More Videos of Julian

I've finished a bunch of videos of Julian. View them all here.
These are still pretty old - I'm working on the newer ones...

The Borg that is YouTube

I finally have some video content of my own creation, so I'm assimilating myself.

We're starting to take a lot of video of Julian, so I'm succumbing to the Borg that is YouTube. Why not, it is a free way to distribute these huge video files to family and friends.

Here is the first one I've uploaded as an experiment (it is very low quality and over 6 months old):

Micro$oft pulls a SCO move

Out of ideas, the Redmond Giant has resorted to stealing ideas from maligned SCO.

Let's listen in on a high-level strategy meeting on location in Redmond, WA, USA....

SteveB: "OK, we are getting creamed by all this damned high-quality open-source free software."

BillG: "Why don't we give another try a making at better product, Steve?"

SteveB: "Huh? What does that mean? Bill, you're so out of touch with my company...
So anyway, we're turning to you, our attorneys, to solve the problem for us. What have you got?"

AttorneyA: "Well, sir, we could try to bomb their offices with smelt-flavored pudding. That would slow them down from making and marketing the good software."

SteveB: "No, that won't work you idiot - they don't have offices."

AttorneyB: "How about sending them all free copies of Windows Vista and asking real nice to stop making us look bad?"

Tech VP: "That won't work either - nobody can afford the hardware to actually run Vista with any useful features enabled. Except our development team, that is."

SteveB: "C'mon numbskulls! If you don't come up with a strategy, you're all fired!"

AttorneyC: "Um, Mr. B, sir? I have an idea. What about we 'pull a SCO' on the world and launch a FUD campaign. We could use the empty threat of litigation for 'stealing' our technology. And the best part is, SCO showed that we don't even have to come up with real details - just the innuendo about infringement is enough to make the world doubt those evil good-software makers."

SteveB: "Hmm, that just might work. Yes,... I like it! Let's see now, how many 'violations' can we get away with?"

AttorneyA: "I don't think it really matters, sir. Make it in the hundreds."

Tech VP: "We can write software to generate a random number to use for the campaign. I'll get our offshore team working on that right away, sir!"

SteveB: "How long will it take, Mr. TechVP?"

TechVP: "Initial estimate is... 265 man-months for development, sir. As usual, testing will be allocated 0.25 monkey-days."

SteveB: "OK, well we'd better get some funding for that effort. I'll talk to SalesVP about forcing another enterprise-wide upgrade on Mega-Customer. No, better yet, I'll just have him use the auto-disabling feature of Vista to force all the grandmothers to buy the new Office version. Yeah, we don't want to piss-off Mega-Customer any more this year, and how gives a rat's behind about the consumers anyway...
OK, men - we have a plan - let's execute!"

AttorneyB: "Sir, didn't SCO fail miserably with this strategy and end up taking the throne from us as the most hated company in the tech world? "

SteveB: "Who's SCO? And besides, Nobody hates us..."

And thus the FUD campagin begins and the ever-so-predictable reactions...

Java Closures

Here we go again with language syntax changes...but this time is it different?

Brian Goetz recently posted an article on IBM DeveloperWorks about closures in Java. It is a well-written description of both the theory behind closures and the two proposals that are currently being considered for including them in Java.

I applaud the article, but as for the issue, I don't really like either proposal very much. BGGA is just more of the increasing complexity of syntax that, IMNSHO, is going to kill Java. On the other hand CICE does not appear to go far enough in simplifying the syntax. It seems that what is keeping the syntax so ugly is the damn static typing, having to declare the types of all your variables; if we could get away from that we'd have lots simpler syntax options (and we'd not be in Java anymore :-)

I guess I'll root for CICE, since it is fairly obvious that one of thee two is going to be The One. However, I was delighted to see this at the end of the article, since it is precisely what I have been harping on for so long in relation to the Parameterized Types decision:

"The issue being debated is not whether closures are a good idea -- because they clearly are -- but whether the benefits of retrofitting the Java language with closures are worth the costs."

That quote notwithstanding, does anyone really believe this proposal won't be railroaded through now that the camel's nose is under the tent?

Get off iTunes' back!

Steve Jobs responded to critics of iTunes/iPod DRM, and he's right.

Steve Jobs has written an open letter to the critics who bemoan the DRM system of iTunes, and I have to say he is spot on with his reasoning and presentation. It is non-confrontational and follows a clear line of thought, detailing the history ("How did we get here?") as well as what possible future courses he sees. I've seen lots of people with apparently nothing better to do than criticize Apple for the DRM, completely ignoring these facts:

• Without agreeing to strong DRM Apple would never have gotten the record lables (the real bad guys in this situation) to license their music to be sold online. In other words, the alternative was to have no commercial, legal solution to meet the market demand.
• Under iTunes' system the consumer is given a lot more freedom to do things with the music than the labels originally demanded. In other words, Apple did a pretty good job of negotiating to slant the power more towards consumers than the labels would like. For example,it is trivial to burn DRMed music to a CD and then rip it back again, if you really want un-protected files from your music, and only the most audiophile of listeners can hear the quality difference.
• The only alternatives are either illegal and, even by my own liberal view of rights ownership, immoral, or just as proprietary as iTunes. Sony and Micro$oft, the only significant competitors, have the same restrictions as iTunes.

The critics, for the most part, conveniently avoid these facts, none of which are disputable. They just want something to complain about.

I am by no means a "Mac person" (don't own one and have barely ever used one), but I applaud Jobs' response for its level-headedness, honesty, and direct approach. I am really tired of hearing those who just want to gripe and want the world without paying for it criticizing the company and system that has revolutionized the music industry. The digital distribution revolution is even more important than the CD "revolution" was, because it is not just a better quality package of the same old model - this is completely new and empowers consumers in ways that were only possible via illegal and immoral behavior before. We have Apple to thank for sparking that and for remaining aggressive and the market leader. As Jobs' letter says, people and governments should spend their energies trying to change the archaic, stone-age attitudes of the record labels who insist on treating their customers as criminals while not slowing down the real criminals at all.

Funny Quote

Micro$oft is the blunt of many a joke these days, but this one made me chuckle out loud:

"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge

[found here - a useful page in its own right]

Why not Casual Monday?

American workforce culture is already too focused on getting to the weekend - Casual Friday makes it worse.

So I'm in the second week of working at yet another new job. It is a pretty good sized company (though nothing like the behemoth that was HSBC), and as is the norm they observe a "business casual" dress policy, including "casual Fridays " where jeans are acceptable. It got me thinking this morning as I donned my most comfortable denim: why is it always Friday that companies (the ones that are still enslaved by the idea that dressing in khaki's and golf shirts 4 days out of the week somehow makes people better workers) designate for "casual" attire? Why not Mondays?

I mean, it is already the sad state of the typical American worker mentality that so many see Friday as a kind of Elysian Field , a reward for surviving the rigors of the work-week. I find that "work for the weekend" attitude very revealing and pretty pathetic; it says a lot about the typical worker's attitude towards his job, satisfaction with his work, and the typical company's treatment of employees, that so many people are so focused on the nearing reprieve (Friday) instead of on what they can accomplish during the week. So when I see Friday accentuated as a partial release of our workplace burdens (in the form of a relaxed dress policy), I can't help but think it is just reinforcing the "work for the weekend" attitude: "I can't wait until the weekend so much that getting to wear casual clothes on Friday is a big deal."

Thus, I wonder why companies don't use the carrot of Designated Casual Dress to entice workers to look forward to Monday or even Wednesday. Who among us does not regularly loathe Mondays, dreading the return to the drudgery of the work week? Alternatively, how far would Casual Wednesday go towards wiping out the thought of Wednesday as Hump Day ? If employers offered Casual Monday (or Wednesday), would that not make those otherwise barely tolerable days that much more palatable?

Imagine waking up on Monday morning and being able to slip into those old comfy jeans and tee-shirt. Doesn't that make Monday at least a little better? Wouldn't that help fend off those draining attacks of Mondayitis ? I think it would.

Reaction to Sun's open source release of Java

It's been inevitable for quite a while now, and this week Sun finally officially announced the open-source plan for Java. Let me take this opportunity to log my personal reaction to this "long time coming" news:
Yaaaaaaaawwwwwn

As far as I saw, the only people who complained about Java not being "open" were the frothing-at-the-mouth FOSS zealots (OK, I'm going to get some flames for that word choice - but I have a soft spot for the overly-dramatic, so it will stay).
Let's be honest: the critical parts of Java, the libraries and reference implementations and compatibility test kits, have been source-available from the beginning. I just don't see a lot of people caring that the JVM and compiler are open now.
Actually, now that I think about it, I take back the yawn. I am very interested, because I'm now concerned that Sun does not have enough influence any more to keep Java from fracturing. We have to hope that the community can restrain itself to keep that from happening - but I would not bet on that. Maybe some other big players like IBM will be able to police the renegades who want this or that little thing and, when they can't convince the rest of the community, go off and create MyJava.
The last thing Java needs right now is to become the next Linux, where binaries aren't compatible and users of one distro can barely find standard file locations on other distros.

Julian at 4 months old

Julian is 4 and 1/2 months now, and September was quite a busy month for him.

There were road trips:

• to Miami to see his Abuela and Abuelo and meet the Miami chapter of the Official Julian Fan Club
  
• to Sanibel to celebrate his great-grandpa's 80th birthday. It was Grandpa's birthday, but Julian kind of stole the show - so many great-aunts and great-uncles and second-cousins, so little time!

He also had his first adventures into the swimming pool. He was skeptical at first but seemed to enjoy it after a while.

Last night he spent his first night away from Mom and Dad - Poppy and Nonni (Jerry and Marilynn) had babysitting duties for the night. We were lonely and wondered how he'd handle himself, but the report came back great.

There's lots of new pictures from September at http://www.rizzoweb.com/photos/Julian (including the road trips to Miami and Sanibel).
We have also uploaded all his photos to Walgreens web site so you can order prints and pick them up at any Walgreens store: click here to see them . You will have to create a free account at the Walgreens website in order to see them and order prints. Email us if you have any trouble.

Enjoy,
Eric and Jazmine

Update on Julian at 3+ months old

We've put up new pictures of Julian from July and August.
http://www.rizzoweb.com/photos/Julian
He is growing so fast you won't recognize him. Last week he was 15.5 pounds and over 25 inches long - 90th percentile on the growth charts for his age!
Julian will be 15 weeks old this week. He has started rolling over on his own, and really interacts with people around him - smiling, cooing, laughing. Last week he started sleeping almost completely through the night (a big relief for his parents :-)
This week we started him at a babysitter during the days - it is hard for us to leave him but this is a big step for him. Pray for us!

The Truth About Infants

Everyone gives all kinds of advice when you are expecting a child. Our least favorite (mostly because it is so dully predictable) is "Your life will change forever" (For a while Jazmine and I were counting how many people said that to us, trying not to roll our eyes each time). Well, Duh! Of course it is going to change - that is one of the reasons people choose to have children, isn't it?
Anyway, lots of people tell expecting parents how much babys like to eat, sleep, and poop. That's pretty much all they do.
But the thing that nobody actually pointed out was this important truth: In addition to eating lots of breast milk and formula, infants gobble up huge chunks of time, taking it up in surprisingly large gulps, until your entire day has been devoured by this little 11-pound time-eating machine.

This seldom-expressed truth is probably the most surprising thing about having Julian for us thus far - I'm sure there will be others, but right now it seems like every day it is 3:30pm by the time we blink, and then it is 10:30 at night before we take a breath. God help us... :-)

I Have Arrived!

Hi, I'm Julian Isaac Rizzo, the newest member of the Rizzo clan.

Click here to see more pictures of my exquisite handsomeness

I came aboard Thursday May 25 at 8:25am, carrying 8 pounds 9 ounces and 20 inches of adorable little ears, chins, arms bottom and toes.
I'm a little busy learning to forage for food and figuring out this whole night and day thing, so this is all I can write for now. I'll dictate some more notes later for Daddy to type.

Adios,
Julian

Signs of things to come

I guess this is the kind of little scene we are going to have to get used to around the house - we woke up yesterday morning and discovered our laundry rack had been infested with these miniature clothes.

There's a lot of laundry, and this baby isn't even here yet!

The Spectrum of "Web Services"

In response to a recent question about a company wanting to jump into the web services pool, I wanted to give some publicity to John Udell's musings on the nature of web services, particularly his notion of WS-Heavy and WS-Lite.

Victor Grazi wrote:

"Our company is interested in exposing some of our server java api as web services. 2 years ago that would have probably meant introducing an ejb framework and wrapping those as web services. I would be interested in hearing other approaches. Any ideas?"

The first question to ask is whether you're interested in going down the WS-* path or the "Web 2.0" path. In other words, are you interested in being WS-Heavy or WS-Lite? (see http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/09/21.html and the links from that page).
Mica's Hotels.com architecture sounds like it lives towards the WS-Lite/Web 2.0 end of that spectrum, while SOAP, UDDI, WS-I, etc. would put you more towards the WS-Heavy end.

Once you understand that distinction and determine which end you need/want to live near, then you can decide on the technologies to implement those choices.

So THIS is what the world looks like before 7:00am

Out of character, I was out of bed before 7:00am last week. It just so happened to be the coldest morning we've had this winter, and I captured the icy beauty on film. Well, not really on film, since in this age of digital photography my Fujifilm S5000 doesn't use that old-school medium.

Anyway, I was rewarded for my efforts at this un-Godly hour - the air was so cold (about 26 or 27 degrees, which is pretty darn cold here on Florida's west coast) that steam floated gently up from the pond behind our house. It was as if the fish and turtles and gators were mimicking children who exhale in just the right way to see their breaths on a cold day.
With the sun rising on the eastern horizon behind the pond and the icy grass crunching beneath my feet, I had one of those moments where I marvel at God's awesome artistic hand.

EJBFactory

A handy utility/helper class for obtaining instances of EJBs (and InitialContext instances and Home interface instances)

In a recent mailing list discussion I mentioned a utility class called EJBFactory that I've used in the past. It encapsulates most of the ugly boilerplate and error-handling code that an EJB client usually must include in order to obtain references to EJBs. I offered to publish a version of the code, so here it is:
http://www.rizzoweb.com/java/EJBFactory.java

It is not complete; for one thing, as the class comment says, it does not do narrow() ing of the remote references it gets. But that should be easy enough to add, and the more robust, complete version of this idea is in code owned by a previous employer of mine.
Hopefully someone will find this interesting and useful as a starting point for implementing whatever their EJB client code needs. I welcome any feedback about improving it.

Private Abuse

The use of private scope qualifier for methods is one of the biggest barriers to reuse in Java.

I was recently searching for a way to dynamically get an instance of a java.lang.Class that represents a primitive type (basically, I needed a dynamic form of what you get when you reference something like java.lang.Boolean.TYPE). I never did find an acceptable way to do it (please email me if you know of one), but someone brought to my attention that there is a method, java.lang.Class.getPrimitiveClass(String) that appears to do exactly what I need. Great! No - the method is private, so I have no chance of ever using it.
This gets to one of my biggest peeves about the state of the Java programming art - the abuse of private, which I see as one of the biggest hurdles to reuse and extension.

A typical response to this position is that "private has a definite use and can often times be preferred as once you make something public then so it must remain for ever," but I take issue with those points.

First of all, they're forgetting about protected scope, which is much more friendly than private and provides the same level of "protection" (the notion of protection in coding is a tricky concept , as I'll get to later) in most cases.
Beyond that, I don't buy the argument about once something is public you can't change it. Very few of us are writing the kinds of code that is set in stone - refactoring is usually an option. Deprecation is your friend, too.
Actually, if you are writing some kind of code that must be set in stone, all the more reason to use protected instead of private. Because in that kind of situation (rare as it may be) you should be striving for more flexibility, not less. Private scope can only add flexibility for code in the same class; on the other hand, for increased flexibility of all other code (the clients/callers and extenders), protected and public provide much more flexibility. When you use private, you are essentially assuming that you know exactly every way in which the code might be used or extended, which is, IMO, rather short-sighted and brash.

The kind of attitude that thinks that way (must make things private because I might want to change them one day or because I know this would never be needed outside of this class) is what Martin Fowler refers to as a Directing attitude (as opposed to Enabling) and I find Directing attitude to usually be counter-productive an frustrating to work with.

Finally, I'll say this: making methods private is often justified by saying "this is implementation specific and could 'break' the code if used externally." But again I find that a bogus argument - if I subclass a class and call or override its protected methods and it does not behave how I thought (so long as it adheres to the documentation or other contract), it is not necessarily the original class author's fault. I would certainly expect testing to happen, which would uncover any false assumptions or mis-use of inherited code. Again, Directing vs. Enabling - I prefer that I'm given as many tools as possible rather than being stuck with the limited set that
some original programmer thought I would need.

OK, one more "finally": Smalltalk, probably the most pure of widespread OO languages, gets by just fine without private methods at all. I've never heard of anyone coming upon a situation where they just NEEDED them and where marking them as "intended to be" private
didn't suffice. Here is an excellent article on the subject
If you read nothing else I've written in this diatribe, read at least that and the Martin Fowler article. They are written by far more effective writers than I, and it shows.

Sorry for ranting - it's late and I was bored. Seriously, I've spent 10+ years thinking about this topic on and off, and my position is very firmly set after all that time.

Code Structure: Multiple Exit Points & Code Standards

On the StriaghtTalking-Java list today, the following question came up:

"What is the consensus with regards to single entry, single exit methods. I was never taught to code to this convention but recently heard that some companies require it. I wondered how people felt about this?"

There were many responses, some agreeing but mostly disagreeing that it was a good "standard" to enforce. Some of the arguments in favor of single-exit-point-ness were:

• Multiple exit points can lead to more bugs
• There's too much license in "sometimes it's ok to do x". That's the same as saying "It's always OK if I feel like it on any given day."
• It is easier to "see" the method structure with one exit point.

My two cents is that code readability wins out over dogma or "standards adherence." Sometimes a single exit point is the most clear structure and makes the code clean. However, I've read and written many, many, many methods that were far more readable with multiple exit points that they were with only one. I also agree that small-grained methods make this even less of an issue, and that exceptions usually throw single-exit off anyway.

To address the "more potential for bugs" argument, I respond with unit testing. A method that is complex or intricate enough to have multiple paths of logic should usually have a set of tests for each of those paths.

In summary: sometimes a single exit point (return) is more elegant, but sometimes multiple returns lead to more elegant code. We might all disagree (and almost certainly do) about how big those two "sometimes" are in relation to each other, but the bottom line is, "Readability/elegance/simplicity trump all coding rules or standards" - it's going to be pretty hard to argue with that.

In general I feel that code standards usually go too far, are too dogmatic. A coding standards doc should, IMO, always be called a "guidelines" doc and the first section/chapter should state something like "code readability and elegance" trump other rules. Yes, it requires careful attention and discipline to avoid the "I don't feel like it today" trap - but if programmers don't have discipline good attention to detail, well then "where they put their curly-braces" or "how many exit points they have in methods" are going to be the least of the problems...

Java Generics: I'm not alone

My thoughts on the addition of parameterized types (aka, "generics") to Java have been documented well here, on the StraightTalking-Java mailing list, and the Eclipse newsgroups. Bruce Eckel has always been on the same side as I, but until now there was little high-profile support for that position. Now, however, it appears to be gaining momentum. Ken Arnold has posted a blog entry "Generics Considered Harmful" and I'm glad to see it got Bruce Eckel's attention as well as Lambda the Ultimate.
Mr. Arnold and Mr Eckel are more eloquent than I have been about expressing the position that we all seem to share - I particularly like Ken's coining of the term "complexity budget." That is the succinct, easy-to-understand phrase that I have been searching for in my ramblings on the topic.
Bottom line: I'm glad to see some others coming out to express the idea that this "upgrade" may have pushed Java out of the realm of "simple" languages for good. I'm not alone any longer in my distaste for the increasing complexity the language designers are introducing.
Not that the company makes the discomfort any easier to live with...

Early Thoughts on Portals/Portlets

I am in the process of evaluating/learning portal and portlet technology for my company. We are a HUGE organization, so there have been several efforts of exploration in various groups within the company. In fact, the "official" company-wide web-app and services framework team has actually implemented portlet functionality into the proprietary framework. I don't like the level to which they have abstracted away everything, though, so I'm making it part of my effort to evaluate their implementation. We use WebSphere Portal Server (we are a huge IBM shop, so it was the only realistic choice).

Thus far, my impressions of Java portal/portlet technology is that it is over-hyped. How many applications really have Yahoo-like requirements? Also, the portlet spec is over 18 months old at this point, but there is no public information about any activity on it. IOW, it appears to be stalled at the 1.0 level, and that 1.0 spec is quite immature. There are several key ideas that the vendors have all solved in proprietary ways that need to be part of the standard API and spec. The authors of the spec are remarkably silent on the progress of a 1.1 or 2.0 version - my educated speculation is that there is little or no progress happening at all.

The user activity I keep seeing (a Yahoo Group, articles, blog entries, etc) seems to be inordinately focused in the offshore population. I wonder if the offshore/outsourcing companies are hearing the hype from management types and trying to find ways to inject portal/portlet into every project they contract now...

Performance also appears to be a major issue. The extra processing required for every single user request is multiple times that for servlet apps, and, especially within our company, that results in apps that can handle significantly fewer concurrent users per unit of hardware than equivalent servlet/JSP apps. IBM claims that latest versions of WPS are significantly better than previous versions, but also seems to acknowledge that it is not equivalent to plain-old servlets and may never be - the stated hardware requirements for running Portal Server are pretty high-end.

Something else: I haven't seen much talk about portal in terms of transactional applications. I can see that having a "main" app as a portlet surrounded by little helper stuff like calculators, mail checkers, stock quotes, etc. would be "nice to have" candy, I haven't seen any examples of highly transactional portlets all coexisting and sharing window space.
Another potential problem is that of screen real estate - you UI designers have a significantly harder job when you're dealing with multiple portlets on every page; it means none of the portlets have as much real estate to work with as they would if they were individual pages or traditional web apps.

I think the portal idea can be very useful for certain applications that have specific requirements about incorporating multiple data views onto one page. I just don't think many applications actually have such needs. When they do, implementing it in plain servlets and JSP can be done, but would require building something like the portlet API and container anyway. It's just that I prefer to build something like that as-needed and specific to what you really need, rather than relying on a huge, bloated, wants-to-do-everything implementation like is provided by IBM, BEA, etc.

As I said, I am still learning and evaluating and planning some PoC mini-projects to explore these topics. Thus, my opinions are young and likely to change at least a little over the next few months