The BileBlog

It’s been a while since a village idiot hat has been awarded. While this is by no means a promise of regular hat givings, in this particular instance the recipient is gagging for it.

The winner is HTMLUnit. HTMLUnit, for those who are unaware, is basically a piddly little framework that lets you create web requests, and parses back the resultant html/javascript and lets you click on things programatically to simulate actual users. It’s great (in theory) for end to end acceptance testing.

Thankfully, the name is a total misnomer. For one thing, it’s not about unit testing at all. Therefore, has nothing to do with JUnit. It wisely avoids the spastic route taken by things like xmlunit, which provides classes tightly coupled to JUnit.

The premise is a pretty decent one, it’s the implementation, as usual, which makes the baby jesus cry hot tears of rage and anger while biting off the nearest nipple.

It all started innocently enough. I have a rather complex page that the current version of htmlunit fails on. Knowing how the oss thing works, I knew I’d just be told to try the cvs version if I reported the problem. Thusly I went off to cvs (sourceforge, the first sin), and grabbed the festering pile of goatpoo.

First problem, I see maven crud splattered all over. My heart sinks as I see the 3 tongued kisses of death; maven.xml, project.xml, and project.properties. This cannot possibly go well. Amazingly, there’s a build.xml there too, so I might be spared. I’m not hopeful mind you.

My dismay was in fact well placed. The ant file is nothing more than the year old solidified wankstain that maven squirts out. It manages to die before compiling a single line (it tries to specify an output dir for javac that doesn’t exist).

As an aside, I’d like to know who wrote the maven to ant plugin. I have never, in all these years, seen such badly written buildfiles. Now I know maven guys are fuckwitted rumpranging ADD-ridden gizmowhores, but surely they can’t know so little of how ant works or of how it should be used. Even their callous disregard for users and the real world doesn’t go the whole way towards explaining the mindboggling incompetence of this build.xml.

To cut a long story short, the file is a herring sporting a horrific red hue. Making this thing work would require an impressive collection of miracles from all major religions.

So we’re onto maven. Running maven, of course, is always a great excuse for a day out, maybe catch a movie or two, and a nice dinner, while it figures out what day it is, what it should do about it, and how to calculate the worst and slowest way of running a few thousand tests.

Eventually, a feeble jar is farted out. Plopping said jar in my tests reveals a rather dismal result. Cookies no longer work across invocations.

Ohdear. Nevermind, I’m a java guy, I can debug this sort of thing. Armed with nothing more than an abiding hatred for java developers and a trusty debugger, I sally forth into the brackish waters that are the htmlunit source code.

Hrm, here we go. At some point, one of these gurus of incompetence decides that we should internally store a map of HttpClients, keyed by host url. Thusly can clients be reused and state preserved across invocations, for a given site.

Said guru however didn’t actually bother fix the thing that gets stuff out of said map. So while the key is now host + port, the blocks that attempts to retrieve things from the map does not include the port. These days, every url has a port, thusly, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.

Apparently, this problem has trickled down to other lost souls who use htmlunit cvs, such as the canoo people, who also have the odd user bleating about cookies being ignored.

So the fix is simple. A few lines of code later and I’m ready to attempt the Herculean task of convincing maven to give me a jar. An outing, couple of movies, and dinner later, maven proclaims that some tests have failed. Hilariously enough, the ‘helpful information’ it gives me about this build failure is line and column information of the jelly script junit plugin that failed. Highly relevant I’m sure, just not to anyone except the halfwit author of said plugin.

So after a few days of pointlessly scrolling around, I find the culprit. It’s at this point that I completely lose it and start laughing hysterically. I can’t quite believe the test I’m looking at.

The test for http state works thusly: It gets at the class that holds the map. It uses reflection to access the (private) map, makes it accessible, and manually puts a value in it. Having done so, it then calls a method which basically just reads from the map, and then compares the two.

It’s mind boggling to me that someone would write such a complex and awkward test to basically test that HashMap functions as a….map. Of course, this test and a dozen other just like it now fail, since the keys they use to do the manual insertion cannot exists anymore. The change to the internals of the class being tested generate keys of a different format, so the test is testing a state that cannot ever, ever happen.

It’s sad and pitiful that things like this happen. It’s even sadder and even more traumatising that it’s not that rare, and is even more common than not. The collaborative effort of so much incompetence should not happen, it should be a freak accident that only happens very rarely, instead of daily, over and over again.

Paul Graham, yet again, proves himself to be yet another completely brain damaged spastic asshole who thinks, that because due to a freak accident of nature, he actually is different from the average slashdot teatsucker or has something worthwhile to say.

The man’s stupidity and ignorance is astounding. The crowd he preaches to is, if that’s at all possible, even stupider. Analogies to symbolise their relationship is perhaps the fundamentalist rabid Muslim preacher advocating death and destruction to a bunch of ill-educated rabid followers. Or perhaps the insane right wing Christian fatshit insisting that anyone pro-choice likes to eat babies to a group of midwest fatfucks intent on lynching brown people and damning random strangers to burn in a variety of hells for not accepting a baby jesus buttplug as their lord and saviour.

So it’s of no surprise to see a variety of blogs proclaim his genius. He is, after all, rummaging about to find their miniscule genitalia, and proceeding to tug it with enough force to elicit happy noises.

Where does one start? This man is so stupid, so ignorant, so eager to probe exactly how far up his own sphincter he can crawl that it’s amazing there’s anything outside of it.

Lets see, he claims that Firefox is better than IE because the people who develop it do it in their spare time and with religious fervour. Gosh, you haven’t spoken to a microsofty recently have you? These people have just as much passion, if not more, for what they do as the average dirty hippie whose poo you’re so desperate to eat. In fact, for a wide variety of opensores, you can get better service, better software, better documentation, and more professionalism overall by instead finding a commercial version that does the same thing. The converse is not true quite as often, or many more commercial endeavours would be killed by their open source variants. Certainly, anyone trying to select a product would be dimwitted in the extreme to choose one run by a hobbyist who is ruled by whimsy and mood and fears social contact and views professionalism as an insult to his artistic sense.

The blogging gibberish he spouts is also astounding. How can one man be so thoroughly ignorant and know so little of the real world? Give me a professional unbiased educated journalist any day over your average armchair blogger. Most blogs are a disturbing mix of zealotry, incompetence, ignorance, and randomly strung together smattering of incoherent prejudices. Lowering the barrier to entry does not improve quality, it lowers it. Some good stuff will obviously get in, but the vast majority will be far worse. Whether the former outweighs the latter is certainly not a forgone conclusion.

I’m also baffled by the amazing leap of faith he makes by assuming that if you work on opensource, you like what you do more than if you were paid (commercial). How many baby kittens did this filthy animal have to consume in order to achieve such enlightenment? If only he’d attempted a scientific approach and logical argument instead of mindless bloodletting, he might have actually preached to more than the choir.

The working at home stuff is also bullshit. Antisocial misfits perhaps work better at home. It certainly is harder than working at an office, it requires more discipline, but it is certainly not qualitatively superior to an office environment. The lone hacker bullshit works for certain things, but does not for most things you’d want to build a business out of. Maybe he lucked out by flinging feces to the wind and had them land at the right scat fetishist, but it’s certainly not a model for success.

In fact, a mere reality check is sufficient to prove that this man is so out of touch with reality that it’s amazing nobody has chained him up and tossed him in a mental institute for all the harm he causes society. I dare anyone to find me a successful open source business that operates with nothing more than hobbyists faffing about at home at random. While that’s a fine start, the demands of the real world soon make themselves felt in terms of an increased need for coordination and a more definitive plan and roadmap than the nearest shiny object.

I can but hope that this man is blessed with a king midas touch of shit, and that every startup he ever touches will crash and burn, as it has no choice but to do if anyone involved actually takes his deranged spastic twitching as anything more than a joke that has long lost any humour value. Shame on anyone who takes him seriously.