All posts by rbowen

Catching up on my rants

Thursday or Friday on the news, there was a story about a budget bill. Apparently, this budget bill (the “omnibus” budget in the US congress) was released a whole week before they were to vote on it, so that people could read it and know what they were voting on.

And this is unusual.

Normally, they are released the night before. And they are thousands of pages long. So there’s no chance that anybody voting on it will have any idea what they are voting on. And that’s the normal, accepted, practice.

Doesn’t anybody but me think that’s wrong? Surely, that’s a miscarriage of our congressional representation, no matter how you look at it, if they are voting on stuff that they haven’t read?

The story went on to say that they were finding stuff in there (which they ordinarily would have approved blindly) giving zillions of dollars to personal projects in various folks’ hometown and home states. $100,000 for this hospital. $200,000 for park benches in that town. $800,000 to renovate a statue in some town square. It’s absolutely amazing.

For a while I’ve been viewing some stories like this in a sense of awe that we have a closed-source government. We’re not permitted to see how we are being government most of the time, at least until it’s too late. Granted, this is not a simple democracy – it’s much more complex and disfunctional than that. But it would at least be nice to see what’s going on before it’s too late.

Phrases like “crafted in closed door sessions in the dark of night” should not apply to how my tax dollars are being spent, or the next way I will be harrassed when I go on a business trip.

So, I applaud the folks that released this bill early so that people could actually read what they are voting on. I sincerely hope that they are not alarmed by people finding unsavory stuff in it, to the point that they don’t do this again. I only think that it doesn’t go far enough. I think that these things should be developed entirely openly, with cvs commits going to a public website and/or mailing list of interested persons, so that each addition and extra pork can be scrutinized while it is happening. Personal accountability for every wasted dollar would put a bit of a pinch on this kind of absurd spending on personal projects.

Which brought me to another point. Some of these things were worthy projects, and I’m sure that the folks that were to benefit from them are cringing that they are now likely to lose them. But should *my* tax dollars go to pay for a children’s museum in Potowski, Utah (or whatever)? No, *my* tax dollars should go to assist kids in Kentucky, not in Utah. That’s why we have state tax, right?

Anyways, I had other rants, but I need to go make breakfast.

File persimmons

I just got email on an Apache mailing list with a subject of “Permissions”. At the same time, I got email to a food mailing list with a subject of “Persimmons”

Always in the slow line …

it appears that i have a hidden talent for finding the slow line at the grocery store. i always seem to manage to pick the line in which the harmless-looking person with three items will hagle for 27 minutes over the 12 cent coupon, and have price checks on the other two items. i need to find a way to turn this skill to profit.

Geronimo demo

In the closing session at ApacheCon, there was a demo of the Geronimo project. They showed some web pages of a fictitious Pet Store web site. I didn’t get it at all. The folks giving the demo made no attempt to explain what Geronimo was, or why thse pet store pages should in any way be interesting or impressive.

Finally, this evening, I understood why it was impressive.

What amazes me is the attitude that these folks seem to have. It’s as though they assume that the entire world understands what they are doing, and any attempt to explain it is below their dignity.

So, for those of you who still don’t understand, here’s the basics.

J2EE is apparently a specification (or, perhaps, an API) for building multi-user Java server applications. There are multiple implementations of J2EE engines. Jboss is one of them. Geronimo is another.

The Pet Store application is a standard J2EE proof application. ie, if the Pet Store runs, then you have implemented J2EE correctly. It’s like a test suite that verifies function.

So, when they showed the Pet Store pages, this proved that their J2EE implementation was correct, and worked.

Now, why they could not take the 3 minutes to explain this to all of us is rather boggling to me, but seems to be pretty standard across the Java community. The Java folks, as a group, seem to assume that all the rest of the world has alphabet soup for every meal just like they do, and so we all know what J2EE, WSDP, JAX-RPC, and so on, all mean. Either that, or they consider folks who *don’t* understand these things to be unworthy of dignifying with notice. I’m unable to come up with a third explanation, and would welcome a response from a “Java person” who could shed some light on this for me.

It’s increasingly clear that my difficulty in understanding what all these Java projects do, is based on the fact that they are all 18 levels deep in abstraction, and it’s assumed that you already understand the first 17 layers.

However, I’m trying very hard to be open minded. I really want to undersatnd what every one of the Apache projects is. And if my quest leads to some better (more world-friendly) explanations of what the projects do, that would be great, too.

I have a simple benchmark for these sorts of things. Can I explain it to my mother? Now, understand, my mother is a *very* intelligent person. But she is not a programmer, not a techie, and has not been exposed to the jargon that we steep ourselves in every day. So if I can explain these things to my mother, that means that I’m using regular english, and I’m probably going to be understandable to most beginners in that particular technology.

Apachecon keysigning

I was too lazy to actually send out all the keys that I signed at the keysigning, but this evening I hacked up a script for sending them for me:

sigs.pl

Obviously, you’ll need 1) a file of the key IDs, 2) edit the regex that tests to see if you’ve signed the key, and 3) to edit the script to put YOUR name and email address in the email message.

Too many projects

So, once again, I’ve arrived at the point of having too many things going on at the same time, and so being incapable of getting anything done. I’m working on two books (one Apache, one fiction) and there are at least a half-dozen books that I need/want to read. I’m trying to get 3 different servers running the way that I need them to (and one of them seems obdurately determined not to cooperate). I really want to spend some time getting up to speed with the Perl DateTime project, which I played a small part in getting off of the ground, and have subsequently abandoned due to Apache stuff. And there are a few things that I want to get done on Apache – notably, several of the howtos are crap and need redone, and there are a number of other howtos that I want to write. Oh, yeah, and I have this great idea for a series of articles, of which I’ve written the first one.

Apparently I need to get my ToDo list back into RT and try to get priorities assigned. Oh, yeah, that would mean that I need to get that server operating again, and get RT installed. And then … um … there we go again.

Whitman, button-wood trees, and missing poems

My great grandmother used to tell a story of the crazy old man Walt Whitman, who walked around Camden, NJ. The kids, of whom she was one, would make fun of him, and throw things at him from the button-wood trees as he walked past.

When I was in college, I found a reference, in one of Whitman’s poems, to kids throwing things at him from the trees, and I thought it was pretty neat how my great grandmother’s story was corroborated by something in this great poet’s writings.

Well, this week my mom asked me what poem that was in, and I went looking for it. I’m sure it was somewhere in Leaves of Grass, but I can’t find it. I’ve done full text searches of the entire book, and I can’t find anything that comes close to matching my memory of the mention. It was only a single line in a poem. But I’m starting to think that I made it up, or that I imagined it.

Any Whitman scholars out there who can point me in the right direction?

Medicare and irritating politicians

The discussion about the medicare bill has gotten me very angry about politics. For those of you not following it, the discussion goes something like this.

Republicans just passed a medicare bill, and the Democrats don’t like this because, darn it, Medicare is a Democrat issue. They opposed the bill, the reasoning goes, not because it was something they disagreed with, but because Democrats, not Republicans, are supposed to pass bills like this.

Huh?

I find this utterly disgusting. The idea that there’s no thought for the best interests of the American people, but only interest in politics for the sake of politics, is revolting. Even more revolting is the way that people are talking along these lines as though this makes sense, and is the way that things should be.

I’m not even claiming that the bill is good or bad. Not knowing anything about Medicare, I really don’t have any basis for an opinion. I’m just saying that the attitudes about the bill are utterly disgusting. To put party alliance above all other considerations, even the value of the bill itself, is disgraceful. To not even be aware that it is disgraceful is also disgraceful.

Getting back into the swing

I’m finding it very hard to get back into the swing of things after ApacheCon. Being at ApacheCon, and, in particular, helping make the conference happen, I felt that I was part of something that really matters. Additionally, being part of the ASF makes me feel that I’m part of something that matters – some that makes a really significant difference in the world as a whole.

So, now I’m back at work, doing things that have very little significance outside of the moment. Someone couldn’t check their email. Someone couldn’t get to their network file share. Someone needed to install a Microsoft security patch. *yawn*

I mean, it pays the bills and all

So I need to persuade some local company that there’s a real value in employing an open source developer, to work on things that matter. Hey, it worked for Ticket Master …