The BileBlog

Last week, a rather insidious and clever marketing tactics presented itself to all bloggers with a valid email address on javablogs.

One Mr ‘Ken Gaebler from Chicago’ wrote a rather amusing email to every single blogger asking them ‘two quick questions’. These questions, surprisingly, were whether said blogger would mind talking about some new search engine on their blog, and whether it’s OK to send them a press release. Of course, a mention of said dubious product on said dubious blog will result in some vague flailing about regarding ‘a small marketing budget’.

The personal touch at the end will warm the heart of any insecure blogger: ‘…and thought your blog might be a decent vehicle…’. Ken Gaebler, CEO of walker sands communications certainly knows the exact speed and angle at which a blogger’s dirtbox should be approached. For smooth entry, stroke that ego for all it’s worth, and the flaps of ill repute shall part for you like the Red Sea before an assortment of holy men.

As if the ego fondling isn’t enough, the internet savvy Ken follows up with the death thrust, the vague yet seemingly just within reach offer of monetary compensation.

Really, I’d imagine he’d have a lot more success offering $10 for official shilling, ‘mention me on your blog in a positive sincere sounding light and I’ll roll up $10 and stick it in an orifice if your choosing’.

What’s even sadder is how many people will, or did fall for this. After all these years of endless spam scams, chortling merrily at the idiots who fall for these things, us ‘techies’ can be conned as easily as anyone else. It’s a fascinating study in social engineering, at the very least.

So, what can you do to help? First, either nag the javablogs people to stop showing real emails, or do what I have always done and simply don’t provide a valid one. I cannot for the life of me imagine being interested in any mail from javablogs. Secondly, avoid any mention of Dieselpoint (the search engine poor Ken is trying to get people to bleat about). Feel free to mention it in a derogatory or insulting tone, but never ever link it to anything.

Finally, listen to your goddam mother. Didn’t she warn you about answering emails from strangers?

Ahh, what a year it’s been! So many abysmal projects, so many predictions coming true. So much delightful abuse hurled in so many weird and wonderful directions.

January kicked off with a good laugh in the general direction of a certain ‘open source java programming’ book. Unsurprisingly, the book is now pretty hard to come by on any shelves. After all was said and done, the one thing I think everyone can agree on is that the whole thing was a deeply embarrassing experience and I’d be stunned if any one of the four miscreants would ever work on a book with each other again. Jon Tirsen’s J3EE ‘joke’ was mocked thoroughly, but thankfully thoughtworks has kept him and his friends busy enough working on menial demeaning codemonkey tasks that their brand of excrement is being pooped out at a much slower and more tolerable rate.

Amazing, the non-story of open sourcing java still has the odd lunatic trying desperately to revive it. If only these OSS zealots would apply their zeal and pinko commie approach to their code and documentation instead of hurling it feebly into poorly written blogpuke, the world would be a far happier place. February also saw my continued bafflement at the lack of OSS project deaths. Thankfully reality restored itself and Jakarta Avalon got the long long overdue decapitation it so richly deserved. The only downside so such events is the stigma of doing a Nelsonesque ‘haa haa’ at said hapless projects, or surely half of java land would have rejoiced in a very public and gleeful manner.

Jikes of course continues to be developed by a bunch of crusty wankstains. The insidious incestuous relationship between that compiler and the Effective Java book is a startling marriage that neither god nor man can sanction. I wonder how Bloch’s moving to Google will affect jikes though. Will compiler warnings now include url’s to google groups, perhaps an adword or two to spice things up? An automatic geek penis fondler and dirtbox tickler with every successful build?

Of course, most of the projects predicted to fail have obliged in a most disturbing manner. It’s depressing in many ways, how little has changed. XDoclet 2 is still nowhere. Groovy, against all odds, still managed to go nowhere. Geronimo’s original estimate of an August deliverate is beyond hilarious at this point and was clearly a joke in very poor taste. Axiondb (remember THAT?) is dead in the water (but lives on in the form of various commons-fapfest projects). IDEA’s eap’s are still cruddy. JDJ awards are still….an accurate reflection of the industry. The fine folks at Jakarta are still debating 3 different metametalogging frameworks (ugli, enterprise logging, and something else). Anyone who knows anything about logging will now finally admit that clogging is a dismal failure. JavaLobby still runs its ‘Java is dead! Is Java dead? Is Sun dead? Is IBM great? OhlookwhereIvestuckMicrosoftsPenisToday?’ gamut of parlour tricks. TSS still posts astoundingly tedious blog entries. Hint to any aspiring TSS news item people, change your name to Cedric, Mike, Rickard, or Cameron and you can talk about your fetish of cramming dogturd in your ears while singing I am a little teapot wearing nothing but a nipple clamp and you’d still have a pretty good chance of making it to TSS’s frontpage.

Of course, no list of cheating dishonest scoundrels is complete without JBoss. Oh what entertainment they provided this last year! Bill’s social ungraces, Nathalie’s erudite and disturbingly out of place damage control, Marc’s drug induced idiocy/mania/goodgoddidhereallyjustpostinallcapsyetagain. Remember the old astroturfing incident? On the bright side, their VC’s have pretty much banned them from posting their brand of smegma, so while things are less fun, the world is certainly a better place for it. Of course, product wise, JBoss 4.0 is still really, really crap. Bill Burke is still desperate to prove to SOMEONE that he isn’t as AO(P) clueless as he seems. Still, pretty impressive how much shit people would like flung in their faces, as long as it’s free. So Geronimo folks take heart, your silly ‘integration’ project might have a fart’s chance in hell after all, despite being a valiant attempt at being the greatest ‘worst of breed’ showcase every assembled.

Oh, and Maven is still rubbish, and I’m rapidly finding out that there is fact a group of people who might be even stupider than Maven developers; Maven users.

So there you have it. Java land hasn’t changed that much, EJB3 is even further away, jakarta is now focussed on churning out commons-turdlings, and we have a whole other year of non-events and tedious regurgitation to look forward to. Wonderful.

It is with some bemusement that I see that jakarta.apache.org has finally acknowledged, however implicitly, than their frontpage is possibly the worst designed page on the internet since early 1995.

A minor facelift seems to have taken place. The only discernible benefit so far though seems that it’s actually possible to get to a project without scrolling for 10 pages first.

Sadly though, the rest of the site remains the same pathetic incompetent avoided-all-human-computer-interaction-classes-I’m-a-geek-forfuckssake attitude we’ve come to know and love from those inbred gimps.

Let us begin at the frontpage, shall we? We have an astounding page full of body blurbage which is utterly, completely, and thoroughly irrelevant for EVERYONE.

This might come as a shocker, but I have yet to find a single person outside of the apache circlejerk who gives a flying fuck about the licensing scheme, jakarta’s teatsucking relationship to apache, project management, announcement lists, volunteerism, the ASF, or any of that gibberish that befouls that page. Wake up you rumprangers, people go there to download your pathetic soulless code because it’s free, not because you have the right principles, attitude, buttock size, or genital flora.

So if you want to cater to your actual users, perhaps you could get rid of your ‘look ma, I can put my finger in my bum and wiggle it’ attitude and provide information that might actually be relevant, in a terse and useful form that doesn’t hide the NEWS (that’s changeable content, you know, the stuff people tend to come back for) off the page and forces people to scroll to get at it.

The download page of course is still there in it’s delightful awkwardness, except that insult has been added to injury in the form of an arbitrary grouping of projects at the top. Apparently jakarta’s output is now 75% commons-jizz. Analogies to a malignant cancer would be insulting to cancer at this point.

It’s all so deliciously opensoresy. ‘People find the page awkward, I know! I’ll add MORE to it to clarify!’. The one mantra of open sores is ‘never ever delete’. Nice to see jakarta genuflecting to its almighty god, and ‘fixing’ all issues by piling on their own aromatic blend of shite onto the midden heap.

Of course, the subprojects rise to the occasion as well, and ensure that they’re not out-incompetented by their filthy home. Alexandra for instance presents us with a plain sad page proclaiming its demise. BCEL’s developers seem to display their logo the way a shameless parent would display their retarded child’s latest crayon masterpiece. Who needs titles or headers with such a snazzy logo!

BSF tries to at least look consistent, but things start slipping by the time you hit Cactus, which tries to look consistent but has that trademark king Midas touch of shit that only maven can bestow. The delightful generic ‘I am a fuckwitted asshat’ that only maven users can announce with a mere stylesheet.

Commons of course is where the real geniuses hang out. Following the parent’s lead, the frontpage goes out of its way to tell you everything you couldn’t possibly want to know about commons, and forcing you to scroll to actually find any of the filthy commons-* poogems. Still, I’m glad that every damn project goes out of its way to inform you that it’s part of jakarta, how it’s licensed, how they run their mailing lists, who the developers are, what their favourite toilet experiences are and whatnot. The other fifty thousand mentions of said subjects all over the site could easily be overlooked, so they can be forgiven for this repetition.

ECS is up next, and here we have developerhood at its best, with documentation proudly proclaimed to be ‘TestBed.java’ and javadocs. Hivemind of course is a pleasant jab in the eyes next, with that astoundingly large header than can only come from boys that are lacking in size in other departments. Still, at least I get that nifty doodah that lets me change the font size on every page, a crucial feature without which modern day web browsing would be incomplete. Snore.

The list just goes on and on and on. It’s truly amazing to me that there can be so many developers working on/for/with apache, yet not one of which seems to have a single design bone in their miserable nerdy little bodies. This stuff really, really isn’t hard. Just pretend you’re a user. What would you like to see? Surprising as it may be, it’s generally not fun to go somewhere that spends all of its time telling you boring irrelevant details about itself. A user will (rightly think) ‘what can you do for me?’ and any site that fails to answer that should have its authors throttled with their own intestines, or at least legally banned from being anywhere within 100 meters of a computer.