The BileBlog

Not one to be outdone by any old fake news sites (tss, I’m onto you!) I decided to interview Klaus Wuestefeld of prevayler fame. He’s a pretty interesting guy, and I am for one am impressed with his brand of truth, honesty, and telling it like it really, really is. So without further ado, here’s a rushed transcript:

BB: Who are you, Klaus?
KW: I am a noncomformist. I like to walk around naked and scare little girls, to encourage them to think out of the box. Many people will no longer employ me or have anything to do with me, but I have recently conned those poor db4o bastards into handing me some of their money.

BB: Klaus, please tell us about Prevayler and its goals.
KW: Prevayler is like having sex with thoughtworks developers. At first, you are unclear on who is sticking it to who, and the exact number of orifices involved. Prevayler, like the sex, doesn’t have much of a goal or end in sight, it’s more about breaking free of conventional sexual activities and learning to love taking it up the dirtbox for an indeterminable length of time. It is also unavoidable because prevayler is, at this point, practically an Act of God, and you WILL use it, whether you know it or not, technical considerations be damned.

BB: How are brazilians and the foreign public considering this project?
KW: I’m very lucky to have found a group of java developers that seem to be completely and utterly braindamaged. I used to worry that Brazilians might be intelligent and wise java developers, but given how well they have adopted Prevayler, it’s clear to me that they’re the perfect idiot centre for my gibberish. The other country where I am successful is Germany. The reason for this is because of strict laws, it is impossible to ever fire anyone in Germany. Thus, developers can use prevayler and nothing bad will ever happen. Sadly the rest of the world lacks either of these crucial criteria (idiocy, unfirability) in order for them to adopt Prevayler instantly.

BB: Does the prevalence concept still scare people?
KW: I once saw a grown man put his hands into his underwear, puff and pant for a minute or two, then pull out a perfectly formed if somewhat smudged brown log. He then held it aloft while solemnly proclaiming, ‘this is prevalence’. He was not afraid, and his tone suggested he understood how important this concept is. I am confident. Sometimes though I worry that I will get cancer because of all the lies and exaggerations I have told.

BB: Changing to more technical questions, what advantages will Java 1.5 bring to developers who use Prevayler?
KW: It will be brilliant. Let me give you an analogy, which will help spell out my exact thoughts on the technical issue. Imagine there is a man in the street. He wants to cross the street, but the traffic light is red. He then waits until it is green, then crosses. Who is the man? Why is he in the street? You see, Java 1.5’s role is the chicken in that story.

BB: Is there anything new planned for Prevayler 3?
KW: The most amazing new feature of prevayler 3 will be that it will be based on the pure power of thoughts. Everyone is currently tied to the idea of using some kind of persistence, but I want to encourage people to think outside the box. The persistence myth is a cancer that is slowly eating at the heart of javaland. Prevayler 3 will be the first persistence API that breaks out of this mold. It will be so simple that it will consist of ZERO classes. That’s right, ZERO. All the data you need to store will simply have to be remembered by the user, and pulled out when needed. Of course, the query API is built in, you can just use natural language to ask the ’store’ to pull out any data.

BB: Any final thoughts?
KW: I am a prophet sent by the god ungudungu to preach his holy message of poovaylance. My god has deserted me however and so I have now assumed the godhead. I am a deity, worship me! KNEEL BEFORE ME AND PARTAKE OF MY CREAMY WISDOM! HEAR ME ROAR! GIBBERGIBBERFLIBBLE! NOOO, NO SQL! WOM WOM WOM MEEEEP BLIPBLIPPRRRTHHH PAAAARP…(transcript cut off as it’s rather hard to record the sound of all orifices firing)

BB: Indeed. Thank you for your time.

Why oh why oh why must so many projects work so hard at alienating so many users? What is it about open sores that, more often than not, behaves as if it’s some plague ridden leper that does its utmost to convince you to walk far far away as quickly as possible?

I’ve ranted about this before, but running into it day after day still gets my blood boiling. What the poo is the obsession with shit like a build.properties.sample file? How hard can it possibly be to create a build.xml that does NOT require tweaking or customising?

For fuck’s sake, even maven, a tool for spastics, by spastics, a tool that’s so badly written it would make any number of holy figures break down and cry like little girls, a tool so horrifically incompetent that it’d make the baby jeebus attempt to gnaw off his own family jewels, manages to actually get this right.

Of course, unsurprisingly, the biggest culprit here is jakarta projects. That grand repository that is almost satirical in nature. The consummate ease with which it demonstrates all sorts of ‘this is the kind of code that the average moron develops, welcome to the real world’ principles is truly a work of art.

It’s not even worth enumerating all the projects in jakarta that do this, the ones that don’t are few and far between. Lucene is a worthy exception; how those lucene devs sleep at night while being part of such an embarrassingly incompetent organisation is fast becoming a modern day mystery of epic proportions.

Of course, when you’re used to this level of pain, having to cp build.properties.sample build.properties and maybe add in a path to your favourite servlet.jar might seem trivial. Projects like slide and taglibs however go out of their way to make the experience unique and memorable.

It is insufficient in this case for example to merely specify that. You will often have to also specify an xml parser implementation (sometimes even separate sax and dom jars!), the path to jaxp.jar, maybe a jmx jar, the clogging jar, xalan, and often paths to multiple versions of said API’s.

In some rare cases (never, in the case of jakarta projects), there is actually a legitimate reason for not including some of these jars for legal reasons. In this case, ant’s <get> task will do nicely. Even if it fails, it wouldn’t kill you, asshole rumpranging chozgobbling shirtlifting developer, to avail yourself of the delightful <available> task in ant to check for your idiot jars and maybe, just maybe, provide some kind of useful feedback as to what shapes the poor overworked potential user needs to contort into in order to get your worthless sorry project building.

So please, please, stop hurting us poor users. There’s enough other stuff that defecates on us from great enough heights that this last touch seems just a bit excessive.

Anyone subscribed to the groovy mailing list must either feel exceptionally gleeful, or horribly depressing. I won’t rub too much salt in the wounds of the latter group by cackling about being in the former group. Oh wait, I will, because they’re a bunch of spastic hobbyist fuckwits would should all be fired.

It is with particular glee that I note that no serious work is now being done on groovy. Even the morons who decided to commit to it are starting to complain. Bugs are piling up, the developers have mostly moved onto the next shiny bauble, and there are calls for fresh blood and a ‘new’ set of developers to get things going; a fairly compelling symptom of a project in its death throes.

Particularly hilarious is how all the turdburglars involved feel that getting together for some drinks constitutes a move forward. It’s really quite amazing that any of these people have actual jobs. Is that how you do things at work? Go out for a drink and your projects just magically finish themselves? Perhaps you blog about it a bit and tell everyone how great it is, and then documents magically write themselves? Or perhaps you’re one of these new breed of fuckstains, who think that the code is the documentation and brag of that, instead of the traditional shame usually associated with making such a comment. On the other hand, groovy could be breaking (more) new ground by being the first JSR where the final spec format is…mp3 (for those of you not reading the lists for their comical value, the ‘outcome’ of the groovy JSR gettogether is nothing but a bunch of mp3’s).

Still, at least it’s good to see that after all these months, the end of line semicolon saga is still dragging on, as are all of the syntactic sugar issues that people raised all those months ago. Democracy at its finest.

It almost seems spiteful in fact, how the groovy fearless leader seems to go out of his way to never post anything to the mailing lists.

It’s also delightfully satisfying to see that the early adopters are being punished, as they should be, by guarantees that the syntax will change in non-backward compatible ways. You fuckers need to be clubbed on the head like that so one day, one day, you might actually learn.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a regular posting of the build breaking or someone unable to get it going, thanks to the wonderful magic of maven. It’s truly astounding what sort of shit people will put up with in order to uphold their religious convictions.

The one person who has to be pitied though is poor Guillaume Laforge, who is the only remaining groovy developer. He tirelessly responds to emails on the mailing lists even though he probably knows deep down inside that it’s a lost cause. It’s sad and depressing, but I suppose some people just don’t know when to give up. if I were his employer though I suspect I’d gradually start getting more and more annoyed at my employee pouring so much time and effort into such a dirty toilet.

I have to give credit to Sun as well, for managing to milk so much good PR out of pretending to listen to these monkeys. First they accept the JSR, knowing how unlikely that a bunch of open source ADD kids can manage to stay focussed for a few minutes, let alone the months a JSR requires. It costs them nothing, and all the usual suspects will be dazzled and impressed.

Even funnier is Tim Bray’s PR stunt to get that group of misfits together. They came, they saw, they chatted and looked serious, and in the end, of course, very little will actually happen. This is all a great thing, people doing real work won’t have to worry about the children smearing feces all over themselves, and the children get to smear feces like they’ve never smeared before.

Will groovy ever get past the alpha stage? Sure, it’s quit plausible. It’s quite a race between them and the JDOM JSR. What is clear though is that if it ever makes it to a final JSR, you can be sure that the current developers sole contribution to it would be as a footnote in the credits section. In the meantime, I’m going to sit back and gloat and scream out I told you so to anyone who’d care to listen.

Oh JBoss Mail Services, we barely knew ye! Imagine my dismay and surprise when someone pointed me out to a fascinating JBoss forum thread pretty much proclaiming that said project is essentially….dead.

Taken away from us in its prime! Oh how we laughed and frolicked together. That young brave project had such promise! Chief turdbringer Andy ‘I’m a tit’ Oliver assured us it would be the java mail server to end all java mail servers, finally knocking the venerable jakarta James out of its dubious position of being the only open sores java mail server around.

The brave little thing worked hard to become something, yet sadly, outside forces destroyed it before it had the chance to truly be the mountain of turd that titboy kept promising. Mean old Scott Stark proclaims that the project is in stasis because…gasp…NOBODY GIVES A FUCK!

That’s right, Andy Oliver is after all the delusional insane lunatic that pretty much everyone is convinced he is. Now I know that it’s such a cheap shot to fling personal attacks at him, but he’s just such a despicable little worm that it’s impossible not to. Besides, it’s sort of a pavlovian approach, if he feels he can whine about redhat developers in his blog, then his hypocrisy deserves to be punished by any means necessary.

How can one person manage to be such an incredible embarrassment to everyone around him? The man is a unique phenomenon in the java world, it has to be said. Take any two java developers, and no matter how much they despise and hate one another, you can guarantee one thing they’ll agree on; Andy Oliver is a complete and utter tosser, the like of which hasn’t been seen since Gerald Bauer in his heyday. Apache people hate him, Apache haters hate him, and the odd JBoss employee will also admit in private that he’s a bit of a twat (pre funding/gag orders, that is).

Of course, anyone with half a brain could see the writing on the wall. Half of poor andy’s posts were about he’s managed to lose his mail yet again, and asking people to resend things. He’s probably the first person since sometime in 1994 who has managed to actually use a server so unreliable that it actually loses mail.

Of course, the little runt hasn’t quite given up, and is still living in his delusional world that somehow his astounding idea is relevant and useful and worth plugging away at. Here’s a hint Andy, two users saying they want to use your crappy little server does not a community or developer base make.

Credit where credit is due though, Scott Stark seems to grok that having a bunch of monkeys pissing about with their own pet projects is not really a great way to build a company, despite what the country bumpkins he’s lumbered with might think.

In other JBoss news, I must applaud the AspectWerkz guys for so thoroughly spanking Billy Berky on a TSS thread. I imagine there was much squirming at such a delightful public humiliation; being made to look like a retarded wayward 8 year old child clamouring for attention while the adults are talking.

Gosh, I actually feel bad for making fun of poor Andy, it’s just too much like taunting a retarded kid. Fun for everyone, but deep down inside you know it’s wrong. Oh well, thank fuck it’s online so I can pretend he isn’t a real person and keep on pointing and laughing.

Oh and incidentally, Greg Luck has posted an interesting experiment in Bile sans Bile (google him, no linking policy blah blah).

What do developers from all over the world have against the poor English language? What has it ever done to them that they repay it with such cruelty and malice?

Of course, one can understand and even chuckle at that old ‘HELLOW I HAVE A DOUBT YES VERY THANKS PLEASE TO BE HELPFUL’ type situation, second language and all that. However, the problem doesn’t stop there. In fact the biggest culprits are often people who only know the one language.

How can someone speak just the one language and STILL manage to fuck it up? It’d be understandable if said person were of dubious mental competence, but said person in this field is more likely than not to be a reasonably well paid professional, who somehow has trouble constructing a coherent sentence.

Of course, it’s all fun and games when it’s nothing more serious than the odd freshmeat announcement with a changelog saying that the app has been ‘deuglified’, but the curse of the miswritten word strikes far and wide, and dons many troubling guises.

Witness the writing ability of one James Strachan, for example. A jolly chap by any measure, yet amazingly incapable of writing coherent documentation (see activesoap). To his credit, he does seem to have mastered the mindboggling ability of writing strongly coupled documentation/implementation. The end result of course being that you can’t figure out what the docs mean unless you already understand the product, but can’t understand the product without the docs.

Picocontainer is another fine example of hijacking English in the name of religion. In this case we have a truly impressive example of how one can string numerous words together yet somehow fail to ever communicate anything of worth. Another impressive trick considering that the words themselves will often make sense and be quite accessible; a delightful spit in the eye of synergy.

Somewhat perpendicular to these two approaches is the ‘try to make friends with the reader by sounding retarded’ approach. This can be seen in many books, where the author takes on an obscenely friendly tone that is guaranteed to fall somewhere between obsequious and patronising, rife with cultural references that have a curious countrybumpkin-ness feel to them (Geronimo developer notes book draft is a lovely example).

Finally, we have the old ‘ohmygodthisissofuckingclever’ tactic. The author here sounds perpetually amazed and delighted by every little thing that happens in the world around them. They are that embarrassing retarded child that none of us asked for yet were cursed with anyway, happily reaching into its feces laden diapers and smearing fistful of the good stuff onto itself while grinning inanely and hoping for approval (see the ‘open source java’ book for a stellar example).

What’s really odd about all these pieces of writing is how little regard they have, at the end of the day, for the poor recipient. So here’s a tip to all you bloggers, hopeful book authors, random article monkeys, and opensource documentation fucktards. Think of your despised and hated end users, and for once, do something for their benefit, instead of trying to spite them and shit in their coffee.