Why eBay was invented

If for no other reason. To provide a source of the euro-style turn signals.

Really looks better.

It will be mine. Oh yes..

This will be mine. Oh, yes it will be. I have (had) three of these keyboards on hand; and as a bonus my dad had an incomplete one. So I don't have to break a working one (a bonus since I really like these keyboards).

One last piece of cool.

I was fortunate to be able to pick up my brothers old phone; which means it is a wicked smart new phone. It’s a HTC Trinity, and lord above I have no idea why you would replace this phone.

Short of washing my socks this phone does everything; and that only because I don’t know how to make it wash them.

As always I wasn’t too sure of buying a new phone; I had spent so much time picking the old one. That when by Bro offer to sell it to me I was going to say no. But the wife said I should get it; after all she could start using my old one.

It’s like a vacation.

But with way more work. You may have noticed that I haven’t been post as much; you may have also noticed that when the sun goes down it gets dark. My only excuse (and it is an excuse) is that the new job is a hassle. Seems every project is due tomorrow and we ship the day after.

Anyway this is about to change.

Kinda.

While I will still post here (but even less) my other blog “Ground Zero Labs” is about to pick up. Big time!

See ya in the funnies.

The job I used to have.

I wanted to rant about how bad the job I used to have was, except they still owed me money. And it looked like they could go out of business any time. Well they still might (well really they are going, it’s just a question as to when) got out of business; but I have my cash!

So let’s talk about Option nOne for second. Why are they going out of business; when not to long ago they where they 3rd largest mortgage lender in the country. Well I can’t speak to the market forces and securities failure rates.

But I can talk about their complete lack of computer ability. They have proven beyond a doubt that these current ideas are false:

1) Manager who manage technical people don’t need to be technical.
2) Outsourcing saves money.
3) Use of open source software saves money.
4) Consultants can back-fill technical short comings.

If you think any of the above are true, and you are a CEO; I have a prediction for you. You’ll be out of business within a six months, a year tops. Fortunately no CEO’s read this blog, so that is kind of a safe wager.

First point. Putting someone who’s non-technical in charge of technical people shows the wisdom of putting Rosie O’Donnell in charge of a cookie factory. I’m sure the factory will turn out a lot of product; not much is going to make it to the store. Honestly, do you think someone who doesn’t understand polymorphism is going to be able to understand when the developer tells them they need to make another interface? The technical people resent it, and the non-technical people think they should make just as much as the technical people they manage.

Second point. Your out-sourcing partners are not your partners; they are your enemies. They want all your money, and want to do as little as possible to get it. This sounds just like your competitors. Your new India buddies know you can’t do the work yourself (otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to them) and they know you have little choice but keep up the pretense of paying them for work; while they keep up the pretense that they are working. They don’t want to succeed, if they do, you’ll never need to pay them again.

Third point. This falls into the rule you get what you pay for. If it’s free, you probably paid too much. Java is not free; Linux is not free, Apache is not free and it not very good. While it might look that you can get these without paying anything, once you try and do something with them; oh you’ll pay. Out-the-nose. Option nOne’s Java implementation ended up costing Millions. Some went to Sybase, and some more went to BEA.

Last point is Consultants. They are like Out-Sourcing, they don’t really want to succeed; if they do, you won’t need them anymore. They know that, and so should you. There are two thing that I loath; simply because they start the Consultant buffet; Oracle and PeopleSoft. I’ve never seen so many fancy cars as outside an Oracle workshop. They demand a lot of money, and now that all your company data is locked up in there databases; you’ll have to pay whatever they demand.

Even my pens are geek

I have two Fisher space pens. I was going to post some pictures of them; except that they are both Telescoping Pens; and they are no longer on the company’s web site. How nice is that; classic geek cool.

The reason I bring up the pens is because of an old joke that’s been running around for sometime: “The U.S. spent a million dollars to invent a pen that could write in space. The Russians took a pencil.”

Very funny. Except that I propose that the reason the U.S. made it to the moon and back (again and again and again) was that the U.S. could afford to spend a million dollars to invent a pen. Space is not cheap; you don’t cut corners when you’re going 250,000 miles without a gas station nearby.

China says they are going to the moon. No they’re not. You don’t get to go to the moon till you can blow a million dollars inventing a pen that can write upside-down.

Only a few countries can do that anymore. And a couple of people; but I don’t think Bill Gates thinks zero-gee makes him look good… Paul Allen does!

Java: The new Cobol

It comes as no surprise that I love to program. With my natural ability to misspell anything; it also come as no surprise that I like really good IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments) to help me out when I want to start using code like:

HttpWebResponse MyResponse = (HttpWebResponse)MyWebReq.GetResponse();

With so many opportunities to misspell.

When Java first came out; there were no IDE’s for it; so while I learned the language (hey I learned Modula too), and thought it was kind of cool, you couldn’t do a whole lot with it; yet. Soon there were graphic libraries out that would allow for some acceptable applications to be done. But for some reason all the IDE’s that were being created boasted that they were 100% written in Java; like that was good. To be clear this was some time ago and Java ran slow. Really slow. Go get a cup of coffee and drink it slow.

For someone who learned on a slow computer, and learned Assembly just so my programs wouldn’t be slow, this was unacceptable. So I grew up, and put my childish ways behind me, and Java too.

Fast forward a couple of years and computers a blazing away at multiple gigahertzes; ok now even Java is running fast. But what have the users done with Java in the mean time? Are there awesome transactional libraries, database connection models, super graphic integrations, imbedded scripting? No, in fact the company the run the Java standard has gone off and sued people who tried to integrate those things in. “Breaks compatibility” is the claim. Which is odd, since everyone who actually uses the language already knows it’s “write once; debug everywhere”. So now these people have gone off and developed systems that do support those requirements.

This led to the creation of the Domain Specific Language (DSL). Simply put, the environment requirements design the language to be used. Want to tie a rational database to a HTTP presentation layer? Ruby on Rails is tough to beat. How about a distributed web based transaction business model? C# is your man.

In today’s business model; everyone wants to be lean, with a short TTM. This leaves Java languishing at the bottom of the programming barrel. It’s not the fastest language, it’s not the smallest, it’s not the easiest, and it’s not even the most universal as was once proclaimed. To make it do anything of use; you have to license an array of products making it rather expensive to use.

Just like Cobol I’m sure there are millions of lines of Java out there running, and at some point in the future some IT guy will point out that they would like to turn such and such server off, but no one knows how the system works anymore, or how to upgrade the code; so they can’t. Maybe next year.

Dude, you got a job!

Yes; things worked out for the best (at least for me). I've got that fancy new job after all. A careful search of this site will reveal the name of the company. However to be fair, I already owned some of their stuff. So I'll still be able to void the warranty but now I'll have to document how I did it.