Daniel Allen says nice things about our book, in the Linux Journal

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.

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.

I’ve been reading “Chasing Shadows” by Shelley Bowen Hatfield. It’s the *other* Apache book by a Bowen. It’s about the Apaches and Yaquis along the USA-Mexico border between 1876 and 1911.

It’s pretty fascinating. With the Mexican and USA governments trying to “pacify” and “suppress” the Indian Menace, it seems clear, with 125 years hindsight, that there’s no good guys in this story. The Indian people are forced off of their land, often into starvation. They respond by turning to raids and crime to feed their families, and the governments attack them and slaughter them by their thousands. For a long time, there was a per-scalp bounty for any indian scalp. That kind of brutality is hard for me to imagine, particularly given that it happened so very recently. And, yes, I consider 125 years to be very recent. I know, we’ve done more horrible things a lot more recently.

What’s particularly interesting is how a few thousand Apaches outwitted tens of thousands of federal troops for 30 years, and how those troops persisted in thinking of themselves as superior beings. It’s amazing to me how folks can block inconvenient things like facts from their minds when they are determined to believe a particular thing.

Anyways, I highly recommend this book.

Buy it on Amazon.com

Everybody hates the Alexis Park Resort. But I’m really not quite sure why. So far, my only complaints with it are 1) the ethernet in my room didn’t work (but, seriously, can’t I survive a few hours a day without network?) and 2) breakfast is a little overpriced.

It’s certainly possible that if I did some comparison shopping with other hotels, I’d find that I was paying a little too much, but I like being right there with the conference.

Presumably, some folks don’t like the location, but, as for me, I find it to be adequately far away from many of the reasons that I dislike Las Vegas in the first place. ie, The Strip.

So, in the hopes of receiving useful feedback that will be informative in our choices for next year, I believe that I’m going to have to embark on a quest to collect some of the reasons that people revile the Alexis Park so much. As for myself, I liked my room, I like the folks that work there, and I like the location. Perhaps, as Bill would say, it’s a third world thing. I expect beds to keep me off of the floor at night, and I have very little further expectation about hotel rooms. I guess I tend to think that some folks are just too darned hard to please, and so when they complain that the bar ran out of a particular kind of beer, or that the swimming pool wasn’t warm enough, my reaction is inclined to be “waah waah poor baby” rather than anything more feeling.

Just a touch of clarification regarding my link to the /dev/clue blog.

The only reason I linked to it was that it was mentioned in Chris Pirillo’s keynote, as an example of how the Feedster search engine works. Feedster looks pretty cool, and it was an interesting demo of it.

As to whether anybody asked for clarification of your remarks, well, given that 1) everyone that I have talk to agrees that the conference went really well and 2) I’ve heard a great deal of constructive criticism already, and don’t really have time for people spewing bile. I’m a little unclear why a remark that you use the word “hate” 100 times in a day lends any additional credence to your opinions. However, I’m glad to report that I’m perfectly clam about it. I just didn’t consider your criticism worth pursuing. Thanks for clarifying it on your own time.

At the moment, I’m in the air on the way to Memphis. I had hoped to leave a little earlier, and now I really wish that I had done so, because the guy next to me is snoring like a water buffalo. But the guy at the ticket counter in Las Vegas said that there was a good chance I would not make my flight out of Detroit, if I went that way, and then I’d be overnight in Detroit, which is hardly my idea of fun.

So here I am.

Yesterday, with the conference over, and nothing pressing to do, I found myself actually relaxed for the first time in longer than I can remember. I had no deadlines, no obligations, and no particular plans.

I went up to Comdex, in the hopes of getting on the wireless network and talking with a person or to. I had come up with a possible ending to the novel that I’m working on with CJD, and wanted to tell him my idea. I’m not entirely sure how he felt about it, because the network went down after I told him. But I’ve written out the closing chapter as I see it, and we’ll see what happens.

After that, I took the shuttle downtown and met Dean and Owen for lunch at Planet Hollywood, in one or other of the casinos. I think it was in Caesars. There are so many of them, and they all have a lot in common, but each seems to have their own thing that makes it stand out. The glass flowers at the Bellagio were absolutely amazing.

We walked around the strip for an hour or two – I’m not actually sure how long. At one point, we were out in front of Caesars, and hapened to get there just as one of the fountain concerts started. That, too, was magnificent, with the music and the fountains syncrhonized, and the water shooting 50 feet into the air.

Turns out Las Vegas isn’t *all* gambling and naked girls.

But, geez, it’s very clear where the bulk of the money comes from in that city. There were hundreds of people standing on the street handing out cards and flyers for strippers and dancers. Which is apparently a euphimism for whore, as far as I can tell. With that many folks out there with those cards, even if they are only earning minimum wage, there must be just an enormous amount of money being spent on the flesh business.

What was particularly sad was the elderly women engaged in the hawking. It must be profoundly humiliating for them to have to earn their living in this business. Most of these folks appeared to be immigrants of one nationality of another, but primarily south and central americans.

Anyways, that was Thursday. Didn’t accomplish anything in particular, but I enjoyed my time with Dean and Owen. I don’t think I ever asked how old Owen is – I’m guessing about 2? Anyway, he’s pretty cute.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned anything about Wednesday night. The planners and the various folks that worked the conference went to Quark’s for dinner, at the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. This was indeed an experience. One of the beverages was the “Warp Core Breach”, which was a large glass bowl, served with a chunk of dry ice in the bottom, so that it bubbled and boiled while it sat there.

My mod_perl handlers talk went ok. Apparently when I was updating my slides, I duplicated a lot of information, which sucked A LOT. I think the talk could go a lot better. I need to revise the talk a few times and do some test run-throughs before I do this one again.

So that I don’t get behind, I’ll go ahead and write about Wednesday morning at ApacheCon.

OK, I admit, I skipped ApacheCon this morning. However, being a firm believer that conferences are primarily about personal interaction, I don’t feel bad about this. I spent the morning with Legobuff, going geocaching. We found 8, and had one no-find. And I crossed the 100 mark. Woohoo!

The only real disappointment was that I wanted to hear Doc Searl’s talk, and we didn’t get back in time for that. Perhaps I’ll buy a CD of it, or see if I can find a transcript somewhere. His talks – at least the few that I’ve been to – are very interesting and insightful.

The signatures from the key signing are trickling in. Looks like it was indeed a big success. Many thanks to Sander Temme for doing this.