Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I got my shiny new 24″ iMac yesterday, with 500gb hd, 4gb ram and a 2.8ghz core 2 duo processor.

As pretty much a Mac virgin, I’ve spent a lot of time the last 16 hours learning the ropes, and overall the impression is overwhelmingly positive, I can’t believe I didn’t try earlier!

Among the positives:

• Just so polished it is unbelievable compared to Windows or Linux, everything is snappy, doesn’t crash etc.
• So Unixy, I’ve got a nice little native bash console and all. I’ve always loved Unix- and Linux, but never been able to make a 100% plunge, since there’s always something missing in terms of applications. No longer the case. With a Darwin Unix kernel under the covers, the Unix:ness of Mac is not that strange.
• Hardware calibrated to perfection: I thought my top-end 24″ external screen I already had was good, but the iMac screen is calibrated to perfection for the computer (as you might expect since it’s built in). My old 24″ screen looks a bit cruddy compared to the iMac screen when hooked into the Mac, even though I spent 30 minutes calibrating it yesterday (but it’s still better than most external screens you’d find).

Just a short update for anyone who may be following this blog to see what is going on with Wicket RAD:

I am expecting to make a release probably sometime before next sunday (it could even be this weekend, if I have the time). This will be quite a major update compared to the previous version, and pretty close to the level of functionality that could potentially go into a “1.0″ release. It will however not be called “1.0″ quite yet, although it is stable and very well tested, as there may still be some refactoring and API changes coming in (to me, “1.0″ is a milestone where you bolt yourself down to having a certain level of API stability and backwards compatibility for future versions).

However, I will probably not make too much noise around the upcoming release outside of this blog just yet, as I plan to spend a lot of time up until August doing documentation - creating a website, improving Javadocs, creating reference manuals, quick start guides and samples. I believe it is essential for an open source project to be easy to get into for it to gain wider adoption.

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.

There is one thing that never stops striking me when I come across it: the vast gap between the value that good software developers/architects provide for their clients and employers, and the appreciation of that value shown by clients and employers.

It seems that most of the time, organizations are prepared to bite the bullet of paying quite handsomely for good software professionals, but if they can think of any way not to, they’d rather not: there seems to be some ingrained notion in many peoples heads that software development is somehow a menial and lowly task requiring little to no skill, that can be taught to anyone given a weeks “handover”.

I’ve seen this being expressed many times over: By having the highly paid, highly skilled people being divorced from hands-on development, instead being expected to provide “architecture” and “designs” for an army of lower paid, considerably lower skilled developers.
I’ve even seen cases where companies have given notice to their skilled developers, to then have them “teach” everything they know in a week to some offshore team that are actually web designers/html-jockeys!

As if knowing how to crank out a static web page with some text on it was the same thing as writing scalable software for integrating diverse information systems!

What seems utterly lost on people with this mindset is that skilled software professionals are highly paid for good reason: they have a scarce skillset that takes years and years to pick up and hone. Even the difference between an experienced, highly skilled developer, and that of a junior unskilled developer can be that the experienced developer can do things in no-time, that the junior developer would not be able to pull off given infinite time!

A good metaphor for this situation is that of trying to make a woman give birth in a month by impregnating 9 women - adding women to the equation won’t hasten the delivery, because the quantity of women is not the cause of the problem in the first place.
In raw economic terms, it makes more sense to pay a highly skilled person £600 a day to perform a task that takes him a week to finish, instead of paying 4 lowly skilled people £100 a day to perform a task that they will never be able to finish.

How this appreciation gap has come about, is beyond me, but I think it has to do with people thinking of software development as if it where conbeyor belt industrial production, whereas in reality, it is actually new product development - it is actually designing both the product, the conveyor belt, and the tools and processes around reproducing the product.

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!

I try to keep this blog somewhat politics free, but this is too big to leave alone: the swedish surveillance law I mentioned yesterday has now been passed in parliament.

It gives the government the right to snoop and listen in on, in real-time, on every e-mail sent, every web page visited, every phone call made and every SMS/text message sent. Always sifted through by new shiny supercomputers, sometimes read and listened by government bureaucrats. The thing is, the next time you make a phone call to Sweden, you won’t know for certain if there is a third person listening in on your conversation.

Privacy, protection of journalistic sources, privacy of any correspondance are now well and truly dead.

And what is more worrying is that the main “client” of this surveillance is not the intelligence community, it’s not the military, but officials of whatever government is currently in power. That means that effectively a sitting government can listen in on their political opponents to find dirt and secrets (they’ll probably get a gentle slap on the fingers if ever publicly caught doing so, but nothing more). That will surely have a positive effect for free and fair elections in the long run, or not.

This is a sad day, the country I was born in and grew up in has taken a turn for the worse. It has now chosen its company among the more totalitarian of countries.
George Orwell’s dystopian vision of “1984″ is now well and truly realised, and the capital of “Oceania” is Stockholm.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

It appears Swedish parliament has at least temporarily shelved a planned surveillance law, due to a massive campaign among Swedish bloggers.

The law would have formalized pervasive telephone and electronic surveillance of all telephone- and digital traffic moving across Swedish borders. In practice, broadband and phone providers would have had to install government snooping equipment in their infrastructure (at their cost!), which would then have been used to listen in on every phone call, read every text message and e-mail, and keep track of every website surfed to in Sweden. This traffic would then have been sifted through by super computers and government officials.

In other words, legislation that would have made Orwells “1984″ look like a carefree picnic in the park.

This seems to have been halted by a massive blog campaign, for now. It’s not inconceivable the legislation will come back shortly with some minor amendments, sneaked through parliament while no one is watching - Swedish MP’s have been attentively learning those kind of practices from their EU overlords.