Curmudgeonly

For years I’ve complained to coworker and “bosses” that encrypting data in a web app was foolish. If the key had to be available at run time the same access that granted a hacker acces gave her the key to the data as well. A one way hash of constant data is really no better and adding salts doesn’t actually increase security since, like keys, they’re available at runtime. Now I’ve got a club now hopefully this article by Bruce Schneier will allow me to drive a nail into the coffin of such schemes. Of course the reality is that none of those who’ve suggested these schemes will be deterred, as they know more than anyone else does anyway.

Charlie Stross is a guy who really writes his blog. A whole essay, not just a stretched out twitter post. I could wish i could write like that, seemingly effortless cranking out the verbage. Yet in the end it all wraps up neat and tidily. It doesn’t seem like any amount of effort on my part will ever get me there, but here’s to committing to try.

I’ve been coding java professionally since 1997, started with java 1.0.3 as a matter of fact. Back then java was not clearly better. Python existed, and in fact I built some systems with it. I worked on the OS/2 port of python implementing and maintaining the threading and os modules. Not only did python run more reliably but it was faster. Somehow though java won, the crowd chose the tool closest to the last tool and away we went. Nowadays everybody seems enamored of ruby, due I hope to rails and it’s active record focus, because the language itself stinks. It’s painfully slow, and really how many different ways does a language need to express greater than?  Having gone through the excercise I can honestly say Rails is a fine “contractor” framework. When you only need to finish 80% of an app, it’s the fastest way there. As long as you’re not on the hook to reach 100% it’s great.

Git is fantastic, I’m not sure why you’d even bother with subversion anymore. This morning I pulled from subversion via “git svn rebase” then pulled directly with “svn update”. Git svn was so much faster that it’s scared me. I was sure it must have run off the rails, but no it had actually done the right thing. Slowly but surely I’m moving myself over, even though i work in a subversion shop.

How can it take less time for “git svn rebase” than for (the exact same updates) “svn update”? The only answer is that the base assumptions underlying subversion are not right. I’ve looked and looked and all git seems to be is a fancy front end for diff and patch. I guess I could be wrong but I don’t think so. All the branch, merge tracking subversion does just gets in the way. Git’s a better versioning system than subversion for an individual, it requires basically none of the admin overhead. What’s even better is that by making each developers life better it makes group development better.

The only downside is git’s inability to enforce a development model. I’ve worked in a lot of different shops using any number of development models. The one things those shops had in common was that the choice of version control pinned that portion of the development process. Git leaves that up to each team. I guess we need to develop (a set of) model(s) for using version control as well as the other parts of the development cycle.

you’d think with all the whiz bang great rad tools someone would have written something better that make (after all it’s over 30 years old) It seems that the best we can do though it different. Except for maven! Maven is like make, but worse. You can write new rules but you have to be a wizard to do so and god forbid you want to do something non-standard. Sure there’s a plugin for it, but it doesn’t actually work correctly or do what you actually want. Plus depending on POM definitions written by the kind of asshat who uses maven means doing what i just did, downloading glassfish!

Asshats of the year maven team!

So the word on the street is that Mike (baby kicker) O’Donnell has left Cisco’s Media Solutions Group. Mike embodies all the attributes of the modern snake-oil enterprise software salesman. And yes, he really kicked a baby, and then had the gaul to cuss out the mother for getting said baby into Mikes very important path.

In the end, who really cares? Nobody but the poor shmucks Mike will torment at his next gig. All I can say is keep kicking those babies, maybe one of them will turn out to be full of gold.

There are a lot of really bright, insightful people. Jean-Louis Gassée seems to think he’s one of them.

Let’s step back a little. Apple “pushes” somewhere between 100 and 200 megabytes of updates per month to each Mac user. Last week, the iPhone 2.0.1 update was announced, I connected two iPhones within minutes, the 200Mb files were downloaded and installed without a hitch and I haven’t heard any blogosphere complaints on the matter. iTunes has sold billions of songs, serves tens of millions of customers everyday and everything works with very few exceptions. In other words, some very large scale Apple systems do work. As discussed above, the iTunes boss (some say slave driver, a meliorative term in context) in now also in charge of MobileMe.

And, last week, parts of the Gmail service were down for 15 hours or so. Last month, Amazon’s respected Web Services went down. And, last year, RIM’s servers went down for about half a day in the Western Hemisphere, freaking out Wall Street investment bankers and management consultants. Even the best players must endure their share of false notes.

Back to MobileMe today:if you ask subscribers who’ve never experienced a Blackberry’s

Then he buried them at the bottom of a long pointless ramble? Oh, I forgot. He’s the guy who screwed Apple (in cahoots with Scully) and handed the rest of the world over to Bill Gates. What an asshat.

Here I am, after 5+ years of building and (at least theoretically) using social networking software setting up a blog. I had one back on tribe but since I’m not there anymore it hasn’t been used much. We’ll see how much effort I can put into blathering my thoughts out into the aether before I give it up and go live in a shack in the woods.