In response to this:

I don’t quite get what you mean by the .Net “visio”. As a techie using J2EE at the time all I could see was that they needed something to meet that challenge. 95% of the ideas (e.g. common runtime, remoting etc. etc.) were already there in the J2EE stack. They couldn’t let the Java people steal their business and have enough R&D budget to steal their clothes, so they did.

I believe .Net is easier to develop with if you can afford the MS IDE, because you can put special annotations into the code that allow you to easily create web service end points (etc.). There are a number of OSS tools (e.g. XDoclet) that allowed you to do this, but you have to:

a) know they exist
b) know how to use them

The MS tools do all this for you, that’s where they win – usability and getting productive quickly. Of course, once you have got your head around the OSS development stack, I don’t think these early productivity gains persist. And it’s free! As are the IDE’s.

So, in my opinion, they didn’t have a “visio” they just had a need to protect their markets from innovators who understood the web properly. This is what they are doing again with their “live” software offering, and will do again when the next wave comes. They are a dinosaur lumbering after whatever the new prey is. They did come up with SOAP, but it’s such a boringly obvious thing to do with XML and web servers I’m not sure that proves anything.

In response to this:

So if I, in my igorance, type in the string from your article ../../.. I can end up with my career in ruins?

What?

Mind you, as being a techie Frenchman using a mobile phone in a heavy coat can get you an arrest record then why should we be surprised?

And they want to be able to hold people for 90 days!

Let me be the eye of the storm
the quiet place where all is at rest
and movement ceases

Let me pour gold on the needy
love on the friendless
help on the helpless

The hand is empty
that will give you all you need
look at it now

Say:
I am the one who can change things
the one who makes things real
I am the one who will give you back your heart

Only you can set you free
But I will be there

In response to this

Maybe I’m tired but I couldn’t get what you were trying to say, you seemed to wander from point to point and take a long time to do it. Not your usual fare. Demolish the dhds with your usual 3 paras.

It’s easy to mock the utopians but they are a necessary evil in that they try to make things work when others might give up. Personally I like dreamers because they think things can get better and try to make it happen. I agree with you about the dangers of authoritarian streak we keep seeing – but wtf are these nobodies anyway? No-one will use there stuff if they make it too painful to use, and that’ll be very amusing.

Who the hell is the guy giving you the finger and why should I care about him? In the wild world out there I’m more worried about all the things that might kill my kids if we don’t change our behaviour. One nobody waving his finger is neither here nor there.

I’m picky as well: criterion is singular but the guy gave you a list of points so you used the plural form of the verb. The quote later had it wrong as well but I suppose if it’s a quote then …

Going back to do more certification.

I was going to go straight for the Sun Certified Java Systems Architect (or whatever it is). When I read the syllabus I realised that you may as well get the Business Components and Web Services certs on the way because you cover the ground anyway. So, now reading up on EJB’s and EJB/J2EE design patterns.

To get started there’s a very good J2EE tutorial on the sun website, I’ve been using this to get back into it quickly.

Also, if you download the 1.4 JDK (get everything) you’ll get an example J2EE server that this tutorial uses. You can get the tutorial and related code as well. I’ll let you find them yourself, dear reader. Just make sure you’ve got the bin directory of the J2EE server in your path so that their version of ant will work from the command line.

Register with the server side, if you do you can get free PDF’s of the first two books in my list below, plus a ruck of other things. Very good site. I still prefer paper though.

Recommending:

Mastering Enterprise Java Beans – Roman/Ambler/Jewell – Wiley

EJB Design Patterns – Marinescu – Wiley

Core J2EE Patterns – Alur/Crupi/Malks – Prentice Hall

Enterprise Java Beans – Monson-Haefel – O’Reilly

Java Enterprise in a Nutshell – Flanagan/Farley/Crawford/Magnusson – O’Reilly

Finally: Go here for a list of topics and a brief description of what they contain. Mikalai Zaikin has done a great service for the rest of us and should be thanked.

Well, I suppose I am, given that my parents are both deceased.

But the main thing is that bluesey weariness. Not sure where it comes from. I ‘ve been spending a hell of a lot of energy over the past few weeks getting some software ready for my own company. I feel I now have something to show to people. Next problem is how to market it and turn it into a source of income.

I contacted an old acquaintance who I used to work with when I had the idea for the software. He’s well placed to help me find some people who might be interested in taking the software further into some kind of product. I can’t take it much further on my own efforts at the moment.

I’m working on the “elavator pitch” for the business behind the software so I can show it to him and see if he things it’ll be a runner.

Gotta run – need a reasonably early night for once. Watched “Darkma” late into the night on Friday and wish I hadn’t bothered. A real waste of time being awake. I fast forwarded quite a bit of it because I knew what was coming next.

In response to this:

Very dubious about that management dashboard. Many years ago I worked for large company and they had this thing about drawing graphs of tests completed versus tests to be done. The managment, all ISO9001’d to the hilt, seemed to think that this gave them a metric of how complete the software was.

It didn’t. It gave them a measure of how many tests the developers thought necessary and had done. There was no neutral 3rd party testing department doing systems integeration testing from the specs. You need to make sure you’re measuring the right thing.

If you are writing formal unit test doco’s and so on, you may as well measure it, but you need to make sure you’re doing “proper” testing as well.

Having a sad time at the moment. A whole heap of crap from over 30 years ago, most of which I don’t remember, was thrown in my face by someone close to me.

At least, I thought they were close.

Then they proceeded to insult my house, the way I bring up my kids and a whole pile of other things. Just vindictive, nasty and unnecessary. Also with an ever-so-slight application of a selective memory that puts them in a better light than they deserve, this is only human and makes me smile a little, to be honest.

In case you don’t know, the waters of Lethe (or maybe it’s the Lethe – a river) are what the ancient Greeks believed the dead would drink in the underworld so that they could forget their lives because the memories of living and losing it all were too painful. This is also why we don’t remember our past lives, at least most of us don’t. I don’t want to forget any more. I used to have fantasies about some wonderous drug going into my arm and taking away all of the pain forever. But then I would also forget all of the good things and I don’t want to do that. Not even slightly. However I can’t remeber the details of what I am accused of, so I apologised for any slight, real or imagined and said goodbye. Now I am returning all of the gifts that weren’t gifts, they are wanted back by some cheesy manipulative ploy, some poxy emotional hook I’m supposed to have bitten on. It’s very silly and selfish.

Anyway, now I am faced with probably never speaking to this person again, other than in some kind of clipped code at weddings and funerals. They only ever spoke to me when it suited them, a loan or someone with a car to ferry them about on some errand or other. And they always treated my like a dickhead. I’m not sure what I’m gonna miss, to be honest. I’d like to sort out these memories they carry around that are causing them such pain and bitterness – but I can’t remember that much. I was mired in misery myself from the age of about 10 to 23 or so. Then I moved on, and recovered from the damage that was my childhood and teenage years.

Move on, and keep the precious things close. Forget the rest of it, it only brings pain.

Grow up. But no-one ever listens to that one.

I was out with Rob, a die-hard Genesis fan. We both used to listen to them a lot, but I was always loaned the vinyl – usually from Rob, I think.

Anyway we were wandering around the Trafford centre (another essay needed on this edifice on another day). Bless him, he bought me Selling England by the Pound and Trick of the Tale. It’s very odd listening to Selling 20 (at least) years later and hearing it digitally remastered and really clear. It’s a different animal from what I remember. I’m really struck by the musicality (jargon, sigh) and the fact that the music is arranged, rather than thrown together. Also, it still works really well after all these years. I think the remastered version must be very close to what the guys heard in in the studio, before it got pressed into vinyl and lost some fidelity. People say that CD’s and digital music in general are better at the mid range (because of the samping rate), of course this works perfectly for Genesis. This is why some classical records sound very thin on CD, and also why you get bass boost on some CD players, I think.

I really like the guitar solos that arent 300 mile an hour dashes across the keyboard, I can hear some melody and thought. Interestingly I have a problem doing this when I play and always end up playing way too fast. Probably I don’t play enough – lack of time, not inclination.

I’ve not really listened to Trick before. Weirdly the vocals are really muddy, I think comparing it with Selling. Collins isn’t Gabriel, Gabriel’s vocals are much clearer, but I also think there’s a difference in the production. A lot of echo muddying them compared with Selling. I’d love to hear trick with less echo on the vocals. They must’ve bought a new echo unit and had to use it. Or Collins likes echo …

Goal setting

I’ve been doing some exercises on goal setting. Helps you understand why you want to do things and what you need to do to get the things you want. It’s quite a scary exercise in that I’ve remembered a lot of things I haven’t had time for, like creative writing and playing my guitar. I also have a serious burn to do them when I let myself think about them. It’s funny how you let your horizons shrink through lack of looking up.

Later…

I’ve just finished reading this and I’m thinking that it explains some of the malaise in the open source community:

Simply put – suits think that using LAMP (look it up if you don’t know what it is) is cheap. You don’t have to pay the megabucks to IBM or Oracle for the database and the middleware and it’ll run quite happily on second-hand tin from eBay. In their pointy heads this equates to spending less money on the programmers and designers as well.

So, all of the LAMP jobs out there (at least in the UK) are junior roles paying junior cash. The suits haven’t grasped that good software is primarily about recruiting and motiviating good, intelligent people (the whole ruck of them, including project managers and experienced designers). That’s why all of the innovation is in small companies owned by people who pay themselves decent salaries. The bigger salaries still cluster around the old client-server tools (OK, web-enabled like Oracle Forms, but you know what I mean) and the big-corps who need whatever IBM/Oracle/etc. can offer.

Finding work as a designer, which I’m good at and have done well for years, is hard. I’ve found myself in a hybrid roles and doing grunt work again and again, unable to help others improve and improve myself by doing so.

Maybe I should apply for an enterprise loan … I have product, just no time to finish it properly.

(yeah, I know, marketing plan, budget freebies, partners yada yada bing bong)