i-neighbors has popped up as the next social community meme. Nice logo.

Looks somewhat familiar...

0Spam.com - A Virtually 100% Effective Free Anti Spam Service is a complete piece of crap. Nope, I don't use'em. I'm just abused by them.

One of the many worms out there is sending its crap and spoofing the From with my email address. We all know it happens, right? Well, these idiots don't bother to check to see if it's bogus email, instead, they send an automatic verification email to me, for me to prove that I really sent the mail. 30 times. For the same recipient. Of course, they provide no way to anti-verify it. So, I continue to get assloads of their verification mails in my inbox. Helping to solve the spam problem? Not from my perspective.

update

Just received a reply to my complaint...

OK, your address is now blocked. You could have setup filters in your mail client to block us as well.

Doesn't that seem like an odd response to someone providing services to keep your inbox clean? Not even an opt-out response, but more of a "just delete'em" response. Yep, idiots.

Jason van Zyl, the original guy behind Maven turned a robust 32 yesterday. Here's to hoping he continues to increase the ROI of his life.

Going to the Mecca of domestic coffee next week. Seattle and I have a weird relationship where I only stay in town for 23 hours each time. Though, luckily, I've only ever seen Seattle with blue skys and 70 degree weather. As far as I know, the whole "rainy northwest" is just a ruse to keep tourists away.

I wrote something here

So long, and thanks for all the fish...

Happy birthday to Ben. Ben is my arch-nemesis from bizzarro world and a valued hausmate/despot. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his lovely wife in Amsterdam last year.

<bob> !time
<ben> The time is Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:29:14 +1000 in Bensland, Australia. Happy Birthday Ben! (subtle I know...)

My wife smelled nice tonight, and I asked her what it was. Her response was something along the lines of "Warm vannilla spice perfume from Bath and Bodyworks." I've always thought that we should throw a party where the snacks and beverages were simply Bath and Bodyworks products.

You could mix the Strawberry and Rice Shampoo with a little ginger ale to produce a lovely beverage. Slices of the Oatmeal and Walnut Body Bar would go well with a cup of coffee. The Lavendar and Mint Bath Beads in a dish for guests to freshen their breath. Maybe even roll up and smoke some Pure Hemp Exfoliating Cloths.

Foo Camp was written up by CNN. I was invited, but instead I was off in Amsterdam organizing the first irregular Haus Party. Sounds like Foo Camp was good geeky fun also.

The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot.

MyCalls.net bills itself as Wake Up Calls and Reminder Calls. In order to get to the airport in time to eventually be denied boarding on a flight to Canada, I used this service. Was nice to have my phone ring at 5am with a wake-up call and even call back 5 minutes later since I'd snoozed it. Definitely worth the $0.99. And for future reference, a certificate of adoption is not sufficient evidence that the 6-year-old travelling with you and your wife is an American if you're going to Canada. After jumping through a few hoops, we're finally actually enjoying the Great White North.

Slack : Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is a nice, quick read. I'm glad it was only $11 and change, though, as it's not one that I'll be reading again anytime soon. DeMarco's main point is that an efficient organization has no room to maneuver into being an effective organization. He then spends 200 pages providing examples and specifics along with some remedies. While not specifically a handbook of how to fix your organization, I think that by helping bring some of these faults to light, we can all start getting better. After all, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

Another entry in the small but growing management library that suggests purposely slowing down and smelling the roses could actually boost productivity in today's 24/7 world, Tom DeMarco's Slack stands out because it is aimed at "the infernal busyness of the modern workplace."

I've been doing a lot of writing lately, and I've also learned that many folks simply are not familiar with The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Everyone seems to own a copy of The Elements of Java Style or The Elements of UML Style but are somehow blissfully unaware of the origins of these books.

If you write, you need a copy of Strunk and White sitting right next to your Websters Collegiate Dictionary.

The fact is, the vast majority of so-called book doctors are garbage. An exception would be Strunk and White's classic Elements of Style. It was originally written during WWI by William Strunk who was then a professor at Cornell, and it has since been updated by E.B.White, one of his former pupils. Strunk's strategy was to edit down the complexities of English grammar into those few basic elements which would help people to improve their writing skills. His central rule is simple:

So, my mother-in-law called me the other day, asking me to diagnose her Windows Millenium Edition machine that'd freeze after running for about 10 minutes. Now, I'm completely Windows ignorant, but I poked around anyhow. Basically, all I could come up with was "ayup, you're right, it freezes after ten minutes." I figured maybe I could upgrade to WinXP as a solution. Upon further thought, I decided that was just a bandage to a bloody head wound. After doing a cost/benefit analysis, considering the hours of my time over the lifetime of the in-law relationship, I simply decided to amputate and replace.

So, I knocked upon the door today with a bag of new hardware and said "congratulations, you're a Mac user now!" She's now been vaulted into the 21st century with a G4 iBook, Airport Extreme, Wifi route/WAP combination and a bundle of new software. It was easier than dying a slow death diagnosing Windows.

So, I'm finally back from the Business Rules Forum and have one thought about what I witnessed. One of the BoF sessions I attended was all about rule management, addressing concerns about rule authoring, permissions, analysis and deployment. 98% of the audience came from "the business side" of the enterprise. A repeated theme was that they don't trust their business people necessarily to write and deploy rules. They still want the IT staff involved to do rule analysis and the actual deployment. Some audience members raised concerns that folks on the business side don't know how to write business rules. This scares me. If you're on the business side of the enterprise, your job is to write the rules, whether they are implemented via IT resources or if they are merely policies in a manual or the way you deal with customers. Business rules are the way you do business, and IT is certainly not (or shouldn't be) the expert in that regard.

I'll admit that currently there are technical limitations to allowing business folks to write and deploy rules on IT infrastructure without the intervention of IT staff. But ultimately, IT should be transparent and the people who write the rules (ie, who run the business) on a daily basis should simply be able to do so. If a business person can't write business rules, perhaps he should be flipping burgers down at Krusty Burger.

Of course, I'm also fully aware that some/many business folks don't know how to write rules and only can keep their jobs because it takes IT quite a while to realized bogus rules in code, and by then, it's assumed that it's IT's fault the system doesn't work or make sense. A transparent business rule facilitating technology will make the business side of the enterprise more directly accountable for their decisions. Be careful what you wish for.

As noted previously, I'm attending the Business Rules Forum in Nashville (insert obligatory "yee-haw!" here). In addition to being in the hotel where the Country Music Awards are taking place tonight, the BRF has been a veritable motherlode of knowledge. This is the absolute first conference that has been beneficial to me. In my head (and soon in some LaTeX) I've been sketching out some future directons for drools including rule management, repositories, deployment and analysis.

I've learned that the rule engine is but a small portion of the entire space of "business rules". There's plenty of room to grow. Nothing quite like a swift kick in the ass to get excited about a project again.

So, I am attending the Business Rules Forum in Nashville this week (yee-haw!) and heard this quotable quote:

Agile methods don't produce agile enterprises because you're still writing code.

The context is, of course, that a business rule approach and technology can move a lot of your logic out of code entirely, allowing the enterprise itself to be agile. If you're using agile methods to write code, you're still locking business logic up in a form that's not easily mutable. Somewhat similar to doing agile brick laying instead of reconfigurable cubicle farms.

Kinesis Contoured Keyboard is the best keyboard ever. I've been using one for about five years now, and have finally come across others who use them. If it weren't for the Kinesis, I'd have had to stop programming years ago due to chronic tendonitis. These things rock.

The Advantage USB contoured keyboard sets a new standard for ergonomic keyboards. The Advantage line incorporates the same advanced ergonomic design as our other contoured keyboards and delivers additional features not found on other USB keyboards.

Well, today I entered the "untrustable" phase of my life.

Happy birthday to me!

Talk Like A Pirate Day is September 19.

However you got here, stick around an' get yerself ready for September 19 - International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

More like 15, since I lose a day in flight, but just a reminder that my lovely wife and I will be in Amsterdam from the 30th of this month until the 13th of October. So, if you want to chat about drools, werkflow, groovy or anything else of interest, or you're arriving early for the JBoss Bootcamp, let me know and let's hook up for a chat. I won't be attending the actual JBoss Bootcamp due to scheduling conflicts.

Warren Zevon has passed. My thoughts go out to his friends and family. I never got a chance to see him perform live, but I have had the pleasure of hanging out with his cousin Larry.

Singer-songwriter Warren Zevon died yesterday (September 7) after a much-publicized fight with lung cancer. The 56-year-old musician died peacefully at his home in Los Angeles while taking an afternoon nap.

Velcro is the matron of the household, rounding out about 8 years now, I think. She's pretty much permanently attached to my desk, hence the dedicated cat pillow. Thank your lucky stars that I'm not tossing all 6 cats on the blog.

Well, today is a sad day. The Caribou Coffee store where I met the coffee-wench who'd become my wife closed its doors for good today. It had great coffee, a lovely porch, and was within Wifi range of the T-Mobile at the Starbucks across the street.

I mourn its passing. Good thing a new coffeeshop with gratis Wifi has opened nearby.

Anthem by Ayn Rand is simply a darn good read, especially considering recent activity regarding community and Marxism and other politico-economic discussions floating around out there.

Ayn Rand's Anthem is a short dystopic novel about a man who escapes a society from which all individuality has been squeezed. Its allegory is crudely transparent, and the ideas have lost their political urgency. (The book was published in 1938, a decade before Orwell's 1984.) But Anthem provides a good introduction to Rand's philosophy of "objectivism," which is built on individuality, freedom, and reason.

Declan McCullagh writes about Mike Wendy and the Initiative for Software Choice. ISC is apparently fighting against legislation that attempts to give open-source preferential treatment by the government. While I'm certainly a big open-source advocate, I'm also a big fan of free markets. So, I'd agree that giving open-source preferntial treatment is not what we need. If open-source can't compete with "the big boys", even when factoring in license costs, so be it.

ARLINGTON, Va.--Mike Wendy says he doesn't hate open-source software.

Wendy, spokesman and policy counsel for the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), says he just wants to make sure government agencies don't unduly favor open-source or free programs over proprietary software.

"We want a process that is not based on automatic preferences," Wendy said.

So, it looks like Rebecca (see wife) and I will probably be jumping the pond towards EuroLand around September/October. Current stops include Munich and probably Amsterdam. It's partially a business trip for me, so if you're in the vicinity (or within a few hours train/plane time), want to chat business, and more importantly, care to put us up for a night or two, drop me a line.

You may now notice that I'm participating in Google AdSense. Anything for a buck, eh?

Google AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality. AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages --- and Google pays you.

BookCrossing seems like a cool idea. It's sort of a catch-and-release program for books. Even seems pretty active in my backwards part of Georgia.

You've come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers' community. What is BookCrossing, you ask? It's a global book club that crosses time and space. It's a reading group that knows no geographical boundaries. Do you like free books? How about free book clubs?. Well, the books our members leave in the wild are free... but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing. Book trading has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind.

InfoWorld is reporting (as are some ex-cow-orkers of mine) that Baan will be sold to a US investor group.

I used to work for CAPS Logistics, which was owned by Baan, which was owned by Invensys. CAPS was my only foray into large corporate empires where the org chart is so large it stops making any sort of sense.

A U.S. investment group has agreed to buy Baan a Dutch business software company, from Invensys and merge the unit with another software company in a move to broaden the product and customer base of the new venture.

Invensys has sold Baan to the U.S. private investment group, consisting of Cerberus Capital Management and General Atlantic Partners, for $135 million, the London company said Tuesday in a statement.

The deal comes several weeks after Invensys said it wanted to put Baan up for sale.

Thanks to Floyd of TheServerSide for being responsive to my issue regarding not being able to get off a mailing list. They found a problem in their email process which has now been happily resolved.

Okay, I'm fed up.

TheServerSide has added me to their freaking spam list and provide no way to remove myself. I've logged on, and the box saying "Subscribe to TheServerSide newsletter and Event Notification" is unchecked yet I still get their crap. The mails contain no removal instructions.

Likewise, Java Developers Journal added me to their spam list somewhere along the way. Yes, their mail offers removal instructions, but they are futile. I've removed myself from their list at least a half dozen times, and yet they persist in sending them to me. It seems that they clone their original master list for each vendor they sell it to. Any unsubscribe requests only seem to affect the clone, and not the master.

So, guys, this is pure bad practice and is going to garner you some bad press.

So, if Floyd, Alan or anyone else associated with either of these two organization reads this, you need to get your act together and stop irritating your readers.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is a must see. It follows in the lines of What's Up, Tiger Lilly? by Woody Allen, in that it's a redub (and in Kung Pow's case, a resplice) of an older Japanese movie.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is a movie within a movie, created to spoof the martial arts genre. Writer/director Steve Oedekerk uses contemporary characters and splices them into a 1970s kung-fu film, weaving the new and old together. As the main character, The Chosen One, Oedekerk sets off to avenge the deaths of his parents at the hands of kung-fu legend Master Pain. Along the way, he encounters some strange characters, one of which is a cow trained in the martial arts.

FVWM is my window-manager of choice. I have it configured fairly spartanly, but with 10 virtual screens mapped to my F-keys and various combinations for cycling, raising and lowering windows. I never iconify anything (I do have 10 virtual screens), I never dock anything, and I seldomly reconfigure my system.

FVWM is an extremely powerful ICCCM-compliant multiple virtual desktop window manager for the X Window system. Development is active, and support is excellent. Check it out!

I just bought a new laptop (HP ze5185) and burned some RedHat 8.0 CDs and did the big install. No longer is fvwm2 included in the distribution it seems. My only choices are gnome or kde, neither of which do I like. I've been used to scp'ing over my .xinitrc, fvwm2rc, and my .emacs and feeling at home.

Now, I have to go find an rpm or compile from source. That's just silly. And I would've thought that enough folks were using the linksys wireless devices to include support for them in the distribution also. Alas, nope. More downloading and compiling of pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng.

No wonder my dad doesn't use linux.

CNN's misuse of quotes is sorta annoying.

At the time Sendo declined to give all the reasons for the split, saying only that it had not been given access to so-called 'source code' which would allow it to tailor the software.

It is source code, damnit. Not so-called "source code".

Now I remember why I don't read CNN's so-called "website" too often. Long live boortz.

I am perfect. I know everything. My opinion in infallible. I only use the good things and eschew the bad. Anything that I don't use sucks, because I don't use it. There is no way someone else can find value in it. If they do, then they suck, too. And if it sucks, not only do I not use it, but it is my job, ne, my duty, to ensure that you don't use it.

update: Folks keep asking what inspired this. It was inspired by the massive number of "Foo Sucks" headlines I've seen in the past 4 days. We could all get pretty tired pretty quickly trying to enumerate all of the sucky things in the world. Instead, why don't we just search out and promote the good non-sucky things instead?

Be like Plato: search for The Good.

For some reason, probably due to the number of fingers most of us have, we prefer nice 'round' numbers that include lots of zeros. So, here's my 100th entry.

For some reason, probably due to the number of fingers most of us have, we prefer nice 'round' numbers that include lots of zeros.

Since I've shot my mouth off about not knowing who's behind a blog, here's me, working on my 100th entry.

(yes, intentionally self-referential)

Mr. Hacking Log 2.0, whoever that is, seems to think fairly highly of himself. What's with the trend of not obviously identifying yourself on your blog?

Attack me in your blog and you'll get in the triple digits on FreeRoller!

Just so you know, as others have discovered. If you don't have any actual legitimate points, just trash me and the way I express myself in your blog! It will be a sure winner and you'll reach the triple digits onfreeroller! So have at it! Flame away! (But for now on I'll ignore you...sorry ;-) )

Kibo. Kibo. Kibo. Kibo. Kibo.

Blogging Roller is an example of what's wrong with the world...

Please do not interpret the above statements as an indication that I condone Phish.

Would there be war if we all listened to Phish, the Dead, Widespread Panic, Blueground Undergrass and all of the other happy twirly music? Listen to Phish. Do it for the children. You don't hate children, do you?

Looks like Russell forgot his medicine this morning. We all have political ideas and agendas, but I prefer to think of the java.blog world as a place we can set aside irrational/emotional crap, and go about getting some real work done.

I love CiteSeer, but I need some help. I need something, maybe a bookmarklet, that can help me organize my various findings while browsing CiteSeer. Accumulating bookmarks in mozilla isn't useful and makes it difficult to share my findings. I basically want to be able to have a blog that's centered around a research topic.

In addition to possibly adding to a bloglike recently added page, I'd want to be able to index the page multiple ways (ie, by topic, by project, by date, etc...). Ultimately, it could scrape the CiteSeer page and download a .pdf or .ps to a local cache.

Surely there's a MovableType Perl hacker out there who has Copious Amounts of Free Time to hack something up. I think MT has most everything we'd need. Just need to sort of repurpose it.

Bonus points if it's WikiEnabled.

As many of you guys know, The Werken Company as a hopefully-viable commercial venture, is pretty new. You may also be familiar with our various open-source projects.

We've had the extremely good luck to have some of our development sponsored by Zenplex, a company that uses, supports and produces open-source software.

So, I'm wondering how many of you guys know you have a need for a rules engine, or a workflow engine, or whatever else we're churning out here at Werken. How many of you have done any sort of cost/benefit analysis comparing building in-house, licensing a commercial offering, or supporting an open-source project?

Ideally, I'd like to have our open-source projects treated as sort of a venture fund. Many organizations with a need for rules, workflow, or whatnot could contribute dollars towards the development. Sure, development continues without sponsors, but sponsors get their use-cases considered quicker, their bugs fixed faster, and their voices heard more often in general.

I know the now-defunct SourceXchange attempted something similar, but lacked the coherent organization of developers by instead simply hooking random developers with random sponsors. I think we're different as we have a history, code you can inspect, projects that are already underway, and a developer headcount greater than one (there's three of us werkers, now).

Would your organization be interested in sharing the costs of development of these infrastructure pieces with others and support the open-source community at the same time?

For the longest time, the people who qualified as net legends was pretty small, and pretty much universally agreed upon. Sure, each group had their own legends, as the open-source community has ESR, RMS, or Bruce Perens The Original Author of The Open-Source Definition (yes, I think that's his full name). Others, like Knuth seem to rise above any particular community.

Now, with blogs and maturity of open-source organizations, it seems that communities are getting smaller and therefore it takes less to become a luminary within any particular community. Strangely, it seems that luminary status is somewhat transitive. Joe might be the luminary in the Froboz community, which only has 5 members, but he's respected by luminaries of other, much larger, communities. Sorta like the Senators from Rhode Island.

I recently found the java.blog community and pretty quickly established that Brett Morgan and Russel Beattie are people to listen to. I'm not a part of the RSS community, but I seem to understand that Sam Ruby and Dave Winer are at least making a lot of noise.

Over in jakarta, even that small community is fragmented. The maven community listens to Jason van Zyl (jvz) while, once again, the gump community looks to Sam I think. James Strachan (jstrachan) crosses several communities both in and out of jakarta.

One thing to note, is most luminaries tend to be known by their logins, initials, or some handle. A few are known by their whole names. I'm certain that RMS knows he's a net legend, but do all net legends recognize their status? Do they realize the power they throw around, necessarily, whenever they make an idle comment?

Sorry, no links, excerpts or references. Just random thoughts.

Gartner grades the Web services standards really isn't all that insightful. But then again, the companies I've worked for who were Gartner clients were wasting money as far as I could tell. Buy a couple of your neighborhood gurus a few espressos and they'll give you an opinion as worthy as Gartner's.

Somewhat funny quote though...

Higher up the Web services stack, Perlstein gave BPEL4WS a Promising rating, and called it the "worst-named specification."

I've seriously reduced the number of blogs I read in the past weeks, as the main topic of conversation has turned towards RSS and aggregation. While that's all well-and-good, it's really not something I want to read about in 12 places every day. I know there's a (r)evolution going on in the RSS world, but all of these blogs about blogging and aggregation just seem a tad masturabatory. When I pick up a newspaper, I'm pretty much hoping that it'll contain information aside from that about the printing industry. Likewise, I read blogs to learn about non-blog ideas. Sure, there's a certain sense in dog-fooding the experimental RSS technologies, but I'll stick to Russell, Strachan and other folks who don't feel the need to make RSS/Blogging 98% of the content on their blog.

I guess I'm glad to know that political ad restrictions don't affect Leno and Letterman (what about Conan?). There mere fact that the feds have to clarify that entertainers can talk about an election near polling day shows us just how close we've gotten to losing some of our guaranteed freedoms.

I'll take freedom instead of security any day. But then again, I'm a libertarian.

Jay Leno ( news - Y! TV) and David Letterman ( news - Y! TV) still will be able to joke about federal political candidates in the weeks before an election. The Federal Election Commission ( news - web sites) says comments like theirs are not covered by the new campaign finance law.

The law, which takes effect Nov. 6, prohibits special interest groups from airing ads identifying federal candidates within one month of a primary or two months of a general election.

This evening, Rebecca and I watched Vulgar. Produced by Kevin Smith of Clerks fame and having a clown as the main character, we thought it might be a fun movie. It's a good movie that I certainly recommend. But it most definitely is not in the same genre as Clerks. It's somewhat a mix between Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shakes The Clown and Deliverance.

Plot Outline: A young man finds fame as a transvestite clown named Vulgar.

Tangentially, my all-time-favorite movie is probably Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. The soundtrack by Neil Young is especially cool.

Edsger Dijkstra has just decremented his last semaphore.

So much of what we do is because of Dijkstra's great ideas.

It arrived in my inbox.

The note is titled "Stock (Tymeless, Aug 24 00:37)" If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. If you had bought $1000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then traded in the cans at a redemption center for the nickel deposit, you would have $107.00.

Given the current conditions of the economy, my advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Something to think about.

Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited - The Fluid Soundbox is a great CD I owned a while ago. Today, I repurchased it since my CD-organizationl skills are next-to-nil, and I'd lost my original copy. Anyhow, it thinks it's a soundtrack to a 60's spy movie. There was no movie. It isn't a soundtrack. But it has that surfabilly/mission-impossible sound to it.

Anyhow, in searching for a page to blog, I came across the above link and was surpised to learn I could buy each song on the CD, over the internet, for 79 cents apiece. Too bad its RealAudio and not Ogg Vorbis or even MP3. Oh well.

Cool thought, though.