Why software sucks

Scott Berkun, another essayist on software-related topics, blogged about the interesting topic Why software sucks..

I liked the following quote as an example of the mismatch between developers (aka creators) and customers:

Creator: I love the power of Unix/AJAX/C#/whatever.
Customer: I want to finish my work and go play outside.

Scott forgot to let the creator mention REST and SOA :-)

g'nite for today.

Simplicity and "Zero Training"

On Lesscode I found a cool link to explain simplicity (and a few other interesting things).

You like Joel? I do!

Call me opportunistic, but I really admire Joel Spolskys' writing skills (whereas I do not really admire some of his Fog-Creek products :-). Pankaj Kumar also seems to like Joel's writing and has written a cool script which finds the most-admired stuff from Joel's site.

Found the link here.

Creative use of Post-IT notes

Grady-the-Great Booch came up with a nice link:
capstrat.com: articles: Elvis Spotted in the Conference Room

Searching blogs

Google Blogsearch allows you to search blogs - very handy if you're looking for new topics or want to improve your subsription-list.

RMH: From activist to observer

Richard Monson-Haefel, famous and well-known java author (on EJB and other enterprise-java stuff), activist and committer to various JSR's decided to perform a rather dramatic career change - which he explains in Richard Monson-Haefel's Blog.

He joined Burton-Group as a consultant - and will refrain from his formerly active role in the java community, e.g. Wish you luck, Richard. Loved your books.

Another Fault: 12'' Hummer...

I always thought those oversized vehicles called Hummer to be rather strangely oversized - now a company introduced a Hummernotebook... With its much-too-small 12'' display that does not suit the average hummer user, I suppose... at least I wasn't appealed (but I admit not to own a hummer...)

Btw - will there be Cayenne- or Q7-Notebooks in the near future, with even more stylish looks? Or a Maybach version, probably with a wooden case...

Fashion Faux Pas?

The little techno-freak buried in my fragile self was instantly stirred up a few days ago, when famous Apple began selling their newest baby, the iPod Nano.
Quite a few guys (e.g. Jaqcui Cheng and Clint Ecker) have covered that geeky thing in detail - I liked the photo of the nano buried up to its display in a jeans' coin pocket.

My personal minister-of-finance declared the nano to be machina-non-grata until I clean up my desk, finish last years' tax declaration and other stuff one cannot do without proper equipment. Will somebody please support me with arguments :-)

Aah - the faux pas? White headphone with black iPod.

Drools rulez?

Ok - I'm maybe the last in the universe to blog about Drools, the open source java business rule framework. I will not give another tutorial - but might help you avoid some traps :-)

• If you encounter "unsupported major.minor version 49.0", you might have included too many dependencies in your IDE. That error is known to occur when mixing 1.4 and 1.5 compiled classes.
• For Paul Brown's tutorial you only need a single drools jar in your dependencies - and that's drools-all-2.0.jar. Beware of including too many others, especially the annotation stuff :-(
  
• The Drools 2.1 maven build files are not out-of-the-box compatible with maven 1.1 - you have to manually remove the -tag from the build files.

Who the hell came up with the idea of formulating rules in XML style?
Otherwise drools is following a pretty cool concept - namely giving us kind'a framework for business logic. Alternatives exist, you may look at Jess, Ilog or YasuTech or others.

Acquisition Day: eBay and Oracle both spent a few pennies...

Due to Scobleizer its acquisition day today:

1. Oracle acquires Siebel Systems - which brings two megalomachos into the same boat :-)
2. Ebay acquires Skype - which opens new horizons to a new generations of auctioneering gadgets.

All in all both companies spent lousy 10 billion dollar - which makes the rumor-deal of Deutsche Post with British logistics company Exel of 5 billion Euro look like a second-class deal. And I thought THAT one a big deal.

Exchange Mail and Outlook Web Access (OWA)

I recently switched my complete email infrastructure to a commercial provider -
why the hack have I waited so long? Having a centrally administered mailserver is worth a good nights' sleep - which I wasted more than once to administer my own private server landscape.

Now - having Outlook 2003 installed and operational on my machines I could turn around and continue dreaming - but there is the slight annoyance of sometimes working behind a corporate firewall within one of my projects. The otherwise dynamic duo of Outlook and my mail-provider is completely agnostic of this situation - they simply pretend it does not exist.

After a few wasted Euros in phone support and a few more wasted hours in trying dozens of different varieties of configuration, one smart guy came up with the idea of usind Internet-Explorer as the browser for Outlook-Web-Access. At first that idea sounded pretty awful to me as a firefox addict - but turned out to be brilliant: IE enables a so called Premium client for accessing remote exchange postboxes - and strongly resembles the real outlook.

Smart thing, Redmond! Thanx.

Ray Ozzie's latest "child" - a little disappointing

Ray Ozzie announced the launch of Onfolio, aka project31. As I really fancy Ray's fantastic invention called groove, I gave Onfolio a try - and was, mildly said, a little disappointed.

The feature-set includes the ability to capture (aka bookmark or store-locally) web pages, rss feeds and emails. The functions are pretty well integrated into IE and Firefox, but I could not really detect added value:

• I usually keep annotations to pages, mails and feeds in topic-oriented mindmaps, which can also store text snippets, images and the like.
• Onfolio does not transparently support sharing of captured stuff - I have to manually move things around my two laptops.

So - after de-installing I did'nt really miss anything... apart from the fact that I was really annoyed by several broken links in their docs, the un-ability to display the images of already-captured websites and sometimes poor performance.

Maybe I should have waited until version 3 :-;

Word Butler - One Word A Day

For those who like to improve their English, one word per day...
While slurping a fantastic tom-yum soup in our favorite thai restaurant in Cologne I overheard a conversation at another table, a young (and pretty loud!) guy mumbling about that fantastic site providing free and easy vocabulary training by sending you an email every day with a short vocab quiz.

I tried it out - and I'm impressed. Thanx Paul :-)

btw: Did you know what fazed means? Or namby-pamby?

Adrian "the Aspect" Coyler joins Interface21

In his blog, Adrian Coyler announces his resign from the IBM AspectJ team and his move towards the post of chief scientist at Interface21, the company around Rod Johnson and the ultra-hip Spring framework.

Whow - let's expect for a fruitful cooperation of those gurus...