If not now, when ?

From my favourite Linux online publication lwn.net a great quote by editor Jon Corbet in “The end of the road for the Nexus One”. This will get a classic.

“Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It’s the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming.”

Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, talks about the long way of exposing the damage corruption is bringing to our world. An inspiring aura of true and utter sincerity flows through his talk.

N900 as retro gaming box.

It’s always quite fun to watch the Bambini soccer cups of our youngest son. Most of the teams are swirling around the ball like bees ;-)

But there are usually one or two exceptional teams which have grasped the concept of passing the ball and using the space. Quite fun to watch.

Let’s see if I can finally arrive in the modern times of the mobile web. Kind of hard to type on such a tiny keyboard but definitly fun.

I’m just trying to travel from Hamburg to Karlsruhe which is a major challenge in these days of snow weather everywhere in Germany. Two hours delay and counting. But a nice slowdown in a too busy work schedule ;-)

Decided to get back to some Debian related work: posted an ITP for the vdr epgsearch plugin. The autotimer function of vdradmin which I use extensively is reaaaally slowing down the web interface. Fortunately more recent vdradmin versions are deprecating the autotimer function and recommend the epgsearch plugin for automatic timers. So instead of just compiling the plugin for myself I thought I should better do it properly and include it in Debian. I hope to get it done during the week.

BTW happy new year to everyone who just changed years according to their calendar. For me I’m sure it’ll get an interesting ride this year.

Late evening commuting (pre-launch time at ComBOTS) is quite
interesting during these soccer world cup times right now. Australians
accompanied by 1,5m plastic kangaroos, groups of Italians,
Spanish and Germans wildly debating and celebrating in a mixture of
English, German and Spanish, flocks of young Germans stylishly made up
with german colours for after-soccer parties, people wrapped in flags
everywhere, …. Actually the soccer influence in commuter space is far
nicer than expected and the party still goes on.

Rewatched “Dead Poets Society” recently, another favourite of mine. Two quotes although pretty commonplace can’t be mentioned too often ;-)

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” Walden, Henry David Thoreau

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

The road not taken, Robert Frost

Was baffled today when Tobias Geiger – a colleague at ComBOTS – casually cited from “Absolute Giganten”. The movie seems to be even more popular than I thought ;-)

BTW Happy Birthday, Tobias – Da geht einiges.

Now that RoR provided the valve to let the steam out of the Java web application pot we are seeing similar phenomena in the Java Enterprise pot.

WS-* is an easy target in this respect. I hardly know a (Java) developer who mastered the WS arena. Not because providing web services wouldn’t be useful but because it’s just so complex, confusing and certainly _not_ fun.

In my experience there’s one magical turning point for enterprise architecture: the deadline. I’ve seen more than one project throwing corporate strategy overboard when faced with the decision: delay the deadline or use working code now but without the full might of the corporate architecture. And I’m not talking about flushing the entire design of an application. It was more along the line: company policy: “you’ve got to use J2EE application server xyz”; state at the deadline: “we’ve got a working version on this servlet container but deployment on J2EE container xyz shows a couple of obscure anomalies.”; solution: “take the working version in production now, we’ll abide the company policy later.”; of course it was never deployed on the company J2EE container.

Right now the backlash is developer-driven but before too long it’ll be customer-driven.