Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Time	Event
3:21p	Another year, another TSSJS http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=another_year_another_tssjs Depressingly, despite making a somewhat valiant attempt to get enough sleep, the night before TSS ended with the usual mix of drinking, stumbling about helplessly, and stay up until 3:30am. Last year the question to inflict on poor unsuspecting victims was 'have you masturbated on a plane', which surprisingly 50% of people seem to have done. This year I'm hoping to get a good list going with 'what deviant sexual act would you pay $10 to see if it were socially acceptable'. The keynote in the morning kicked off with the usual fumbling intro, with the TSS guys clearly looking like they'd much much rather be somewhere else, possibly somewhere very far away. As usual, the audience polling thing was a total and utter shambles. It's 9am, there's no way I can count down a bulleted list of 7 items to figure out what number I should press. Which genius though that a bulleted list is a good way of displaying numbered options? Even more depressingly, as I finally figure that out and start furiously jabbing the appropriate button, the handheld piddly pile of poop steadfastly refuses to acknowledge my pitiful attempts. The one mercy is that there were very few of them compared to every year. Interesting it turned out to be yet another venue where they managed to sneak in vendor content, asking a bunch of java devs whether they're interested in DTrace or ZFS is a perplexing choice, certainly. The actual keynote by Eric Gamma was, basically, enough to bore even the more excited of attendees halfway to death. Maybe it's because I'm not an Eclipse user, but really, 10 minutes of discussing the benefits of OSS and what it means to have a community, how it's all so wonderfully transparent, and how it's better for your genitalia than a penis pump is a bit...twee, at this point. How many times do we need to hear? Yes, we get it, OSS is as satisfying as openair hot lesbian twin live action with many toys; lets move on already. Part of the problem is that Eric, while I'm sure is a frighteningly smart guy, is a fairly abysmal speaker. I'm having to work very hard to actually listen, but I've found that it's way too easy to let him become a mildly annoying background noise. Coupled with the miniscule font on the slides, this ensures I haven't a hope in hell of figuring out what's going on, why it's going on, and when's it going to stop. The talk is supposed to be about Jazz, and we're halfway through the talk and I still have as much information about what Jazz is as I do about the contents of Bill Burke's panties (eeeurgh, even I winced at that lurid image). The one interesting thing I guess is the release management arm waving, and all the boring crap that goes with it, its impact on development velocity, marketing, metrics, blahblah. Still no clue what Jazz is, but maybe we'll find out soon! We finally find out that Jazz is some kind of collaboration thiingyboggy. Unfortunately, many people have already chewed off their own heads in sheer boredom, so it might be a little too late. Still, maybe something can be salvaged! From what I can gather, it sounds like a more pretentious and happy agile noises version of TeamCity with better role and team management (at least to the marketing blurb we're being subjected to). Team collaboration junk, better isolation, scalable, blahblahblah. I'm still angry that yet another hour of my life has gone down the drain. Ultimately I guess the only people who don't want to kill themselves just to end this talk are probably Eclipse developers (not users), who likely could manage to keep themselves sufficiently entertained by masturbating in the stage's generation direction for this infinitely long hour.
3:41p	TSSJS: Advanced JPA http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=tssjs_advanced_jpa Sometimes I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment. You'd think that after attending so many conferences, seeing so many JPA drivel talks, I'd stop. Alas, I can't seem to help myself. and am dismayed to find myself sitting in Advanced Topics in JPA by Mark Richards. It's evident that the use of the word 'advanced' was somewhat liberal in this case. All we've done so far (20 minutes in the talk) is discuss the joys of join tables, entity relationships and how to define them. I shudder to think of what Mark would consider to be an 'intro' talk. Perhaps a 20 minute discussion on the benefits of casting? The benefits of coding with eyes open and thumbs out of anuses, to maximise JPA productivity? Even more worrying, he actually makes JPA config look so much skankier than it actually is. Switching from hibernate to toplink for example in his case seems to require changing 20 lines of Spring xml. Spring? Yes indeedy, he managed to sneak SpringSpringSpring in there! Either Mark or Spring is pretty fucked up if changing implementations is so much work (it's the former, incidentally). To his credit, Mark is actually a good speaker, he's just cursed with abysmal material. OHMYGOD, he didn't just.....OHMY... This is a brave move indeed! Totally unexpected. We were happily traipsing about in many to one land when BOOOM! He brought in...MANY TO MANY! There's an inaudible gasp from the audience at his sheer gumption and audacity. What will this crazy guy do next? Drop his pants and moon us? Masturbate into the first row of attendees? I might explode from excitement and anticipation. As if that excitement wasn't sufficient, this crazy man just tossed in fetch types. I'm going to need a nap shortly to recover from this. Oh wait, all is not lost, he actually mentioned something interesting (honest). Throughout the demo, he seems to pointlessly switch from Hibernate to TopLink for no reason, but this finally paid off with showing (what he alleges) a non-compliance by Hibernate, which apparently doesn't support fetching multiple collections, which the spec says must be supported. We switch to TopLink and all is well. Next we're covering compound keys, which I guess is finally venturing to the realm of potentially non basic trivial features, too little too late I'm afraid. The one thing I am enjoying about this talk through is the hibernate bashing. He's showing fairly standard JPA usage, no custom stuff, yet hibernate seems to shart itself pretty regularly as a result. The latest example is that @IdClass is basically broken (and yes, that's been my experience too). I do like the advice that once hibernate takes a big dump, it'd worth switching providers just to see if it's because hibernate developers are cocksucking chozgobblers, or if it's you who is being a muppet. Finally, we cover stored procedures, also pretty interesting and I'd say something that does qualify for advanced usage. All in all, I'm not nearly as angry about this talk as I was in the first 20 minutes. It started off with boilerplate JPA but did eventually manage to eke out some useful info. A speaker who seems interested in his subject and is coherent is such a refreshing change as well, even though he does smirk a lot.
9:34p	TSSJS: I'ma l33t Arkeetektor I pwn j00! http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=tssjs_i_ma_l33t_arkeetektor The last talk I went to today is Enterprise App Mashup: Architecting the Future by Eugene Ciurana. Of course, the talk is as fluffy and pointless as I had expected. I walked in late because the likelihood of anything vaguely interesting being said was fairly negligible. The one thing Eugene does excel at is name dropping. Whatever he did at walmart clearly involved next to no 'real' world, and a lot of musing and faffing about with whatever toys happened to catch his fancy. In many ways, it's a dream job. Wouldn't it be great to have a job where you get to fuck around with whatever you want, without ever having to achieve or deliver anything? Without naming names, there seems to be 2-3 jobs like this in this industry, held by vocal public personalities. Yet more proof that it's a cruel unjust world. The core problem with this talk is how nebulous it is. We get the usual ESB flagwaving, that same tired old diagram of a centralized bus and how we're moving into a happy new world of no point to point, anyone and everyone plops their turdy nuggets onto the bus, who will magically and mysteriously only deliver it to other applications that want to gobble up said turdicles. The clever thing is that there still seems to be some people who haven't tried this approach ,and still don't know that if applications aren't written to talk this common language, you end up writing a zillion adapters, thus having the same ball of spaghetti, except that you're now also now beholden to a bunch of dubious shady people who now happen to own your centralised bus. The ludicrous example we have is making two applications communicate, one of which talks JMS, and the other talks SOAP. Now, has anyone ever come across such a situation? Where they just happen to have message structure that's similar enough so all you'd have to do is drop in an ESB and now the world is magically wired up? It's just so astoundingly stupid. One of the most impressive cases of the emperor having no clothes since SOA. Speaking of which, I went to the SOA panel which was equally depressing, services are pretty much....anything. It's a testament to the power of salesmanship that anyone is able to actually sell this crap. It's very clear that Eugene spent a couple of days playing with Mule (ESB), and thought that he'd give them a shout out as some kind of benevolent godfather type at Walmart. Even more ludicrous, he recommended that people use...JavaSpaces. Good lord, is it 1999 again? He even mentioned it as a sane alternative to JMS. Good thing everyone is going to ignore everything he's saying, so no harm done I guess. The talk title certainly didn't disappoint, the talk is so full of shit, so pointless, so inapplicable to anyone that it's impressive that a human being can actually stand up for an hour and make noises in vague sentence structure about it. Gotta give the man credit though, he has nothing to say but delivers it with style and authority, it's easy for people to end up thinking they've attended a good talk, because the speaker was friendly and engaging and spoke well. The fundamental flaw is that HE SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The talk basically revolved around how great the speaker is, how he's bought expensive hardware because he's so cool, how he knows so many people and vendors, and how some of them lined up for a glimpse of his holy genitalia.

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