Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

The “Dead parrot” sketch somehow reminds me of EJB’s:

“‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies!”

..yet people still think EJB’s are somehow relevant, just because a massive committee is trying to push it, backed by a couple of companies who thrive on selling overcomplicated, overengineered “solutions” to any poor bastard with more money than sense.

..considering the current turmoil in the world markets, the apt video above might serve as a useful informational piece on how things really work in the financial markets..

Refactoring is a much talked about subject, unfortunately in orthodox projects it rarely happens - people use the excuse of time pressures to not do it.

Regardless of how you do your project, such a decision is a mistake. On my current project, we undertook a major refactoring effort last week to fix a few issues we had been aware of for about a month, but not done anything about. The application was already “functionaly complete”, and the only work left to do on it officially is bug fixes and change requests. We might have spent a total of two people and three calendar days on the effort, but it was worth it, we will probably save the time spent in just the next couple of weeks from having made deployment simpler and life easier for the guys installing the software on customer systems, and for ourselves in fixing any bugs that come through or change requests that are made.

Effectively, we shrunk our codebase from about 32000 lines of code to around 27000 lines of code in three days. That is almost 16% less code, doing the same job, but more dependably!

What did we do, you might ask yourself? Well, we did the mistake of introducing a layer of EJB3 Session beans in our application, which introduced all manner of code complexity, code bloat and deployment complexity.
The lesson learned, EJB3 Session Beans are a waste of space and pretty much useless for any purpose you could think of (for anything you could think of, there are better solutions out there) just as it’s 2.1, 2.0 and 1.1 predecessors. EJB3 Session Beans may be prettier than older SSB’s, but an old adage still comes to mind: no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it will still be a pig.
The whole EJB Session Bean concept is flawed to its core and is best avoided.

EJB3 Stateless Session Beans where unceremoniously swapped out for a simpler Open Session In View pattern implemented through an extension of Wickets RequestCycle object. Job done, and life is so much simpler and more enjoyable.

Eelco Hillenius brought someone elses claims of “Open source being communism” to my attention. As Eelco, I don’t agree with that assertion.

A hallmark of efficient markets is that profits and profit margins dwindle down to almost zero as a result of transparent market information and hypercompetition. In other words, when a market is extremely efficient, profits are hard to come by - there is nothing “communist” whatsoever about profit margins being eroded by new types of competition, it’s called “progress” and “competition”.

To make a parallell to the financial markets: in todays world, it is hard for the average investor to beat the market indices when playing publicly traded stock markets. Why? Because the markets are extremely efficient, no one player has any edge in terms of information over other players, the only way to “win” is by having more resources for research and sharper brains in the house.
On the other hand, for many years Venture Capitalists and Private Equity firms have been able to make astronomic profits, because the markets for VC and private equity capital have been inefficient, however that is something that is changing, and as a consequence VC’s and Private Equity firms are seeing their profits dwindle, and having to find new ways of working.

The same applies to the software market with the introduction of Open Source software: profit margins are going down for proprietary vendors. Why? A more effective market, and new forms of competition.
There is absolutely nothing that tells us that selling proprietary software licenses is the only way to make money of software, nor should we believe that proprietary software licensing is the be all, end all business model for software.

The simple fact is Open Source software is not killing the software market, it is merely changing the market and its rules in a similar way that airplanes changed the travel industry. Proprietary vendors have no birthright to stick to the same business model forever, they have to adapt their business models to changing circumstances, adapt or die.

I went to my bank this morning to explore how large a mortgage I could get from them (to know my potential budget), and what they require in terms of documentation. In preparation, I had compiled a comprehensive folder of documentation, with client contracts, personal and business bank statements dating back two years, company accounts, breakdowns of income and spending based on said bank statements, balance sheets of assets and liabilities for both me as a person, and my company (of which I own 100%).
You could say that the documentation gave a picture that is beyond transparent as glas, for both my financial past, present and future. Anyone who would have taken a look at the documentation would probably have gotten a better view of my financial situation than what is possible to extrapolate from the information available from large publicly traded companies.

Problem was, the lady I met was completely uninterested in looking at my documentation, all she wanted was to try to fit me into her model of how to measure someones finances, a model someone who is not in salaried employment, and who gains most of his income through dividends and other investments does not fit particularly well into. It also transpires that despite all of my documentation, I cannot possibly provide them with the exact documentation they want. Why? Because they want to see my income from P60 forms (yearly salary statements) and nothing else. Considering I take a very small salary, I wouldn’t be able to loan enough money for a used bicycle off of them.
What she was saying was that I would better be able to “prove” my income according to their models if I decided to pay 50% more tax and lower my net income by over 20%.

“Brain dead” is just the beginning of it. If she would have just taken an interest in looking at the ample documentation I could show her, and been able to use her better judgement, both me and the bank would have been better served. Instead she tried to push square pegs into round holes.

I don’t think she realized her own stupidity, as she asked me to call her back when I could provide her with the exact documentation and wanted to go through with a full application. Yeah, I might call her. In the year 2525 when hell freezes over.

What is my point, apart from letting off some steam, with this story? Well, it is my regular rant about how credit checking and scoring is completely outdated - it is more or less based on the notion of salaried and lifelong employment, not on entrepreneurial work in a fluid marketplace. 1960 called, it wants its technology and methods back. Reasonably, a person who creates his own luck and consistently makes good money doing so should be a safer bet than someone whose skills are growing stale and outdated, and who is relying on having a lifelong job in a market where no such thing exists.. Not so in the world of personal credit and mortgages.
I stand by earlier prediction that credit checking and scoring will get a massive overhaul in the coming years.
As for my personal circumstances, I might just go for a self-certification mortgage should I opt to buy something, the interest rates are slightly higher (maybe 0.2-0.4%), but it will save me the headache of dealing with the aforementioned stupidity..

I have to admit, I’m a bit hard on salespeople: if I perceive them as too pushy, I will cut them quicker than they can say “lost commission”. If I perceive them as uninterested in helping me, I’m not going to give them any second chances. I simply loathe people that are either completely uninterested in helping others, or try to take advantage of others at any cost.

Therein lies the problem: most salespeople tend to fall into one of the two categories - either they are being pushy, hot on getting their commission, or they just don’t seem to care and are very unhelpful even down to actually taking your money if you actually do hand it over. I think the problem is that salespeople are too focused on what they want: either their commission, or just have a relaxing day with no customers hassling them.

I tend to think that salespeople should really be neither. What they really should try to be is a “consultant” to the customer - guide the customer in the area where they may have a knowledge advantage, and try to work out in collaboration with the customer what they might want and at what sort of price. That type of salesperson understands that their interests can actually be aligned with the client, they don’t need to pull one over them, instead they are best served by finding the client a good deal that will make them happy (and potentially come back for more at a later stage, or at least recommend their friends). With the risk of using a cliche that I try to avoid like the plague: They have to understand what a win-win situation is all about, and not just talk about “win-win” as some sort of closing technique to used against the customer.

Good sales, buying, and the essence of an exchange in a free market is that both parties perceive themselves as better off after an exchange - and that means helping each other to achieve each others goals, not trying to pull a fast one.

Dumbass of the week: National Geographic claims in a (later corrected with a note) video that global warming is threatening polar bears in Finland.

Just one slight problem with the story - Finland is a bloody cold country, but the only place you’ll find a polar bear in Finland is the zoo. There are no indigenous polar bears in Finland!
I guess someone was just too quick to publish a juicy story about a current mass-hysteria..

“Never let facts get in the way of a good story”.

2007 is officially over, and it’s time to lift your eyes and look towards the horizon. I don’t want to be any worse than anyone else making predictions, so here are my predictions for the moust groundbreaking trends in technology and business to watch in 2008:

IP Telephony goes beyond cheap phone calls
The convergence between telephony and IT has so far been mostly about cheap and free phone calls, the natural evolution of new technology and new possibilities is to mimic the old, so it is to be expected. But just as the Internet has ended up being about more than e-commerce, advertising and e-mails, so will IP telephony: lower entry barriers and commoditized infrastructure means that tomorrows winners will create new services unheard of before and enabled by new technology. Technology and features previously only available to telecoms and large corporations will be simplified and put in the hands of SMB’s and individuals - people will be able to create their own “call plans” and call destinations to suit their lifestyle, and location based services will merge with voice services. Interesting times indeed.

Virtualization takes a step to the next level
The potential of virtualization has thus far only been scratched on the surface, VMWare, Xen, Amazon EC2 et al open up interesting possibilities, but so far it has mostly been limited to manually being able to duplicate pre-existing “virtual machines” dedicated for specific purposes.
I predict that the next step will be the obsolesence of traditional web- and server hosting: utility computing such as Amazon’s EC2 will not only be about only paying for the machine hours you use, but also accurately being able to scale infrastructure up and down transparently and automatically as traffic and load differ. Organizations will be able to pay not only for the resources they use, but also for exactly the computing resources they need and not any more or less, this will enable finance managers to sleep easy over the use of their budgets, and IT managers to sleep easy knowing a sudden spike won’t kill their applications.

Social Networking becomes distributed
Let’s face it, Facebook and all the other social networking sites work in a way that is very “un-internet like”, they are big central repositories - if you are on one network and your friend is on another, there is no way to connect the two of you. For the promise of social networking sites to really be fulfilled, social networking sites need to become interoperable and distributed - your online identity should be transparent and portable in the same way that your e-mail address can be e-mailed from any domain, or your phone number can be called from any telephone network.

Credit checks get an overhaul and reputation becomes a factor
The current credit crunch has thrown a light at a few shortcomings of the current credit- and credit checking system, it is simply too easy to manipulate if you know how to do it, and people with perfectly good ability to pay can be penalized for frivolous and nonsensical reasons. Maybe credit checking agencies will start taking a more holistic approach, not only looking into traditional sources of financial information, but also starting to measure more intangible areas that concern a persons overall “reputation”. There are several start-ups trying to deal with online reputation, but I think this area is most valuable to credit checking agencies, and they stand best positioned to make inroads into the area - some leading reputation start-ups may be bought out by credit agencies late into the game, but watch this space for credit agencies starting to care more about your character and slightly less about whom you’ve got loans with.

The man on the street will start watching the watchers
Three out of four trends mentioned above are also potential privacy threats, as we become more and more monitored in all aspects of our professional, private and social lives, there are bound to be some considerable privacy scares - the UK has already seen it’s fair share of Government screw-ups in this area in the last half of 2007. As these screw-ups become more and more common, and larger and larger in scale from both government and private organizations, people will start to care more about their privacy and personal information.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a “terror balance” between people and those who monitor us.
People will be monitored by various organizations, and start-ups will pop up that allow people to monitor in more detail how they in turn are monitored and how their personal information is used - and object in cases where their information is faulty, objectionable or they do not consent to how they are monitored and their information is used.