Fools of the Apocalypse

July 2007: 209 and Citadelle

2007-07-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

I bought two new gins to try out recently: No. 209 and Citadelle.

I lied, Citadelle is not new. Citadelle is one I have tried many times before, but Bevmo had been out of it for well over a year. I think it's been a couple of years since I've had Citadelle in my liquor cabinet. I'll get to that in a minute.

No. 209 is a local gin, and I always look forward to trying local foods, wines, spirits I haven't tried before. Unfortunately, 209 is not very good. It has an overwhelming flavor of flowers. So much so that it tastes artificial, like a bar of soap. I think I've made two martinis with this and then it ended up next to the 3/4 full bottle of $9.99 Indigo that I tried back in March (now $22, which shows you exactly how much credence you should give other gin tasters besides FOTA).

Looking at the No. 209 website, they have a nice bogus history section. "Yeah, this has zero connection to the distillery of the 1800s that's mentioned, but we just started making gin in the last couple years. We hope you'll just think it sounds old and cool anyway." It cracks me up when some rich dude buys a winery, starts making gin and tells you about all of the history before he started something unrelated.

It reminds me that there's a reason gins like Bombay and Beefeater have been around forever. They're pretty darn good for the price.

Speaking of darn good for the price: Citadelle is back at Bevmo for just $20, yes $20! My opinion remains the same, it is too weak for most martini drinkers. However, if you stir lightly and add plenty of vermouth, it can come out pretty good. This is some of the best bang for the buck in the gin section right now. Save the other cheapies for your summer G&T and buy a couple bottles of this for your martinis.

Price/performance is very important in life. Which one of these doesn't fit?

Boodles $14
Citadelle $20
Indigo $22
Tanqueray Ten $24
No. 209 $30

Aha! Trick question! Neither Indigo nor No. 209 fit. Indigo should be at the $10 that I bought it at and No. 209 shouldn't be priced higher than Boodles. Boodles kicks its butt. Sorry to the local rich guy who bought a winery and decided to make gin.

Someone at Mecca must read this blog.

2007-04-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Last time I went there, the bartender actually stirred my martini, didn't shake it. Kudos to him... it was very, very good.

If you're a bartender and need to stir in a hurry, basically just get a spoon and jam down on the ice in a glass. This is very effective and is what I usually see bartenders and restaurants do when they stir the martini.

Oh, also went to House of Prime Rib for my birthday. House of Prime Rib is one of those restaurants where they shake your martini and then leave it in a small shaker. It's amazing that morons on Yelp think this is a good deal, like they're getting more martini for their money. Folks, wake up: you're getting water when they do that. Whenever I get one of those, I basically take a sip, then a gulp of my martini and refill my glass as fast as possible. Then I just leave the shaker. Don't worry, you're leaving water behind, and very little gin.

If you were really getting a good deal, don't you think they'd give you a bigger glass instead of leaving the shaker behind?

Exactly.

Winter 07 Gin Update & Martini Rant

2007-03-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

Two new ones that I have in my possession and others I've tried:

Martin Miller's London Dry. Passable. Acceptable, I guess. Considering that Beefeater is about half the price of this gin and has more botanical flavors, Martin Miller needs to be cheaper. I made my evening martini with Martin Miller for a week, then just switched back to Tanqueray Ten tonight. It was like the lights went back on after a blackout in the dead of winter.
Indigo. A Spanish gin that tastes like soap. I bought this for $10 at BevMo on a whim. It's a brilliant demonstration of "you get what you pay for".

Also...

Beefeater. Never tried it before maybe November, but now I've had a bunch. You know, it's not great, but not bad. It's kind of like the Smirnoff of the gins -- the kind of gin that if you put it up against other gins, it would often win, but would never beat the best gins out there. If you want a straight up juniper taste without a lot of fruit, this is for you.

I can't recall others that I've tried since my Summer Review, so I'll just recap:

Martinis

Tanqueray Ten. Nothing compares.
Boodles. Classic, no frills.
Anchor Junipero. Bold.
Hendrick's. It's grown on me when I'm in the mood. Maybe it's the time I spent in Scotland in the fall.

Gin and Tonic

Bombay Sapphire.
Hendrick's (expensive for a G&T).

And now, my Martini Rant.

All of you out there who keep letting bartenders get away with shaking martinis in a metal shaker have to stop. I'm tired of going to bars and having bartenders assume that the best way to make a martini is by shaking it. Tell them no, you're a fool. Truth be told, about half the time I let them do their thing just to prove that I'm still right. Although, I was proven wrong once. Here are San Francisco restaurants that know how to make a martini and those who do not.

Does not know how:

Jack Falstaff. Ordered a Hendrick's. Shaken. Watery, awful.
Mecca. Ordered Tanq. 10. Shaken. He forgot my order and first made a G&T. Hello? Who orders Tanq. 10 in a G&T?
Lulu. Shakes.
Slow Club. Busy bar, shakes martinis.

Borderline:

Harris'. Ordered Tanq 10. He shook it, however he shook it very gently and not for very long. It was good, not perfect, but good.

Perfect:

Izzy's Steaks and Chops in the Marina. Stirred. Perfect amount of vermouth.

So the next time you're out, please get on your bartender to stir those martinis. Let them know we know what we're talking about.

On using QT

2006-12-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

It actually seems like a great UI toolkit, so I was looking at their pricing today and was shocked at how much it costs to license it! $3000 per developer on one platform. It's $6600 per dev for three platforms.

Here's the only reason I'd license QT:

Can't think of one.

It seems like kind of a ripoff. If you're developing on Linux, use GTK+ and wxWidgets. They're LGPLed. Cost: free. If you're developing on Mac, use Cocoa or Carbon. Cost: Free. If you're developing on Windows, use Visual Studio. Cost: $700 per developer and that includes the compiler, a great IDE and a lot of existing knowledge. Bottom line is, it's cheaper to buy an entire PC, the OS (Mac or Windows), and the dev environment than to just license QT if you're on one platform.

I'm not sure what the right solution is if you need to sell a commercial product cross platform. You could use wxWidgets, which seems pretty good, or Java if you wanted to feel extreme pain. If you're a big enough company, it should be to develop your own UI layer. It takes some work, no doubt... but $6600! Long term, it makes more sense to roll your own than to invest that much in middleware.

Point is, QT.. cool, but really, really expensive for what it is.

No more Python... or Ruby... or Boo...

2006-12-21T23:07:00.000-08:00

So... if you've been reading this blog long enough (why you would have, I have no idea), you've figured out by now that I'm a chronic early adopter.

Languages play right into this early adopter inclination. I'm always looking for a better way to get computers to do what I'd like them to do. Unfortunately, adopting these languages just hasn't panned out as often as I'd like. More often than not, the "dynamic language" approach ends up creating more of a support issue in the longer term. It can bevery hard to figure out what each variable is supposed to do for even modestly sized classes once you've written enough code. Only someone intimate with the code all the time can keep up with that sort of thing. Stepping away from it often leads to questions later (I've had, at least).

I agree with everyone out there that it takes a rigorous amount of testing to write large apps in a dynamic language. I'll admit right now that I don't do this adequately. A lot of times it's a bit out of my control because the things I need to test are external to the language in a separate process (like running a batch application in the background). This can end up being not as easy as just whipping up PyUnit or NUnit and a bunch of fixtures.

APIs can be tough when you pick up someone else's code. Without static types it can be difficult to figure out exactly what APIs are supposed to do. Considering that none of these languages have IDEs that can really help you very much with autocompletion[1], it makes it even worse to deal with. And since people like to write code that is dynamic with these dynamic languages, where objects are modifying their attributes at runtime -- meaning that you might need to go to another piece of code, not the definition of the class to find out what the heck that field/attribute is supposed to do.

As I've mentioned several times, I use C# at work. About 6 months ago, I switched over all of my web development efforts at home to C# and have had a fine time with it. ASP.NET is by no means perfect, but it does the job just fine and it scales.

The thing I've mostly determined is that screwing around with Python, trying to introduce it into a .NET environment, has been a waste of time. We now have a lot of Python code that only I can support because no one else will learn the language. And, since Python's not standard on Windows, it's a pain in the ass to get everything set up right. I have to bring down all the additional libraries I need to everyone's local drive, set up Pythonpaths, etc. Sure, I do this dynamically, but it has ended up being a mess in the process.

So no more dynamic languages. At least for tools, just C# and C++. There are a lot of apps I use that have adopted Python as their language of choice, which is fine and I'll still use it to script, but I'm not going to undertake development in Python anymore. After 11+ years, I'm hanging it up.

[1] - Regarding autocompletion. C# and Visual Studio 2005 present the gold standard for autocompletion. I have yet to see anything that even comes remotely close for any other statically typed language (and no, Eclipse does not fare well in this comparison).

When doing price comparisons, MAC users have to assume the MAC is the preferred configuration to make them look cheaper

2006-10-29T18:14:00.000-08:00

Ok, that was a long subject line but you get the point...

Have you ever noticed how every Mac price comparison asks you to configure a PC to exactly the specifications of a MAC? Why isn't it the other way around?

The answer is because there's no way the MAC can compete if it was the other way around. You can get $300 PC desktops and $600 PC laptops. You can get everything from $2750 Acer laptops that have Blu-Ray burners built in to the ludicrous "mid-range models" @ $1400 or the $474 bargain basement deal.

So don't bother debating prices with these guys. MAC owners want you to price commodity hardware as if it wasn't a commodity, that's the trick that makes Apple look cheaper. Apple can always come up with a configuration that turns out more expensive when you configure it on Dell. Yet, if we were to ever look at MACs in the context of PC pricing in general, it's no contest. Price/performance wise you can only go with a generic PC.

And hey, if you really love MACOS that much, just run it on your beige PC.

Dear home buyers: you suck

2006-08-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal this morning finally says what I said over two years ago: Alan Greenspan and the rest of the Fed were irresponsible jackasses with our housing market.

I just have to wonder what people were thinking? WHY were you falling into this easy money policy of the Fed and buying your houses for interest only loans with no money down and an adjustable rate mortgage? Are you that stupid? Oh wait... you also overbid on the house in the first place.

All that you really helped do was raise housing prices in a way that was totally unsustainable. Nice job. Enjoy that craptacular 1000 sq. ft 2BR house you live in that cost $150K more than asking price, for however long it takes for the housing market to come back to earth.

Why the Lieberman loss indicates the end of the Democratic Party

2006-08-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

In short, it's because the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left to compensate for the "Christian Right" that has helped voted in George Bush over the last couple terms.

Joe Lieberman indicates everything that's good about the Democratic Party. He's a statesman, something that's rare these days in the US Senate. He votes his mind and heart, rather than his political will.

Whatever you think of Lieberman, he will still win in Connecticut as an independent in November. There's no possible way a leftist like Ned Lamont can win in Connecticut. Anyone from the NorthEast can tell you that.

But, that's just the beginning of the end for the Democrats.

All you have to do is look back in history. Look at the demise of the Whig party. Once the opposing party gets so in control that you can never win, you have to start talking about abolishing the party. The Democrats are in that position this year. They will again get crushed in this election. Sad, but true. Especially in Connecticut. An Independent will win -- namely, Lieberman.

After that, what's next? I project a McCain/Lieberman independent ticket in 08, and they will win. The moderates of both parties, often outcasts from the party line, join together to make a powerhouse that can't be shut down. They will be the beginnings of the new Democratic party, whatever it be called. I wish them luck, because it will sure be a lot better than the Democratic Party of today.

Develop for your Xbox 360!

2006-08-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

Very cool announcement by the XNA guys over at Microsoft today. For $99 a year, you'll be able to compile and run unsigned code on your Xbox 360 -- the retail version!

I expect a lot of kids who want to learn to code for 360 to do this. I'm not sure Microsoft will make a lot of money off of it initially, but over the lifespan of the Xenon they'll probably lighten up on the security. I would expect them to make it possible to distribute your apps. Come on, for $99 a year I should be able to distribute and run applications I write with the thing, right?

Web Programming is Boring

2006-08-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

You know, I always have thought my job was kinda boring. People expect it to be really exciting because we put out products that the masses love and think are exciting, but the job's really not exciting. As one of my co-workers put it, we used to be really hands-on, working with models and clay and stuff, but now that we can do everything in the computer, it's more like working in an accounting office than making fun products.

However, this hasn't stopped me from deciding that nothing is more boring than web programming.

Let's face it, when you read slashdot comments about how exciting AJAX has been, you realize people have to get out more. Why is AJAX or OpenLaszlo exciting, because now we can do what computers have been able to do for several years? Fancy UIs with a networked back end have been possible since... oh... when was AppleTalk first released? When did I first play MazeWars on a Mac?

So every time I sit down to work on these web ideas I have -- and by the way, these are pretty damn good ideas that have a better business model than advertising -- I just can't do it. Web programming requires fetching shit out of a database and putting it into bracketed html crapola. Wow. That's exciting. I have really wanted to learn more about it because I've felt like it's a valuable skill to know. Then I finally came back to earth a couple weeks ago when I realized that the skills I do know are far more rare. So I won't be escaping the world I work in just quite yet, which is probably a good thing.

Though, it should be said that computer shit is just generally boring, but at least I work around some cool "iron", as a friend of mine used to call it. About 10 years ago, I asked her if she would come join me at a job and she said "Nah, I'll never do that, I'm too addicted to the big iron" (at that time, she was working on an SGI Reality Monster). At least I get to work around boxes that not everyone has on their desktop. Thankfully, I don't sit around worrying about why grandma can't get to the pictures the family sent her, which some poor slob at Google/Picasa has to do with their time.

To take this to the next level, web programming is boring partly because the web itself is really boring. How many social networking sites do we need? Do any of the people who code that junk actually get that into it? How many Javascript programmers spend their time trying to get around popup blockers? Wow, that must feel really rewarding at the end of the day.

Maybe the Web 1.0 was right. Maybe the web really is more about content than the Web 2.0 people would like to believe. When your users are creating content, it mostly ends up being mindless drivel. When you actually have professional writers creating it, it's somewhat interesting. Look at what the New York Times has done. They're now making you pay just to read their Op-Ed page. I wonder how many people subscribe solely to read Thomas Friedman?

I started thinking about this WPIB post because of FT.com. I really like this newspaper, but I don't subscribe because their website is really slow and annoying. If it was faster, I'd subscribe. But would I want to be the guy that codes the website to make it faster? No. Then I started thinking, what website would I really get any enjoyment out of coding? The answer is, not many.

I've posted this before, but Microsoft is slowly but surely going to take back the web just because people like to have desktop applications. Once MS hooks this into the web applications, people will be happier. I posted a while ago that Office 12 can post directly to Blogger. Well, now MS has released Windows Live Writer. This is a mini-app that allows you to easily post to different blogging sites from a desktop app.

I don't know about you, but I far prefer this over the bullshit web-based editor that Blogger uses. And, it's going to be a lot harder for Blogger to ever get their web-based editor up to the snuff of the desktop editor that someone can bang out. Desktop tools are just that much easier to use over web-based AJAX-y solutions.

Web programming, it's where the money is, I can't deny that aspect. But I wonder how many people who have left my company for Google will eventually come back, wanting to be where truly interesting coding is going on on novel platforms, not just yet another LAMP or AJAXy thing.

Am I the only one who yawned at Apple's leopard announcement?

2006-08-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

I get my collected news from diggdot, since I really don't want to have to read slashdot and digg for all of the lame stories that get posted there.

Yet, many diggdot stories today and yesterday have been about Leopard, the next version of MacOS X.

I've read all about Leopard and am not really impressed. This is the release that has taken them longer than any other OS X release since 10.0? Time machine is great, no doubt. Getting a backup system into the OS is a great idea. But is it worth $129? I have backup software I bought for far cheaper than that.

Other features just don't add up to another $129 upgrade. In fact, all of the features that OS X people tout over Windows still don't add up to all of these upgrades since 10.0.

10.0: $129.
10.1: Free I think
10.2: $129
10.3: $129
10.4 Tiger: $129
10.5 Leopard: $129

That's $645 in OSes and upgrades in 6 years.

Let's see what that would be compared to Windows XP since 2001, its release.

Windows XP Pro Retail non-upgrade: $250
XP SP 1: Free
XP SP 2: Free

Comparable features:

Apple Mail = Outlook Express - Both Free (yes, outlook express sucks, I know, but many use it)
Dashboard = Konfabulator - Was $20 before Dashboard, now free from Yahoo.
Expose = Windows Exposer - $7
iTunes = iTunes - Free
iPhoto = Picasa - Free
iDVD/iMovie = Nero - ~$75
GarageBand = Acid Music Studio = $69
iWeb = Notepad - Free (I'm partly joking -- use Google Pages or Geocities)
Built in RSS newsreader = Bloglines or IE7 -- both free
Search = Google Desktop Search or Microsoft Desktop Search -- free
iChat = Any number of IM clients on Windows -- free
Podcasting = Odeo - free

Dev tools:

XCode = Visual C++/C#/Web Edition -- free
Java = Java -- free
Unix stuff = Cygwin or MinGW -- free

That's not to say there isn't anything good about Leopard. Leopard does introduce some nice new development features, like x64 support that I assume doesn't fucking suck like Windows x64 does. They've also added garbage collection into Objective-C (welcome to the 1990s guys) and a new API that sounds cool called CoreAnimation. Apparently this API will offload animation computation to the GPU? That sounds pretty cool.

But anyway, there you have it, your Windows XP box would have cost around $422, whereas Mac OS X would have cost around $645 for a lot of features no one even needs. If you own a Mac and are concerned with TCO, skip this Leopard upgrade and just buy Windows Vista when it comes out, it will be cheaper in the long run given the history here.

Oh, one more thing.... who the fuck runs dashboard widgets anyway? The secret to using those is turning them off. They clutter the screen and take up too much RAM for what they are. I bought Konfabulator before I had a clue how annoying dashboard widgets are. I can't even run Google Sidebar on a 2560x1024 dual monitor setup and not get in a tizzy about the screen real estate being used by that shit.

Summer 06 Gin Reviews

2006-08-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

3/16/07.... Updated For Winter 07.

-----

I promised in January a mid-year review of various gins, so here you go.

The only new gin I've tried in the last 6 months is Hendrick's. Hendrick's has an odd taste. Looking at their website, it turns out that it's infused with rose and cucumber. I am not terribly fond of it in a martini, but it is very good in a gin and tonic or other mixed drinks. It's really too expensive for what it is, and if you look at their website, they're trying to appeal to the gimmicky/trendy crowd as a result. "Passionately loved by a tiny but growing crowd"... yeah that sounds like marketing at work.

I'm going to split this review up by uses, rather than ranking all gins together as I did in january...

Gin and Tonic

#1... Bombay Sapphire. I've stopped loving this gin as much as I once did, but it is still excellent in a gin and tonic. No bartender can mess this one up.
Runner up: Hendrick's. I'm drinking a gin, tonic and limeade (i was out of limes) right now with Hendrick's and it's pretty darn good. The cucumber taste adds something to a G&T that typical gins do not. I am not fond of this gin in a martini, but it's good with tonic. On the other hand, it's expensive to be putting into G&Ts.

Martini

#1... Tanqueray No. 10. Smooth. Still the best. The fruity flavor is very distincitive, perfect in a martini with a reasonable amount of dry vermouth. This gin has such a distinctive taste that I am well aware if I was cheated by a bartender. As you know, I despise plain old Tanqueray, but they have hit the jackpot with this gin. For the love of god, do not make this martini by shaking it. Stir, stir, stir it!! You don't want this to be watered down.
Runner up: Right now I'm going to say Boodles and Anchor Junipero. I have not strayed from T #10 since falling in love with it.

In the next 6 months I'd like to try some of

Blackwood -- another Scottish gin like Hendrick's. Distilled on Shetland.
Broker's
Damrak -- Dutch gin
Doornkaat -- German!
Magellan -- this gets high ratings on Bevmo
Martin Miller's -- ridiculously high ratings
Old Raj -- very expensive, but very highly rated.
Wet by Beefeater -- Tanqueray did so well, why not try the competition?
And just plain old Beefeater and/or Gordon's. Haven't tried these since I had no money.

Why internet advertising is in a bubble

2006-08-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

So, I've been wondering today why it is internet retail hasn't really taken off? Brick n' mortar retailers still continue to have great returns and revenue. The growth of internet-only retailers like Amazon is higher than that of the largest retailer, namely Walmart. However, if we look at the numbers, it's not as impressive as you'd think..

04/05 year over year Christmas quarter revenue growth

Amazon: 17.3%
Walmart: 8.6%

Now, Walmart is the nation's largest retailer. By far. Their quarterly revenue over Christmas is 30 times larger than Amazon's. Yet Amazon is only growing their revenue twice as much as Walmart?

If the Internet Economy is correct, you'd think it would be more than double that. Given all of the hype about internet advertising, wouldn't you have thoguht Amazon should be growing at about 50% a year? Or more? After all, Amazon is one of Google's biggest ad buyers.

Shouldn't they be growing at a far faster clip when Google, their ad medium, is valued at $100B. How'd that happen? The answer is, the internet economy is bulloney (again). And you the shareholder is going to pay the price dearly (again). I guess people forget the basic economics of these things when a few years pass.

But let's talk about marketing for a minute.

I noticed again today that Microsoft is not selling their Xbox 360 on their website. Why is that? Wouldn't it make more sense to sell it on the website and keep that extra $40-$50 or whatever the retailers get?

But they don't because that's marketing suicide. Not having Target, Toys R Us, Walmart, etc. on your side is going to make it much more difficult to sell these things. Because I would guess that a lot of these things get sold as impulse buys.

The problem with the internet economy is that it's adverse to the impulse buy. It's perfect for things that you can't find very easily -- i.e. most of the shit that's sold on eBay -- but really imperfect for the stuff you can find without much of a problem.

When someone is standing in the Xbox 360 aisle at Best Buy trying to decide if they want to buy a game, it's a lot easier to get an impulse buy out of that than when someone is browsing on the Xbox 360 section of Amazon. That person might decide to go check out a review at IGN, read a few bad reviews, then pass up the game. It's also not easy for parents to know what to do when they're out of the game the kid asked for. At Best Buy, at least someone working there could help the parent find a game that the kid might like.

Same with books. Why buy a book on Amazon when you can go to Borders and really read trough it before buying?

In short, most of our money is still spent at brick and mortar stores for a reason, not just because people haven't caught up with the times.

And coming back to the subject line, that's why there's a limited amount of growth to this internet advertising thing and it will pop soon -- I'd say it's finished by the fall of 2007. There's not nearly as much eCommerce growth going on to back up the amount of spending going on for internet advertising.

As investors, you keep falling in the same trap, over and over and over. When will you people stop being played by the venture capitalists?

I would be surprised if Apple adopted Blu-Ray

2006-08-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

... because Blu-Ray uses MPEG-2. Apple's standards are all MPEG-4. HD-DVD uses MPEG-4. Why would Apple go with a format that doesn't even correlate to the codec they've been pushing and hold some of the rights to (MPEG-4)?

How to save money -- for real this time

2006-08-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was reading this article on some blog and realized that I should really post FOTA's guide to money management. Here it is:

Spend less than you earn.

There you go, there's how you save boatloads of money.

But for the dense fools who need more tips on how to do this, here you go:

Get a charge card, not a credit card. Credit cards are for rubes. Charge cards say "I'm going to pay this off in the next 30 days, because I know what the hell I'm doing." As far as I know, there's only one charge card around that's worth a damn, and that's American Express. A plain old green card will do. There is no spending limit. They're the best customer service around. And for god sakes, they just leave you alone instead of calling and spamming you all the time.
Track your spending using Quicken or Money. With these new fangled online banking sites, it's about as easy as it could ever possibly be to balance your checkbook. Just do it, once a week, once a month, whatever.
Savings accounts are mostly a waste of time. People brag about getting 4% a year? I aim to make 20%+ a year in my investments (see below). Your savings are much better put into investments. Keep $5K in savings, maximum. If the economy goes so sour that your investment account would be worth nothing, don't worry, your savings would be worth nothing either. It's called hyperinflation. For your investment account, set up with a tax-free municipal money market fund. You get interest and don't pay taxes on it.
401(k). Now why 20-somethings max out their 401(k) is beyond me. Here's the problem: 401(k)s are only tax-deferred only for as long as the Federal government says so. So if they change the law 15 years from now, you're SOL. If they change the law that you have to pay more taxes on it when you take it out, you're SOL. Max it out once you have hundreds of thousands saved up elsewhere or a really sweet deal from your employer in terms of match. Otherwise, put a token amount in there.

Investments. I'll try to keep this brief.

Sell as soon as you think you've made enough profit and don't look back. It's better to make a profit than to lose that profit holding on for more.
Beware of low volume trading days where the stock climbs for no reason. If you're thinking about selling, that would probably be a good day to do it. Oftentimes these kinds of climbs are due to shorters.
Don't buy more stock after you've lost a lot of money on a non-growth stock. I've made this mistake a couple times and actually keep doing it. Your money would be better spent in a stock that has more potential upside than trying to wait for a bloated behemoth to move back upwards.
Do not -- repeat do not -- do not take capital gains into consideration when thinking of selling before a year. If you make a great gain and you think of selling, then sell and pay the taxes. It's better to pay more taxes than to lose money by trying to hold on too long.
For those of you with stock options at a company, never exercise your options before you're ready to sell. There are tax implications and risks in doing this and it's not worth it unless your options are worth $1m+. For $5K of options, just exercise and sell immediately.
Added onto that, never ever exercise options in a non-public company. I know many people who have and it's absolutely foolish to do.
Lastly, remember that the stock market is almost entirely speculative and has been for the better part of a decade. Hardly anyone pays dividends anymore. Fundamentals matter less than the perception of the stock. Just like money itself, a stock is only worth as much as it is perceived to be worth. It's worth looking at technicals, but at the end of the day, that seems to be the only thing that matters anymore.

Good luck to you all.

The Hiroshima Myth

2006-08-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

A very well reasoned article about Hiroshima: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson7.html

I don't agree with the entire point of the article. I honestly don't think it was sheer bloodlust or "boys with toys" that led to the use of the bomb.

Beltway-level logic for using the bomb:

Use it in the event the war had continued. Had the public found out that this bomb had been available while Americans died, whether or not the Japanese had offered conditional surrender, would have been political suicide.
The atomic bomb is the most expensive project ever undertaken in the United States. Again, had the public thought we had a bomb that could have saved American lives and hadn't used it, this price tag would have been political suicide.
He fails to even mention that the United States had immense fear of the Russians coming in to take part of Japan, like had been done with Germany. The US wanted control of Japan and (as he mentions) had to demonstrate US power post-haste.

I'm not saying these reasons are right, but they do make sense in to politicos in Washington. This author is absolutely right that there's no proof American lives were saved by dropping the bomb. However, at the time, the political climate was probably one that would not have allowed the atomic bomb to ever not be used on August 6, 1945.

BTW, he points out events between July 20-26th, 1945. If I recall Richard Rhodes's excellent book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" correctly, the bombs were already well on their way to Tinian by that time. Trinity fired on July 16. Unless I'm not recalling this right, the mechanisms had already been packed to go and started off as soon as the test was successful.

I guess I don't really have a problem with the US pushing for "unconditional surrender." If the government was representing the will of the people at the time, it's hard for someone who wasn't around to comment on it with a lot of certainty. We've had several conditional surrenders since then and all of them have ended badly -- Iraq part 1 being one example.

Hiroshima was a sad day in a long, bloody war. We all would have preferred it did not happen. But it was war folks. We have to move on.

Though, let me lastly mention that August 9, 1945 seems like more of a day of atrocity. Once we've blown one city to smithereens, how many times did we need to do it to prove the point? This is probably the part that has puzzled me for the longest time. Killing tens of thousands in one day was not enough, we had to do it again 3 days later?

But, again, we have to move on. They were decisions made long before i was born, there's not much I can do about it.

zOMGWTFBBQ, teh Mac iz h@xoreD!

2006-08-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

Headline nonwithstanding, I found this interesting that Apple released 26 patches for security flaws in OS X. http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2161483/apple-patches-26-security-flaws

It's interesting because the Cult of Mac™ likes to claim that the Mac is more secure than Windows. Again, folks, it's only more secure because it's obscure. If you do dumb things on any platform, someone will find a way to 'sploit the system and take control. That's just the way it is. It could be under OpenBSD for god sakes.

Dear Religious Morons

2006-08-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

Here's something for you fools to mull over.

When you go out and try to push your religious beliefs based on the Old Testament, New Testament or Koran, you're not exhibiting faith in God, Christ or Allah, you're exhibiting faith in the humans who have presented God, Christ or Allah.

Accept it.

Faith in God, Christ or Allah means that you, in your heart, believe and accept something to be true. It doesn't mean you crusade for others to do so. It doesn't mean you kill infidels because someone wrote that you should in a book 1500 years ago. That, my friends, is the control that other people have over you. You are letting them tell you what God, Christ or Allah mandate for you what you should be mandating for yourself.

Getting to modern problems in the world... I ask Muslims reading the blog... really, why would Allah want to kill Jews? If Allah created everything, he created the Jewish faith, right? So shouldn't you just live in peace and let them believe what they want? In my heart, I suspect that's what Allah would want.

I guess the bottom line is that we're all suckers for anything that creates conflict. The easiest ways to control people are fear and hatred/anger. This is why I'm almost starting to buy the notion that there's some kind of Illuminati group behind the scenes running all of this shit, and they're all in cahoots with each other just to keep us in control. Are we (the United States) really so helpless that we can't just bomb the crap out of the Middle East and bring that region to peace? Are we so weak that we can't accept that every war will have civilian casualties -- in fact, that's pretty much the only way to end any great war?

I watched Men In Black last week and it had a great line in it: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

Yeah, that pretty much sums up everything that's wrong with the world.

Only Old Money would buy a newspaper

2006-07-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

Only someone who didn't make their own money would be this stupid:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/business/media/31observer.html

Newspapers. Only a moron would get involved in that business today. Newspapers are on their way out. The only thing we care about today is the best story, not who reports it. It could be on a blog for all we care.

Here's some advice to reporters still at fishwraps today -- the world's best reporters should start going on their own to report the news. Don't worry, you won't starve. You'll still get the lucrative book deals that you've gotten all along. Only you won't be on a sinking ship.

I wish luck to this guy. Enjoy spending your dad's money.

IBM is making an office competitor?

2006-07-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

I'm catching up on old news today and having some fun looking into the Apollo Hoax (video). I happened to come across some comments about ODF in some article somewhere. Then I noticed that IBM was claiming about a year ago that they were going to make an Office competitor.

Who cares?

Office is a done deal. Why are people spending effort on making a new office package? Because they hope to take money away from Microsoft?

Microsoft's doing a good enough job of that from themselves. Many people already don't want to upgrade to Office 12. I happen to think Office 12 is great, but the IT departments of the world are afraid of retraining the nimrod employees of the world to use it. So don't expect to see Office 12 in wide use for a while, whether or not IBM or OpenOffice or whoever tries to compete against it.

But getting to the point here... who cares if we go with ODF versus Microsoft's XML format? Parsing XML is a well-known quantity. If Microsoft hopes to be compatible with themselves, it's going to be around for a while. Anyone can parse XML. It doesn't require a lot of work at all -- yet the state of Massachussetts is mandating the use of ODF.

I'm all for making sure that documents have longevity -- especially when it comes to government documents -- but why does that mean the world's top Office package needs to have their format mandated to them? Why not just take their format and work with it, write tools to interpret it? Microsoft's done everyone a favor by moving to an easy XML format anyway.

If you want to interpret that as Microsoft fanboi talk, so be it. But it seems senseless to spend this much effort to legislate Microsoft to be open when they're already doing such a thing with XML.

Microsoft: "J2EE has run its course"

2006-07-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Eweek article about it.

Yeah, here's a clue to Sun and Java fans as to why that is: because Java is fucking impenetrable. How many books would I have to buy to even get something to compile? You guys have built an amazing amount of stuff with Java that's unusable to anyone outside of your circle.

Whereas, with C# and .NET, I can download Visual Web Developer Express and get everything I need to make a website (including the integrated database), or I can download C# Express and get started with applications. Try downloading a version of Eclipse that has a UI designer in it. Good luck! You have to download a bunch of components, and then you get a half-assed UI designer that still sucks at the end of the day.

Face it, Microsoft offers a complete solution that makes it possible to comprehend for someone who doesn't keep up with it all the time. Java offers about a million components that takes a year of reading and a PhD to work your way through. That's why .NET is taking over.

The Mac User's Agenda

2006-07-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

Just to let you know, when someone tells you about how great their Mac is, they have an agenda.

You see, I don't really care if people use Windows (except at my business, then when people use Linux or Mac it pisses me off). I certainly don't go around telling people to use Windows because it's a great experience.

The fact is, a Mac is exactly the same parts as any other PC, and mostly the same parts as any UN*X based operating system. It's just an OS and operating systems are just not that exciting.

So why the endless Cultish behavior of trying to convince people to "switch"?

Because they need you. Mac users need more users. The rest of us joyfully use all of the supported applications for Windows and don't even realize there are other platforms out there, whereas Mac and Linux users are continually reminded of Windows. You see, all the time they see that another game or another application is being released for Windows without supporting the Mac. They see that their Treo only supports sync with Outlook (I don't know if this is true, but just an example). And that makes them feel inferior. So they have to put on this superiority complex and try to convince you to join them.

All I'm trying to say is, don't get tricked into sacrificing the software you own and use just because of the mythical "better experience" of using a Mac. That experience wears off the first time you can't get something done that you need to, and you end up continuing the cycle by trying to convince other users to buy a Mac.

RAM results: outlook vs. gmail

2006-07-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

RAM taken to open, read a couple emails:

Outlook: 68 megabytes
Gmail (IE): 58 megabytes
Gmail (Firefox): 33 megabytes.

Above, plus open another window with calendar:

Outlook: 70 megabytes
GMail/Google Cal (IE): 68 megabytes
Gmail / Google Cal (Firefox): 41 megabytes

Iconified:

Outlook: 5 megabytes
IE: 15 megabytes
Firefox: 40 megabytes

AMD and ATI... a match made in hell

2006-07-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

Why? WHY?

Let me tell you a little story. We have a lot of platforms to support at work. So one of the guys got an AMD 64 running x64 Windows with an ATI x1x00 card. This machine was so unstable that it's sitting in the middle of his cube not plugged into anything. That's AMD and ATI in a nutshell separately: unstable. God knows what they'll be like combined!

Frankly, since AMD doesn't make their own chipsets, AMD's only hope of making serious inroads into the desktop market is NVidia's nForce chipset. What happens now? Will nVidia keep supporting this with ATI on board? Or will nVidia partner with Intel more closely, since Intel has the clear winner in the next generation chip race anyway (Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest)?

AMD is heavily overvalued right now. They're in a bubble and they know it. Basically what has happened is a bunch of companies in their own bubble -- like Google -- have mostly gone with AMD chips for their servers. Hence, AMD gets some extra money that way. The rest of corporate America are going with Intel chips as usual because we buy Dell.

AMD sees the end of this Opteron/server bubble in sight, so they decide to flail and merge with ATI. Welcome to the year 2001. Is Carly Fiorina suddenly in charge at AMD? This is obviously a ploy to hide the fact that the slowing economy will take its toll on AMD's server market.

The bottom line is this: sell short on AMD. They're screwed. The benefit and curse of making x86 compatible chips is that Intel can come along and clean your clock. Intel has a winner with their new Conroe-Merom-Woodcrest chips -- their 65nm yields are high, etc. AMD has no chance of catching up to anytime soon. Intel has the stability factor on their side, as does Nvidia of course. This merger idea is the only thing the AMD execs could come up with to save them from the collapse in the next 6-12 months.

I wish their shareholders luck.

Went from Gmail.... to Outlook!

2006-07-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

Frightening, isn't it? Basically, here's the story.

I need a web interface that has threaded convos. The only one that has that is Gmail. But I really hate Gmail's reliability, so when I get home I want to use a desktop app with an integrated calendar.

Enter Outlook.

Unlike Thunderbird, which throws fits at large mailboxes, Outlook handles them like a champ. I've got 20,629 new messages in my inbox right now and have been filtering them with Outlook, no sweat. It also happens to have the UI that I use all day long, which I'm sure helps sell me on it.

I gave Live Mail Desktop a try but it really sucked, so I decided to just go with Outlook. As mentioned earlier, I installed the Beta of 2007, so I've been using that at home and at work. It's been really pretty nice.

Chalk another one up to Microsoft.

Vista developers: how do you do it?

2006-07-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

Seriously, how do you get through the day?

I would never be able to put up with the amount of criticism that every fucking build gets. Computerworld has about 15 articles about every build you guys put out there. Do you just ignore most of the comments and let the product managers sift through the shit on Slashdot, Computerworld, Mossberg, whatever 2-bit journalistic hacks are criticizing your pre-release software?

I, for one, commend you guys for being able to develop Windows with this much criticism/feedback.

By the way, one thing that really pisses me off is the daily comparisons of Vista to MacOS X. You know what the difference is between Vista and MacOS X? 97% of the world will actually use Vista, unlike the Mac. You are bringing great stuff to the masses who will keep using Windows. Remember that.

Live.Com

2006-07-19T23:27:00.000-07:00

I'd love to start using Live.Com in general, except a couple of things.

Can't they seem to get threaded email working in either the mail.live.com web interface or in the Windows Live Mail Desktop client. My god guys, do we really have to buy outlook to get this basic feature?
I don't want ads in my mail client. You can put them on the website, but do not put them on my desktop. My desktop is sacred. I'd rather use shitty Thunderbird than have to look at ads in my desktop mail client.
I don't want ads in my IM client. Do not put them on my IMs. This is again something Microsoft is insisting on doing for Live Messenger. The ads take up about 1/8th of the window. It's not as bad as AIM has become, but it's still really noticable. And, how about the linked ad at the bottom of your conversation window? That's horrible.
Microsoft has more money than god, why do they need to sell these ads to us? Just make an integrated Windows experience and you don't need ads. You just sell more Windows licenses. Duh. Or is MSN.com that desperate to get their own revenue stream going?
The basic Live.Com personalized page is slower than shit. Start.com was faster. What happened? Google's personalized page loads really fast. I'm not exactly sure what the mystery is here with Live.Com that makes it so slow.
I was going to ask why do you contain my search results in a little window with its own scrollbar? But now I understand, it's so the results can go on forever and ever. I'm not sure if I like this, because it's easy to go back a couple pages on Google when you remember that you want to look at something earlier in the list. It's not so easy to find something earlier in the list on this.
Local.Live.Com is easily better than Google Maps. Anyone who has used the two should agree with that.
It takes a long time to reload the main live.com page because it's saving some kind of state or something. It's annoying. Or try clicking "Search Only" takes forever to get a basic search box.
Most of the UI sucks sucks sucks. It doesn't have the readability that either Yahoo's stuff or Google's stuff has. Rework the border widths and spacing. Seriously, just an extra pixel or two would make things so much nicer.

Live has a lot of good ideas. It's just flawed in too many ways to use right now. I guess I stick with Google and Outlook, again.

Gmail sucks redux

2006-07-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Server Error

We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily
unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in
to your account in a few minutes.

Yup, that's what we're getting right now. Can you imagine the outcry if Hotmail had this kind of outage? Slashdotters would call Microsoft everything under the sun, saying they're horrible, can't write code, etc. Yet everyone gives Google a free pass for things like this.

24/7 reliability. That's what we ask of these web services. If you want to show us ads, that's the price you have to pay or else we'll go somewhere else. It's that simple. I have less outages with Exchange at work than I do with Gmail.

Aliens are this generation's polytheism

2006-07-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

I was watching "Independence Day" the other day and thought aliens are our replacement for God. Maybe this is not novel. Maybe it's what Carl Sagan was getting at in Contact. But those who don't really believe in religion probably believe in aliens.

I don't just mean "aliens" as in the guys who come down with little probes. I mean people running around theorizing that there's life somewhere else in the universe. Thousands of geeks run SETI @ Home because they think aliens are trying to contact us. Almost all theories out there seem to assume that there's a more sophisticated life form than humans out there, and if they're that smart, they might be sending us a signal.

I think it's almost taken the place of religion. People believe so strongly that there is life out there that they're willing to spend hundreds of dollars of their own money running their machinery to try to detect it. This is the exact same kind of faith-based searching that goes on in religions. SETI @ Home is this generation's searching for Virgin Marys on the wall of an underpass or Jesus in a churro in mexico city (whatever that quote was from the Simpsons). SETI @ Home is an example of faith in the modern age.

Faith that some alien life form out there will have more advanced technology, will have detected our planet (which, coincidentally would have to be able to sustain life in a way they know of to detect it), and then sent us a signal.

A signal that would have to be within fractions of a degree to be on target and would coincidentally have to have been sent exactly N number of years ago (N being number of light-years away they are).

Right! I don't see it happening.

So there you have it. If you're not religious and you find yourself running SETI @ Home, consider yourself religious.

The Elephant in the Room

2006-07-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

So... it was announced today that the Russians had gotten to the guy behind the killings at Beslan a couple of years ago, the moscow theater takeover, and other terrorist acts against Russa. The Ruskies set off a truck bomb that blew him up -- instant karma.

In any case, I'm sitting here reading the Wall Street Journal article about it.... didn't even make the front page, by the way. Anyway, I'm sitting here reading this article and not once does it mention most Chechen separatists are Sunni Muslim.

You gotta ask yourself, how long are we going to let the media get away with trying to hide this elephant in the room called Islam. What other religions are doing committing terrorist acts right now? How many militant Christians and Jews are out there bombing shit and killing kids? How many other religions recruit young children to be suicide bombers? People like to pooh-pooh this by saying "Oh, they're very desperate and don't have the means to do anything else." Oh really... so how come other desperate non-Islamic parts of the world don't see this?

Pretending that Islam isn't a factor when reporting these stories, or generally minimizing the terrorist faction as "fundamentalist", is this generations' fiddling while Rome burns. You'll feel great about yourselves until your world will be crumbling down around you.

The NY Daily News had an opinion piece this morning that claimed that WW III has already started. He says, we're already in it. I'm starting to think that it's not such a stretch to believe that. Did people realize that WW II had started when Hitler invaded Czech and Poland? Did they know the war was on when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich with his famous claim of Peace In Our Time™? I don't think anyone realized WW II was fully on until bombs started falling in downtown London or maybe even when Hitler strolled down the Champs Elysees.

WW III starts with exactly what we're looking at in the paper every day... unfortunate, but true, it's shaping up to be Islam vs. the world. How long until we're willing to fully come to terms that the jihad is the elephant in our room?

Please, no more complaints from Mac users..

2006-07-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

... when a website doesn't work right in Safari or on your Mac in general.

According to this survey by W3Counter, as many people browsing the web are using Windows 98 still as use a Mac. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement for Mac use, because Windows 98 will be officially sunset next Tuesday, folks. Hilarious.

Anyway, I more wanted to rip on these Sophos ideologues who put out there that people should switch to a Mac to feel more secure. First of all, there's no security when people do dumb things anyway. If everyone out there was installing Kazaa on Macs, they would have the same spyware problems that PC users have. I have only once had a machine infected with spyware... when I installed Kazaa (in the early days of Spyware).

The bottom line is, if you don't want spyware and viruses, don't be stupid. It doesn't matter what platform you're on.

In any case, their advice is horrible.... switch to a Mac? Last I checked all of the software and peripherals I own are set up for my PC. Why should I give all that up just to feel some faux, they-haven't-found-me-yet security blanket? Yeah great, I switch to a Mac, and I can't get any work done anymore. Genius plan there.

Idiots.

Are Most Mac Users Communists?

2006-07-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'm just wondering because of the patrons of a coffee shop near my house.

"Coffee To The People" is a commie coffee shop I frequent. I love to go there because I ask them for my coffee for free, since they're socialists for the people, yada yada. They've never given it to me for free -- it costs $3.50 for a latte, like everywhere else -- so the awkward silence is always thick with irony.

Anyway, whenever I go in there, everyone is a Mac user! Today I think I saw 10 Macs and 2 PC laptops, and on the counter was a copy of MacWorld. Which brings to mind...

Has anyone ever gotten real work done in a coffee shop? One dude was reading his Gmail, another girl was blogging or something. I saw one person working in Word, but was mostly scrolling up and down over a mostly blank page rather than typing or reading. I just wonder what encourages people to work on their laptop in a coffee shop. It's not like it opens up the possibility of meeting people while you're staring into an LCD screen. Maybe these people just like feeling like they're studying back in the dorms, where we also never got any work done because it was too distracting.

Back to the original topic. The people sitting in front of Macs don't generally look like commies. One chick was wearing a Google shirt -- even without the Mac connection, how hilarious is that? Drinking at a place called "Coffee For the People", underneath a poster of Cesar Chavez (no lie!), wearing the apparel of one of the most capitalist engines of our time. Sweeet.

She was sitting on a Mac. I'm not sure what inspires people to buy Macs in the first place, but it seems that people who do buy them then want to go sit in coffee shops. Do they have too much time on their hands? Are they so wealthy that they're willing to drop $1000+ more on their laptop than on a PC laptop just so they can sit in a coffee shop and not do anything meaningful?

Then again, I'm at home, alone, blogging. Who's the fool now? But at least I didn't pay a lot for this computer and join a cult.

The Register's a little late to the Ruby bandwagon

2006-07-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

Guys, try posting a tutorial like this... oh.... 18 months ago, maybe? When Rails tutorials were something new?

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/07/03/ruby_rails_part1/

BTW, of course Rails is simpler than J2EE. It can do a fraction of what J2EE can do.

SQLServer 2005's XML features

2006-07-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

In the past 10 days, I've figured out that SQL Server 2005 rocks.

At work, we've been debating whether to use a database or just source-controlled XML files to manage the meta-data for our project. The reason that this debate is even remotely entertained by someone like myself, a devout XML hater, is because the schema is going to change consistently for the next several months and it would be easier to keep data in a flexible format.

As a compromise, I proposed we check out SQL Server 2005's XML features and shove our XML in there. This would give us the fast indexing and reporting that I want, as well as the flexibility to store untyped XML that the engineering team wants.

As it turns out, the XML features rock. DB2 and Oracle have XML features as well, but

DB2 doesn't work correctly on Windows Vista, and if you read my post yesterday, I have to run Vista right now at home. Home was the only place I have time to check out things like DB2.
Oracle 10g's syntax and handling of XML is somewhat annoying compared to SQL2005. It also wasn't as fast running the same tests (and yes, I know Oracle is highly tunable, but I just wanted to see what out of the box performance was like).
Of course, Microsoft's development toolkit is the best of the three.

So I set out to prove that this system would work for us, and I did. Here is what you need to do to make XML work for you using SQL2005:

Joins across pure, untyped XML work in SQL2005, but they're not very fast. Use just enough straight up primary key columns to make joins and selects fast.
Do not use computed columns from XML queries to accomplish the above, it will be too slow.
XML indices actually slow things down when you have small bits of XML and many rows. Instead use those primary keys to find the record you need, then query on the XML in your select. If you have large files of XML that you want to store and query, XML indices will probably help the situation.
Applying an XML schema to your XML column makes selects faster (joins across XML columns get to be about 3-4x faster in my brief experience). However, if you're using XML in SQLServer 2005, I contend that you should only be doing it without a schema. If you know what your data looks like anyway, why not shred it into faster columns anyway and do away with having SQL manage the XML?

In any case, if you have any desire to use XML on your project, check out SQL2005's XML features. If you have any inkling of deploying on Windows, just give SQLServer Express 2005 a try. It's free.

Using Vista every day now

2006-06-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

Well, my XP install is screwed up somehow, so I'm using Vista every day. It's going pretty well.

Here's the trick to making it usable:

Turn off Aero. This will save you at least 100m of RAM and your GPU won't have the fan on all the time.
Disable Microsoft desktop search immediately. Go into services and turn that shit off. It's been screwed up since day one, and it's still screwed up. It scours your disk with no remorse, basically making the system unusable. I'm surprised no one at Microsoft has noticed the performance implications of this yet, I found it thrashing my disk within 10 seconds of launching Vista.
Oh, and of course turn off that sidebar. Who needs that shit anyway? It was useless in MacOS, useless in Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) and it's useless here. All these things do is take up a lot of screenspace and ram. Forget it.

After doing those things, Vista is actually pretty usable. It would still be better with 2G of RAM, but in general it holds its own. I think the Explorer has a lot of work left on it -- mostly in the windows themselves. Really, is it that slow to list the programs I have installed on the machine? And does it need to be so clumsy with these weird back-buttons instead of just a pathname at the top of the window?

Of course, I'm happy that Vista will come with WinFX (aka .NET 3.0). Now I might be able to distribute a fucking .NET app and have someone out there run it without installing a runtime. Welcome to what 2003 should have been.

Though, it should be said that Vista is a massive failure at the same time. While it's an OS that I'll use and buy an upgrade for, it's not one I can recommend to my bosses to install at the workplace. It's a waste of time and resources for that. What features would we need that I couldn't get out of a .NET 3.0 redistributable? Probably nothing except a higher resource need. That's unfortunate for Microsoft. While Aero looks cool and appeals to the home users who want coolness, those of us in business just don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thing. That's why, for Apple, that's a strong selling point -- they have no business customers who won't give a damn.

I suppose for my x64 machine that I run at work, Vista 64 will be an improvement over the hack job that is Windows Professional X64 (i.e. a hacked up version of Windows Server 2003 for x64). I haven't gotten a chance to try that out yet just because I spend too much time at work doing actual work to fool around with the Vista x64 install. But, based on my experience using XP x64 for the last year, I can't imagine Vista 64 couldn't be an improvement.

Bottom line: Vista's decent, but I just wonder if Microsoft is going to really push a lot of individual sales with it. Vista is far from the revolutionary OS we were promised. I hope someone at Microsoft is taking a step back to figure out what they could do over the next 5 years to make a truly inspirational OS.

Then again, OSes are generally not that exciting. Do I really care that much when I upgrade OSes probably once every 4 years as it is? Whatever.

ASP.NET = too much rope

2006-06-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've figured something out. I've figured out that ASP.NET sucks.

This is NOT because it's not a great tool for great developers making great websites. MySpace runs on it and handles a billion page views a day or something like that. C# rules, Visual Studio rules, etc.. These are all truths which we hold self-evident.

No, the problem is that people who don't have a clue can develop shitty websites reeeeally easily, and not seem to realize that they're making shitty websites in the process.

Let me give you a hypothetical intranet site as an example. The company that use this hypothetical site is a sizable company -- fortune 700 or so, with 5-6K employees. The site is referenced by everyone in the company. The guys who developed this site would be nice guys, and are capable of using VS and C#.

However, they would use the tool, not their heads.

Example: the site would be able to display little profile pictures of employees on the front page. These profile pictures would go through an ASPX to retrieve the image, instead of using a static link. This is the kind of thing that seems like it makes sense when you're sitting there in Visual Studio given Microsoft's tools. Of course, stepping away from that for a minute, most of us realize that this would put far too much demand on the server just to serve static content.

I'm calling out Microsoft on this one. They've made a tool that's so easy to make a website that best practices and thoughts of efficiency go out the window. Microsoft has to step up and make it so the tool helps people make efficient websites, not just make websites. Businesses in the above situation waste a lot of time.

The Real Jack Murtha

2006-06-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

I don't post about pure political things on this blog very much, but I found this Washington Times editorial very interesting.

Sad to see that a Representative who superficially appears to have convictions is just as corrupted and shallow as the rest of them.

If you advertise with IntelliTXT you're a fucking moron

2006-06-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

I can't word that any more plainly than that.

Few click on IntelliTXT links in the middle of a text passage on purpose. And if they do, no one clicks on your link because they want your product. They click on it because either they were clicking around the page, like I do, subconciously and uncontrollably, or they were tricked into thinking it was a meaningful link. Either way, they'll close your page immediately.

So the bottom line is, if you're advertising with IntelliTXT, you're a fucking moron. I try not to frequent sites that use this obvious click-fraud solution because I realize that by accident, I'm costing advertisers money.

Arguing against global warming...

2006-06-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

is pointless.

I'm not saying that because I believe humans cause global warming. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I'm not involved in the science enough to know either way, I just have to listen to what the geniuses agree on.

No, the main reason it's pointless is because there's no good reason to keep using oil and coal unless you're an idiot.

I sent this article to a friend today because he told me that Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is really great. In discussing the article, I realized something. It doesn't matter whether global warming is actually happening because of humans. We should stop using oil immediately anyway.

The United States' oil dependence is arguably the worst foreign commodity dependence a (non-island/non-isolated) country has ever had in the history of the world. The political and economical ramifications alone should be reason enough for any sane person to want off the fossil fuel crack pipe, much less global warming.

Arguing against global warming is a smoke screen. It's a way to trick you into thinking you want to keep being oil dependent. It doesn't even matter if Gore et al. are right... we should all want off of this anyway.

I'm spending $50+ week filling up a car that gets pretty decent gas mileage. That's $2500+ a year. In gas. For what? To drive 40 miles a day. Which brings me to the reality of the situation, and why there's so much FUD....

Energy Independence = Freedom

Now imagine if we had electric cars and solar panels on our roofs. Or we had that plus hybrids that had more battery life. Now imagine that those same solar panels heated our water and powered our homes, and we only really bought power for the nighttime.

There, my friends, is the worst nightmare of every energy baron and politician in the world. If we were able to make this work, you'll no longer be dependent on anyone. There's no control. No one can shut off your power. No one can charge you to drive to work. Small foreign nations no longer have power over our politicans just because they have oil. We no longer need to fight for those resources.

We're slave to oil companies and to power companies. Any Californian's hindsight will tell you that deregulation of our power grid was clearly a fraud; something made up by libertarians and sold to the public on the idea that competition is good. Except that there is no competition when it comes to natural resources like oil and gas. Hence Enron and the fleecing of our state. Hence the sticker shock at the gas pump right now.

And of course they're a boon to the goons in Washington and Sacramento! Gas, Electricity, Natural Gas ... all of these are taxed up the wazoo. What would happen if suddenly a few billion bucks was no longer available for pork barrelling? That's not even to mention the fun stuff the oil cronies give these guys already. Their board of director job is waiting for them after they leave office. Yeah. You can bet these clowns don't want to see oil dependence go away... it stops all of their fun.

The sun, on the other hand, is free. It shines on us all the time. Unless some C. Montgomery Burns-like evil genius blocks it out, efficient, personal solar panels cannot be stopped. While nuclear and wind power are great, they still don't get us to be any less dependent on wires coming into our house.

While complete solar independence is a pipe dream, it's all we have to try to free ourselves from these guys. It's time we all start urgently investing in some way to get ourselves off of the fossil crack pipe -- whether or not it's actually causing global warming. That is, unless you're against individual freedom and love seeing Exxon pulling in $10b profits per quarter.

My Xbox 360 might be the best computer in my house

2006-06-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

I (heart) my Xbox 360. There, I said it.

The thing is fricking amazing. It plays games (obviously), downloads trailers, plays music off of my PC while I'm playing games or just hanging around, it lets me plug in my ipod and my digital camera. I can talk to my friends on Xbox live, or leave them voice mails or text messages. If I had a media center, I'd be able to use the thing as a remote playback device. Oh, and it's Hi-def.

The only basic computer thing it doesn't do is web browsing (ok, and word processing, money management, etc.).

I like my desktop PC, but, for what it does, the Xbox 360 is tight. It's really easy to get around, fast, robust, and just great packaging overall. I can't wait for the upcoming update which will have background downloading among other things.

I'm just wondering if Microsoft sees all the opportunities they have here. I hope they do. They can do so many cool things with the 360 and I think for $400, it's a steal for just about anyone if it can do half of these things:

Potential opportunities:

VOIP. Make it possible to call your friends on MSN Messenger from your Xbox. Make it possible to buy credits to dial outside telephone numbers.
Downloadable/streamable network television, like Apple's ITunes Video, except at a decent rez like 720p.
Downloadable/streamable HD movies. Comcast is really lagging behind in the amount of HD content they're offering on their OnDemand service.
Subscription music from URGE.
Since it has USB, why not port a basic version of IE, Word or Microsoft Money to it? Then it becomes a $400 home PC. This might piss off Dell but, honestly, who cares? You're Microsoft. Like Dell would stop buying Windows?
How about porting Remote Desktop to it? Then it can be a client for windows machines. Man, that would be awesome for me (I need to do remote desktop a lot, doing it from any 360 would kick ass).

Seriously, if Microsoft puts out half of those, it will kick everyone's ass. Who wants to buy network TV from Apple for their crappy Ipod at 320x200 rez when they can get it in HD!?

This machine is a great, tight machine that consumers must like (if I love it, and I hate almost everything, I'm guessing the average consumer must love it). It's certainly easier to manage than the average PC. C'mon Microsoft, take it to the next level.

Chili Peppers ripping off music

2006-06-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

This is funny, I thought this song sounded like Tom Petty when I saw them on Saturday Night Live.

http://www.gigwise.com/news.asp?contentid=17507

Unfortunately, the Red Hot Chili Peppers suck. They've always sucked. Mother's Milk was a tolerable album because it was humorous (e.g. "Magic Johnson"). After that, it has been all downhill. That "She's my Aeroplane" song is so annoying it makes me want to hang myself -- and they played it like every 2 seconds on the radio when it was first out, so I felt like hanging myself a lot back in 1998 or whenever.

The most suckiest-ass album they put out is Californication, though Blood Sugar Sex Magik must be one of the most overrated albums of all time. If you read the reviews on Amazon, people talk about how that album changed the universe in 1991. Hm. 1991... what about a little album called Nevermind, you dumbasses? (Not that I am a big Nirvana fan, but that album did "change everything"). Edit: Nevermind and BSSM were released on the same day. Sept. 24, 1991.

Chili Peppers are decent musicans, except for Keidis. Man, that guy cannot sing worth a damn. I'd take Eddie Vedder over him, and if you've been reading this blog for the past 3 years you probably can figure out how I feel about Pearl Jam.

Why bother comparing MacOS to Vista?

2006-06-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

So, computerworld has an article entitled "20 things you'll hate about Vista", wherein the author immediately declares:

Meanwhile, I'm placing Windows Vista as a distant second-best to OS X.

What, why? Second best in what regard?

People who want to run Windows and have access to most of the world's interesting software certainly don't consider Windows second best. Sure, MacOS might have some niftier gadgets and stuff. It might have a slicker UI and better security and a better command shell. It might have better hardware support (since it's a closed system).

And then you sit down and want to do something with it and can't. This is exactly how I felt when I dropped $3100 on a Mac laptop a few years ago. First few months I thought it was really cool. About 6 months in, I bought another PC to actually get work done again.

MacOS is great for people who can use it for their work. I can't. I need machines with DirectX, .NET and just generally want the rest of the tools that are out there for Windows. Like Rhapsody. I would not enjoy it without Windows. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. So let's just review Vista as if MacOS doesn't exist. Unless all you do is browse the web and waste time with your computer, that's how it is for most of us anyway.

I hate it when bands go from good to suck

2006-05-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

I used to see this band called Superunloader in San Francisco around 1997 or so. It was three guys from San Diego who could rock, so whenever they came to town I would go to their show at Paradise Lounge or wherever.

Well, while I was writing the last blog post I was rocking out to The Donnas’ “American Teenage Rock-N-Roll Machine” and thought of Superunloader (though their music is different, the Donnas are an SF band, and it triggered a memory).

I really regret not buying a disc at the time because I just looked up their site and now they suck! They added a horn section? I guess they jumped on the whole Ska bandwagon to try to gain more commercial success or something? Anyway, take a listen to some of the ass songs they have out there now.

http://www.superunloader.com/super_2.php

I took one listen to this and thought “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?”

Anyway, I wish the commercial success, it looks like they have their own label and stuff. Good luck to you guys, you really used to kick ass when it was just the three of you. Your sets were so tight it reminded me of how much Rush gets out of having just three guys. Drop a line if you guys are ever coming back to SF and plan to rock.

Twisted is freakin’ fast

2006-05-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

I knew about the work that Sam Rushing was up to back in the day with Medusa, so I’m surprised I haven’t tried it before, honestly. I just used Twisted to develop a project at work that needed to provide some network services (HTTP as well as a telnet port) in addition to doing its actual processing in a separate thread.

First pass, I used a separate thread with SimpleHTTPServer using Clearsilver to do the HTML generation. It turned out that the something wasn’t too happy about the way I had structured things, and I was occasionally getting hangs. In just getting the first pass working, I didn’t care, and knew I’d fix it later. So last weekend, I decided to give Twisted a try to replace SimpleHTTPServer and add the telnet connection.

First thing that should be said is that it was ridiculously easy to do. I don’t use Twistd (the service for Twisted), or mktap or any of those things. I embedded Twisted, and it worked flawlessly within a couple hours. Awesome. Then I redid the logging to use Twisted’s logging in addition to the Python logging module that was already in use. This worked out spectacularly because the logging needs to be divided up according to the person currently doing work on the machine.

Second thing to note is that Twisted is remarkably fast (duh). Even though the HTTP server on this is an afterthought so people can get the status of the work being done-and is really shittily set up (it loads about 16k of logs to push over the web on every load)-it still is able to muster a response in about 100ms on a not-so-great machine.. including time on the wire.

The two downsides are it looks like Twisted is in a huge state of flux right now, and the documentation su-uh-uh-uh-cks. Fortunately the code is pretty straightforward to understand it without good docs. The state of flux is a little scary when it seems like 1/3 of the package has been deprecated.

Based on this experience, I’m going to use it for a new project I’m starting. This time I’m going to put it behind Apache (only because the machine I’m using to serve has an apache install that can’t change). Nice work guys, Twisted is really cool.

Critical Mass

2006-05-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

I think an important thing to evaluate when choosing to develop with a language or framework is “critical mass.” Critical mass just means that there’s enough momentum, enough people using it, such that you’re not going to have support problem later. Really, who wants to develop in a language that, 3 years from now, no one will know or want to support.

Of all the nouveau languages out there right now (i.e. post C, VB and C++), I think only three are achieving critical mass.

Java.Granted, Java is not the best thing out there, but it does have a lot of momentum. It has more eyeballs looking at it every day than any other language. Although Java is mostly being used for web server back ends, it does have some applications that make it worthwhile for the desktop, like Azureus and Eclipse.
C#.Maybe this has achieved momentum just because it’s Microsoft. I think it has because it’s actually good. The CLR is spectacular, and the best route to it is to use C#. It has a lot of things that are a direct rip-off of Java, but also some things that are better thought out (like Properties, for example). I also think C# has been helped along by the demise of VB6. Instead of moving to VB.NET, which doesn’t really have the simplicity of VB, developers just went ahead and went to C#. That’s what Microsoft was advocating for a lot of people anyway.
Python.I bet you thought I was going to put “Ruby” here. No, Ruby doesn’t have much momentum overall. Ruby has a single app that’s garnering attention right now. Meanwhile, Python is everywhere.

Hundreds of high-volume production websites using it. Google uses it for some of their sites, IronPort, DiggDot, Xoom, Yahoo Groups, the Django guys' websites, etc..
Loads of highly used web frameworks and tools. You’ve got Twisted, the whole Zope project, Django, Plone, CherryPy, Kid, Trac. All of these are production quality and handling immense loads. In fact, Rails’ development is managed with Trac.
It’s being embedded all over the place. Games are using it as their scripting language (Battlefield 2). The next iteration of NVidia’s FXComposer has IronPython embedded. Softimage XSI uses Python as one of its scripting languages. We’ll probably see more examples in the future, it seems like there are more every day.
Though there aren’t many desktop apps that use Python as the core language, it should be noted that lot of the tools used on Red Hat and other Linuxes are written in Python.

I guess I spoke too soon about Microsoft

2006-05-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

I’m typing this from Microsoft Office 2007, which has a built in blogging mechanism. Wheeee.

It may seem like a novelty, but the basics of what I was talking about in yesterday’s OpenLaszlo Rant are covered in this basic concept: make it so people use Windows desktop apps to do web stuff. And that’s the way it should be. I don’t want to use Blogger’s asstastic DHTML WYSIWIG editor.

Let’s go over the requirements real quick:

I don’t want to have random Javascript errors that make me lose my work.
I don’t want to depend on a stateless connection like HTTP to do what I need to do.
I want rock solid desktop apps that do most of the things I want to do on the web.
I want spell checking on the fly.
I want to know that I won’t accidentally hit the back button and lose what I typed.

The thing I spoke too soon about in that prior post is the UI thing. I said that I think sticking with desktop apps is good because that’s what people know. Well, Office 2007 is obvious proof that Microsoft thinks that web UIs with little clicky icons that have Photoshop highlights are the right direction to go for the future of UIs. This, actually, might not be so bad, if done right. Office 2007 might be an example of it done right. More on that in a second.

Let’s first talk about an app that did it wrong.

Money 2006 is an app that implemented a new type of UI poorly. It was a good experiment but I find it very difficult to navigate around this app. There are lots of “a href” type links around the app to get to essential functions. Some of these end up in the sidebar in some modes and some not in others. So to update my accounts, I have to navigate to accounts, then navigate to update, then hit “OK”. Money 2006 is better than Quicken, which I’ve used for 15 years until this year, but some of the UI needs improvement.

Office 2007

Office 2007 on the other hand, does not have a menu bar. It looks very web-pagey but is full featured at the same time. There are a bunch of “expand-icons” (the box with the arrow on it, ya know?) that expand into the dialog boxes from Offices past that we’re so used to. Like the Paragraph dialog box, with all of its tabs and crap… that’s still there. You just have to click to find it. That dialog box is like a warm electric blanket… on fire… burning the dog.

Office 2007 is a bit of a mish-mash at this point, but it seems to be heading in the right direction. The menus are gone and are replaced by toolbars and contextual menus. These aren’t customizable though, and that really blows. I really don’t need proofing tools taking up a 400x200 rectangle of my screen. Seriously.

I’m actually more ok with this than I thought I’d be. Of course, there are some things that are weird.

Like, if I have a selection and hover over a style, why does it change it to that style? Is a click REALLY that difficult? I think this is something that they should lose before release, it’s just confusing. You can turn it off, but IMO it shouldn’t be on by default. This is the kind of thing that panics grandma, and that web pages do with DHTML and shouldn’t do.

Very unintuitive is that you double click on a tab to hide that huge toolbar. Microsoft needs to figure out a nice way to make this obvious. I right clicked on the tab. I right clicked on the toolbar. Both of these should have given me the option to hide it.

Ouch, the Vista colors are really ugly. Is Vista going to be this ugly?

The way templates are connected to the toolbars is very cool actually. But how do I customize that toolbar? Can’t figure it out in an obvious way. How do I customize it for that template? Can I make it so a toolbar is not customized for each template. That would be nice too.

I’ll think of more later. I want to see if Office 2007 can actually publish this post to Blogger and how the HTML looks when it’s done. That’s pretty slick if it works.

[Edit. I just posted and re-opened this post in Word. It actually works! Except it doesn't save! It gives me an error when trying to save changes back. In any case, if the office guys read this, nice job you guys in Redmond, supporting a Google product is very subversive and cool of you.]

OpenLaszlo is proof that Microsoft has blown it

2006-05-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

I was just reading this article and came to terms with exactly how much Microsoft has blown it.

From the text:

OpenLaszlo supports a rich graphics model with scalable vectors, bitmaps, movies, animation, transparency, fonts, audio, streaming media, reusable components, user interface widgets, control panels, property sheets, keyboard navigation, browser "back button" navigation, as well as advanced WYSIWYG text and graphical editing tools.

That's amazing! Especially because Windows does all of that too! OLE has even made these components integrated into the web browser since something like 1996 (whenever IE 3.0 introduced "ActiveX").

The Pandora music discovery service is based on the music genome project, and it uses OpenLaszlo to implement a slick, easy to use interface for listening to your personalized internet radio stations via streaming MP3 audio. The service it available for free with advertisements, or by subscription without ads.

Rhapsody, Napster, Itunes, Urge... all have these features and are all on Windows.

Be sure to check out the contact details, search interface, the WYSIWYG email editor, spelling checker, and how the user interface adapts as you resize the window.

Sounds remarkably like every version of Outlook since 1997.

The Flash player itself is not open source, but it's freely available, often pre-installed, and widely deployed on 97% of user desktops.

Windows... not open source, almost always pre-installed, deployed on 97+% of user desktops. Any questions?

BTW, I couldn't help but notice a couple gems in here...

OpenLaszlo is designed to use open standards, and built with open source tools and technologies.

Why are people so hung up on "open standards" and "open source"? Flash is neither an open standard NOR open source.

In other words, OpenLaszlo is the velvet glove for the iron fist of PHP.

That's just a classic line I'll let you admire for yourself.

Getting on with the part about Microsoft...

How much more of this does Microsoft have to see before they realize they dropped the ball on rich networked applications. AJAX, Flash... are you kidding me? These are rinky-dink toys compared to what you can do with a desktop app. Yet Microsoft seems unable to convince anyone do to that kind of thing.

And the door is wide open. A lot of people hate web UIs. The problem I have--and a lot of people have--with these web interfaces is that nerds think they're doing users a favor by constantly reinventing traditional UIs. Obviously they think they've somehow improved on the wheel when actually they're just confusing average people who are used to working a certain way. New UIs often work for a specific application with a ton of depth, but it just doesn't work for an email client. Give me a list of my folders, my messages, etc.. Give me a delete button (that one is aimed at Gmail, who didn't have a delete button for like 1.5 years).

Plus, only in the last year has the web grabbed hold of the idea of draggable DIVs and stuff like that. We've only had that in Windows and MacOS for 20 years!

Windows has a consistent UI. Yes, it sucks to code for MFC but at least it's consistent! We can only hope Microsoft will do something worthwhile with WinFX to alleviate some of the pain (those of you familiar with Windows.Forms know by now that it's a thin layer on MFC). Windows is everywhere. Besides getting people to run an installer, is deployment on Windows a problem.

So why on earth aren't people writing to Windows and spending all of their time doing crazy Javascript and Flash hacks?

Microsoft has fucked up in two major regards:

This security shit has people thinking they're safer using a Flash or AJAX web app than using a Windows app -- and, sadly, they're right! It is safer to use a web browser than it is to install some random app on your machine. Unreal that Microsoft hasn't seen the implications that security scares would have on that.
Not pushing on rich applications earlier. The components have been there for years. Microsoft pushed for adopting SOAP in the first place, right? Now, granted, Microsoft focuses their efforts on the corporate customers when creating these things. I'm sure loads of companies are deploying .NET apps that talk via SOAP to a server. But how could they have not seen the eventual emergence of XMLHttpRequest as a competitor to Windows applications?

Basically Microsoft has screwed up so badly that no one in their right mind would develop an application on the desktop anymore unless it had to be. Since people just don't want to install apps for security reasons, and Windows gets so bogged down over time when you do install a lot of apps, why would you not do a web application instead? You can do your advertising business plan and people won't get mad (remember when ACDSee did ad-sponsored in like 1995-6? ... seems so uncouth now).

Although there are some new apps that have taken off lately for Windows. They couldn't have worked in a web application very well, and people who install them really like the user experience. Oh, did I mention they were by Google?

Picasa
Google Earth

[Edited for clarity 5/23/06]

Welcome to fuckedville, Sony

2006-05-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

$600 for a game console? That's twice as much as a basic PC costs people these days.

They're screwing up their business and taking the games business down with them. Nice job.

Nintendo Wii??

2006-04-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

Bahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha

Attn C Programmers: Don't write Perl

2006-04-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

I have something to say to all of the C programmers out there: don't write Perl, Python, Ruby or any other high level language and think you know what the hell you're doing. You don't.

Chances are you'll ignore every high level concept that might save someone time. Every function will be 8x as long as it needs to be. Things like lambda functions are completely lost on you.
Even worse, you'll treat it like a shell script and never do any kind of packaging or refactoring.
You won't bother to look in standard packages. You'll write 800-1000 lines of code before you think to search on Google whether there exists a way to accomplish the same thing in one line.
The syntax you write will look like C instead of whatever language it is you've decided to take this on.

So, for the love of god, if you're a C programmer and need a Perl or Python script, hire someone who knows what they're doing. But if you are going to do it, start here to find out more about the standard packages and language:

http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com

I've lied to bosses before about knowing Perl

2006-04-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

You know, I've lied to bosses before about knowing Perl. I had a boss about 3 years ago that asked me directly, "Do you know Perl?" I flatly said, "Nope. Never touched it."

Thankfully he didn't look back at my resume and see that I had on there: "Supported 30,000 lines of PERL in production environment."

Ok, I've written about all this before on this blog. That's not why I'm posting. New shit has come to light.

Here's the new shit: I voluntarily took on supporting several thousand lines of Perl today.

The code is complete ass. They didn't even use packages to organize anything, resulting in PL files that aren't refactored at all and are all somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 lines. Packages were introduced in, what, Perl 5? 1994, I think? Way to be modern, guys.

I know what you're thinking: WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT did you take on that ass code? Why, you ask, am I taking this on when the people who wrote the shit are still employed here? Why are you taking your Python-Fu and applying it towards towards a clearly evil language?

It's not out of good will. The reason is because sometimes if there's any hope of getting rid of this asstastic mess and make something decent, you have to do it yourself. It's a higher calling. I've seen the light.

I used to write a lot of poetry

2006-04-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

When I was more depressed a lot of the time, I wrote poetry. I haven't written any lately, but I was so bored and depressed feeling tonight that I decided to read back on that stuff. I figured I might commit some of it to the ether by posting it here. Since I'm not a very good poet, I'll explain some 0f them.

This first one is for a friend who moved to London. Nothing amazingly notable except that I missed her.

Expatriate

I'm picturing you in that big, old city
across the Atlantic—way past
Montauk and Halifax—
wondering if you miss me.

It feels lonely without you being
just a train ride away anymore,
(even though, admittedly, visitation was poor)
and when it’s our country that you’re fleeing.

I'll be here, in New England,
a keeper searching the dark expanse
out East with the lighthouse's beam intense.
That sea, between us, is a mutual friend.

I think that one's okay but damn there are some pretty shitty ones too. Check this one out:

We broke up just now,
you, the girl I still love,
and I, a fool.

We broke up just now
and on my way out the door,
you asked if I’d ever talk to you again.

We broke up just now,
and that was the first time
I knew you cared about me.

We broke up just now,
and on the way home,
I smelled your faint scent
on my jacket.

Ants, crawling around my bathroom,
were the only ones to greet me at home.
My answering machine was unused again.

Then I thought I could smell your faint scent just now,
but all I could smell was bug spray.

Wow, that one really sucks. You know how they tell you that poetry is either about meter and/or rhyme? That one has neither. However, it was written in a moment of distress where i just had to write something. So it does help me to remember how I felt right then.

Ok, now this last one I think is the only semi-good one I've ever written. This was written on a trip to Australia by myself. I had just spent the couple weeks before getting together with a girl who ended up dissing me pretty badly. By the time I was on the plane down there, I knew it was over, even though we had spoken that morning. In any case, here's the poem.

If you don't get the symbolism, this one goes out to all the cold hearted bitches out there -- all billion or so of you.

The Opera House.

Delicate, distinctive curves:
Tourists come to see them
From far away continents;
And as they climb the stairs
Of the long, full, granite staircase,
Wooden supports form baleen
Behind glass,
Not visible in pictures.

Echos of beautiful performances
Resonate within those walls,
But I didn’t hear them.
I saw an empty foyer
Behind that glass today—
I saw an empty dining room.

I sat on those steps and
Listened to the horns of productive ferries
While the whale strained desired krill
And only dangerous, superficial curves
Were left to appreciate.

September 8, 1999
Sydney, Australia

It was really dumb for Match.com to partner with Dr. Phil

2006-04-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here's the problem with dating sites: you can't just appeal to one of the sexes. Hence, whoever in marketing over at Match.Com decided to partner with Dr. Phil is a fucking moron.

No guy in the history of mankind signs up for something because it has Dr. Phil on it. In fact, if my wife ever asked me if I wanted to go on Dr. Phil, I'd be like "Oh my god, are you kidding? It's a trap!" Anyone who ever gets an offer to go onto Oprah or Dr. Phil, just remember the immortal words of Ackbar:

You see, Dr. Phil has an agenda: make men look bad and sell books and airtime doing it. When you mention this to the ladies, they're like "Oh, no he rips on women too." Of course he does. That's how he makes it appear to be fair and balanced. This is like when Bill O'Reilly lets a liberal get their point in for about 30 seconds. He wants to give his audience the appearance that he's letting them hear all viewpoints.

So why did Match.Com partner with Dr. Phil? Because marketers think getting some big name is a good thing. Of course, they never think about the side effect of their action... and the side effect here is that guys won't sign up for the site because they know the women who do subscribe to Dr. Phil's evil plan.

If I were Match.Com I'd make a different site that runs under a different domain name, like "BabeDate.Com". Have that site's spokeswoman be Jenna Jameson or some porn star. However, little do the men know the site uses the same database as its back end, so they'll be unsuspectingly trying to date Dr. Phil disciples.

Goddamn I should be in marketing.

Boston ROCKS!

2006-04-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

I once went out with a girl who was looking through my Creative Zen while we were driving and making comments about what was in there. Then she paused and slowly asked,"Boston?". I said, "Yeah, Boston's first album is 70s rock gold. Who the hell doesn't own that? You grew up in Vernon Hills (Illinois). Didn't they issue that album to you when you were born?" She replies, "Oh my gawd, why do all boys like Boston? It must be a guy thing, they suck."

As you can plainly see, she was a total bitch and we broke up shortly after that.

I thought of posting this today because I heard Boston's "Piece of Mind" on the radio this morning and turned it up to 11. The songs aren't some amazing pieces of songwriting. These guys don't have the songwriting abilities of, say, Prince. But that's not what it's about. Boston is all about Tom Scholz awesome guitar sound. Yeah, sure, you can buy a pocket Rockman for like $75 now. In fact, there's some weird dude who rollerskates around Venice, California playing a guitar on a mini-Rockman for people's pocket change. Boston's guitar sound is everywhere now. Once upon a time though, it was only one place: on Boston's album Boston.

Springtime: That means it's smoking season

2006-04-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

Ok, so all winter long I only thought about 15 people in the world smoked. Those people are the 15 guys who smoke on the balcony next to my cube, taking half hour breaks every half hour to do it.

Today, however, I was reminded why RJ Reynolds et al continue to stay in business. When that springtime weather comes out, it's time to light up, people! Everyone seemed to be walking around with a cigarette today everywhere I went. We tried to eat lunch outside at a Pho place and of course the smokers were nearby and the wind was blowing smoke over toward sour table. I left the building about 45 minutes ago, walked across the street to the store and encountered about 10 smokers on the way.

Does everyone just go "Hey, it's springtime, gotta buy a pack of Cherries"?

Please don't use the word 'grok'

2006-04-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

There's only one place to use the word 'grok', and that is the Slashdot comments.

Using the word 'grok' in the title of a speech or paper is an absolute abomination of English and should not be done without anticipation of Shakespeare or E.B. White or Strunk turning over in their graves.
Using the word in spoken English declares "I'm a fucking idiot who thinks he's a geek who can't even utter a second or third syllable to enunciate the world 'understand' or 'comprehend'."

So for the love of god, don't use this word at any time. It's just easier.

Thank you,
Your Friends at the Fools

Here's how you know Madonna's career is over

2006-04-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

...because once an artist samples or steals some song to make a new hit, it's over for them.

On Madonna's most recent album, she sampled Abba for the song "Hung Up". This is clearly an indication her career is over. Here are some other notable artists that sampled a song and quickly went into decline.

The Verve - "Bitter Sweet Symphony". Biggest hit they ever had, right? How many albums did the Verve do after this one? Zero.
Coldplay - "Talk". Now, this isn't really a sample. It's playing the song "Computerlove" by Kraftwerk on a guitar. But this new X+Y album of theirs is shit. It's over for them shortly.
MC Hammer - This guy hit into the double play on the album "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em" when he sampled both "Superfreak" and "When Doves Cry". Now, he did have one hit after this, "2 Legit to Quit". But we know where Hammer ultimately ended up.. on a reality show with Gary Coleman. Next.
Vanilla Ice - sampled Queen. Ended up doing celebrity boxing against Greg Brady, I think?
NWA - Continuing on the rap thread. They sampled William DeVaughn's Be Thankful for what You've Got for "Diamond in the back, sunroof top". And where are they now? Eric "Eazy-E" Wright is now dead. I think Ice Cube is the only one who made it out alive.
The Bravery - These guys didn't really sample anyone, but doesn't it sound like they just took Duran Duran's album Rio and re-released it? These guys are screwed like the rest of them.

I'll think of more and post them.

Vodafone -- ripe for a buyout?

2006-04-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's not every day a $140b company has speculation thrown around that they'll be bought out for upwards of $170b. But here you go:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=408198&in_page_id=2

I think this makes more sense than most other solutions I've heard. Such a massive stake of Vodafone is locked up in Verizon Wireless that it makes a lot more sense for Verizon to help with a leveraged buyout of the entire enterprise, rather than buy the 45% stake VOD owns in VZW. Telefonica is another telephony giant that can benefit immediately from the buyout (since they'd add to their network in Spain and elsewhere).

The Japan debacle should be the sign of things to come at Vodafone. My hunch is that Vodafone has outgrown their usefulness as a multinational giant. They're idling without much direction, with not a lot of room to expand like they did in the past. It's time to break this puppy up and give the shareholders back some value (yes, I'm a shareholder -- for now).

Don't tout book sales numbers to prove something

2006-04-17T20:39:00.000-07:00

I saw someone quoting O'Reilly's Radar regarding Ruby book sales.

There's nothing more silly than pushing these numbers at someone trying to prove that either your language is better in any way except that it sells more books. Java probably sells 10x the number of books every week than either Ruby or Python. Does that make it better? Does it mean people are dying to learn it?

No, actually it means neither of those. There is no correlation between book sales and anything you want to extrapolate except that people are buying books. Did people buy The DaVinci Code because it's a great book, or because everyone told them they needed to read it?

People buy books for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the subject or enthusiasm about it. Companies buy engineers books that collect dust on a shelf 99% of the time. Hobbyists buy books because they want to learn about the hot new thing and then never open them past a few weeks.

So don't point to book numbers, they prove nothing.

This guy hit the nail on the head with Rails

2006-04-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's called "Rails only Solves Easy Problems".

I've been thinking about this for a while. Most of what I've seen out of Rails have been relatively simple apps. They might have nifty UIs, but the relationships in the DB and robustness requirements haven't been very high. One of the first Rails apps written was 43things. Not very demanding. Then everyone and their brother started writing new CMS or blogging software with Rails. Even Odeo doesn't seem very complex on the surface.

I guess this is why it always kind of bugged me when the Rails advocates responded to performance questions with things like "Oh, just use FastCGI" or "just use Memcached." You know, some problems out there just aren't that easy to solve. My first time out with Rails, I came up with an app that had a many-to-many relationship that was a PITA to try to code with their model. I eventually threw out ActiveRecord. Then I figured out most of my time was being wasted in rendering and threw out ActiveView for Clearsilver. What was I left with? A Ruby controller, which didn't buy me a lot.

Django revisited

2006-04-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

Spent a week or so playing with Django again for two reasons:

It's been so long since I've touched Ruby that I've forgotten what I was doing. Picking up a Python framework and playing with it seemed like a slightly easier path given the amount of downtime I've had there, and the amount of experience I have with Python.
After Adrian responded to my last post about Django, I thought I should give it a fair shake and see what happens.

Thoughts (good and bad). I didn't dig too deeply into everything here, so if I overlooked something please respond in the comments.

I honestly don't really understand the need to import pieces of the framework. Shouldn't Django be taking care of this by execing my code so I don't have to deal with it? I really don't want to have to remember to import HttpReponse in every script, it seems like a waste of time and actually makes Django harder to learn. This is one thing Rails does nicely, though on the other hand, it creates a lot of magic while it does so.
On the flip side of Rails' magic are the annoying rules you need to follow with database naming and such. It's nice that Django doesn't have as many restrictions. Django is clearly a better framework for dealing with legacy databases, and I think is easier for new development since you can generate the DB from your code.
I like that models are bidirectional -- you can either define them in code and generate the SQL or gather the code from the SQL (haven't tested the second part, but it seems possible). This is wayyyy faster than Rails' constantly hitting the DB for the schema.
Manipulators seem cool but there seems to be a missing happy medium between an AddManipulator and a CustomManipulator when you have to customize verification. I'd like to make a two-step webpage where someone can enter text and then have it modified into a choice of foreign keys. How to do this without going to a CustomManipulator wasn't clear to me.
I had a bear of a time trying to figure out that {% extends "base" %} actually looked in the directory above the template itself. Please document this better!
In general, the organization of documentation could use work. I like the sections that are there... they are pretty instructive, but there's no really concise API reference. I'm not fond of RDoc's formatting for Ruby on Rails, but at least it covers the API well. I think there is some really descriptive, interesting stuff in Django's docs, but I guess I just wasn't understanding the bigger picture after I had read something in the docs. It took lots of fooling around and 404 errors/debugs to actually get to the point where I did.
Django needs an Instant Django on Windows, much like InstantRails. Just do it with SqlLite or something. This would have saved me a lot of time getting started.
BTW, gotta get rid of the need for a symbolic link in the install process. I got around it by SVNing directly into my C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages
I still think Django is much, much more efficient than Rails. Ruby is a dog, we knew that, but the stack seems a lot lighter in Django. Compare any traceback between Django and Rails to see what I mean. Even using the built in webserver in debug mode seems faster than Rails behind Apache in production mode!
Love the builtin login system and admin site. I really prefer this to Rails' lame scaffolding, and it's much MUCH smarter than scaffolding.

I'm so-so on the template language so far. I've used Clearsilver for years, and it would have been very easy to use it with Django. But I decided to give the Django templates a try just so I wouldn't have to retrofit everything. Templates:

Not fond of the syntax ({%). I would have prefered the more standard lessthan-question mark (Blogger has a problem with that)
Why the difference between {{ and {%? I guess I can see from a parsing standpoint but I don't like the inconsistency.
I wish it was a little more "Pythonic", but how can you be when Python is whitespace-significant!
How do you emulate Rails' link_to type of functionality?

Questions:

How do I get metrics like rendering time, DB time, etc., that Rails supplies in its development log?
How can I get Django to tack on the debug page onto every rendered page (whether successful or not)? I'd like to always see what the requests look like while in debug mode.

Anyway, Django seems cool. I feel like I'm at a point where I either have to stick with what I know (Python), or go back to Ruby. I think I'm about 75% towards sticking with Django and Python. I've never been sold on Ruby's syntax and I like the flexibility and speed of Django much, much better than Rails' oppressive stack. Putting Clearsilver into Rails well took a lot of hacking and ultimately made things messy and slower. With Django, I can see how to do it relatively easily and it's not that big of a deal.

Bottom line: Django is small and flexible, Rails is becoming the next J2EE. Just a hunch. It's hard to deny Rails' popularity of course, but sometimes it's just better to takes something more lightweight that gets the job done.

Glaring problem with python

2006-04-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

We're in version 2.4.3 of Python.

I was first introduced to Python ten years ago.

It's used by more websites and scripters than ever before.

Yet a goddamn list doesn't have a built in length method. You still call a global function to get the length of a list.

Way to get the language into the modern age of objectness, guys!

Oh my god does Word suck

2006-04-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Word that is.

It keeps locking up on my machine every time I go away from the window and come back to it. Is this because I'm trying to edit a document off of a Sharepoint site? Who knows? There's no way of knowing why Word isn't taking any CPU but is showing me an hourglass for minutes at a time.

Hey Microsoft, try using some of those 60,000 people to make your stuff suck less, more often.

I should take up smoking

2006-04-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Pro-smoking point #1. I sit right next to the "smoking deck" of our company. I see the regular smokers take a 10-15 minute smoking break every hour. So that's a minimum of 80 minutes of free time every workday to hang out with people. That easily makes up for the lost time at the end of your life, when your life sucks anyway, right?

Pro-smoking point #2. When my life sucks, and I am dying from whatever diseases smoking gives me: lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, impotence, whatever... I can turn around and sue the cigarette companies for millions! It's all their fault I smoked my life away!

That's it, I'm taking up smoking! How can I lose?

Cursive (the band) kicks ass

2006-04-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

Continuing on the music thread, if you have any appreciation for good music, check out Cursive. Sadly, they get lumped in with all of the other "Emo" acts out there. Emo is probably the stupidest label I've ever heard, however, it does seem to be somewhat consistent. I mean, what other label would you put on Dashboard Confessional, right?. Cursive are from Omaha, which seems to be the source of awesome music from a few years back.

I highly recommend checking out Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes. I frickin' love this album. It's just raw, RAW music. Tim Kashner can't sing by any standard that's going to win American Idol, but his voice is perfect for Cursive's midwestern angst rock (and with lyrics like "There's no use going to Des Moines / I heard it's just like here", you've got plenty of Midwestern angst on this album).

I am not a huge fan of The Ugly Organ, though there is some gold on there. I sawCursive live after they released this album and the songs sounded about a million times better live than on the album. Still a decent buy.

For some reason, I never bought Domestica. I'll have to get on that.

Anyway, for those of you who think you're on an "Emo" kick and want to listen to something awesome, check these guys out and delete that crap-asstastic latest Jimmy Eat World off of your IPod.

Oingo Boingo sucks

2006-04-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

How come every 80s collection includes Oingo Boingo? They sucked then, and guess what? They still suck now. I can't even watch the scene in Back to School where Oingo Boingo plays "Dead Man's Party" at a party. God, they suck so much. Someone please tell me the appeal of listening to them. Here are 20 80s songs I'd rather hear than that assclown Danny Elfman and his craptacular Oingo Boingo (trust me there are many more songs where these came from):

Buckner & Garcia "Pac-Man Fever"
The Fixx "Saved by Zero"
Alphaville "Forever Young"
When in Rome "The Promise"
Paul Hardcastle "19"
The Time "Jungle Love"
Hall & Oates "Maneater"
Baltimora "Tarzan Boy"
Greg Kihn Band "The Breakup Song"
John Cougar "Jack & Diane"
The Go-Gos "Head over Heels"
Billy Idol "White Wedding"
Don Henley "Boys of Summer"
Foreigner "Juke Box Hero"
Bryan Adams "Run to You"
Glass Tiger "Don't Forget me (When I'm Gone)"
Kenny Loggins "I'm Free" (Footloose Soundtrack)
Kim Carnes "Betty Davis Eyes"
Nu Shooz "I Can't Wait"
Toto "Africa"

And there you have it, 20 songs that kick the hell out of Oingo Boingo. After you listen to these 20 songs, you'll probably be done listening to 80s music for the year anyway, so you might as well move on. That is, until you turn on the radio and hear one of the million retro-80s bands out there like The Bravery, The Lovemakers or The Killers.

Everything you need to know about aspect-oriented programming

2006-04-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

Is represented on this blank wiki page:

http://aosd.net/wiki/index.php?title=Catalogue_of_Useful_Aspects

Get real: Apple's move is genius

2006-04-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

I can't believe what I'm reading in the press today about Apple's decision to release Boot Camp, their dual-MacOS/XP boot utility. Here's one ignorant-as-hell article entited "Bootcamp: End of Apple?"

The title is misleading, because it makes it sound like another traditional AppleIsDeadNow,ReallyThisTime article. His main point is that Apple is going to become a Windows clone maker.

No, ass, Apple will not become a clone maker. Why would they? All margins in clone making go to zero. HP found this out the hard way by acquiring Compaq.

Instead, what I'm not reading anywhere out there is how this is going to be a great boon for Apple. Windows/.NET developers like myself will buy a Mac now that it supports Windows. We'll install Windows, sure, but we'll also keep MacOS X around because we respect the OS. We'll probably start playing with OS X a little.

Next we'll probably fire up XCode to develop a few test apps. A lot of us will probably like what we see. We'll end up writing more apps for MacOS. Maybe the next great killer app will be out on a Mac before it is out on Windows. Maybe the next time we're looking at building an enterprise app, we'll suggest trying WebObjects, or some other Mac-related technology.

No one should believe that this will do anything but hurt Windows in the long term. If anything, it gives Windows users more of an out, more of a reason to try MacOS, and more of a reason to stick with it.

Wise up!

The truth about XAML revealed: going nowhere fast

2006-03-26T22:58:00.000-08:00

For several months, I've written about the future of the web in terms of XAML. I feel that something along the lines of a smart client offers a much more powerful solution than the Javascript or Flash hacks that encompass what we know as "Web 2.0."

I still feel that way today, except there's one tiny problem: installed base of Avalon/XAML -- I should say, lack thereof. It's looking more and more like Microsoft is going to be unable to sell Vista except through OEM sales. It has become Windows XP SP 4. All of the technologies that would have made Vista a worthy upgrade are likely going to be come upgrades to XP. And there's a question if they're going to ship in Vista at all.

Besides that, I barely can get WinFX working on my machine, it's such a huge resource hog. I can't use the designer with C# Express, etc..

Bottom line is, we're going into the 5th year of .NET being out there, and it is still not included with a Microsoft Windows distribution. .NET started out as a Java killer. It evolved into a worthy application SDK. I use it at work every day and love it. Now, however, my feelings about it are swinging back the other way. Why would I develop an app on this framework when I have no guarantees of the installed base improving anytime soon?

The troops at Microsoft aren't feeling good about Vista. Many of them question why they didn't just start from scratch like Apple did (though Apple didn't really start from scratch -- MacOS X 10.0 was very much a version of NeXTSTEP with a new drawing API). A lot of them are wondering why Apple doesn't just put MacOS out for the PC and give Microsoft some real competition.

I'm starting to wonder the same thing. I use XP every day and am happy with it, but because Microsoft seems to be screwing up so badly, I priced out buying a Mac Mini for the first time today.

Microsoft damn well better hope bringing a third manufacturer online for the 360 is going to get them in stores faster. They're going to need an amazing year for the 360 to make up for this delay of a product that now seems like it was vapor all along.

Framework insanity

2006-03-21T22:47:00.000-08:00

I just read a thread over at The Server Side about how a new Java framework called Stripes is out. It seems like frameworks are coming out every week for every language and platform. More on that in a minute. First thing I want to do is comment on this comment somewhere down past the article:

We picked our toolset (JSF, Spring, Hibernate, Facelets, Acegi, AspectJ, Maven). Then created a sample app. .

Holy shit, that's a lot of complex frameworks. Each one of those has a bunch of XML configurations to memorize, APIs, etc.. Did someone sit down with each of these and decide to use them? It seems absurd to adopt that much open source middleware for any project.

But that's not why I'm posting. The real question I have is: why are there so many frameworks being developed?

I think it's because it's so easy to develop a framework with your favorite gadget of the week that people do it all the time. Want to develop a framework that uses annotations and generics? Go for it. Want to develop (yet another) that uses XML config files? Ruby? Python? For the love of god, Smalltalk?

Whatever your fancy is, you can develop a web framework around it. It's easy. I mean, how hard is it to generate tagged up text to send over a wire? Note that almost all of these "frameworks" deal with the easiest problems in the book: the controller layer of an MVC application and a templating language.

Then you have your ORM solutions. I've posted before that I like ORM, it helped me develop faster. However, ultimately what is it buying me? An extra layer of abstraction that slows things down, and actually makes it more problematic to extend a database than when I'm not using it.

Yet few seem to care about the hard problems. The Rails craze has been on for about a year. So how come no one has written any kind of JITted Ruby over this time? You'd think the first thing someone would want to fix about Ruby is performance.

Or how about the documentation -- just enough to get you started, then you have to buy the book. It seems like a lot of these framework developers are just out to make a buck by pushing a framework out there, seeing if it sticks, and then writing a book. Example: the documentation for Spring is abysmal online. I had to buy the $50 book to figure out that I didn't actually want to use Spring.

Ya know, all of these frameworks remind me of the window manager craze of the mid-90s. When everyone started developing for Linux, the first thing everyone wanted to do was make it pretty. So we ended up with about 15 window managers and no apps that used anything other than X controls. Finally, KDE started to get some steam behind it and the Gnome team started the other branch. Using another window manager is kind of silly today.

Here's what I want from a framework: great documentation online and the ability to rip it all out easily. I don't want to get really far down the road and find out there's a performance problem that's very difficult to solve because of the framework I chose. With Rails, I've found that the more a framework offers at first blush, the harder it is to rip it apart later.

Once the window dressing stage is over, some framework will offer all of these features and still be easy to use. It will be easy to rip apart and extend, tear out pieces because they have performance issues.

Attention hybrid owners: i will cut you off

2006-03-09T09:17:00.000-08:00

I've figured out a new strategy when driving -- cut off the hybrids.

Most of the time, they're like sheep on the freeway. They can't merge. They'll change into to fast lane and not accelerate (I think this is because many have become so obsessed with the little gas mileage computer that they are afraid to hit the gas too hard). At stoplights, they don't see the green light. Things like that. Here's what I figure: the folks who drive them are touchy-feely enough to spend an extra $10K on a car for a couple extra MPG, so they're not very aggressive drivers.

So if you're driving a hybrid, I commend your dedication to the environment. I've thought about buying a hybrid myself. But please realize that you're a target for getting cut off on the freeway, and forgive us that take advantage of that.

"Must have" glue code

2006-03-01T15:41:00.000-08:00

The last post got me thinking about essential third party software that needs to have glue code for a language to taken a language seriously. For example: it's essential that Python have mysql-python. If these items are commercially supported, that should be even better.

Feel free to add your own to the comments.

Essentials for every language to have support for on every applicable platform:

Native-compiled XML parser
MySQL
Oracle
OpenGL
GTK, QT or WxWidgets

Specific to Windows:

DirectX
COM support
Win32
CLR/Windows Forms

The D language

2006-03-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

I started writing this response in the comments and decided to make it a post instead. In the comments from "Layers upon Layers", vuk wrote:
Maybe is Mango better solution than C++, and D is nice
language, with power of C/C++ and agility of scripting languages.

It's funny, because this is probably the second or third time D has been brought up to me in the last couple weeks.

I hadn't really considered D as a language for deploying serverside. I guess the thing that scares me is yet another language that few people have much experience with, and few companies support (if any, besides Digital Mars).

C++ is a known quantity... it can run on the CLR, or can run native, and lots of people out there know it. There are a bunch of different compilers to choose from and commercial frameworks to buy. Deployable on Linux and Windows. C# and Java are your widespread GCed, header-file-less alternatives with similar support (though Java is more widespread).

I'm just not sure what the point of adopting a small, GCed, compiled language like D would really be. There might be some syntax niceties, but otherwise it looks like support is the issue. It's like writing a website in Smalltalk with Seaside. It's nice academically, but then you have to hire people to support it, or want to buy components to plug into it.

Breaking that down another level, when I look around at "project" languages, there are often a lot of small open source components, but they haven't been updated in years For example, a bunch of people write Mango as a project on top of D. Six months from now, a year from now, whenever, they get bored and move onto the next thing. It wasn't making them money anyway.

I guess this is the thing that Rails has going for it... it's making the author a lot of money via book sales and such. Money = future support. I'm not sure I feel comfortable adopting anything that doesn't have commercial success.

Are there any commercial sites using Mango in production? Do any large applications use D?

Managed C++

2006-02-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

One thing I failed to mention in my post yesterday is that if you're a .NET person, you can get a significant performance increase by using Managed C++ over C#. Not only do you get much easier and faster interop capabilities, but VC++'s compiler runs a C++-specific optimizing pass before writing MSIL. If you're doing simple performance testing, you'll notice this right away because meaningless code gets stripped, etc..

Anyway, thought I'd mention it for any of you who are actually curious about using Managed C++. I use it at work because we have a ton of C++ code that needs interop and it's just sometimes easier to write in MC++ than to do PInvoke.

BTW, managed C++ compiled code does work on Mono (with no native component, of course). In VS2005, just compile with the "/safe" flag and you are good to go. Don't use the /pure flag, it will end up requiring MSVCRT80.DLL.

Web frameworks are like onions (layers ypon layers)...

2006-02-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

Last night's post got me thinking about something else... high-level languages/frameworks and performance.

Take a look at the call stack for any ASP.NET, Java or Rails web application and you'll see what I mean. On Rails, there's a massive amount of pure Ruby code being executed for every query.

With a general HTTP server like Apache, we've already put in a layer of abstraction between our app and the socket to write data out to a user. Granted, that's a pretty thin layer witthen in C, but it's still a layer. Next we have FastCGI. Then the aforementioned pile of Ruby code. Pretty much the fastest query handling I could get in Rails, even without any DB action, was upwards of 16ms.

In the business I work in, 16ms is an eternity (our company doesn't directly sell web stuff). On the computer I'm using right now, 16ms is 54,400,000 cycles. Obviously we've come a long way since I was coding in 6502 assembly if we're willing to give up that many cycles to putting together some text.

So let's say a pure C# version of a Rails app can get that to be 5x faster (I don't think that's at all improbable, given Ruby's slow interpreter). By adding a little complexity to your language and adding to development time, you've essentially allowed yourself 5x less machines in the machine room to handle queries.

Now let's say you write a pure C++ version of your app and it's 10x faster. Again, 1/10th of the machines can handle the load.

At what point will this kind of thing pay for itself? 2 months? 5 months? Never? Is it ever worth working in the lowest level language anymore?

Granted, I'm a .NET junkie, but I've started to wonder if maybe we've gone too far in getting away from the bare metal. Shouldn't we still care about maximum performance? Java and C# are pretty damn good JITs, but you can still get a massive boost by using raw C++. And there's much less memory overhead.

Thoughts? I found Wt because I was wondering if anyone was doing web development in C++ anymore. So I guess I'm not completely alone on this line of thinking.

Who the hell thinks XML is a good idea for everything?

2006-02-26T23:58:00.000-08:00

I was just checking out a thread on slashdot about AWT vs. Swing vs. SWT. Not that I really care about making that decision -- you couldn't pay me to use any one of those three (ok, maybe SWT). Anyway, scroll down far enough and of course the buzzwords start coming out. Some of the comments mentioned things like "Why even look at these at all? We've got AJAX!111!!!! LOL"

I won't get into AJAX again here, but I did want to rip on another fad-ish project that's out there and got mentioned in the comments. That project is "OpenLaszlo".

A couple of months ago, I was telling a co-worker about Ruby on Rails and how I thought it was pretty good. He responded "Even better than Rails... check out this OpenLaszlo." Now, granted, he's a sharp guy but not a web guy. So when someone with his credentials introduces OpenLaszlo to me as an alternative to Rails, you know something's up with the hype factor.

OpenLaszlo draws pretty cool widgets though, and I actually think Flash is slightly less awful than Javascript (hard to believe). So I clicked through on the link today to see what was up with it.

I'll tell you what's up with it. Programming in XML files! WTF?! Here's an example:

http://www.laszlosystems.com/lps/lz-utils/viewer/viewer.jsp?file=/sample-apps/weather/weather.lzx

My god, with all of you Java nuts running around making XML config files for everything, I just have to ask if this is the future of programming? Are we going to have to put tags around our class definitions from now on?

This kind of thinking is absurd. IMO they should have made either:

Class libraries in C, C++, Java or some other widely used language that do the XML-generation work for you. See WT, Echo2
Some kind of UI designer that generates this code for you. See Microsoft's XAML stuff.

Actually seeing this kind of worries me whether making all UIs data-driven is more problematic than just continuing to make frameworks easier. .NET framework is already pretty easy to use, even without XAML. What do I care if you can make a XAML clock with "zero code"? I know how to code. I want to code. I don't want to have to verify my code against a schema instead of compile.

Strange, but since I decided to use Ruby back in November...

2006-02-24T20:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't used it once.

If you'd like to see what post I'm talking about, check out this blog post of yore http://fota.blogspot.com/2005/11/mr-indecisive-makes-decision.html

I guess I've just realized that I'm not the Ruby type. I far prefer C# over anything else right now. So I've pretty much decided I'm just going to use "C-like" languages as much as I can in the future. I'm sure I'll bounce into Python here and there (as I've mentioned, I've been a Python user since 1995). But I just can't see myself doing any real development in Ruby, Python or any dynamic language anytime soon. My day job has me working in C# all the time. It's convinced me to just stick with something I know really well... and that something is C#.

Wow, H2 looks very promising

2006-02-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Check out this complete, from-scratch, rewrite of Hypersonic SQL: http://www.h2database.com/html/frame.html

Gmail - again having issues

2006-02-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

Gmail is taking approximately 15 seconds to bring up any message right now.

It was down on Friday.

It went down again earlier today.

I'm not sure I trust Gmail. It has had continual problems since day one of its two year "beta". I'm just hoping Microsoft will be able to put threaded conversations into Live Mail, at which point I'll completely move over to that.

Object Databases

2006-02-02T22:28:00.000-08:00

So, I've asked people why they're not using ORM. I use ORM myself. Yet I do have a couple nits to pick about ORM.

ORM is a great time saver in terms of programmer efficiency, but of course has amazing performance issues when trying to scale up. I've measured NHibernate to take 5x longer than using ADO.NET when making large selects. If you look at the call stack, this should come as no surprise.

It also adds some complexity that I'm not a fan of. Debugging XML configuration files is a huge pain. One mistyped class name and you suddenly get crashes that are hard to debug without thorough log files.

So my real question is -- if ORM is such a big deal and is helping so many people -- why haven't full ODBMS taken off? Why aren't we seeing a major increase in usage of Objectivity, Db4o and the like?

10 years ago, the company I was working for began a massive project to move all data into Objectivity. We were all graphics guys, and so the engineers on the project really knew very little about:

a) C++ (which was also just becoming standardized at the time... STL was just up and coming at the time)
b) Databases

So the project failed. And to this day, no 3D graphics company I know of has attempted what they were trying to do, but it was an awesome idea and should be attempted again. If it was, would you choose persist large amounts of graphics data using an RDBMS with Hibernate?

I'm not trying to say that ODBMS are a panacea. Clearly relational databases continue to do well in the web development community. Considering that ORMs give a performance hit, I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe this is because they're free or because the data is just not that complex. Managing someone's blog entries on the ILUVCareBears site is just not a compelling reason to move to an object database. In any case, it might be worthwhile for anyone using ORM to revisit ODBMS and take a long hard look at it.

Albums I'm listening to these days

2006-01-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

New, old... ones I'm just listening to.

Say Hi To Your Mom "Ferocious Mopes"
Say Hi To Your Mom "Numbers & Mumbles"
Anthrax "Among the Living"
Depeche Mode "Playing the Angel"
Paul van Dyk "The Politics of Dancing 2"
Megadeth "Greatest Hits"
Queensryche "Empire"
Longwave "The Strangest Things"
Postal Service "Give Up"

Microsoft needs to get their act together

2006-01-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

It's almost February, yet I still can't walk into any store in the San Francisco area and buy an XBox 360. What's up, Microsoft?

Right now it's looking like Microsoft is not going to get their supply act together until Sony is ready to ship PS3. Nice going. Can you screw up getting a jump on Sony any more?

Bullet points for Microsoft:

You've got a great machine available NOW
Sony is late and hurting because of recent Rootkit backlash
You're Microsoft, you have more money than god

Not only that, but I can't put down money to buy one at Gamestop or EB. How do you guys expect to get any impulse buys with leftover Christmas money if no one can spend their money?

Bottom line: we're all looking to spend money, we see your ads on TV, yet can't find an Xbox 360 anywhere. Who loses in this situation?

Should a pay site ever be "beta"?

2006-01-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

The Register is ripping on Google's Video site again -- quoting the NYT, no less: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/19/google_video_refund/

I totally agree with what's said here, but let me ask a question about Google's strategy:

Should a PAY site ever be beta?

I think this is a reasonable question to ask in light of the snafus that Google has had with the video site. Google has now gone 2 weeks without apparently addressing these issues -- to the point where they're giving refunds. Meanwhile, Apple's video store, which has never been "beta", continues to clean up. They've sold, what, 8-9m videos so far?

So this is probably the point where the "beta" word has bit Google in the ass. Beta or not, there's no getting around a service where someone shells over money and it doesn't work. You can't defend it by saying "Well, it was just beta." That works when a service is free, not when it's a for-pay service. When it's a pay service, people just take their money back and go elsewhere. In this case, I assume they'll go to Apple.

Gin update

2006-01-15T09:29:00.000-08:00

It's been since October that I've updated my gin preferences. After tasting a few more gins and getting a better taste for it, here's my new top to bottom list:

Tanqueray Ten -- the fruit in this gin is very, very good. I think this has the most complex and nice flavor of any gin I've tasted.
Boodles -- that martini I had several months ago still stands out in my mind as one of the best. I have yet to buy a bottle and try it thoroughly though. This is a tentative #2.
Junipero -- this is Anchor's--a local San Francisco brewery's--gin. Very good, though much less fruity than others.
Bombay Sapphire -- the old standby. Still the best in gin & tonics. Compared to No. 10, I've decided it doesn't have enough fruit to be very interesting on its own.
Citadelle -- after two tries on my own, I've been very disappointed with this gin when in a martini. It tastes and smells spectacular straight out of the bottle, very citrusy and complex -- probably as good as or better than No. 10 -- but seems very weak in a martini. It seems like it can't be on ice very long. Absolutely do not shake this one when making a martini, it will be extremely watered down.
Tanqueray (original) -- still my least favorite.

I'll write another update in a few months, when I've gone through my new bottles and gotten a few more. I think Citadelle cold move up if I figure out how to work with it. Next up to purchase and experiment with are Boodles, Hendrick's, and maybe one of those fancy bottle ones like Van Gogh.

Missing the point of web services

2006-01-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

Eric Newcomer sounds off on web services in the attached article, and he says the following:

Do you think the WS* specifications will provide a bridge between the .NET and Java worlds?

Newcomer: I really think we're trying to get to an XML world and the established vendors in Java and .NET are still viewing the world in terms of Java and .NET. For a long time, the industry kind of profited on this competition between Java and .NET, which has been a good thing in terms of innovation, and each has tried to outdo the other, but it still means the focus of the efforts of those companies has been to get the developers using their tools at the exclusion of the other vendors tools. We're seeing that too much. In Web services today, we're still looking at annotations in Java or doing annotations in .NET to create services objects, instead of allowing developers to develop the XML and then map it down to some language later. Today, we're still seeing too much emphasis on trying to choose your development language between Java and .NET, and we're seeing XML as kind of a byproduct of that. I think those communities are resisting that change.

Uh yeah. That's exactly what I've always wanted to do, define APIs in XML before writing the object model they're based around in Java or C# (*rolls eyes*).

No my friend, XML is not the way we want to think of the world when writing code. Hasn't anyone in the Java or .NET community learned anything? We came up with languages like C#, Java, and Python to get rid of header files for a reason. Basically this guy is proposing we bring header files back, and this time make them even uglier by defining them completely in XML. This is just another sign that XML continues to be the most abused/overused thing in all of software. Ever see an XML "database" in action? Oh god.

No matter what people do with the WSDL standard, web services should be defined from the code, at least originally. A web service is, by definition, supposed to have an implementation. No one starts out to create the perfect abstracted web service API, I hope... right? I know that when I've written web services, I've done so with a purpose. Therefore I start defining methods that I want to expose in whatever language I intend to actually serve them in.

I guess in the academic world of thinking about web services, this makes a lot of sense. You'd want every WSDL to be perfectly designed before implementing. Yeah right. In the actual test-driven, dynamic world of writing this kind of stuff, the people in the trenches just want the most flexible way to expose their code in WSDL automatically. Just about the last thing I need to do with my time is have to modify some goddamn XML when it's midnight and I just want to get something working again.

Keep it in the code, let the software do the XML. That's the point of a web service.

Google and CBS release embarrassment of a video store | The Register

2006-01-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

The Google Video UI has been pretty good for just finding random fun videos, but when you're shopping, it's impossible.

What this reviewer doesn't mention is that the movie prices are astronomical. $14.99 for an internet movie? I know Adwords has helped Google make a science of pricing internet ads, but what happens when they start out with a price that's too high? How does their pricing model work when no one's bidding against anyone?

Regarding Advertising

2006-01-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

FiltersetG allows you to use Firefox to block ads on the web. Combined with the AdBlock plugin, you can completely block ads from most websites you're going to visit.

Sounds good, right? But it seems some people are calling foul on this practice:

http://www.shadowsinmotion.com/filtersetg-is-evil/

Wait, so does this mean this guy is against Tivo? Does this mean he's against dumping all of the ad sections that come with the Sunday paper? Should we read every flier that's handed to us?

What he doesn't understand is that this isn't malicious at all. Not viewing an ad is the right of anyone using the web, watching television, reading a newspaper, etc.. Read on.

Advertising has two purposes for those who sell ad space/time:

To create a revenue stream for things people wouldn't otherwise pay for.
To increase the revenue stream for things people do pay for (newspapers, movies).

In other words, usually people don't go out of their way to see ads. Therefore, there's a limit to advertising. After that tipping point, people won't watch anymore. Surely we've all watched a TV show that had way too many commercials, right? At some point, people just tune out. It's no longer worth the content to put up with all of that wasted time.

So what's your limit to viewing ads on the internet? I hit mine long ago, when flash ads started coming around.

Today, textual ads have become all of the rage. Yet Google AdSense links are today strewn so thoroughly among content that I accidentally click all the time. Or how about the pages where they've messed with text selection in order to make you "accidentally" click on some ads that are linked into the article text itself? That's the latest trick to get you to click on more ads.

Google themselves have increased the amount of click space for ads. Have you noticed that now if you accidentally click anywhere on the table cell when a big sponsored link that you'll go to that page? Ooops... lots of misclicked links.

I'd advise all advertisers to carefully architect a click-through tracking system to see how much this stuff actually pays off for you. I've been asked to click on ads with absolutely no intention of ever shopping at that ad just to help out the owners of that site.

On the side of the consumer, let me make a completely different point. Why are we required to use our bandwidth and our screen real estate for your ads? Just like Tivo owners are not required to spend their time watching broadcaster's ads, we're in no way obligated to spend our resources to view ads. Turning on one of these adblockers is like getting a major bandwidth boost! Some sites have such terrible ad servers that it's like getting an extra megabit connection when your browser ignores the ads.

The bottom line is, if you don't like Adblocking, either try to trick it with Javascript or start charging for your invaluable service. Let's see how many people actually subscribe to your blog when you charge for it.

BTW, that "tricking it with Javascript" line is a scary one. All of this Web 2.0 stuff isn't for the good of making appealing apps. It's for allowing the ability to stick ads wherever they want and we can't block them. Once we all have programs running on our computers, we can't stop an ad. One day, we block the "make_the_ad()" Javascript function, then the next day, they'll call it the "eosodwee()" function.

Furthermore, the problem with the information economy is that most of us wouldn't pay for the shit we find on the internet. That's the scary thing about investing in this stuff. Do you feel safe with your Google or Yahoo stock knowing that if people adopted Firefox they might not even ever see another ad on the Google or Yahoo website?

Java v. C# - First blush

2006-01-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

I think usually people have spent years with Java before coming to C#, I'm exactly the opposite. So after finding and loving NHibernate, I spent a few hours porting my hobby application to Java to see if I could get my head around it a bit more. I worked with Java a little bit in the early days of massive hype (1996-7), but haven't touched it since. I started working with C# when Visual Studio .NET was released in 2002.

This post is aimed at people who don't use either and are looking to learn. Find a comparison that can help guide them is something I could have used years ago.

(Note: I am purely evaluating this on a developing-applications-for-Windows viewpoint. I don't care that Java works on Mac or Linux because I haven't used those lately. If that is a requirement for you, then you'll have to take that into consideration.)

Getting Started.. installing the language, dev tool and database

.NET:

A single install put the C# language, Visual Studio IDE and SQLServer Express on my Windows machine.

Java:

Language: JDK (Java Developer Kit) install is done from Sun. The first time I tried installing, their website was actually having problems.
Integrated Developer Environment (IDE): I'm very confused about what the preferred IDE is for Java, so I just went with Eclipse. Being a Java application, the Eclipse install is a zip file. It doesn't use an installer and end up in your start menu or anything Windows-friendly. The main problem is that it is missing many features out of the box. To get a visual form designer, I had to perform an extra plugin download to Eclipse. It does not come with the app. Similarly, a JAR creator that includes all referenced libraries does not come with Eclipse and must be downloaded (see FatJar).
Database: I used SQLServer for my testing, which required an extra JDBC download. It seems that no connectors are supplied with the JDK. For the sake of being thorough, I tried installing 100% pure Java HSQLDB to see how the install went. This also comes in a zip file. I wasn't able to get their utility bat file to run, so I had to type "java -cp hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManager" to make it run and set up.

Thoughts:

Obviously Microsoft has throughly trounced Java in this department. I continue to find this the most mind-boggling thing about Java. Coming to it seems to require endless amounts of Googling and downloading for the things you need, and ultimately requires typing in the command shell on Windows. I thought having to type "java my.class" was archaic in 1997 when I was doing it on a linux box, it's absolutely ancient history in 2006.

Sun and Java boosters would be wise to spend some serious time on this. There are three main issues to address:

Finding information. Sun's website is abysmal. The documentation is not easily found when doing searches through google. Meanwhile, MSDN is almost always the first hit when doing searches for Microsoft information. Also, Sun has an acronym for everything. This makes it near impossible to understand what they're talking about when you aren't familiar with the technologies. Here's an example I pulled from their website about using Web Services:
Make a single download Windows installer for everything. No IDE should be distributed without a runtime. No IDE should be distributed without the visual designer. Maybe I was a fool for using Eclipse, but like I said, it seems to be what the masses are using these days. The Windows installer should put Java in the path and register Java to somehow execute JAR files wisely. These are two things the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) fails to do right now.
No more typing command lines to get stuff to run. It's obscene to download a Java application to Windows and have to run it by typing a command line. This has to be fixed if you want to be taken seriously for things like a database (HSQLDB). I would never consider trusting a database where the developers haven't done the work to have it install itself as a Windows service. Sorry guys.

Setup Winner: .NET by a landslide

Developing - the language

Java and C# are very similar, it's generally toss-up though C# seems a bit more advanced. There are only a few things I noticed missing from Java that C# has and really prefer:

Properties. I love the way you can set up getters and setters in C# using properties rather than calling methods. It makes for very clean code to be able to use properties. This could be personal preference, but I think many would agree that these are nice.
Delegates.
Continuations (see yield section)
Anonymous methods (see anonymous methods section).
Partial Classes. I hate having to manage generated UI code in the same file as my hand-written code. C# 2.0 has fixed this with partial classes.

Language Winner: C# by a tiny margin

Developing - The IDE

If you're going to say it's not fair to compare a free product to one that's commercial, you'd could be right. However, both Visual Studio 2005 (by way of C# Express Edition) and Eclipse are available to the end user for no charge. Since they didn't cost me anything to install on my machine, I will compare them.

In that light, there's no question that VS2005 blows away the competition. However, I do prefer one thing about Eclipse, and that is their debugging layout. I find it a bit more intuitive than Visual Studio. But that still can't beat the fact that VS lets you hover your cursor over variables during a debug session to find out their values. Eclipse also has some issues with Intellisense on Windows. It seems very skittish. The window wants to appear or disappear at random times, and the scroll bars don't work.

I've used Eclipse for some Python coding and have liked it, but for some reason I'm not as impressed with it as a Java IDE.. which is weird, since that's what it was built for.

If there's a commercial Java IDE that you like, post it in the comments. There are so many IDEs out there that I have no idea which one is any good. Otherwise...

IDE: Visual Studio 2005 by a large margin

Developing - The API

Another important thing to discuss is what exactly does the framework give you--and customers who use your application--out of the box. I'll rate each area individually.

The Basics -- A tie. By "the basics", I mean list, hash structures and the like. The two frameworks generally give you the same functionality here.
Web -- .NET. I'm giving the tip of the cap to .NET again because ASP.NET comes with the base framework and J2EE apparently does not.
Consuming Webservices/XML -- Another tie. (The basic API is generally the same, though it should be noted that VS 2005 and Java IDEs all have functionality to consume web services easily, which I didn't compare.)
Data Handling -- .NET. JDNC seems to have Java's similar technology, but looks to be incomplete and unsupported, and doesn't come with the base package.
UI -- .NET. This one's a no brainer again. System.Windows.Forms far surpasses Swing or AWT. They look better, behave like they should on the platform, have more functionality and are still straightforward to use. SWT is much better, but this isn't in the standard Java JDK.

API: .NET has the advantage for desktop apps.

Deployment

Both Java and .NET have functionality to deploy from the web. Java's is called Web Start (mysteriously referred to as JNLP by Sun, see what I mean about acronyms?). .NET's is called ClickOnce. Both can run behind any web server once you set up the mime types properly.

.NET required me to drop down to the shell to generate a key to sign my assembly, but all of the signing and publishing is automatically taken of from VS2005. +1 for .NET on this.

Java also required me to drop down to the shell and generate a key, but then also requires a hand-written JNLP file to go along with the file. There might be an IDE that generates this for you, but -1 for Java on deployment.

Bottom Line

I decided to do this half-port of my app to Java because I know that Java is in high demand and I thought learning a bit about it would be a good thing. After getting a little more familiar with Java, I am more intrigued by its success. It does seem to have a lot of momentum behind it, though I think it's lacking in so many areas. Is this solely because people want to deploy on Linux?

Some bullet points:

I'd be hard-pressed to ever write a GUI app in Java. If I needed to deploy on other platforms, I'd prefer to use Mono before I used Java.
I do prefer writing C# to Java. I think the features of the language are superior in just the right ways to appeal to my history with dynamic languages like Python.
The amount of setup, searching and head scratching was much higher than Java than it ever was with C#. Granted, I have 4 years of experience with C#, so maybe I've forgotten.
J2EE would be a good choice for deploying a web application on Linux, though I'd use Ruby on Rails before going there. If I was working somewhere with a budget that wanted to develop a J2EE app, I'd recommend ASP.NET.
Third party support of Java is far superior to .NET. You can probably find a package to do anything you can think of.

Why aren't you using ORM?

2006-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

I've been once again struggling with trying to make .NET's DataSet/DataTable organization work nicely in an app. The nice thing about using these strcutures is that they plug right into Windows Forms, right?

Instead of saving time, I ended up spending literally days trying to manage my data with these -- and it was slow when I was finished. My code requires smart merges with incoming sets of data and their relations, so it ended up being a hodge podge of trying to figure out when to create temp tables, specialized views, etc.. I was about to consider stored procedures, which would have been massive overkill (this app is small and a pet project that I recently wanted to add persistence to).

So last night I finally said "Screw this!" and downloaded NHibernate. Wow, what a difference 12 hours made with ORM. Not only did ripping out all of that code make my app a lot MVC-cleaner, but I got the app working better and faster than before in probably 1/10th of the time. No more embedded SQL code in business logic, no more crazy DataTable merges.. now I'm just using plain old IList of my business objects that have overloaded Equals to do my merging. And yes, it's faster!

NHibernate is just a port of Java's Hibernate library, which has been around for a while. So after spending some time with it, I can sorta see what all of the Java guys have been talking about with respect to Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord. NHibernate is more flexible, though takes a little more time to set up for the basic operation. It can do a more thorough job of hiding your database structure and can deal with tables that don't necessarily map to the way ActiveRecord wants to work.

In any case, I don't want this to turn into a Hibernate v. ActiveRecord discussion. The main thing I wanted to report here was that NHibernate was like a godsend to my code that was trying to use straight ADO.NET. I suggest checking it out if you haven't. But if you have and still prefer to roll your own with ADO.NET, I'd love to hear why in the comments. I know ORM vs. no ORM is a hot topic, but I'm a big fan of neither writing SQL into my code nor using stored procedures... which made NHibernate perfect for my style.

Why not C#?

2005-12-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Ignoring the fact that it requires using Windows, why look any further than C# these days?

On a language level, a few things are still missing compared to dynamic languages. You still need to declare types in C# and you don't in Python or Ruby. And you can't truly change instances of classes in an interpreter. C# is not "dynamic" in the true sense of the word.

But, C#/CLR 2.0 and VS 2005 have introduced three huge features: partials, generics and edit and continue. Plus, anonymous functions and iterators make their debut. Since porting a chunk of code to generics yesterday, they've already made a noticable impact to simplify my code. No more crazy casting to handle an index to an ArrayList of an ArrayList of a Hashtable, etc. With List<> and Dictionary<>, my code has gotten far more simple literally overnight. Meanwhile, people who use this code--it's for an API--can easily figure out what the expected types are.

Novell's hoping to support these next year. Originally they said Q2 for full .NET 2.0 support, now they say Q4, which kind of sucks. Check it out at Mono Project.

Back to the original point, in an enterprise environment based on Windows, why are people still pushing for Java? Is it purely existing code and knowledge at this point? Every day I spend with Whidbey (VS2005), .NET 2.0 and SQLServer 2005 has pushed me further down the road of wanting an entirely .NET environment to work in. If it wasn't for the fact that I only have access to a Linux box for my websites, I'd probably scrap the Ruby on Rails push and just use ASP.NET 2.0. If Mono 1.2 does support ASP.NET 2.0, I might honestly give that a go for the next round of sites I build.

The Search for A Good Story: Top 10 System Administrator Truths

2005-12-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

Spectacular list here. I used to be a Mac and Sun administator back in the day, and of course involve myself with IT stuff because I just can't help myself. The Search for A Good Story: Top 10 System Administrator Truths

Why Microsoft will win...

2005-12-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

...the console wars

Microsoft has shown with Xbox and Xbox 360 that they understood the online component better than Sony ever could have for PS2. It remains to be seen what Sony does with the PS3, but so far, they have a TALL order on their hands. Xbox Live is an unbelievably tight online gaming service. There really isn't anything that compares to it, and Sony has tough road ahead of them trying to match it for their next generation game system.

...the web back end game

J2EE? Ruby on Rails? Python? HA! As a Ruby on Rails user myself, I can safely say the only thing keeping those alive for myself is a desire to try to not spend any money on Windows Server licenses.

But Linux has major problems.

For one, it IS harder to administrate. I'm on a server right now that's running RH 9 and desperately needs an upgrade. But I'm terrified to try upgrading it to FC4 because if something goes wrong, I'll have to get access to a machine room to fix it. These are the kinds of things that generally just work when you upgrade a Microsoft machine. Really! Upgrading from XP to SP2 would not worry me nearly as much as this kind of upgrade that requires a libc change. Almost never in my life has an upgrade like that on Linux gone seamlessly, but I can say that it's gone seamlessly more often on Windows.

The other thing is that none of these frameworks can ultimately beat what Microsoft is putting together with .NET and Visual Studio. As mentioned several times below, .NET 2.0 rocks. ASP.NET is not my favorite compared to Rails, but it's getting better all the time. I'm not the only one who thinks this. Why do you think IIS is trending up and Apache is in decline ?

All hype aside, if you're willing to pay for Windows licenses, it's advantageous to use .NET than using any of these other systems. The only thing is that at the end of the day, you probably have a much more integrated site than if you used Java plus a million frameworks (spring, struts, etc), or one of these other frameworks. Can you get any more integrated of a solution than C#, SQLServer and IIS? Microsoft has started giving away all of these components... now all you have to pay for is the Windows Server license... oh, and that's now only $400 with Windows Server 2003, Web Edition. Except you can't put SQLServer on it, which is probably OK except for the smallest companies.

Anyway... .NET will win, that's my point here. The open source guys will lose interest and move onto something else, or just slow down their development speed. Meanwhile, MS will just keep plugging away until they win again.

... the search war

I know what you're saying... what the hell?!! Ok, I admit this one is a stretch and will take years.

Microsoft will win the search war because while Google is looking for ways to expand their business in general, Microsoft will be able to move in on Google's core business... advertising. This is pretty much what they've been doing to Oracle with SQLServer, so Oracle desperately struck out trying to buy companies like PeopleSoft.

Everything Google does is basically in defense of or to promote AdWords. That's smart, given that it's where actual revenue growth comes from for them. Most everything Microsoft does is to protect Windows. It's a lot harder to invade Microsoft's core business than it is to invade Google's. Microsoft has the ability to add services directly to MSN, and have those services come up as soon as you launch IE 7 for the first time. And sure, a lot of people are going to switch the page over to Google as soon as it comes up. But if they don't, that means revenue for Microsoft. And how hard is it for Microsoft to start thinking about advertising driven versions of their apps?

One more small argument here. Microsoft controls their own tools and operating systems that they'll be building these sites with. Google has built most of their stuff on open source. While Google has the best and brightest, and open source is open source... I'd still give the advantage to Microsoft, since they have complete control and complete knowledge of every tool in their toolchain.

...TV

Xbox 360 and Windows Media Center are putting Microsoft right there in front of you. How long until they just start distributing HBO this way? How about last week's episode of 24? I guarantee that Microsoft will come out with this in the next year.

Live.com - better than Google's personalized view

2005-12-09T08:14:00.000-08:00

I've been using Google's personalized start page for a while. Well, I just checked out Microsoft's Live.Com today, and it's better than Google. Not only is it faster, but you can write your own widgets. This is awesome. I'm going to write one to show my Gmail feed on Live.com and start using that as my home page for a while.

Wozniak patently wrong on this one

2005-12-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

"Although, I don't know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work."

http://inquirer.stanford.edu/2005/jstaffor/woz.html

Actually, Steve, you can't make generalizations across the board like that. There are always pockets of genius in any successful organization. Microsoft has one of the most compelling products in years: .NET. I have never been so effective as a desktop app programmer as I have been on .NET. Meanwhile, their Office group might be screwing things up (I don't really know if they are, I'm just saying that). Likewise, Apple has not made much innvoation on top of NeXT's programming model, yet they've made a lot of successful advancement with iTunes Music Store.

The point is, every large organization has good and bad, you have to take both. You can point to a small organization and say "they're doing all good work," but that's only because they're doing one thing and doing it well. There are also many small organizations that I'm sure aren't doing it well, but you don't hear about them because they can't stay in business long. Google also has the bad along with the good. Taken a look at Google Reader?

Classic Titanic Quote

2005-12-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Ballard on the recent "discovery" that the Titanic sank faster than thought (who cares?)

"They found a fragment, big deal," he said. "Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there's stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051206/ap_on_sc/titanic_find

Why pay more? or, "Why the internet has failed to increase competition"

2005-12-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

GEICO advertises, "Why pay more for car insurance?"

I agree. After all, insurers make a business because they pay out less than they bring in. So even the most popular insurer is going to try to weasel out of paying claims. My boss was just telling me yesterday that Farmers insurance would not pay out a claim to his car -- and Farmers is the second largest insurer in the California.

And of course, every time there's a disaster, the insurers try to weasel out of paying those as fast as they can. Twin towers, anyone? Larry Silverstein's insurers tried to weasel out of $4 billion in that case.

Fast forward to the internet. Insurance seems like the industry that was born for internet competition. All insurers do is sit there, getting your money, until something happens. Then they hire a freelance adjuster to look at the damage. I like my Allstate agent, but I haven't actually seen him face to face in 8 years.

So why are rates going up in the insurance industry? My car insurance with Allstate has gone from $500 to $700, even though my car has depreciated almost $15,000 over that same period. I just priced out insurance with 3 different companies (GEICO, State Farm and Progressive), and the lowest rate I found was GEICO by $300.

Oh, and you thought Warren Buffet was a technophobe? GEICO seems like they're the only legitimate insurance company that actually is trying to streamline their business on the internet and offer lower rates. They offer lower rates by not having agents. I tried to figure out what my new rate with Allstate would be since I got married. Allstate's site said "contact your agent." State Farm doesn't even have a nationwide number to call, you have to do things through an agent. Your quote from them gets forwarded to an agent.

The point of this post isn't to complain about insurance (okay, maybe). Insurance is a hell of a business when no disasters happen. So why hasn't the competition gotten greater with the advent of the internet?

Answer: the belief that the internet improves competition is mostly false. People are afraid of brands they don't know. Even if Joe Blow Insurance offered the rate for $100 less than GEICO, would you go with them? Of course not, because you have no idea if they're legitmate.

So basically, I submit that the internet is mostly strengthening global brands and putting small guys out of business even more than before. It allows price fixing on a level never thought possible. Instantly, American Airlines can find out what United is charging for a flight and pop up the price. I had a plane ticket price jump from $530 to $689 in 30 seconds the other day -- and this is a flight that used to cost me $250 before buying tickets online became popular.

Efficient markets aren't good for the customer, no one has an advocate that will give you a better deal because they want your specific business. When a computer runs the show, pricing sciences take over and you'll always pay the highest rate the market can bear, which allows for the highest profit. Companies like Geico, JetBlue and Southwest are the future: you'll pay just enough, but there's no real competition that would bring that price down to what it should be.

Enjoy.

What do you do when people want you to innvoate with bad requirements?

2005-11-30T23:48:00.000-08:00

I don't want to get too into specifics to protect my job but...

About two weeks ago, I was given a big, broad requirement for our latest project and how it relates to the last project we shipped.

This requirement was very vague. So at work today, I asked people to give a prioritized list of sub-requirements that would help to shake out what people actually want to preserve from the last project.

The results I've gotten from the prioritized lists do not look promising (so far). Basically, the requirements look to be "just make it work exactly like the last product." These tools are not easy to move forward with requirements like that. Basically, these requirements mean that it pretty much has to work exactly like the last one, just with a bit more turd-polishing.

So what have other people done in these situations? Just given up and polished the turd, pass the buck and move onto something else, or just try to push a square peg through a round hole and try to innovate around very restrictive requirements?

I'm thinking that option #2 sounds good... passing the buck.

Mr. Indecisive makes a decision

2005-11-29T19:27:00.000-08:00

Ok. After a long hiatus, I'm back on my web development kick.

And when it comes to web technology, I've been very indecisive.

I'm really tired of looking into every option out there to take on projects with -- ASP.NET, JSP, Rails, Django, Turbogears, Struts, Spring. Whatever.

I'm tired of installing the language of the week. C#. Boo. Ruby. Python. Java. Whatever.

I've decided to simplify and stick with something, and that something is Ruby and Rails. I made it further on Ruby on Rails than any other language and framework this year, so that's what I'm going back to. I also like the up-and-coming nature of Ruby. The Ruby community is kind of like the Python community was about 8-10 years ago... lots of originality, lots of arrogance, lots of potential. When you look around the Python message boards and OSS development for it, it just seems to have stagnated a lot.

I did try using Python, my old standby. I thought I was going to be able to make progress with Python and Django, but I actually made zero progress every time I've sat down to try to do something with it. Python is just not as expressive as a language for this kind of thing as Ruby. It's simpler, that's for sure. And, sorry guys, Django just doesn't hold a candle to Rails. I don't doubt that it's more efficient... I am sure that mod_python allows Django to blow the doors off of most Rails apps running on FastCGI. But getting things working in Rails is much, much easier and the language, though arcane at times, is pretty good. Plus, I already figured out how to extend Rails considerably, so I should just continue with it.

I was able to make progress with .NET. .NET is actually truly excellent for developing web apps, except for one problem: it requires I use Windows. IIS has been rising in usage recently, which has been credited to the .NET framework, but I still don't want to have to do it. Apache is just something I understand how to administrate. MySQL is just something I know how to administrate. Ruby and Rails are easy to understand (except the innerworkings can be somewhat crazy... they use a lot of Ruby tricks)

What does Ruby need? Simple, a far better interpreter. Get it to run on .NET. Get it to run on JVM. Or just make a better VM for it. But you know what, those things will come, and that's why I'm going with it.

For now :)

.NET 2.0 really does kick ass

2005-11-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

Today's exhibit: I had a quick internet scraper I needed to write, just for a one-off of about 20 pages with a bunch of data. Do I write it in Python or .NET?

Actually, it ends up being much easier to write in .NET 2.0. I can embed an IE into a .NET app, click on the stuff I want to scrape, and make a couple regexes to do the rest. It's so easy it's almost scary: about a 20 minute project. Could Java do this? Could anything else do this besides one of MS's languages?

NO other API compares to C#/.NET when it comes to writing one-off, interactive mini-applications. This is not just true for Windows, but any other platform. I would rather install Windows and .NET than try to develop anything like this quickly on any other platform. Yes, that includes Mac.

I hope we can someday see IronPython become a supported language in VS.NET. Don't get me wrong, I love C#, but Python would be incredible for writing interactive .NET applications.

The Search Engine Experiement

2005-11-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

You can do a blind taste test of search engines at http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/seo-experiments/the-search-engine-experiment/

On subjects like 3D graphics, Python, Ruby and Oracle, I picked MSN about 5 times, Yahoo 2 or 3 times, and Google exactly once.

Pretty much backs up what I actually thought of various results from engines about 6 months ago, but I still use Google just out of habit.