Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I think it is common knowledge that Windows Vista is the most useless pile of shit that Microsoft has crammed out of its nether regions since Windows ME.

But for every day I am forced to use it (at work on my laptop), it dawns on me even more:

Last October, Vista automagically deleted everything in my home folder that was created prior to a specific date. I did not delete anything myself, the files just vanished from the face of my hard drive.

In the last few days I have come across a new problem: I have a bunch of folder in my users home folder that are locked to read-only. No amount of changing permissions changes this. I can’t edit the files, I can’t delete the folders, I can’t add to the folders. The folders are simply locked and completely uneditable.

Tonight when I get home, I’ll take my chances with Ubuntu’s disk trashing bug and install it. Nothing could possibly be more crappy than Vista, hence I will risk burning my HD rather than continue using Vista.

I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone, but I recently updated the software to 2.0, so I could download apps from the app store, and I found the one application to rule them all, the one application that has persuaded me to eventually get an iPhone once they become easier to come by:

NetNewsWire, and RSS reader. Why is it so good? Well, it is available for Mac as well (and there is a compatible, but not as good Windows client), and it does what I have always been looking for: it syncs the read status of my feed across devices over the internet. In other words, if I read a feed on my iPod or Mac (or even their web client), it will turn up as read in the other device.
Seamless syncing of feeds, perfect!

I have already found the app useful on an iPod touch alone (combined with that of my Mac at home), syncing over Wifi.

But for an RSS junkie like me, being able to read my feeds anytime, anywhere is brilliant. Enough for me to get an iPhone very soon.

Wow! Having dual 24″ screens with a powerful Mac running VMWare is way, way cool!

I can run Linux or Windows in fullscreen mode on one of the screens and jump between the screens seamlessly, which in itself is powerful (need Windows or Linux for something? Use it in it’s own screen, and it’s like having two computers in one)!

For me personally, this implies I won’t pollute my Mac with a bunch of development applications I need - for instance, for my MySQL needs, I will simply have a Linux VMWare image that I bot up that has MySQL installed on it, and for development, I will be calling that from my Mac.

Brilliant! Virtualization on the desktop is no longer nice in theory but unworkable in practice, it’s now working, and working perfectly.

Picked up a nugget on TheServerSide, which I thought was worthy of highlighting on my blog:

Any serious manager will always go for standard solutions, such as JEE, simply because it is less risk.

Now, to play the devil’s advocate for a second: WHY is it less risk?
4-6 years ago, everyone went crazy for EJB’s because it was “a standard and hence less risk”. Now most people who adopted them are in a right mess: they can’t upgrade their JVM’s or app servers because it is too big a risk, they can’t improve or extend their codebase because it is too big a risk since EJB’s are almost untestable (and even if they where testable, good luck retro-fitting fitting tests on container-based code years after the fact).
On the other hand, anyone who went with writing in mostly plain Java have been able to continue on their codebase and update JVM’s & app servers to their hearts content.

Just stating something is “less risk” because it is a standard doesn’t make it so. Sometimes you actually have to think about what the actual, real risks are.

SproutCore, a JavaScript framework for building thick, browser based clientside applications is being bandied around by many as the Next Big Thing(tm), much due to Apple’s adoption for mobileme.com, a desktop like suite of webapps for Mac owners. The demos look impressive, I have to concede that, but..

The next big thing? I don’t think so, more like a step backwards in time. Look at this code example:

<%= label_view :my_label, :tag => 'h1', :bind => { :value => 'HelloWorld.appController.greeting' } %>

Yuck! Doesn’t that look a whole lot like old school JSP’s with scriptlets, prior to even any taglibs being around?

If someone thinks programming in Javascript and jumping back in time to 1999 in terms of developer productivity is a good idea, well.. Then I’m not going to comment on that by saying anything more than: “not a great idea”.

If someone can provide compact, nice, clean Java- and/or .Net API’s that encapsulate all of the Javascript horror, then maybe. But as it stands now, I don’t think any amount of bells and whistles justify making webapps slower to develop, harder to test and more complex.

Interesting piece from Om Malik’s broadband blog:

But when it came to persistent storage, he pointed out, they started talking about it as soon as they had a beta, putting startups and other firms planning such a service on notice that Amazon would enter that market.

“We wanted to make sure people had a look at our roadmap,” Vogels said. “Our goal is to be very respectful and recognize the value of the ecosystem.”

It seems Amazon recognizes the value of the eco-system being built around their web services - they would rather be the keystone in a large, healthy business eco-system, than alone control a small eco-system that is withering away. Good news for startups.

Ever since I got my current laptop, I have had endless frustration with Windows Vista. I tried switching to Linux for a while, but when I found a few concerns about it cooking the harddrive on laptops, I duly uninstalled it (a problem that has still not been addressed by anything else but fingerpointing by the Linux community, btw).

At around about that time, 8 months ago, I started eyeing Mac’s, but I was unhappy about the fact that Java 6 was not fully supported. Now that has been addressed officially, and for Java 7, it seems the open source community is taking over the torch to ensure a future roadmap. Problem solved!

So, today, after weeks of back-and-fro, I finally took the plunge and ordered a 24″ iMac, with 2.8ghz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 4gb of ram and 500gb hard drive! I’m quite looking forward to using an OS that for the most part should actually work, rather than be in the way.

I’m not particularly happy about the range that Apple has: I think an iMac “without the screen” would be in order (I already have a 24″ screen, but I guess I’ll have to live with using dual 24″ screens, sob..). The Macbook Pro’s have woefully substandard low-res screens for that price, and the Macbook Air doesn’t have any storage or ram to speak of. But all in all, I felt the 24″ iMac was the best fit for me, with a future more powerful Macbook Air being earmarked for an “on-the-road” computer.

I think in the grand scheme of things, my choice to go for a Mac after over a decade of Windows PC’s was more a case of Windows Vista being so terrible that I was driven away, rather than me being seduced by the shininess of Apple-gadgets. The reason for not going for Linux was that after the above mentioned harddrive escapades, it’s been proven to me, in my opinion that Linux still isn’t mature enough for widespread consumer adoption, even if it has taken steps forward in leaps and bounds in recent years (I’d prefer it over Windows anyday).
But most of all, this is less about Apple’s brilliance, and more about just the sheer awfulness of Windows Vista.

Admittedly, I’m a bit late to the game when it comes to learning hands-on about Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), but I’m glad I’ve put in the time during the last few evenings.

There are a few niggly bits to get over, but when it all comes down to it, they are actually helpful: there is no persistent storage for your server instances in the cloud, which means you will loose any files or databases not backed up if your instance crashes. But I’ve actually found this useful, it has really made me think about how to best do frequent backups to the S3 storage, how to automate backups and restores if instances go down, and actually test that all this work.
How many people can actually say that they have put their backup- and restore strategies to the test? I think most organizations think about them, pay lipservice to it and have something in place, but it is rarely properly tested, with the consequence that from time to time they fail.

One thing that is easily addressable annoys me though - all Java API’s for Amazons Web Services are extremely poor, there are a few out there, but they are all subpar, including Amazons own. I guess this is down to Amazon preferring that people roll their own and simply use the RESTful http API’s that they provide, which are actually quite good.

These little annoyances got me started in writing my own Java API on top of S3, that will encapsulate the (small) complexity of the REST API’s in something that looks more akin to a regular “File system” interface for Java, but one that still gives you meaningfull Exceptions when things go wrong. I might go on writing some tools for management of EC2 instances too, and roll it up into a bundle and release it as open source, we’ll see about that (I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, with trying to make an imminent release of Wicket RAD as well).

Overall, I’m starting to really like the concept of not having to pre-emptively know how much storage I need, or how many/how powerful servers I need, I’ll just increase capacity as I go along!

According to the Register, the Firefox team is claiming that Firefox 3RC2 is almost bug free and ready for primetime.

So why does it crash the instance I start it, with no possible recouse about 75% of the time? The only possible way to get it to run is to restart the computer, and try again.

That doesn’t seem very “bug free” to me, it seems rather half-baked.

In my previous post, I made the guess/assertion that Twitters scaling problems stem from the high likelihood that it is architected with web technologies, when it is fundamentally a messaging system. Seems I was right - Twitter themselves are acknowledging this on their dev site:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.