Jim's Ramblings

In a little less than 2 months, my younger brother, Michael, will be 44 years old. That, in and of itself is enough to make you feel old. But that's not the watershed issue with this.

It's just than that means that for almost 34 years, Michael has been in and out of institutions, hospitals, group homes and our homes.

You see, Michael is Matthew

Despite this surgery, and a host of others, as well as numerous medications, most of them experimental, Michael is still held hostage by his own brain.

And so in July, when we celebrate with him his birthday, and he blows out his candles, he'll not be the only one making a wish. If only it was that easy.

Very cool beans. PlanetApache is now updated with a whole new look, feel and infrastructure. It uses the amazingly cool Venus codebase written in Python.

The new site has loads of improvements and, as part of the people.apache.org family, should have a much better uptime.

We are getting closer and closer to ApacheCon EU 2009, which is scheduled for 23-27 March 2009, Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam.

This year I have a number of sessions I'm presenting. In addition to the Opening Plenary and the "Chew and Chat" talk about ASF Sponsorship, I'm also doing a session on Advanced Topics in Apache HTTP Server 2.2. This will mostly be a detailed overview of the cool useful features in Apache 2.2, with a look and how they are likely to be enhanced in Apache 2.4.

What is also really exciting is that I am also co-training with Rich Bowen in the Apache HTTP Server - Nuts to Bolts training class on Monday and Tuesday. The format will be similar to the training in NOLA last year, with the 1st day being a deep dive into the fundamentals of the web server, with myself, and on Tuesday Rich's famous "cookbook" examples of hints and guides on how to make Apache do everything, even give you a pony!

You should really, really attend. This conference promises to be one of our best, and I look forward to seeing you all there!

As most people who know me know, I am a big fan and user of scripting languages. There are just so many places where they not only make sense, but are the only logical solution to the problem. My recent preferences have been Python and Ruby and PHP and Perl, and they've been enough. At least, up until now.

At SpringSource, I and my team been working quite busily on software products, and one area which tied all the pieces together was a front-end installer and various post-installation scripts that provide additional capability. Now historically we would use Perl for these scripts, but an additional requirement was on the product: assume a bottom-line dependency of a Java JVM. This meant that Perl was out.

Now of course, I could still do this in Python or Ruby (the languages) but that the implementations would need to be the Java versions (Jython and JRuby, respectively). So I could still script in one of these languages, I would simply compile them and ship the class files for the scripts (jar-ed up, of course). So there was no real problem. I did some prelim testing and was somewhat disturbed to fine that Jython was somewhat old but happy to find that JRuby was quite up to date and, from my testing, very, very robust.

But SpringSource had recently acquired G2One, and so, in the logical interests of eating our own dogfood, decided to take a look at Groovy.

I'm glad I did.

My first mistake, unfortunately, was looking at it as a "version" of Ruby. Although there are numerous similarities, there are also enough differences that programming Groovy requires you to, at a very low level, keep your Java thinking-caps on. For example, you need to concern yourself more over actions that would cause an Exception in Groovy, whereas Ruby would just "do the right thing". In this way, I discovered my 2nd mistake: ignoring the fact that Groovy wants to maintain a Java-like consistency. In other words, I was looking at Groovy from the standpoint of a "traditional" script monkey, and not from that of a Java-monkey would wanted an extremely robust scripting language that removed like about 98% of the normal pain in programming in Java. When I got my head around that, then foo = new Fee() made more logical sense than foo = Fee.new() for example.

So I've added new language to my scripting belt. And, I'll be honest here, it's made me enjoy Java programming more than ever.

I've made my ApacheCon US 2008 slides available at:

• http://people.apache.org/~jim/presos/ACUS08/

There will also be available on Slideshare shortly as well.

On Sunday, I'll be leaving to attend ApacheCon US 2008, which is located in New Orleans. I'm really looking forward to the conference, which I'll also be presenting at as well. In fact, this is one of the busier ApacheCons, having 4 presentations (the State Of The Feather, Apache Nuts to Bolts (which I'm co-presenting with Bill Rowe and Rich Bowen), Sponsoring the ASF and Advanced Reverse Proxy in Apache 2.2). Plus, it looks like a lot of meetings, interviews and other brikabrak going on as well, so it promises to be a pretty full week.

As always, I'm also looking forward to seeing and spending time with so many friends, people who I don't get the opportunity to see nearly often enough. As much as I really enjoy the technical exchange, I also like the deep social aspects of ApacheCon as well. We know how to code, but we also know how to kick back and enjoy ourselves.

Are you going to ApacheCon? You should!

I was so busy traveling and pushing out 2.2.10 that I didn't even blog about it.

Well, better late than never: Apache HTTP Server 2.2.10 is released... enjoy.

If this election indicates anything, it's that people will vote for whoever they want to, no matter what and no matter how much rationalization is required.

Ignore inconvenient facts; explain away issues; describe as "immaterial" or "besides the point" anything that would indicate that your choice isn't the best one.

In other words, make your choice and then see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

So Wall Street will get a bailout of $700 Billion. It must be nice knowing that no matter how badly you screw up, you can count on your friends to completely cover you.

Of course, that is a simplification and the deal as currently defined will almost for sure not pass. The major sticking point seems to be that even though the companies are in woeful financial state, and the gov't need to step in with $700B of taxpayers money to shore things up, the executives of those companies will walk away with tens-of-millions (at least) of compensation and... wait for it... BONUSES! I have no idea in what Alice-In-Wonderland universe these things happen, when an executive expects and receives bonuses for basically being a greedy, selfish tool, but I obviously don't understand The Financial Market.

Of course, we are told, that the bailout can't add limits or restrictions for these types of things, because it would prevent executives from taking the bailouts to "save" their companies. If there is any clearer indication that the executives' priorities are screwed up, I don't know what it is. "Screw the company! I want what's coming to ME!"

And what is even worse is that the main people in the gov't behind this bailout have no idea why we feel that this is somehow wrong...

Lots of people like Spring. The only trouble is that a lot of people also don't like Java. They would love to be able to use Spring but don't want to make the leap from their favorite scripting language.

Well good news, especially for us Python fans. The latest version of Spring Python is now available. The real cool thing about this is that Spring Python is now an official Spring Extension with this latest release. Spring Extensions are a way of extending and enhancing Spring and Spring-related addons with the official help of SpringSource. It's sort of like a mini-Incubator for SpringSource.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to diving into Spring Python. Looks like fun!

Valleywag reports that Monty has decided to leave Sun (and MySQL)...

Wow... and yet, not totally unexpected, imo.

Before I even start, I want to note a coupla things. First of all, I have never really owned a Windows system. Not to say I haven't bought them, but mostly for my sons and never for myself. I do run WinXP, but under VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Secondly, I have performed tons of upgrades of systems, from FreeBSD to OS X, but the upgrade from XP to Vista was a new one for me. And finally, I've built quite a few systems (physically) from the ground up. Sometimes it's even fun.

But even with all that, the recent full upgrade of Jon's computer from a Pentium 4/WinXP system to a new Quad/Vista system was, to put it nicely, painful. Much more so, IMO, than it should have been...

Due to both my interests, as well as projects at work, I go thru phases of using various languages. Lately, it's been a C, PHP and Java cycle. It's amazing that of the 3, Java is the only one that most people consider "enterprise worthy".

For PHP, I think it's mostly due to its association of being "just" a server-side language. People forget that you can write standalone PHP applications, which is a darn shame. I'm not saying that PHP is better suited for such tasks than Python or Ruby, but it is pretty rare to see PHP apps that aren't assumed to be running in a web environment. Be that as it may, as anyone even remotely familiar with various social networking sites (and others) know, PHP is certainly more than capable of being a cornerstone of an enterprise worthy implementation.

Now C is very different. Most people don't write applications (web applications, that is) in C, and yet most of the entire service infrastructure (OS, various protocol daemons, utilities, etc...) is programmed in C. So how can C not be enterprise worthy, if it provides the underlying foundation for enterprise apps? And yet people deride C, as if it is somehow quaint and yet also stupid to "dirty your hands" with C, simply because C requires the programmer to have a better understanding of how hardware is actually implemented and how software and hardware interacts. I've met many "professional" programmers who have no idea what "native word size" or "indirect addressing" means, and yet optimal and efficient programming depends on these, and other, constructs so much. Instead, the glory is saved for precious "programming patterns", which have their place, to be sure, but are not the be-all and end-all.

And so we come to Java. IMO, there is nothing within the actual language itself which makes Java enterprise worthy. Instead, it is the vast supporting infrastructure which does so, as well as the results of years and years of external forces "convincing" people that Java is the (only) way to go. Unless you think otherwise, consider how crucial RoR was to bringing Ruby to the forefront. Now imagine if Ruby (or Python or whatever) had the same sort of supporting infrastructure that Java enjoys, and Java had none; in that case, Java would be considered the "toy", the "fringe player" as far as enterprise apps.

IMO, enterprise worthiness is more a measure of the talent of the programmers, developers and architects, and not the language itself.

It's no real surprise that the US economy is spiraling down the crapper. Prices for everything has gone up and wages have dropped and/or stagnated. The biggest increase (and impact both to the economy as well as to each individual person) has been in the cost of energy. With gasoline prices above $4 a gallon, I don't know of anyone who isn't significantly changing their driving habits.

But for the most part, there is one "habit" that is very very hard to change, even when you really want to. It's the drive back and forth to work. Mass transit in the vast majority of the areas around the US is a joke and although people would love to use it, it's not a viable alternative. You would think that companies and businesses would be smart, realize the pain and seriously look at such obvious alternatives as compressed work weeks or telecommuting (for the benefit of the employees, the economy and the global climate).

But no.

Except for some rare exceptions, the management of most companies agree that it will result in significant savings and benefits, but still refuse to offer the option. After all, we all know how devious and untrustworthy employees are. You need the watchful and ethical eyes of management on them at all times, to ensure that they do their jobs. I hope readers appreciate the sarcasm.

What really got me going about this topic was an articles in today's Baltimore Sun about this very issue. It appears that one county government actually has a flexible workweek option available for employees (including compressed), but they *actively discourage people from using it*! A spokesman states, "We're comfortable where we are." Yeah, I bet you are, but what about the employees? What a joke.

Make no mistake, of course. There are some positions where telecommuting (my favorite alternative) does not make sense. But if you are in front of a computer terminal for most of the day, either as programmer, developer, designer, administrator, accountant, etc... then there is really no valid reason why you cannot do a lot of your work from home. Heck, people bring work home all the time, to "catch up."

When will the powers that be get smart enough to realize that the days of 9-5, Monday-Friday, in the office are on their way out. We, as a society, can no longer afford such old-fashioned concepts.

Disclosure: I have been lucky enough to be able to have telecommuted for several years now... My past and present employer see the obvious value and benefits of the arrangement. Of course, one never knows what the future will bring...

Some interesting news/links:

• GPL vs BSD
• How NOT to do REST
• Protocol Buffers
• Apache HTTP Server 2.2.9