Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Why Tobacco only? Cars are are more harmful

Consumers are suing Tobacco companies again
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6140857&ft=1&f=1001

Why the hell we do not sue Car manufacturers which (mis)lead us to believe that bigger cars are better and that commuting every day to work is a cool thing?

If we just try to estimate harmful consequences of our addiction to [bigger] cars:

- pollution caused by cars and gasoline production causes us to get ill;

- roads take away valuable land out of ecosystem to which we belong;

- commute eats out lives and separates us from our children (and inhaling heavily polluted air in the street is not beneficial to our health);

- general population now accepts Global Warming as a fact and cars are big contributor to that very dangerous trend;

I think we all need to join California’s lawsuit http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20450337-661,00.html

Friday, September 15, 2006

VIsta to create 50000 jobs, huh?

This article claims that MS Vista will create 50K jobs and will be boon for European economy. Hmm, it means that Vista is LESS usable than previous OS from MS and require more folks to keepo it running and rewrite applications for this generation of OS.
I would not call it progress, however it is a great way to keep folks busy...

Sunday, June 11, 2006

What usability? We do not need that stinking usability!

With so many people talking about UI usability there many examples of sites which are clearly designed NOT for usability but for page views maximization. Lets look at the weather.com for example and navigate to the 10 days forecast page ( snipped is shown). As we can see they do not show precipitation, wind speed, high temperatures and low temperatures simultaneously in the area B, which is clearly can accommodate them all comfortably, but instead the site requires us to click on the control A three more times to see all the weather information.


Note, that changing the control A selection causes entire page to refresh, and vuala! The site has thrown three times more advertisements on us.


Good luck if you try to suggest them to improve usability!

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Proliferation of Meaningless pages

I am so sick of the made up meaningless pages that comes back as the result of mu search. I am talking about pages that simply compile list of crap in the hope user will click on them. I wish search engines have a way to report those pages and they would not be ranked high in the results. Right now the situation is desperate: those pages are optimized for search engines and as we click on the links they ranking gets higher and higher despite the fact they do not provide any meaningful information whatsoever.

global trends

Looking at the global trends I find it funny and sad simultaneously: information and knowledge are the only things which obey the concept and principles of infinite abundance, infinite utilization and recombination. YET people fight to limit that with patents, licenses etc.

But naturally finite resources: oil, top soil, drinkable water, minerals are used by humans in wasteful without any limitations or thoughts.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Java Artifact Repository live

I have been annoyed by lack of comprehensive artifact repository in Java community. Perl has CPAN, Python has PyPI, Ruby has Gems and to this moment Java did not have something that would resemble CPAN as Wikipedia put it.

And therefore I wrote my version of CJAR, which is based on Maven repository structure but is not Maven specific and has some additional services available:

- search artifacts by name or content: class names etc.;

- quickly getting information about artifacts – license, bytecode version, availability of javadocs and sources;

- creation of Ant or Maven build file based on selected artifacts;

- jardiff that allows comparing different versions of Jars and see precisely what has changed at class and package levels: new and removed classes, methods, and method signatures;


I am working for SourceLabs and the company supports the service and hosts it on its servers at:

http://area51.sourcelabs.com/cjar/app


It is just a beginning – many things need to be done:

  • repository needs to be filled with artifacts;

  • POM files needs to be cleaned;

  • missed information needs to be put into POMs and MANIFEST files;

  • java artifacts needs to be signed by they authors or trusted persons;

  • more information should be available about artifacts;

Please visit the CJAR site and leave feedback, together we can fill the gap in Java infrastructure!

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I happily replaced Mac G4 with GNU-Linux desktops

Got rid of Mac G4 in favor of Linux desktop machines and I am happy. Sure that Mac has sexy look, but it is 3 times slower than my AMD64 3.2G. I typically have tons of applications working locally: ORACLE database and application server, or Weblogic plus two or three projects open in my IDE (IntelliJ-IDEA by the way), plus I start building project(s) by Ant in command window - this works just fine on Linux but Mac simply crawls...

And I do NOT like Mac's UI. Two most annoying things for me:

- there is no simple way to navigate menu from keyboard, I like to see underscored letters and being able to press ALT-something;

- windows resizing by bottom-right corner;

So yes, Mac is definitely way better than Windows, but for what I am doing GNU-Linux is much more suitable.


Another thing that makes two desktops worthwhile: when I have to work at home and need to get things installed on my home machine I immediately spot any inconveniences, documentation cumbersomeness, etc. So, while it add inconveniences to me, it simultaneously improves quality and portability of what I am doing. I wish developers of WebSphere, Weblogic, and OC4J were required to reinstall their products every week at least, then we might see some improvements in the way those monstrosities operate :)

Friday, March 17, 2006

software marketing needs to be changed

Most boring and stupid marketing message in the software industry:

we help you to lower costs.

I do not want to lower cost – I want to increase my profit. I am more than willing to spend money if it allows me to earn more money, or if it makes my life easier somehow.

It is law of business: to earn the money one has to spend money.