The BileBlog

The keynote, much like any keynote, involves an awful lot of self congratulations. Floyd tells us how great TSS is, what an industry leader TSS is, and how absolutely delightful, bright, impressive, and thought leading the audience is.

Once the initial round of we’re you’re, you’re great, we all love each other is over with. It’s time to pay homage to techtarget’s buyout of TSS, with some gizmos that let the hapless audience vote in real time to various questions.

The little gizmo allows one to vote onj questions posed by floyd on various relevant topics, ranging from preference of Star Wars vs Star Trek (WHICH Star Trek dammit! What the hell should I vote if I love TNG but despise all the others??)

What is interesting about the results is that they reveal that Floyd’s premise of the audience being thought leaders and innovators and all round smart kids is, plainly, rubbish. The morons all seem to use Struts, Eclipse, and over half of them think java should be open sourced.

Sorry Floydy, your audience is, as one might suspect, a bunch of fuckwits.

Next up we have Mark Hapner. As anyone who has seen Mark speak, he’s awfully bright but also a fairly abysmal speaker. His delivery is so deadpan that as far as the listener is concerned, it might as well be in a monotone that never varies in pitch or volume.

Suffice to say, we’re at the first slide and I’m alredy pondering if this might be the right moment to take a sorely needed nap to help defray the physical cost of the requisite stay-up-until-4am-with-java-lossers-insisting-junit-sucks-ass session last night.

Mark dutifully waves his SOA flag, with the first slide subtly avoiding the dreaded acronym yet still managing to casually slip in ’services’ in a number of places.

It’s pretty interesting that Mark has avoided coming out and admitting that he’s pimping SOA. I suspect that he’s cottoned on to how deeply unglamorous and unsexy those three letters are.

So in order to avoid passing out or gnawing on various appendages out of sheer boredom, I am going to digress and discuss those Spring freaks instead.

What the hell is it with these people? The cult of Spring is disturbing yet fascinating. Taken individually, the members are sane, coherent, and pragmatic. So why do they insist on behaving as a hive? Really, why must they cling to one another so? They go for drinks together, they marched into the keynote together, and I suspect they all share a room. One can just imagine the goings on in this room of horrors. Poor Rod Johnson perched on a platform oiled and naked, with the acolytes twirling around him as humble supplicants, hoping to gain succour through his puny (yet holy) manboobs. Genuflecting wildly, no doubt coupled with some disgusting sexual practices and flinging of genitalia with gay abandon.

Come on folks, sure, you’re better put together and a lot more rational than the JBoss people. You’ve mastered the art of not frothing at the mouth in public, and most of you seem well potty trained. Really though, it’s just not healthy for a bunch of grown men to need this level of physical proximity to one another. Questions of sexual orientation will arise. The cuteness factor of pretending to be little ducklings hovering around a mother duck wears off very quickly.

Back to the keynote. It’s question time and as predicted, nobody seems to grok the armwavingy aspects of SOA/JBI/services. The first questioner wants to know how all this is different from webservices backed by EJBs (no satisfactory answer beyond ‘it’s bigger! It’s more! It’s shinier!’)

I think one of the flaws of Mark’s talk is that he’s forgetting (or is unaware of) his audience. They aren’t, as Floyd would like to think, clever leader types. They’re just everyday grunts who have enough spare time and meaningless enough jobs that they can fart off on TSS every other day, interspersed with the odd person who has been sufficiently beaten with the cluebat.

The whole SOA myth makes for a great sales pitch by IBM types to high level ‘architect’ types whose job involves little more than doodling with crayons and going on IBM sponsored golfing trips. It does not, sadly, translate well to gruntspeak. us grunts are simple folk, we like code examples, we like concrete classes, and by god, we like xml. Anything else and most of us will be flailing about helplessly trying, and failing, to relate to the subject matter.

It’s that time of the year again. Since TSSS is kicking off in a couple of days, I thought it’d be apt to post something related to that delightful organisation.

Now, I’m not an avid theserverside.com reader. Most of the threads are astoundingly tedious and repetitive. So, I thought that it’d be nice if there were some kind of summary, to avoid having to drudge through all that pap. Failing to find such a guide, I felt it my duty to write one. So here you go folks, you never ever need to read TSS again, as below I give you a succint distillation of everything that has ever been said or will be said there.

	Message #160234 Mark as noisy Mark as noisy Mark as noisy Post replyPost reply Post reply Go to topGo to top Go to top
Another innovation… Posted by: Dion Almaer on February 28, 2005 12 replies in this thread Cedric today pointed out that if you make funny fart noises, some people might laugh. I tried this and amazingly, it worked! What do you guys think? I wonder if we could add some aspects to it and wrap it in a groovyJSythonOP script with some annotations, surely we’d have the killer laugh maker on our hands!

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Helpful Posted by: Dirty Sanchez Sabramajinnahasujawali on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 2 replies in this thread I use jboss and love it, I work in a fortune 666 company. I like poop.

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Re: Another innovation… Posted by: James Strachan on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 2 replies in this thread Activefarts makes the best noises, I did a lot of work on it over the weekend and we’ll have a release out soon, it works, and it works now. You should be able to download the code at codehaus, since the whole place is such a quagmire that I’m now able to create crap willy nilly with no one the wiser. This is the power of OSS.

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NOISY: Personally… Posted by: Rolf Tollerud on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 2 replies in this thread

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On the other hand… Posted by: Cedric Beust on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 0 replies in this thread Hi sanchez, if you like poop noises, try poopNG, the latest version has some great features that many users have asked for. I’ve rewritten it in php with annotations, a combo which is surprisingly easy, intuitive, refactorable, scalable, and hardon inducing. It required jdk 1.6 betas though but we’re all running that now right?

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Re: Another innovation… Posted by: Andreas Mueller on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160236 2 replies in this thread Shut up James, you’re just abusing your position as the active* master pooper. I have to say I think it’s very unfair that you’re able to use your connections and lofty promises and occasional code spurts for financial gain, all the while doing your best to suck OSS penis. Those gluecode bastards, having their cake and eating it, it just makes me sick, sick of the whole cake.

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Helpful interjection Posted by: Cameron Purdy on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 0 replies in this thread Guys, actually if you think about it, blah blah blah ;) If you investigate further actually, you will realise that I have nothing to contribute at all, but the thought of leaving a TSS thread without a link to my company’s product causes me to lose sleep at night. Thus, here I am yet again trying to sound sensible and wise with my irreverant pithy comments. Peace, Cameron Purdy, Tangosol, Inc. Coherently fucking JBoss Cache

	Message #160239 Mark as noisy Mark as noisy Mark as noisy Post replyPost reply Post reply Go to topGo to top Go to top
Re: Another innovation… Posted by: Geir Magnusson on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160238 2 replies in this thread Well at gluecode we HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH APACHE. I REPEAT, NOTHING. I work for the ASF, but I also work for gluecode. That’s TWO aspects of my personality. They have nothing to do with each other and there is no conflict of interest. Sure, we (in the royal sense) have access to the super expensive TCK’s from Sun, but I (active* underhanded funder) think that I (gluecode honourable employee) am behaving in a sensible and fair manner. I (ASF hat wearer) for one appreciate Sun’s open source stance, even though I (gluecode) have to pay a lot of money for TCK access, and I (gluecode) hire a lot of my (quick ASF hat switcharoo) Geronimo friends just as they (geronimo) hired me for work for them (gluecode)

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Re: Another innovation… Posted by: Bill Berk on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160239 1 replies in this thread Fuck you geir! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you jboss hating thief! You’re a joke, I piss on your code, and Dain, fuck Dain! Fuck you all backstabbers! My AOP impl rules anyway, and now that I’m the officially designated JBoss pottymouth I’m going to do my utmost to tell you all that you’re a bunch of dirty little cocksuckers. The VC’s can stop Marc and the others from talking smack, but nobody pays attention to me, so I can do wtf I want!

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Another happy random user Posted by: I Like Poop on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160235 0 replies in this thread Hi dirty, we also use JBOSS, we ESPECIALLY appreciate the great FEATURES it has especially in JBOSS 4. We used to use WEBSPHERE and BEA but now we are very HAPPY now that WE have switched to JBOSS. We work in the REAL world!!! BEA is SCARED!!!!! mf

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Clarification Posted by: Jonas Bonér on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160240 0 replies in this thread Bill, you’re an idiot. Shut up and let the adults talk.

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Another perspective Posted by: Rod Johnson on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160234 0 replies in this thread Actually, all this is possible right now in Spring CVS, and I touch on it briefly in my book. Download it and give it a shot! You certainly don’t need J2EE or anything else!

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Re: Another perspective Posted by: Jason Carriera on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160243 0 replies in this thread EJB’s suck anyway, for me Hibernate/Spring is the winning combo, even though the only jobs I seem able to get are ones where EJB’s are heavily used. Why would I ever use EJB3? I hate EJB3! Screw you Sun! All I need is WebWork! WebWork lets me make all the noises I’d ever need. Just file an issue in JIRA and we’ll get to it soon. Have you filed an issue yet? That’s odd, we’ll investigate. Please file an issue. Any thoughts Patrick?

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The truth Posted by: Vic Cekvenich on February 28, 2005 in response to Message #160241 0 replies in this thread It’s obvious that Sun here is making a powerplay and trying to muscle in on my obscure little business. I have no actual opinions but I will do my utmost to sound like a complete moron. Thanks. .V

See you kids at TSS. Any sessions that you’d particularly like covered or avoided?

Does anyone understand this whole podcast nonsense? I feel like I’m missing out on some great innovation. Perhaps I’m wired differently to those people, because I simply….do…not…get….it.

From what I understand, it’s basically audio RSS. Whereas before you could happily subscribe to a feed and read it at your leisure, skip the boring parts, scroll down to the conclusion, or simply copy and paste the useful bits elsewhere, the format does work.

It works through the magic of the written word. The strength of that approach has, I think it’s fair to say, withstood the test of time. People like reading things. Reading is encouraged, those who can’t read are generally mocked.

Yet now, we have a whole new bunch of fuckwits who somehow want to LISTEN to each other. How on earth is this a step forward, or even a step sideways? I mean, forgetting how obscene the idea is in the general sense, it’s even more mindbogglingly irrelevant and inappropriate for technical content.

For one thing, geeks are by nature anti social creatures. If we enjoyed talking to people, we wouldn’t have chosen careers that result in us spending endless hours staring at an inanimate object that hardly ever communicates via the spoken word.

For another, technical content requires a different mode of digestion than a conversational piece. One often has to skip the boring bits, re-read the hard bits, and maybe even copy a code sample or two.

It’s really a sign of the inmates running the asylum. Shitstains like Michael Levin on javablogs who seems to spend literally all his time drooling over his own cleverness in managing to either record something, take pictures of something, or admire someone else’s ability to record stuff.

Sure, he’s now on my ignore list, but why must so many people suffer so needlessly? Why must there be a place in the world for such blatantly spastic ideas? Why can’t people like that be punished in a more tangible form for their negative contribution to society and/or their inability to use the right tool for the right purpose? Why can’t the javablogs editorial staff be a little bit more nazi and cull such worthless crap? Why isn’t Michael Levin bored yet? Why why why!

All we need now is for some unholy alliance between these guys and FOAF to complete the biggest circlejerk seen since the last TSS AOP panel.

UPDATE: For a good time, go to www.365adult.com. Oh those wacky aussie pornographers!

I’m off to the TSS Symposium next month, and I was trying to decide if there’s any talk that might actually be interesting enough to bother going to. Really though, I feel my excellent experience last year was mostly due to avoiding certain talks, than going to them.

So what do we have to look forward to? Very little I bet. Judging from what tickles the prostates of the TSS editorial staff, it’ll be the same old crap they promised us was relevant last year. So we’ll have some AOP panels and talks where various experts tell us all the amazing things they’ve learnt this year, and how AOP IS in fact relevant to everyone (again). For variety and to spice things up a bit, they might even show us a practical example of AOP to oohh…I dunno…inject logging statements? Implement servlet filters in an awkward and silly way that goes out of its way to avoid the facilities offered by the spec? The possibilities are, allegedly, endless.

Howard Lewis Ship will no doubt give us talks showing how clever he is and how successful tapestry projects will be if he were hired to implement them (just ask TSS, who wasted a lot of time and effort with absolutely no business justifiable end result beyond more sex appeal). The JDO crowd will make the usual disturbing noises, and we’ll have the obligatory opensymphony regurgitation talk where Mike does his ‘I’m an expert on open source and the fearless leader of OpenSymphony’ party trick and Jason twitches in rhythm to a discordant webwork2 beat.

Bill Berk will no doubt tell us how great JBoss is (I hear he’s been practising his umms, hmms and errrs). Gregor Hohpe will STILL be trying to sell more copies of his book (possibly giving Jason Hunter a run for his money in the best-dead-horse-flogging-via-a-book category), while Ted Neward will drop names and refer to Microsoft celebrities by their first name (that really must wow the girls) and somehow try to convince us that .net is relevant for java people. Rod Johnson will have completed his transformation from mild mannered intelligent British guy to freaky mad glint in the eye Spring zealot and ejbhater (possibly with a bigger posse in tow that his six pitiful acolytes last year).

Yep, great things to look forward to. This year we might even have new things to laugh at. JSF gibberish will start popping up, with Craig Mclanafanablahblahhan the bearded wonder telling us how it’ll revolutionise webapps the same way struts did (har har). I only hope Rick Hightower doesn’t make it or there’ll be a serious risk of a number of people chewing off their own genitalia out of sheer boredom.

Also new this year is a bigger vendor presence. BEA are busy convincing the java fucktards that they DO love opensource (hey, it worked for IBM), and want to marry it and beget many filthy children immediately. Oracle will err…actually the Oracle guys seem alright, and in my exposure to them so far don’t seem to do the almost mandatory chest thumping that a vendor badge demands. Maybe this will change this time round though and they’ll start telling us to use ADF and TopLink.

All in all, very much a case of same old same old. Many of last year’s woeful presenters are back for a second run with some slightly updated slides and maybe an extra joke or two.

The saving grace for the whole thing is that it’s in Vegas again, and the prospect of not going to a single presentation and just spending the three days wallowing in debauchery and smut is strangely appealing. So see you there!

What is it with this guy? I know he’s somewhat of a pothead, but really, someone somewhere should be monitoring his intake very closely, as based on his writing, it’s swinging dangerously from recreational to insane.

The latest example of this poor man’s frothings comes in the latest jboss blog entry. He’s upset about some guy who wrote some crap about open source. The actual content is pretty much irrelevant, the amusement value in the whole escapade lies in Marc’s hilarious flailing about in indignation at said article.

It’s strangely fascinating yet deeply embarrassing. The random capitalisation, the application of FistsOfF(le)ury, the half formed sentences, the surprising and innovative sentence structure, all combine to produce a piece of writing that’d result in the expulsion of any third grader in even an American school. O Natalie, where were you in this hour of need?!

I mean, what does ‘…JBoss helps this guy make money by sponsoring Tomcat and being the lead developers’ actually mean? Who is the lead developers? JBoss is a synonym for a group of people?

The insults themselves are delightfully French too, witness ‘… in order to pay our own developers and R&D and bring that PIG professional open source grade software like Tomcat 5.5′. That capital P, followed by caps on BOTH the I and G practically scream French at all and sundry.

The whole thing is hugely baffling, at first glance. It all becomes clear though when you read a bit about the target of the FistsOfFleury. Said hapless victim just happens to be one of those Geronimo asshats. This is actually pretty interesting because it shows that surprisingly, JBoss is busy soiling a variety of underwear due to the alleged threat of Geronimo. The fact that they’re worried at this early stage, when Geronimo is nothing but a frankensteinesque collection of half baked components is very odd.

Calm down Marc, you have nothing to fear. Geronimo the reality is far, far away. Still, at least they’re adding useful J2EE spec features like deployment of spring webapps. Har Har.

Welcome to open source java, where every sexually frustrated teenager gets to flail his genitalia in ways he’d never be allowed to at home or work.

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.

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.

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.

For the first time in a few years, I’ve found an article linked off of slashdot that manages to be both articulate and interesting. Once I recovered from the initial shock of such an anomaly, I found surprising parallels between the trials and tribulations of wikipedia and the open source community.

The article, for those who haven’t read it, discusses why the very openness and ‘community’ aspect of wikipedia ensures its own limited usefulness.

Open source suffers from the exact same problem. The very openness of the source, the low barrier to patch acceptance (in most cases), and the group oriented approach ensures the final results is somewhat of an incoherent jumble.

There are, of course, many exceptions. The exceptions are in cases where there is a strong gatekeeper who by default refuses community submissions, preferring instead to have the submitter sell their case successfully first.

I’m sure all open source participants/project owners like to think of themselves as qualified gatekeepers. Statistically though, the majority of the patches you receive will be mediocre, yet for most projects, the patch acceptance level is well over 50%.

Setting aside the gatekeeper issue, there’s also the spastic community aspect to further defecate onto the project in ways far beyond harmful patches.

User contributions and suggestions are a good example. Much like in politics, the average bumpkin hasn’t a clue on what’s best for them. They will kick up a fuss and demand features that are simple bad design, out of scope, irrelevant, or already covered through some other mechanism.

The examples of this sort of thing are everywhere. Jakarta clogging is a good one, where a tool has come about that nobody actually needs. JBoss is the same, with huge disparity between various modules. Some are written by people who have perhaps taken a java class or two, whereas some are written by people who’s sole ability seems to be to flail about helplessly in the general vicinity of a keyboard (UnifiedClassLoader 1-4).

To be fair, I’ll toss in a closed source example; IDEA. The more community-driven IDEA’s features are, the more end users are dissapointed. IDEA 4.0 for example was driven by users feedback and what they wanted. It’s a shining example proving that that particular set of end users is as stupid as Texans.

So open source (I realise I’m generalising, and there are plenty of projects that prove this wrong, but they’re the minority) ends up suffering from the same problems wikipedia does. The competency distribution curve makes sure of this.

How is closed source any different? Well, there’s a higher barrier to entry, and there’s a carrot/stick mentality that caters better to the fact that the average developer is a fuckwit. You do well, you get paid well. Do badly, and you’re punished. Being paid well lets you buy shiny things, which makes you happy. Not being paid will make you sad, and your significant other will mock you/become sad/point and laugh at your genitalia/starve. Beyond some dubious penis tugging, open source just doesn’t have the same cold hard incentive/disincentive approach. Submit a bad patch that gets committed by a desperate committer? No big deal, at worst some random joe schmo will think ‘well this code sucks’.

I do want to stress that there are projects that buck this trend, but the laws of statistics apply there too, they’re few and far between, with the majority sitting pretty in the middle hump of mediocrity.

I am heartily sick and tired of javalobby’s endless crusade against all things Java. With friends like this, who needs enemies? It’s utterly revolting how those swine manage to go on and on and on against Java in so many different threads.

What’s astounding is that there’s actually an audience for that kind of fear mongering. All those people seem to secretly wish their jobs didn’t force them to use Java, and would allow them to wallow in .net filth instead.

Particularly bizarre is Rick Ross’ vendetta against Sun. Now, I don’t know who from Sun pissed in his coffee (and by the sound of it, has a rather oversized bladder and thus hasn’t stopped pissing for the last few years), but the guy has a very deranged and bizarre Sun fetish. He just can’t say enough mean things about that poor little company. Sun sucks, Sun doesn’t understand Java, Sun should , Sun hates developers, Sun ate my babies, Sun should stop molesting my pets, Microsoft will tug my penis but Sun will only point and laugh, and so on and so forth.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look over some threads on there shall we. We have a thread about how Sun has no faith in Java 5.0, as proven by the fact that the ‘latest’ download on java.com is 1.4.2. We have a discussion about how Java is going to die on the next version of Windows. Of course, it’s all not all anti java, we have some pro .net stuff too! To inject some variety, we also have the ‘come on guys, lets band together and promote interest in java’ type gibberish. It’s like there’s this horde of demented lobotomised children out there, who take what their fearless leader says a wee bit too seriously. Who can forget Rick Ross’ poignant offer to help NASA with their Mars ‘java stuff’ using nothing but the willpower and intellectual prowess of javalobby members? We laughed, we cried, but mostly we shuffled about feeling very uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s a bit like when your senile uncle whips his willie at a wedding ceremony and brandishes it furiously at the groomsmen while tittering ‘I am a purple teapot, short and stout’. Funny for a split second, but very uncomfortable thereafter.

To its credit though, javalobby represents the masses perfectly. Endless stupid threads that somehow defy reason and all that is rational by generating comments that seem to outdo each other in terms of sheer ignorance.

The .net fetish is very disturbing, it has to be said. I avoid .net stuff like the plague (or SWT), so I have no idea how things look from that side of the fence. Do .net sites also go on and on about Java? It just seems like bad manners and a distinct lack of social grace. It’s not called randomlobbyforpartimejavamonkeyswhoalsodabbleindotnet, last I checked.

Here’s a plea to the evil minds behind javalobby, can you please split up the RSS feeds you aggregate at javablogs? The product announcements are an enjoyable informative read that I’d like to keep seeing. The forum posts however make me want to launch into a fairly disturbing frenzy of self flagellation and stabbing of random innocents; a situation which can only end in tears from almost all parties involved.

Finally, something for all you Americans. Please, please, vote for notbush tomorrow, or don’t vote at all. I won’t join the mental masturbation that is so fashionable now and gloat about how evil one side or the other is. It’s easy for you all to have pithy cosy opinions about war, civil liberties, democracy, peace, freedom, and all that. You might not know anyone affected so it’s all fun, in some sick sense. Some of us however have relatives in Baghdad. Some of us are Arabs in the US. I’m sure it’s easy to condemn random brown people out there, to thump your chest about the greater good and whatnot. Is it as easy to look me in the eye and tell me it’s alright for my relatives to be killed? Relatives who love, cry, laugh, joke, and have children. A family that deserves to be bombed, invaded, ‘liberated’, and attacked about as much as you think your own family does.

I’m sure we’re all highly impressed that the fleury clan actually managed to get compliance for J2EE 1.4. When I heard the news, I naively and foolishly thought that their incompetent days are now over. This is the dawn of a new era in the dirty incestuous little family’s sordid history.

Of course, a 90mb (!!) download later, I’m very rudely corrected. Wary from bad past experience, I thought I’d first just unpack the server and run. No customisations, purely out of the box experience.

What do I find? Well, the console output (standard size console), is 73 pages long. Of those 73, 61 are stacktraces (it’s hard to tell, but it’s one exception that’s nested about 12 times). Nice to see they’re still letting the same old inbred halfwits code. Of the remaining 12 pages, I’m given some very crucial information about startup, stuff that will hugely aid debugging and my usage of said server, I’m sure.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to know a 800 character IOR corba unique identifier (or two)? Surely the fact that the patch URL is ‘null’ is of vital importance! Don’t even get me started on those bastards who think that ‘Initialized REST’ is a useless bit of info. Why, we should all refuse to use those cryptic servers who don’t tell us all these vital things we must know in order to use J2EE!

Anyway, in the time it took me to write this, server is now up. The shameless little runt even admits to taking 2m:31s:305ms just to start up, clean, without a single application deployment (by me anyway).

Let’s try shutdown….Not as bad now. A mere page and a half of output, and about 10 seconds. Why a server has to take 10 seconds to shut down when it doesn’t have anything deployed yet is a mystery best left unsolved.

So, armed with an ear, maybe it’s time to deploy something for shits and giggles and see what sort of evil that might bring forth. A deployer.sh and deployer.bat in the bin directory look most promising. Whoops, guess again. The scripts complain that there’s no deployer.jar in the current dir. One has to wonder at the marketing/packaging genius who thought to ship shell scripts for non-existent components.

The bin dir contains other misfits too. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the self-professed ‘primitive’ jboss_init_redhat.sh and jboss_init_suse.sh, with their cutesy hardcoded paths and lack of support for any kind of external config.

There’s also the delightful ‘twiddle.sh’, which apparently allows you to ‘twiddle’ remote jboss instances. This sounds somewhat reminiscent of diddling said remote servers, and I’m not sure about you fleurites, but I for one would rather plop my genitalia on the wrong end of a piledriver than even think of any sexual activities with anything jbossian. Merely viewing the help output of this diddler will, of course, result in a twiddle.log file deposited in the current directory, with nothing but debug messages.

Deployment is still the painful arduous hope-and-pray-you-get-a-helpful-hint process we’ve all come to know and love. The smallest hiccup will cause the server to flail about wildly, spewing error messages with a frequency that is only matched by the number of new pointless codehaus projects every week. The error message themselves are as delightfully whimsical as they’ve always been. Random ObjectNames, with tantalisingly empty ‘I depend on:’ proclamations. The ‘Depends on me’ of course still impressively manages to insist that ejb’s within a module depend on a seemingly random other ejb in a far flung module that has absolutely no dependencies to anything. Hot redeployment of apps that failed to start up doesn’t work worth crap, the stacktraces seem longer, and the whole thing just makes you run to your nearest j2ee vendor and beg them to let you fling cash at them just to stop the pain.

There are some silver linings though. For one thing, JBoss 4.0 should serve as a great motivator for the Geronimo folks. It sets such a low bar that their goal actually seems attainable (as long as they avoid going after commercial vendors, who will wipe the floor with them). It’s also an excellent advert for BEA, IBM, and pretty much all the other players in the field. People who start with JBoss will learn to appreciate professional products so much more (alright, well maybe not websphere, but anything else).

For anyone having high expectations of JBoss 4.0, time to put them away. It’s the same old shit, just 9 times the size, half the speed (well, twice the slowness, to be accurate), 3 times the incompetence, and an order of magnitude more hype. Calling this ‘professional’ open source can only be a very very sick joke, or the most filthy example of doublespeak yet this year.

Still, to their credit, the jboss fucktards have realised one vital fact: it’s pointless to spend money on development or developers if you’re stick with a truly rotten team at the core, and much more useful for the ‘business’ if it were all poured into marketing, where the art of conning people is far far easier to perfect than with boring old code.

I’m told that Russell Beattie managed to get fired YET AGAIN. What’s truly astounding is that anyone would actually hire that fat oaf. Here’s a hint to any prospective employers: Taking on nazi ashcroftesque democrats who change jobs more often than they change underwear is about as wise as jousting with a lump of turd.

Also, a clarification. I’m not Jordanian or of Jordanian descent, I’m from another middle east country altogether. Even more amazingly than that, I’m not a pilot, nor am I balding.

I’m glad I don’t know anyone who has commit access to jikes. I’m glad that when I wish ill onto those people, when I want them to die slow painful agonising deaths, it’s not causing harm to a friend or acquaintance.

I had previously ranted and raved about the obscenity that was jikes 1.19; how it so gleefully quoted from a book. I was assured by many people that they’ve gone way overboard, and will tone down the output to be sane and a lot less offensive.

Foolishly, I upgraded to jikes 1.21. Every time I compile now, I want to immolate those chocolate log miners. I am filled with such rage, such fury, that no punishment or torture method seems severe enough to slake my thirst for revenge and retribution.

Why in god’s name do I need to be informed, by default, of every time I use a local variable to shadow a member field? Why can’t I not specify a break in my switch statements if I so choose? The language allows both and has VERY explicit clear rules about what happens and how it’s treated. If it’s good enough for the goddam JLS, it’s good enough for me. You, jikes twats, have NO right deciding my coding habits for me. You’re a bunch of fuckwitted angsty IBMers who think that all they need to do is tug some linux/OSS penis to be admired and loved by all.

It’s one thing to write a custom compiler for children just taking their first java steps. It’s quite another to foist this disgusting filth onto people who supposedly know what they’re doing. I mean, we can forgive the fact that it emits different bytecode to javac (look at the code generated for asserts, for example), we can forgive the fact that its website is one of the most difficult to navigate or find any info at, but really, even us seasoned bitter cynics have our limits.

The problem is that the language has moved on since jikes 1.18 (the last usable version). The ONLY reason I prefer using jikes is to avoid the JVM startup time. It’s depressing and frustrating that one is forced to choose between taking the startup hit with javac, or sticking to an old version of jikes before it was taken over by a horde of braindamaged fuckwits unable to accept that there might be developers out there who aren’t quite as dimwitted or spastic as they are. On the bright side, those folks make a very powerful argument for the merits of genetic cleansing.

On the whole, theserverside.com is a pretty decent site. It has some mildly interesting articles, the product announcements are relevant, and the editorialising is kept to a pleasant minimum. The technical content is also surprisingly relevant and topical.

The whole thing however is let down by regular baiting and shilling by some users/authors, who seem to go through moments of panic when the comment count drops for a few successive stories.

So what to do in this case? Why, say something controversial! Over the years, TSS has pretty much identified both of the ‘hot’ topics (ie, JBoss, and opensource) as great obsessive fanatic breeding grounds. So when things flag, you can be sure you’ll have some link to a highly dubious article saying one or the other is great (nobody is offended when either is portrayed as not THAT great, interestingly enough).

A particularly funny/offensive example of this was a ‘is JBoss ready for the enterprise’ advert run there a couple of weeks ago. This is supposedly an objective evaluation of said product by some random guy who is trying to determine whether it’s good enough to use, based on some dodgy metrics. Fair enough, nothing too odd about that. The fun bit is when you realise that the author happens to be the CEO of a company that does training and consulting for open source products. Gosh, and he found that some opensource product is in fact ready for the enterprise?! This is NOTEWORTHY to him? I mean really, shouldn’t it be sufficient for him to say ‘my business is all about open source in the enterprise’ for the rest of us to realise that he thinks it’s a good idea?

While much of the blame should be placed on the genius who authorised this offensive article, tss users should also shoulder much of the responsibility.

Cameron, please please stop baiting these poor people. It’s a well documented fact that Gavin Fleury has claimed the deeper shades of purple for his exclusive use lately. The poor guy’s head will at some point explode if you keep taunting him so subtly.

See, one has to understand something about these jboss kids. They’re very, very sensitive. Their favourite movie is When Harry Met Sally. They cry when they hear sad songs, and they blow up when you say their favourite toy isn’t your favourite toy. So why keep baiting them like this? I mean, it’s fun and all, but the novelty value of torturing a bunch of kids wears off fairly quickly. So please, let’s just ignore them and stop their tedious yapping.

It’s pretty sad that TSS regularly lowers its tone by such postings. Perhaps they have some kind of freakish javalobby envy syndrome, and aspire to to scale those admirable heights of crapulence, a dubious goal at the best of times.

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’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.