Category: Archive

Yesterday, I’ve been talking on Java messaging at the Philly Java User’s group. Up till yesterday, I was sure that NYC has the best JUG, but now I’m not so sure…

I was pleasantly surprised to see more than a 100 members gathered in a large corporate cafeteria equipped with multiple TV monitors mirroring my PowerPoint slides. I brought a box of JDJ magazines, the group leader Dave Fecak has started with raffling off a dozen of free O’Reilly books, and then was my turn. I really enjoyed talking to this audience. After talking in front of many groups, I can feel when people appreciate/understand/participate in the talk. Let me tell you: Philadelphia has top notch Java professionals! And my kudos to Dave for promoting Java, finding speakers, sponsors and bringing so many people together. Here ‘s the feedback I’ve received from Dave: “Yakov, I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to come and present to our group – the feedback I have received so far has been very good and I expect I will get much more in the coming
days. Someone already said you were the ‘best ever’ and we’ve had about
30 meetings in our 5 years! “.

Now I’m also thinking of creating yet another Java Users Group either in NYC or in NJ. If someone is willing to be a sponsor (for now, just a meeting room and a projector) please let me know (yakov@weekendwithexperts.com). I’m a big proponent of Java Users Groups and would like to contribute even more.

Recently, in one of my Gas Station columns I’ve been writing about the “donation ” of WebLogic Workshop 8.1 IDE to the open source community. Workshop was a dead end product, and BEA got rid of it in a smart way earning credits for being a software donor.

And now BEA announced their acquisition of M7, and IDE maker that created NitroX, a tool for Eclipse for development with JSP, JSF and Struts. If you do not know, the dumped Workshop 8.1 was also meant to simplify JSP development using a NetUI libraries built on top of Struts. Now BEA executives say that this purchase “fills the gap ” without mentioning that they have created this gap themselves by getting rid of Workshop last year. BTW, anyone knows the fate of donated Workshop? Did anything good come out of it?

It looks like dump-to-open-source-buy-real-staff model becomes popular these days. Last week IBM has donated a part of their RUP tools to Eclipse. I do not know what was wrong with these tools, but something should have been not right. Let’s just wait for new RUP-related acquisition announcements from IBM.

It’s not a secret that CS/IT enrollment in colleges is on decline. There are ongoing discussions trying to find the reason(s) of this trend. Usually the following are mentioned:

1. Outsourcing of junior programming jobs

2. Low salaries (plumbers with no or little education earn much more than junior programmers)

3. Computer programming is difficult to master

When my friends tell me that they do not advise CS major to their kids because they are not too good with math, I usually sing them the same song: “99% of business applications do not require any special math skills other than algebra and a simple logic: if this do this, otherwise do that “. I’ll change my tune after the yesterday’s episode…

I was waiting for the bus and there was a couple of young people standing by. She was about 25 and he was about 17. She was talking about some event in the past.

She said, “This happened about nine years ago, when I was 16… ”

He answered, “I can’t believe this. You’re 25 now? Hold on… “. After that he picked his cell phone and started pressing the buttons. I though that he was going to call another witness of this event for a confirmation. Boy, I was wrong! He was using his cell phone’s calculator to subtract 9 from 25…

Now if some one will ask me if their 18 years old kid should take CS/IT major, I’ll give them the following advice:

“Ask you kid to subtract 9 from 25. If it’ll take him/her more than 1 second, they should pick another major “.

If the USA wants to increase the number of CS/IT students, they should invite kids from China, Russia and India, which are good at arithmetic, at least now.

I usually write for JDJ, but I read everything and anything that has the J-word. I read most of the online Java sites like theServerSide.com, JavaLobby.com, ibm’s publications, and others. They all have great contents, but do not give you this nice feeling of reading a fresh and glossy Java magazine during you morning commute. I have access to all JDJ artcicles about a month before the printed copy arrives, but you can’t compare reading plain looking online articles with professionally laid out and illustrated ones, and I re-read these articles again. In print. In the USA, we still have two of such magazines: JDJ and Java Pro. But it looks like we may lose one soon.

Yesterday I’ve received the first (or second ? )
JavaPro magazine published this year. It was a sad experience… It was super thin, packed with some junk CD, and half of the content was some marketing BS.

The first signal that something was not right was when last year they started to force you to login to read anything on their site (they’ll just let you reading the first couple of paragraphs of the article). I understand, they need your e-mail to re-sell it for vendors. But could not they collect your emails in a more elegant way?

JDJ has tons of advertisement on their site, they are obsessed with Flash, but there are plenty of good technical articles there as well. Some women use a heavy make-up, some do not, but in the end of the day, all of them take a shower and give us men (or I should say partners) exactly the same thing: The Content 🙂

If you do not like the into-your-face ads, ignore them and go straight to the content. But JDJ is trying all bleeding edge technologies: videocasting, podcasting, live streams, Flash tricks, etc. I stay with JDJ, because I like the publisher. He works 24/7, he always has some “crazy ” ideas, sometime the Web content is a bit buggy, but he’s trying… The only problem he has, is too much tobacco smoking…

I always respected the JavaPro writers, but the problem seems to be with the magazine’s editors/management.

If you do not live, breeze and eat your magazine, it won’t make it.

I really want to see more than one Java periodical IN PRINT. I do not want Java Pro to die, really!

My mobile phone contract with VerizonWireless ends soon and I need to decide if I should stay with them or switch to Cingular. This weekend five of us went salmon fishing, and I’ve been bothering each of my friends with the same questions: who’s your provider and how do you like the service.

I’ve been with Verizon for about 10 years and they were providing the best coverage in the USA, but… they are still using CDMA, while it’s cool to have GMS (which is used by Cingular) and reuse your phone around the world (Europe in particular). Also, several of my colleaugues bought a nice phone called RAZR (btw, it’s a Java phone), and are very happy with it. So before going on my fishing trip I was almost certain that I’ll switch to Cingular.

Here’s what has happened during this trip to lake Ontario. We’ve caught a couple of 20Lb salmons and were cutting them into pieces. Blood was everywere, and my friend was putting the salmon’s head into a ziplock bag when his Cingular phone rang. His hands were dirty, so I picked up the phone. This was his wife (needless to say that we do not take our wives for fishing). I started the conversation like this: “Your husband is all covered with blood and he’s putting the head into a bag… “. The next thing I see is the message: “Call failed! ” Luckily, he was able to find a spot in the area with a decent signal and called his wife back explaining that he’s fine, and that I was talking about the fish 🙂 It may sound funny, but his wife got scared…

After this episode, I was not so sure about Cingular.

My other friend had his laptop with him equipped with a broadband VewizonWireless connection, which is fun! As a matter of fact, I’m typing this blog sitting at the back seat of the car moving at the speed of 80Mph. I was getting an Internet connection from 15 Kbs in the middle of nowhere to 1.5 Mbs in NYC Since I usually spend about 3 hours on the bus daily, it may make my commute even more productive

I guess, I’ll stay with Verizon and will keep buying the calling cards while in Europe. The only thing that stops me is a fee of $70 a month (with taxes) for unlimited Internet.

Recently I had to prepare a presentation on Java Annotations and went right to the source: Sun’s documentation.

I was able to find only these two pages on annotation. To say the least, such poor explanation of a new language feature is not sufficient for the vast majority of Java developers.

But things get much worse if you’ll try to understand what is the “Annotation processing tool”. Just open Sun’s

“Getting Started with APT”. It starts as follows (remember, this is a Getting Started manual):

“The command-line utility apt, annotation processing tool, finds and executes annotation processors based

on the annotations present in the set of specified source files being examined. The annotation processors

use a set of reflective APIs and supporting infrastructure to perform their processing of program annotations (JSR 175).”

I have a feeling the manager of the technical writer who wrote this piece of crap gave him the following assignment:

“You know Joe, I do not like apt, and it was a bad decision to even include this tool in J2SE 5.0.

Write the Getting Started manual on apt, but make sure that people will hate this tool and will never use it”…

After writing this manual Joe got unusually large bonus.

I admire Sun’s Java evangelists traveling around the globe explaining the new language

features, but why their documentation is sub-standard? They just do not want to invest into this area knowing

that there are millions of Java enthusiasts (I’m being one of them) who will write about each

and every feature of the language anyway.

Meanwhile, I was able to prepare a presentation and some simple and practical samples that will help

my students in understanding of this nice feature. One day I’ll write an article on annotations.

I won’t sit by the phone waiting for a phone call from Sun, but I’ll keep writing about this

language… until a better one is created.

I’ll start teaching my Saturday Java class for beginners at NYU on October 8

If you live in the area and know nothing about Java, come on in!

If someone would ask me what’s the coolest application I’ve seen in years,

I’d say Google Earth. With this program I was able to see my backyard from the sattelite and trace my recent trip to Europe. It’s a desktop application and it’s free. If you did not try it yet, do it now: it’ll make your day.

But I was even more amazed by reading this article.

I’m looking for blood donors for my friend, a cancer patient . If you live/work in Manhattan and do not mind donating blood, please help . As a token of appreciation, I’ll sign and send you my book “The Java Tutorial for the Real World “.

You can contact me at yakovfain@sys-con.com

This week, one of my online articles (Core Java Interview questions) will set my personal record: 100 000 reads. Thank you, than you, thank you 🙂

If this would be an LP, say in UK, I’d have a right to say that this was a golden album. By Canadian standards this would be a platinum one, but by US standards, I’d need to have 500K to qualify for the gold.

I’m wondering, if there is a similar award in India? Based on the feedbacks to that article, most of the online readers live there.

If this article, has helped you in job search, please put one dollar (rupee, ruble, euro, etc.) in an envelope and mail it to Sys-Con publications, Attn. to Yakov. They are honest people and will pass all the envelopes to me. In a couple of months, I’ll write a comment to this post disclosing how many envelopes I’ve received and what was inside.

In the best case scenario, I’d get the following: 80000 rupees, 10000 dollars, 5000 euros, 2000 pounds, 2000 yuans, 500 rubles, 200 grivnas and 300 bills of other currencies.

And in the real-wolrd scenario, I’m expecting to receive not more than one or two dollars 🙂

An update: after 8 months of the original publication date of this blog the read counter has reached 260,000, and I have not received even one dollar. I’ll keep checking my mail box though…