The BileBlog

In a rather perplexing move, it’s announced that the Java 6 JDK will include Derby, the turdy little unwanted IBM poop plopped onto Apache (about par for the course, since large swathes of Apache seem to exit solely as an IBM marketing tool.)

What’s perplexing about this decision is how incredibly arbitrary it seems. I have yet to see a single rational justification of its inclusion, even from within Sun or from the community at large.

It’s one thing to suffer from the tyranny of the masses. We have plenty of cases of that in Javaland, do we really need to now add arbitrary bizarre decisions that not only pop up out of nowhere, but also have nothing at all do with the community?

Honestly, not even the JDK6 Expert Group decided on this addition. It’s literally as if someone at Sun woke up one day and thought ‘you know, I miss the old days when we could add random shit to the jdk without all this community and expert group nonsense, I’m going to sexually arouse myself now by doing just that’, in one of the most harmful public displays of nostalgia ever seen in a technical forum.

I honestly cannot conceive of a single reason for this. It doesn’t even make life easier for anyone. You can’t rely on it being there since it’s not in the JRE, you can’t actually do anything with it since you have to ram various awkwardly shaped objects into unexpected orifices to create a db and manage it using derby’s amateurish and unpleasant tools. It’ll work out of the box much the same way as an Oracle 8 install CD can be considered functional.

Even the silly ‘explanation’ from Mark Reinhold on JavaLobby says nothing compelling. It really does seem like a completely random decision based on a freakish whim. The motive in fact is fairly evil, getting people hooked onto JDBC 4, which will be a nasty thing to hook people onto since invariably they’ll need to move onto a real database, and end up being exactly where they are now; at the mercy of the real DB vendors, with nothing useful at all gained from the fact that they got to play with some half baked alpha pile of IBM dingleberries; a dubious joy at best.

This is even bad news for the handful of morons who are incompetent and desperate enough to use Derby. Now you’ll have to bend over and invite over a large group of chocolate log miners and perform things your mother would be very upset about just to upgrade your db. Of course, you WILL want to upgrade it. It has hundreds of open issues, and is clearly labeled alpha.

Even if those issues are miraculously addresses in the next few months, we’d still end up with more IBM shit in the JDK. Honestly, when will people finally realise that IBM has never produced anything of worth, beyond genius marketers? How many times must I mention java.util.Calendar and java.text before people start listening?

How hard is it really to install lightweight pure Java DB? We have mckoi, we have hsqldb (in its various incarnations), and we even have a halfassed one from Apache (Derby). All of these (except derby, funnily enough) are very easy to download and install, and are perfectly adequate for testing and playing with and the odd bout of sexual experimentation for the curious. In ALL cases, this should NOT be in the JDK. Why should one DB be blessed above all others? Did we learn nothing from the crimson fiasco? Mark also naively claims ‘Vendors of little DBs are already threatened by Derby whether or not a copy of it is co-bundled with the JDK. I don?t see how doing that fundamentally changes the picture for them.’ A clearly ludicrous claim; just look at how successful Tomcat is. That lovely servlet engine that’d have gone nowhere had it not been the RI. I don’t envy the little guys having to compete against a product called ‘JavaDB’.

The branding of the whole thing is equally ludicrous. JavaDB? What next, renaming Glassfish to The Java Application Server and making obscene lawyery gestures at anyone wanting to refer to their appserver by that name?

I’m one of the few people I know who will publicly admit that he’s a Sun fan. I think they’re an excellent steward of Java, and have done a remarkable job in every way (except marketing of course, I can’t think of a company that’s more incompetent in terms of how they present themselves to the public or of the ludicrous stuff they seem to push). How out of touch do you have to be to be ‘honestly surprised at the reaction to all this’ according to Mark? Have you people lost all respect for what we love and care about our platform, and felt that for the sake of consistency, you should whore the rest of the JDK and sell all your products NetBeans style? Come on, surely there are enough technically minded people still at Sun, who have some say and can prevent this travesty from taking place?

Is there a polite way to inform a coworker that they have a personal habit that makes one want to slowly rip off one’s own arms and hurl them in the general direction of said coworker just to get them to stop, however briefly?

Over the years, I’ve been confronted with what feels like more than my fair share of obnoxious habits. So much so that I’m starting to suspect that it could just be that I’m such a sensitive sort that the merest distraction is enough to make me want to cry like a little girl.

It all started with the tapper. At the time, I was working in a location where the floor had no carpet, in an artsy sort of venue, where most of the developers laboured under the foolish notion that they’re also musicians and expert music critics. The tapper’s methodology would go as follows. He’d bring in his fatass Seinheisser headphones, plop them on his severely underpopulated head, and listen to music. All is well so far, perfectly anti-social and work-friendly behaviour. The fun though starts shortly thereafter, where he starts twitching his entire body in sync to this imaginary music. This was no mere head bobbing up and down sort of event, nor is it the odd foot waggle. Oh no, it’s a full body spasm, where the feet tap furiously, the arms jerk onto the desk, and the wheelie chair he’s on periodically slides out from under him. It got so bad that I would have to take regular breaks from work depending on his energy levels. This went on for six months, and I never figured out a polite way of suggesting that my life would be vastly improved if he either became a quadriplegic or lost all his limbs.

Next we have the eater. The eater consumes lunch at the office (nothing wrong with that, of course.) The eater however does not consume his lunch in a manner than civilised people have been taught to. The eater consumed it with a perplexing disregard for that simplest of eating axioms, close thy mouth, you obnoxious loud fuck.

The eater feels the need to share every single chew with his mesmerised audience. Whether or not you want to, you will discover the exact texture of everything the little shit ingests. Soups will be slurped, moist sandwiches will be squished moistly, and every bite will be followed with one of those loud caricatures of a swallow that normal people only use for the sake of exaggeration or effect. Don’t even get me started on the deafening roar of drink gulps.

There are other varieties, depressingly. Just when you think you’ll never have to deal with one of these again, you’re confronted with a…nail clipper. Yes indeed, some people think it’s perfectly sensible to clip their nails (all 20) in the office.

The problem with these, unlike the farters and burpers, is that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve just never found out that behaving in this manner is uncouth and unacceptable, so you can’t make a joke about it or even tell them off. A farter knows he’s doing something wrong, and will either look sheepish or brag in the face of authority. The tappers, chewers, clippers, heavybreathers, twitchers, rockers, pokers, patters, sportsyellers, arsebandits, hairstrokers, beardedwonders, turdmisflushers, malpissers, snotwipers, peepers, (those who come up behind you, ask you a question, then just stand there indefinitely looking at your screen), and other such office flora and fauna seem to be blissfully unaware. I’m sure I haven’t even covered the worst of it. Is there an acceptable way of dealing with such without committing a crime or copious amounts of blood?