Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

With the effects of IR35 (and contract terminations in the contract market around the globe looming due to the increasing fall in economic conditions) now is the time for us to show the world just how much we care.

It’s just not right. Hundreds of contractors in your very own country are living at or just below the six-figure income level! Atrocious! And, as if that weren’t bad enough, they will be deprived of pay for several days – possibly whole weeks – as a result of Christmas.

But now you can help!

For about five hundred pounds a day – that’s less than the cost of a large screen projection TV – you can help a contractor remain economically viable during his time of need.

Five hundred pounds a day may not seem like a lot of money to you, but to a contractor it could mean the difference between a holiday spent golfing in Florida or a Mediterranean cruise.

For you, five hundred pounds is nothing more than a months rent or mortgage payments. But to a contractor, five hundred pounds a day will almost replace his pay.

Your commitment of five hundred pounds a day will enable a contractor to buy that home entertainment centre, trade in the year-old Ferrari for a  new TVR, or enjoy a weekend in Rio.

“HOW WILL I KNOW I’M HELPING?” Mr Leroy, Cambs.

Each month, you will receive a complete financial report on the contractor you sponsor. Detailed information about his stocks, bonds, real estate, and other investment holdings will be mailed to your home.

You’ll also get information on how he plans to invest any spare cash he doesn’t manage to spend. Plus upon signing up for this program, you will receive a photo of the contractor. Put the photo on your refrigerator to remind you of other peoples’ suffering.

“HOW WILL HE KNOW I’M HELPING?” Miss Bunn, Suffolk

Your contractor will be told that he has a SPECIAL FRIEND who just wants to help in a time of need. Although the contractor won’t know your name, he will be able to make collect calls to your home via a special operator just in case additional funds are needed for unexpected expenses.

Simply fill out the form below. YES, I want to help!

I would like to sponsor a contractor over Christmas. My preference is checked
below:

Note:

* Higher cost

** Much higher cost

*** Please call our free phone number to ask for the cost of a specific team

(Sorry, does not include secretaries).

Please charge the account listed below, £500 per day for a contractor for the next 3 months.

Please send me a picture of the contractor I have sponsored, along with my very own corporate logo baseball cap to wear proudly on my head.

[ ] MasterCard   [ ] Visa    [ ] American Express    [ ] Diner’s Club

Your Name: __________________________

Telephone Number: __________________________

Card Number: __________________________

Exp.Date: _________

Signature: __________________________

Mail completed form to any major contract agency or call 0800-TOOMUCH now to enroll by phone. (Children under 18 must have parental approval.)

Note: Sponsors are not permitted to contact the contractor they have sponsored, either in person or by other means including, but not limited to, telephone calls, letters, e-mail, or third parties.

Keep in mind that the contractor you have sponsored will be much too busy enjoying his free time, thanks to your generous donations.

Contributions are not tax-deductible

The cost for the Federal Reserve and US Government for the recent bailout mania has already gone past 4 trillion dollars according to CNBC – the 700 billion TARP programme is just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s more than the cost of World War II, inflation adjusted.

To take the WW2 analogy a bit further – we might have deflation in the short term, but we as the good Jim Rogers pointed out, it will probably end in an inflationary holocaust.

Just found this gem by Stefan Fussenegger about how to apply the visitor pattern to make Ajax-enabled components really easy to deal with.

One of the challenges in Wicket is dealing with interdependent Components and their state on Ajax updates, the pattern behind the link takes all this pain away.

I also hear a similar approach is to be used officially in the upcoming 1.4 or 1.5 release of Wicket.

Paul Graham wrote an excellent post about doing startups in a bad economy. Definitely worth reading.

But I thought I’d add my own two cents to the subject, considering I have one startup in the works, and additionally two or three “micro startup”/”micro ISV” type projects in the works:

• Personal risk management: creating alternate cashflows, less dependence on a single client or job, and creating the potential of freeing yourself from the 9-5 is a great concept when people are loosing their jobs left and right. This is certainly a big factor in my own efforts.
• Less competition: Yes, sales might/will be harder to come by in a recession, customers may be more reluctant to go with small, new players unless they have compelling arguments, but the space you are targeting might not have 20 or 30 other competitors as would be the case in a “hot” economy.
• Lower marketing cost: In a hot economy advertisement, online and offline, and other PR costs are considerably higher. The ad industry is the first one to go down in a recession, so your marketing dollars will go a lot further now.
• The right time for certain type of breakthrough products: In a hot economy a lot of organizations will spend money like drunken sailors in a mexican whore house, they simply don’t care, it’s not the middle/upper managements money anyway. But when money is tight, if you can prove significant guaranteed cost- and time savings, your product will sell itself.
• “Necessity is the mother of all invention”: If you are working within financial constraints – not having an endless supply of VC money, having to create positive cashflow within a known timeframe, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll build a profitable business and how lean and mean your organization will learn to be. Living large when money is no problem is simple, but the steel bath and trials of a recession will teach you the value of money, and how to put it to work in the best way.

Of course, all of these points assume that the business you want to build will be lean, efficient, profitable and sustainable, as opposed to a large moneypit that mostly exists for the benefit of throwing grand parties at the expence of the VC’s limited partner investors, but maybe that goes without saying..

I have criticized the Spring Framework before, and it is quite clear to me that the flagship parts of the Spring set of projects is past it – Spring IOC in my book has been superceded by Google Guice, Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow where never even close to being good, and Spring AOP etc are poor ripoffs of better things.

One thing in particular that rubs me the wrong way about Spring is the IOC framework – it was great. In 2004. These days it is mostly an annoyance.
Why? Consider you have several JAR files, further consider they have Spring XML configs in them. Not only is XML configuration annoying because you are effectively tying together your app in an environment where the compiler won’t catch your mistakes, you also have a further problem:
Your application will depend on everything, everywhere!

Because Springs IOC container creates all defined beans, it will also require you to have all their dependencies and configurations at runtime, even if you are only interested in a single managed bean. Dependency hell!

I had this happen to me as recently as this week – all of a sudden I was missing an Oracle driver, only problem is, the application I am working on doesn’t have an Oracle database, nor does it have any dependencies that need one!

Despite this, I actually did find one area where I still have use for Spring – the framework has a number of useful utilities, for instance, the JmsTemplate and “Message Driven POJO” utilities are really useful for JMS messaging based work. Although I have to admit: given a choice, I configure them programmatically and steer clear of the Spring XML crapola.