegitimate offspring freakshow. No longer will they be able to casually express approval by using that word, or even exclaim with slight surprise using that particular combination of letters.

So, for the sake of this beautiful language, can we please learn our lesson and not allow words to be hijacked again? It’s a cheap dirty advertising trick and should be beneath us, mature responsible adults that we all are.

I hereby declare that anyone wrapping a wrapped exception should be forced to bend over and prepare to receive the holy instrument as offered by the best Catholic priests to the freshest of young disciples.

How hard is it for apps to ensure that what-you-throw-is-what-you-get? Why oh why do people insist on endlessly wrapping exceptions inside of other exceptions?

Now, I can understand wrapping a low level exception like SQLException in some application specific exception. After all, you don’t want your frontend to be coupled so tightly to your backend and have such intimate awareness of its plumbing.

However, there is quite a difference between doing that and having every single pointless layer add its own wrapper so that by the time the exception finally gets to a layer that decides the buck stops here, you’d have to unwrap it a dozen times to find out what the hell is actually going on. Unless of course you’re a fan of the jbossian school of development, where you just print a stacktrace that will gleefully span 12 medium sized bibles punctuated by the odd ‘root cause:’ message.

This issue is compounded when you have different turdburglars writing each layer. Everyone is hugely nosey, and left to their own devices, people like to know what exceptions have been throw. So not only will said rumpranger wrap the exception throw up to them with their own brand of exception excrement, they’ll also decide that it’s a jolly good idea to see what the exception was, and to log it as WELL as throwing it up.

Needless to say, all it takes is two layers to adopt this crazed brand of genius for your logfiles to lose all meaning and coherency.

For the love of god, do NOT wrap already wrapped exceptions, let them bubble up until someone who cares decides to actually deal with it. Do NOT log an exception if you’re going to pass it along, have some faith in that final recipient, and assuming that they’re likely just as intellectually blessed as you are when it comes to using log.error(ex.getMessage(), ex)

I’m constantly surprised by how easy it is for IBM to get good karma with the community by consistently, persistently, and gleefully pumping out a steady stream of crapulence.

Take a look at alphaworks, for example. Supposedly a repository of cool emerging technologies that do something innovative.

What do they have? A truly impressive collection of useless crap, united by silly licensing and restrictive usage. To be fair, a lot of the junk they have on offer does vaguely smell of ‘cool pointless research’, so in that way at least they are remaining true to their mission.

We have such wonderful examples as the ‘Reflexive User Interface Builder’, basically yet another pathetic attempt at an XUL like xml descriptor for user interfaces. Why do these people delight in flogging the bloody carcass of this particular horse? How many times must this idea fail to catch on before people realise that writing interface in verbose non-visual XML is astoundingly unintuitive and irritating?

Exactly how many suspicious half-baked api’s does one need to tack onto websphere/DB2/mainframes anyway? It’s not like anyone could actually use this beyond installing it, gawping (mostly in confusion) for a few seconds, then uninstalling it since there’s no way to actually ship it or use it in production without either a) figuring out some back channel to do so, b) Forking over precious dollars.

The problem isn’t even limited to Alphaworks. IBM is almost impressive in the amount of crud it churns out. I am literally lost for words when some of you halfwits suggest that Java be handed over to them. Just look at any JSR they’ve been involved with. Awkward names abound, coupled with a disturbing case of 1998 coding practices makes for vomit inducing JSR’s.

Of course, the reason isn’t as mysterious as it might seem. IBM’s interest in java is predominantly due to Websphere. That delightful tool that IBM KNOWS is nothing more than a very big wankstain on the no longer so virginal application server market. IBM might be full of dimwits and dullards, but they certainly know that to sell websphere, they must avoid all technical people and ensure they only sell to sales/upper management/marketoids, because they’re the group that’s too detached from the crapulence to know any better.

So before you pillowbiters start cooing about how great IBM is, remember that their ultimate goal is to force everyone to use the absolute worst application server there is. They know it, we know it, and their whole business model is based on the fact that those who control the purse strings are the only ones who don’t know it.

I recently joined a mailing list that will remain nameless. The first thing that struck me about this was how…well..amateurish it was. This wasn’t your average bunch of morons busily yanking one another’s laughably sized genitalia, this was a whole new magnitude of incompetence and idiocy.

Oh alright, the list shall not remain nameless. It is in fact the portlets mailing list on yahoo. I have a vested interest as a portal vendor, so I thought it’d be a good place to hang out to see what sort of issues people have and suchlike.

Gosh, how could I possibly be more wrong? The posts on the list can be broken down into three broad categories.

The first, and most prevalent, is job postings. Every little turd pops up and says they want a documentum or (insert random obese legacy system that possibly uses portal in its marketing blurb) guy. In fact, the only thing that all the postings have in common is how little they have to do with JSR168.

The second type of posters are vendors posting announcements. This likewise gets awfully boring after a while.

The final sort are posters who apparently have next to no grasp of the English language, use obscene things like Websphere, and are bewildered by installers of any sort. Now, while I can with all honesty say that I have nothing against Indians per se, I DO have trouble thinking that anyone who is unable to express themselves successfully and formulate coherent sentences is blessed with anything approaching intelligence. To be fair, it’s far more baffling when it’s someone like Andy Oliver who speaks the one language and STILL manages to be incoherent, but I digress.

The whole experience reminded me of how many mailing lists so many of us are on, and how much junk there is out there. While it’s generally acceptable to be on a list with 1 smart guy to every 10 turdburglers, the portlet list seems excel at coming nowhere close to that elusive ratio.

Perhaps all it takes is a snowball effect, where a bunch of interested non-spastic people choose to participate, and that results in other like-minded people participating. On the other hand, it’s also equally likely that some lists are just full of wankers and trying to raise the bar is likely to be about as effective as pissing into the wind.

I am stunned. Utterly stunned. In fact, I was so stunned when I first saw this that I was actually lost for words, briefly.

Never in all these years have I seen a document so badly written. It’s one thing to lack polish and finish, it’s quite another to marry awkward incoherent embarrassing style with obscene content, and have the gall to claim it’s some kind of technical document. Not even the early jboss group made-in-india manuals come close to this abysmal quality.

So, what is this inspired work of under-appreciated genius? It’s the first two draft chapters for the Geronimo developer notebook (you can find them on today.java.net).

Where does one start, really? Perhaps some choice quotes to help set the mood.

- but it’s no worse than those movies with flying cars that take place only 20 years in the future (Page 1)
- It’s also a poor excuse to make a reference to the geek-bible, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Page 1)
- … and tons of text will scroll by (Page 2)
- Now take out your number 2 pencil and write down the complete path to that directory (Page 2)
- Give yourself a pat on the back. (Page 2)
- Maven is a pretty exciting piece of software (Page 2)
- If you are in Windows, you can easily use WinZip to extract the file (Page 3)
- CVS is older that the hills in terms of open source software, so we are going to assume basic CVS knowledge in this section. (Page 5)
- Good patches have been known to get you a free beer or two and some time with the developers at any of the conferences we speak at (Page 5)
- Downloading the dependencies is unavoidable (Page 6)
- Jane, stop this crazy thing! (Page 10)
- get your number 2 pencil ready then jump back (Page 10)
- The test suite should be gloriously piling dots down your screen (Page 12)
- Oh the beautiful dots of JUnit test cases (Page 12)
- The rest of the examples in this book all use Maven. Trust me, it is a lot simpler. (page 13)

This is all chapter 1. Chapter 2 is more (and often much worse) of the same.

The maven obsession is rather troubling. It’s almost as if the author had just recently discovered it, and is, at the time of writing, blissfully unaware of any of its downsides. For one thing, he’s very big on remote repositories, whereas conventional wisdom would state that the ‘right’ way to use maven is with a local repository. As if that wasn’t offensive enough, he frequently just loses the plot altogether and proclaims how exciting it all is, and gets sidetracked gushing about maven for no reason whatsoever.

Now, I realise that the purpose of these O’Reilly developer notebooks is to be friendly and casual, but really, in this case it’s downright offensive. We have references to Johnny Carson, noting things down with pencils, jokes that fall flat and elicit nothing more than a wince or grimace at best.

There’s a huge difference between being engaging and informal and talking down to people like a bizarroworld mixture of American pop culture, idiot grinning, and condescending twatiness. These chapters seem to largely ignore that difference, sadly.

Setting aside the obscene tone of the whole thing, and how every single sentence is in need of some very serious editing, the actual content itself is abysmal.

For example, in one chapter we’re told that there are no deployment tools because the Geronimo folk take security very seriously, and those pieces aren’t done yet. Yet, shortly after that our dear author starts cooing and oohing at the fact that Geronimo can download random wars off the internet and install them.

I am also unable to decipher who the target audience for this monstrosity is. Is it totally clueless developers, who need to be told to use winzip to unpack files? Is it pretentious but spastic opensores fucktards, who know all about CVS but need to be hand-held through setting environment variables? Is it average Americans in the midwest who can only relate to things through TV references? The only conclusion I’m forced to draw from the content is that the chapters are not aimed at all. Someone just thrashed about wildly in the vicinity of a keyboard and hoped for the best, which is far, far, from good enough.

Perhaps this is why O’Reilly is such a prestigious publisher. They have the uncanny ability to turn absolutely worthless incomprehensible frothing drivel into something mildly inoffensive. Hats off to them if they manage to salvage anything out of this train-wreck though.

Fleurites rest easy, you have nothing to worry about it.