Hotels.com Sucks

I made a reservation for 2 nights at a Days Inn. I arrived to the hotel an hour after the reservation was made. And they haven't faxed the confirmation. I got on the phone with their sales for over a period of 1.5 hours and still, they weren't able to send a fax. Then their sales people started to put me on hold for 20 minutes 3 times and didn't get back to me. Hotels.com is one nasty, awful company. Finally some salesperson decided to think of giving me the customer care number. Customer care finally were able to send a fax. So here is the question. How many cheap labor in a customer service center in India it takes to send a fax. Hotels.com is a complete failure!

It is really nice to SpringSource dismantling and re-defining the enterprise Java scene, much better than the rubbish coming for the likes of Sun/JCP, IBM, Oracle, RedHat/JBoss and any other enterprisey Java monoliths. An article on Infoq

Free RoR security book

Very nice book on how to implement security in Ruby On Rails.

Get the book

Java is now a punching bag

So is Sun. I agree Sun has done a lot of bad disservice to Java. I personally dislike the JCP, a bunch of committees that produce terrible specs. Here is a good write-up of why people hate Java & Sun. RE: Java haters, gtfo

Ruby Support on App Engine

Make your voice heard. All you have to do is Star the ticket Please add ruby support

Rails web servers are on fire

Make a cluster with one of these
Ebb
Thin
And for the fornt end kicking Apache's ass Nginx
And to monitor what is going God watches over them

Wicket success story

A Year of Wicket

Inextricably linked

Very bright guys, one of my heroes
Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim takes Palestinian citizenship

Maybe monad

Failure is really nothing, how awesome is that!
The Maybe monad

How Wicket is different

A good explanation of how Wicket is different from most web frameworks Wicket Misconceptions

WS-Trashcan

No surprises here, the fading of WS-* and SOAP is picking up steam. Confessions are just coming in now, here is one from James Snell.

Those who are familiar with my history with IBM should know that I was once a *major* proponent of the WS-* approach. I was one of the original members of the IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit team, I wrote so many articles on the subject during my first year with IBM that I was able to pay a down payment on my house without touching a dime of savings or regular paycheck, and I was involved in most of the internal efforts to design and prototype nearly all of the WS-* specifications. However, over the last two years I haven’t written a single line of code that has anything to do with WS-*. The reason for this change is simple: when I was working on WS-*, I never once worked on an application that solved a real business need. Everything I wrote back then were demos. Now that I’m working for IBM’s WebAhead group, building and supporting applications that are being used by tens of thousands of my fellow IBMers, I haven’t come across a single use case where WS-* would be a suitable fit. In contrast, during that same period of time, I’ve implemented no fewer than 10 Atom Publishing Protocol implementations, have helped a number of IBM products implement Atom and Atompub support, published thousands of Atom feeds within the firewall, etc. In every application we’re working on, there is an obvious need to apply the fundamental principles of the REST architectural style. The applications I build today are fundamentally based on HTTP, XML, Atom, JSON and XHTML.

Why can developers seem slow

Developers who don't work as a team, i.e. each goes and does her/his thing, they end up writing the same piece of code over and over and over..... For example I saw once some Java date formatting code that is implemented 16 times in 16 classes, and the there is a DateUtil class that is is sort of empty!

A great ECM solution

Better than many COTS that cost almost One million dollars, way better!
Nuxeo

A good discussion on Developers vs. Designers

Designers vs. Developers, Declaration vs. Procedure

Apple should buy this company

This is what Apple TV should be

Crappy sites

I suggest writing sites that make Firefox sad using one of these Mozilla Site Evangelism Letters

Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis?

Alan Kay once said "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
Continue reading Software Is Hard at gamearchitect.net

Rails envy at its best

Spring-On-Rails

A font to rule them all

What a beautiful font to write code with. Inconsolata

F. Xavier Noria has posted a screenshot of a draft version of the font on his Mac OSX desktop.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This is a good day! To see one of the WS-* specs shutters its doors. I think 08 will prove the end of hyped-up concocted Webservices via SOA, ESB and WS-* brought to us by mega consultant who would don't learn from history. WS-Addressing Working Group Closes

Another gem to check out about the the near extinction of ESB type concepts, I can't wait to see the look on some of those sheep type consultants, rephrasing their sales mantras. You might have to read this article twice to believe what you're reading, best of all it is brought to us courtesy of IBM ESB-oriented architecture: The wrong approach to adopting SOA

Dangerous Knowledge

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan ... all » Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware

Pirates and counting part deux

Nash equilibrium

Pirates and counting

You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it?

Java the annoying

I shall call it the anemic language.
Look at some of the cool stuff coming from Ruby 1.9
http://www.davidflanagan.com/blog/2007_08.html#000131

Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Rational Clear Case must sieze to exist!

Distributed revision control with Mercurial

Wormhole

The Java language, and the hordes of C programmers who jumped on the Java band wagon cling and are attracted to bad practices like these:

Wormhole anti-pattern
DTO's
Jacob Hookom suggestion on how to avoid DTO's with JSF We've Grown too Fat for AJAX

Bryan O'Sullivan on Mercurial

The Mozilla organization is switching from CVS to Mercurial.

Linus on Git

And there are people still in the dark ages; still using Rational ClearCase.

A composeable open social network

Brad Fitzpatrick of Live Journal, memecache, and OpenID fame

what do you reckon

Sam Ruby's "long bets"

Pro java people are fighting back

In vain, is it?

Nice to see articles like this one

In a mainstream publication:
Eight Financial Reasons Why You Should Use Mac OS

Yes they are evil!

I wholeheartedly agree, and I wish that many developers out there stop writing helper classes. These things - the helpers just cause code to sprawl and get duplicated.
Are Helper Classes Evil?

SOA governance according to Dilbert

IF this THEN oops!

Sean McGrath writes....

What gives

Why do people insist on using terrible products in our software industry? I have used ClearCase and Subversion over several projects. What amazes me, is how reliable and versatile subversion is, but some manager who was told by his manager, who was suggested to by his golf buddy to use ClearCase.

Here, very nicely expressed, the research is already done for you. Just pick subversion for crying out loud. Clear Case vs Subversion

I hear static

Some developers especially in the Java world are so enamored by static methods. Is it a deficiency thinking in terms of object capability and responsibility or just the rush to get it things done. The system ends up with on amazing thousands of lines code class, that is everything and the kitchen sink. That is the God Object!

Just wondering

I wonder if the software engineers at Google running around the Googleplex trying to figure how to build SOA and or ESB based applications, to make Google and its developers more productive, solve interesting problems, while developing the next killer app.

I know somebody out there is going to say, well SOA and ESB are not there to solve every problem where data is stored in various repositories, with different owners or custodians. Then why is the deafening marketing drums are not sounding off the other effective architectures!

Java is the new Cobol or is it the new VB?

Finally! I am going to start writing on this blog.

I have been writing or learning to code in Java since JDK 1.1.4. But in the last 3 years I have really started to dislike it verbosity, the ease with which mediocre code and coders can rule the day. Other people also think Java does suck.

Fear of Commitment