Author Archives: Karl

Struts, Boland, EJBs, Complexity, Successes, and Bridges

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Rafe points out a growing chorus is critquing Struts.

Marc Fleury, creator of JBoss, posts a self serving, but very insightful Why I Love EJBs. It is a must read for server side Java developers.

Dave Winer hasn’t smoked for six months! Congratulations!

Borland being bought by Microsoft is just…. ironic! Wonder if it will happen?

Mike posts about the desktop software market and wonders is it dying?. I’d have to answer no. What has died (settled down more like it) is the productivity software market. That market was the area of so much interest/competition/innovation during the 80s and early 90s.

During the mid to late 90s software development turned it’s attention to the internet. A grand switch of attention occured on the server side. The desktop stagnated.

Now that attention is turning itself back to the desktop looking to utilize the lessons learned and the bridges built to exploit the benefits of connectivity, sharing, communication, integration, and convenience.

New ways of organizing the complexity out of the desktop/internet experience are are coming on the scene almost daily. Napster? Kazaa? Maybe an RSS Aggregator? Radio or AmphetaDesk perhaps? Google on the desktop will happen. Believe it. Weblogging as a metaphor for organizing your desktop? Yep. That too. Think of categorization and date/time instead of folder/office cabinet. Check out the Microsoft MyLifeBits Project. These are the kind of desktop innovations that could only occur after attention was spent on the Internet.

I’d argue that iPhoto heralds a new kind of app. It’s more then a simple photo manager. It integrates a multimedia external device to your PC. It enables you easily share your efforts. That’s a new class of software that won’t settle down for a long time. Think iPod, cellphone and PDA. How will these ultimately impact your desktop is unforseen right now. But they will.

One long running behind the scenes market not dominated is developer tools. It’s still wide open. But if MS buys Borland…. man oh man…. that would be interesting. I wonder if that will do for IDEs what it did when they purchased FoxPro and took over the desktop database market?

Speaking of bridges Shelley is building them at her weblog lately.

Of Resignations, Responsibilities, Law and Lott

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Let me lay down a few links for you.

CNN: Trent Lott won’t step down. The Bush administration did a good job of distancing itself from him. Here’s the bottom line… if Bush/Rove wanted Lott to go, he’d be on the first Chevy Suburban out of town. All that’s come so far is brilliant political sidestepping. Keep that in mind the next time you blindly vote for a political party across the board – it’s your/our fault he’s in office in the first place.

dangerousmeta: Garret argues for zero tolerance and points to the latest unemployment rates. It’s damning. That’s what it is.

The Cardinal steps down. That’s not enough when this is as systematic as it appears. I’m surprised at how quiet the other Christian bloggers have been. Yes, statistically, the occurence of these crimes against humanity are similar to the population at large – but that is no excuse for the coverup. No excuse. No excuse. No excuse! It makes me sick, gets me angry, and depresses me all at the same time when I think about it.

In the cases of Law and Lott you have organizations that should have taken responsibility and done the right thing. Instead you have protection of the organization superceeding protection of those that are served by it.

In other, related news….

NYTimes: Kissinger Pulls Out of 9/11 Commision.

Oliver Willis: Whitman expected to resign from her EPA post. She was set up to fail IMHO. You can argue what you may about her, but she does inspire passion. Hopefully we will see her in the public service realm arena again.

No bonuses for jobless, hungry

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Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.

Then imagine that this country’s king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.

Read the rest of this editorial at Yahoo! via therablog.

Bumper Mentality

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This is harsh. …

Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such assholes? Surely it’s no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Dem-ocratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the Lincoln Navigator. Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher’s new book, High and Mighty, the connection between the two isn’t a coincidence. Unlike any other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation’s most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be.

According to market research conducted by the country’s leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be “insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others.”

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch! Read the rest of Stephanie Mencimer’s review of Keith Bradsher’s “High and Mighty: SUVs”.

Post-9/11 priorities: Stephen Covey

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Minneapolis, Minnesota: Since 9/11 my significant other has found more dissonance between his job and his career goals so he decided to quit his job. Unfortunately that dissonance remains and he seems stuck at determining what he wants to do with his life. What suggestions do you have for moving on? In other words the intent to change is high but his actions seem weak. He focuses more on his house repair than on exploring a new career.

Stephen Covey: The ideal career can say “yes” to the following three questions: Am I good at it? Do I really like it? Does the world need it to the point that I can get paid for it? This requires a lot of self-knowledge, and also the study of opportunities to discern the real needs and problems in those opportunities. Then proactively, you go to that opportunity as a prepared solution to their problem instead of being just another problem.

Comment from Stephen Covey: The main reason most people don’t have the job they want is because they don’t do this homework, and they’re nothing but a problem rather than a solution to problems.

Comment from Stephen Covey: Arise to your responsibility and make it happen.

Read the rest in this missed Stephen Covey chat transcript at USAToday.

Stephen Covey is chatting now at USAToday on Job satisfaction.

Irony And The Truth About Computing

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Shelley posts on the irony of a summit on Social Software that has as attendies mostly “made up almost exclusively of white, educated, upper-middle or upper class, 30-50 year old males.”

Dave Rogers posts in her comments a “truth” I believe in computing – “I think history shows that technology has never changed _what_ people do, it only changes the _how_. Technology usually compresses processes in time, or expands them in space, often both at the same time. Most of the time we confuse the “how” with the “what,” and think something novel has happened.”

That last phrase though is a little off. It *is* novel when the time is shorted to accomplish a task, or distances are compressed, or messages further distributed. The “How” is important 🙂 But the essential truth he points to here I know to be very true.