Tainted Green

A friend of mine recently posted on his colorful and witty blog a little reflection about using vegetal oil instead of gasoil in diesel engines, which triggered some thoughts and lead to what you are currently reading.

Let me introduce you to the French ecologist political party named Les Verts. With the increasing environmental issues (lack of water, extreme weather events) and the energy crisis (need for alternate source of power), you could imagine that those guys would be booming.

Let me give you the big no-no: they are not. They are divided and wishy-washy, thus weak and useless. To be more accurate, they made the single biggest mistake an environmentalist party could make: they decided not to be politically neutral and took side for leftist parties. Therefore from truly green they turned pink, if not red.

This tragic mistake made ecology a left-side concern, when it should have been a truly independent and impartial business ; a third power with the mission of issuing warnings and suggesting new paths about how to run the country in an environment-friendly way.

I think that people are readier to pay attention to ecologists: everyone knows how harsh we scorch the Earth and how bad she gets mad at us ; everyone knows how our oil-based energy system is unsustainable both politically and ecologically ; everyone knows that it is time for a change unless we want to impotently watch the upcoming disaster.

Can tainted green be turned back to its original color?

Blue Oyster Wisdom

Airplanes make strangers of us all
Give us distance
Much too easily
Blue Oyster Cult, Mirrors, In Thee

Oh boy, what a summer! Airplanes in the news almost every day, and not for good reasons: the birds keep falling down, claiming the lives of hundred of passengers and crew members, leaving us with sadness and doubts.

Is flying so benign after all?

As a (currently grounded) pilot, my answer will be of course: no. Flying is a very involving activity, where the most critical part of the job (landing) is performed when the pilot is the most tired (after hours of flight) and where there is no easy way out like parking on the side of the road for a little break...

But, as a very distracted driver, famous for increasing the chaos level of highway traffic (dubbed as "D-Factor" by my friends), I will remind you that flying remains the safest way of transportation! The shocking thing about a plane crash is that it takes many lives at a time, while it will take more car crashes to reach the same death toll.

Anyway, this blog was not about travel safety, it was about another side effect of airplanes. Nowadays, you can work and meet people all around the world and then, just after you started to have feelings for them, you fly back home.

Your cherished ones will expatriate to some remote land where you will pay visit to them from time to time, but soon it will, again, be time to fly back home.

Home is known to be where your heart is, but, because of these airplanes, your heart will be in so many different locations, so where will your home be?

The heck to such hollow concepts as "global village", this hurts! Even BOC knew it and this was in good old 1979...

The Land of Possibilities

I am just back from my usual summer trip to the US and I have to say that, more than ten years after I started to roam this country, I am still very impressed.

Not only by the awesome landscapes I had the opportunity to discover in Utah and Arizona, but also by the spirit of the people. Let me detail a little.

There are many places in the world that you would like be emptied of the locals prior visiting: yep, I am thinking of France! Just imagine France without the French! As far as I am concerned, this does not apply to the US: Americans are really interesting people to meet and discover how they live.

The main driver I have discovered in the different places I have visited and people I have met is that things are possible there.

Roads are too narrow and create the heck of traffic jams? Let's widen them, let's build new ones! How about car pool lanes to encourage car-sharing? Ever dreamt of drive-in banks? It is there. Ordering Wendy's while refilling the tank? Piece of cake... Want a new job in a field where you do not hold a diploma? Who cares? Work hard, perform and you're in!

This country is a place where will in action produces results in order to make things reality, not any land but a true land of possibilities.

Summer Bloody Summer

So it's all wicked and bloody and sad, as a summer can be.

First, Paris loses the Olympic Games in favor of London. Personally, I do not really care nor know how bad it is, but according to people around me, it's pretty sad news, so I am emphatically affected.

Then, the morning after, London gets hit by terrorists and many people lose their lives. It seems that using the US Army as a bait in Iraq is not enough anymore: terror is coming back to us, as Al Qaida resumed their deadly agenda.

Only two flashes of light this week:

• the European Parliament rejected Software Patents: that was enough of this non-sense that could only satisfy big corporate.
  
  
• and the success of Deep Impact, a jolly NASA mission that consisted in crashing a probe on a comet.
  

Pfew, I just can't wait the autumn gloom.

It's going to be a beautiful spring...

What happens to me? Summer has been here for five days and I start talking about spring... Well, in fact, I mean to talk about this Spring.

Yes, the Spring framework is beautiful. Not only: it is a friendly framework that goes where you want, without forcing you to subclass its objects. It is full of facilitators that make a developer's life really easier.

I already had this academic knowledge. Since a few days, I have tasted the true nature of Spring, and my life has changed.

I have just started a new open source project (jinFORM) and after a few days already used these features:

• the Dependency Injection framework (the true core of Spring) for gluing all the components together (bye bye infamous Mr. Service Locator!),
  
  
• web flow for MVC support, easy URL/controller mapping and centralized exception support,
  
  
• EHCache support, for a no-brainer instantiation of the cache manager,
  
  
• AOP for introducing Serializable in DOM documents and JAXP XSL Templates, where this interface is missing, which prevents them from being cached,
  
  
• property file support for easily injecting configuration values into beans,
  
  
• and many utilities like the so convenient FileCopyUtils...
  

Next step will be to use Spring for easily exposing internal objects as JMX beans!

If you have not started to use Spring, please do yourself a favor and follow this link.

Kudos to the Spring team!

Eurotrash in Euroland

Old habits die hard: Europe is once again on the verge of... of what? Nervous breakdown? Temporary malfunction?

In a world where compromise is not an option, the current tensions are not surprising. Our favorite politicians flex their muscles in Brussels to look like champions fighting for their own homeland, in order to appease nationalists and protectionists at home.

And all this costs an awful lot of money. Is it worth it? Yes, definitively. Burning billions of cash to feed and bread eurocrats is still much less expensive than risking war again. Investing money in such rooster parades, I mean, high level political talks, is worth each and every penny: let them meet, talk, get angry and reconcile... When they do that, they do not ask us to fight each other.

Talking about things that die hard, I know someone able to handle this eurotrash: John MacLaine! Beware politicians...

Get Out Of My Field!

So Martin Fowler reminds us what we all should already know, that people matter most. Why does he have to do that? Probably because in I.T. you very often face the situation where this obvious statement is loudly claimed while at the same time people are considered disposable. There is certainly an attitude problem, that finds its source in both the employers and the employees.

Employers: If I.T. is for you only a way to generate margin by selling at higher price what you have bough cheaper, please leave the field! We do not need you here, we all suffer from your cold cynicism: clients get infuriated because you sell rookies as experts, experts get mad at you because you break the market prices. Consider selling gravel and stones.

Employees: If software development is for you only your day activity where pride and thoroughness are excluded, please leave the field! We need a true mixture of professionalism and passion in here. We do not want bland little minds but people devoted to provide clients with the most efficient, most valuable and most durable solutions. Consider civil service in a governmental agency.

Thank you.

Gee! With a little more cursing, I could turn that one into a bile!

A Dog Called Rover

I curse the day that I spent listening to Scott Meyers during the last SD West. Since this very moment, whenever I am facing arbitrary restrictions in a software, I am seized by Scott's spirit , turn berserk and start climbing up the walls shouting : Keyhole! Keyhole! Keyhole! That is pretty embarrassing.

What is a keyhole for a software? It is the poetic name Scott has given to such an arbitrary restriction. Text box too small, fixed-size windows, all these limitations that make life so much fun are keyholes.

Some are simply annoying, other are potentially dangerous.

For example, the last keyhole that drove me the Hulk-way, was the incapacity of Windows XP's new search facility to find string content in files whose extensions are not recognized by the OS. Why such a limitation? It made me miss important data because some files where found during the search. If none would have been found, I would have suspected a failure of the search engine, but in my case, the fact that the search facility returned arbitrary files that contained my search string caused me much troubles.

Keyholes! Keyholes! Keyholes!

And, believe me, swapping Rover (the animated dog) with Links (its feline counterpart) does not solve the problem.

Vote While You May

Referendum time is over, the results will fall in a few minutes. It is already a big success for democracy, as around 75% of the voters moved out of their houses to cast their ballots.

Too bad the question was stupid: yes or no. What can you do with that? Moreover the "thing" you had to decide on was not really a constitution but a genuine international treaty, the full monty, with everything written in lawyerish (a variation of gibberish). European Institutions prove here, time and again, that they are unable to understand the citizens they claim to govern.

They should have made two texts out of this big mess:

• A jolly constitution with a dozen of points, written in the vocabulary of an eight years old kid, and talking about peace, human rights, access to free healthcare, decent housing and jobs and whatnot. This constitution should have been approved by referendum.
  
  
• An international treaty for replacing the Nice Treaty, which monicker comes after the city on the French Riviera and not because it is nice in any way. This treaty should have been signed by politicians without asking anyone, if possible in a city of a newly enrolled country with an unpronounceable name, just for the fun of it (it has been so cool to slaughter the pronunciation of Maastricht for years !).

So we ended up with a yes-no question to this huge treaty. So, on one hand, there were hundreds of reasons to vote "no": it was very easy to find a paragraph one found confusing or risky, too liberal or not, too federal or not ; while on the other hand, there was only one reason to vote "yes", and this reason was a sloppy: "yeah, okay, I don't really like it 100% but go for it, you have my support on principle".

I might have found another reason to vote yes: to compensate someone who voted no for a bad reason. This is democracy. With a spin.

Old School

So today I went out to watch the latest adventures of the most famous asthmatic of the galaxy (or is he famous for his black clad?). Anyway, after asking for a ticket, the cashier asked me if I wanted the digital version (for an extra 50cts) or the 35mm film version? What the heck?

Hint: I am the kind of guy who, when finding an interesting article on the net, prints it out to read it. Now you understand the title of this post: I am pretty old school, on some subjects at least. And by the way, Joel, thanks a whole bunch for having printed-out your blog. I finally had access to this masterpiece of wit and wisdom.

So what did I answered to the cashier? Something like: Keep your over-head-projector de-luxe session for bit-maniacs and hit me with a ticket for a true cinema projection. I want the click-click and the spots and the hairs. And I want the color palette to change when the roll changes. Oh yeah, this is old school too.

First Post!

Well, that one was easy, at least much easier than posting the first comment in the Bile Blog.

So why starting a blog, today, in 2005, after all these years of refusal, on the false pretext that I had nothing interesting to say? Do I have now anything interesting to say? Only time will tell. Maybe I simply came to accept that, like anyone, even without anything interesting to say, I had to say it.

Or not?