the corner office

No more excuses, time to get back to the much-neglected new blog template. This post is just a few thoughts on defining URL structure.

My current blog has links of the form http://www.thecorneroffice.org/plink/060225-0915. That's a nice and clean URL, but there are two things I plan to change. First, not all blog content is behind the plink directory, so the blog effectively sits in the 'root' context. This is fine for a domain name that's blog-centric and little else, but one of the things I liked about 'thecorneroffice.org' as a generic host name was that I could hang other sites (user directories, etc) off of it down the line. So the first change I'm keen to implement is that the new blog will be sitting in its own context, something like www.thecorneroffice.org/blog/plink/ze-plink.

Since that breaks incoming links already, I can tackle the next pet niggle. I don't like the fact that my permalinks don't have a file extension. It's not strictly necessary, but I think it's good netiquette. What extension will I use? They'll have .html extensions. A principle I'm quite partial to is that bookmarkable (ie. long-lived) links should hide implementation details. Mypage.php is going to break if you move away from PHP. Ditto for jsp's and asp's and nsf's and whatnot. I'm not sure if the web powers that be would frown upon it, but my feeling is that if a page is serving up HTML, then giving it a .html extension is not a bad thing, irrespective of what's actually generating it.

Apart from being able to switch web app engines without breaking URLs, it also means that you can dump the entire site to HTML one day and serve it statically, if you want to. That's another reason why I'm not fond of index.php?id=12345 URLs. Not only does it tie you to a particular platform, but it means that your web server is going to have to dynamically handle these URLs in perpetuity.

Obviously, there are some things where that doesn't matter. Summary views aren't meant to be static, long-lived, or bookmarked. Ditto for comment-posting actions and the like. Moving from a doc?CreateDocument to a postComment.do in a form action isn't going to bother anyone.

There's another issue I haven't decided on, yet. Many blogging apps sort posts in a year/month directory structure, like 2006/02/mah-blog.html. The month/day division is a Good Thing - having all posts in a flat structure, hanging off of plink, screams 'database-retrieved'. A few thousand posts down the line, that virtual plink 'directory' is getting rather busy. As I said, I'm still thinking this through, because while it makes sense, I think it looks a bit uglier. Do aesthetics win over principles?

The jury's out.

How will I deal with incoming links to existing permalinks? Weeell, I don't have many incoming links to my posts, so I can get away with a simple app sitting on a /plink context, serving out 301 redirects for known permalinks and 404's with 'hey, try over there' comments for the rest. Most of my traffic apart from RSS feeds and faithful friends and family hitting the front page, is via Google for esoteric technical posts, and Google will sort itself out soon enough.

The only downside of the move, is going to be the eventual retirement of the colinp.dominodeveloper.net host name. When I started hosting with DDN, that was the only host you could use. Four months later I added thecorneroffice.org, and have used that in web comments etc ever since, but waaay over a year later, colinp.dominodeveloper.net still gets 4 times more traffic!

I felt a bit bad about postponing a number of my Honours exams last year, and this makes up for it a bit. I wrote (and passed) the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam today.

All credit to Head First Servlets & JSP, which I'd enthusiastically recommend to anyone writing the exam. I got 84% which was more than I expected (or deserved), but I definitely could have done better with less cramming and more diligence. You really have to know lots of API nitty-gritties for the exam, and it's a rare bird who's really going to try to memorise all the various J2EE specs and APIs. In addition to the HF format which does a good job of getting concepts into your noggin, the fact that the authors were involved in setting the SCWCD exam helps when it comes to knowing what to focus on. Also, with a number of questions I could see why certain niggles were emphasised in the book.

Also, if you're out on the West Rand and looking for a quiet Prometric venue, give these folks a shout. I had an expiring voucher so this was a bit of a last-minute thing, and I was able to book last Thursday, and write today. Even better, I was the only one in the exam room - nice, quiet, easy.

Cape Town seems to be the place where the real politics is happening, in the run-up to Wednesday's elections. Power failures providing fodder for spittle-flying anti-ANC rhetoric, forgot-to-register court shenanigans with the ACDP, and real personalities in the mayoral race (except for the ANC, where The Mystery Mayorial Candidate will jump out of the victory cake at the celebrations if they actually win). It's fun stuff, it makes for Good TV.

Joburg, on the other hand, seems rather stale. Ultimately it's all a bit disconnected, and I don't think many people around here are that involved in the local politics. Driving down Pendoring/Weltevreden road, there're posters for a DA candidate named Van Zijl (iirc), and an ANC candidate named Twala (iirc, again) (correction: drove past, I had her name wrong). Which just goes to show, I have no bloomin' idea who these people are and I'm barely sure if I'm remembering their names correctly (correction: I wasn't). I don't even know if they're candidates for my ward or one of the wards next door to us.

The only other memorable posters down Pendoring are Uncle Tony staring longingly into the distance, dreaming of a Bright New Tomorrow where black people vote for him, and Oom Pietie Mulder trying to look as impressively conservative but good-naturedly earnest as you can get.

If I had to vote purely on how dynamic and capable people looked in their posters, I'd vote for Ms Twala.

But I won't. It really just comes down to old-fashioned opposition politics, and because of that, the ANC doesn't get my vote, and the DA does. They haven't done much to earn it, but since they're not the people calling the shots, I hope they'll at least make life difficult for the people who do.

It is nice to see, though, that people are standing up and giving the ANC what-for in places where the ANC has really failed to deliver.

I run Linux on my home PC, so I guess you could say I'm a bit of a Linux fan. Let me say this, though: if I had the dosh to buy a Mactel, I wouldn't be running Linux on it!

But if I wanted to, I could soon, 'cause some smart fella managed to get Gentoo running on a pretty new Intel iMac.

There's an Is Java Dead type post at TSS, based on the comments of Bruce Tate, a respected turncoat^Wauthor who made the leap from Java to Something Else. I haven't bothered to read all the (at current count) 109 comments on the thread, because I don't think it will be a productive use of my time. (As if blogging is... *snork*)

This 'Is X Dead' stuff can be tiring. Having worked with Lotus Notes for many years, the Is Notes Dead thing was a constant topic. There was a time when it seemed like it was but these days that's not true and it's apparently doing quite well again.

The most important lesson I learned from all the back-and-forth though is that usually when the 'Is X dead' question is asked, it isn't. It's just shorthand for 'we found other cool shit for you to play with', often whether you like it or not. Thus, the message could come from business execs (in the case of Notes, where IBM execs thought that WebSphere was the One True Ring) or from thought leaders, as is the case with the current rumours of Java's demise. If you believe what you read, you'd have to conclude that languages and platforms are always in state of semi-death (except for COBOL, which died sometime in the 70s but still made people rich right up to 1 January 2000, which, I'd just like to point out, was one year before the start of the New Millennium, no matter what the masses think).

Anyway. C++ dead? That meant 'hey, check out this Java thing'. Java dead? That means 'hey, check out this Ruby thing'. Bruce Tate has fuelled the current furore with his recent book 'Beyond Java', which, as I uninformedly understand it, explains why Ruby rocks in comparison to Java. The reactions have varied since then, from 'hey, he has a point, y'know,' to 'dude can't code his way out of a paper bag and blames Java for it.' I have no opinion myself, but on a meta level do believe that Bruce Eckel probably hit the nail on the head last year with his essay 'The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts'. In a nutshell, it boils down to some hyperbole, a dash of geek machismo and not a little bit of seeing who can pee the furthest. All of which is unnecessary, imho. C++ is wonderful. Java is wonderful. Ruby is a wonderful addition to the wonderfulness that is the circa 2006 IT landscape. Why can't they all jus' get along?

Incidentally, my ex-neighbour and all-round smart dude Leslie discovered Ruby last year, fell in love with it, and encouraged me to try it out. I haven't yet, because if I do and find that Java really does suck in comparison, that's going to make my day job pretty damned depressing, because there isn't a whole lot of work going for Ruby developers. Yet.

I have to agree with someamongus, our local news is pretty damned colourful compared to elsewhere (birdshot-peppered-Republican-lawyer syndrome notwithstanding). I, like many others, thought that Jacob Zuma's rape defense team was being nitpicky and playing legal games when they wanted to get rid of a second judge assigned to the case. It now seems that they may have a point.

Turns out the judge in question, Judge Jeremiah Shongwe, is uncle to one Mziwoxolo Edward Zuma, who just happens to be Jacob Zuma's 'love child'. No, really.

What's more, it turns out that Zuma Jr has also been accused of rape before, and that time the case went away round about the same time that payments were made by one of Shabir Shaik's companies, to the rape victim. No, really.

Who needs Egoli or Isidingo when you have JZ and crowd running loose on our streets?

Fresh from the 'no shit' department, the byline for this BBC article on the new Abu Ghraib photos says:

US fears new images could fuel global anti-American feeling

So says the Pentagon. Which is funny, because every time someone suggests that US foreign policy might have some kind of influence on anti-US sentiment in the Middle East, it's dismissed as the rantings of uppity ignant Muslims or hand-wringing defeatist fag libruls.

The pictures that are cropping up all over are really disturbing, but hey. We gotta put this in perspective. Us Westerners aren't barbarians like the Middle Eastern hordes, dammit. At least we have the decency to commit our atrocities by proxy, and if you don't actually have blood on your hands, then you don't really have blood on your hands, do you?

Besides. Every time a naked, hooded Muslim is traumatised by a guard dog, Jesus smiles. And God reserves a special bit of Freedom-loving sunshine, every day, for Gitmo.

Take on a lion with your bare hands - that's hunting, that's manly. Stupid, but manly. If you vanquish the beast and feast on its heart, it's yours man, you earned it.

If you track a rhino for days in the veld and eventually get so close you can take a photo of the pimples on its arse, and then take a photo instead of putting a slug of lead through its brain, that's an achievement, and it is worthy of respect. That's hunting.

But when you have a geriatric with a shotgun blowing quail to bloody bits, it's not hunting. It's not even close. It's just deriving pleasure from idle slaughter for its own sake. No matter how you try to dress it up, it's just a sad old man shooting birds.

And that is all I have to say about Dick Cheney's 'hunting' 'accident' this weekend.

If I tried to turn these into posts it would take another week...

Tech:

• VMWare Server is free. That sounds pretty cool, but how does Server differ from Workstation, which isn't free? Can you fire up a Notes client or MS Office in a VMWare Server session?
  
• An express version of IBM DB2 is also free. This is also a cool thing, but who's the target market? Will open-source RDBMS users make the change? I'm not sure. Will lots of would-be SQL Server users make the change? I've always thought of DB2 admins as the kinda dudes who wore pocket protectors. Big tin and no sunlight five floors below the basement in a bank somewhere. DB2 and SMBs should be a decent marriage. Is there much of that currently? Will there be more?
  
• Those poor buggers: Borland are saying OKBye to JBuilder et al. Eclipse: the open-source IDE that out-cooled everything else. Aka Creative Destruction: it ain't pretty.

Politics:

• The Google China censorship isn't cool. But how is Google different to any other Western corporate that does business with China?
  
• Thabo Mbeki hasn't said anything inflammatory about the Cartoon saga because like most people, he just hopes it'll go away. Insulting someone's religion is a bit like insulting their music: no matter how justified it might be, they're going to think you're an asshole, and this is why politicians and public figures never diss music and always act like they give a shit about relijun. That ain't cool, but that's the way it is.
  
• Commentary just got two links because even if I heartily disagree with lots of their content, they are the political blog in SA. One of the few places where people from across the spectrum duke it out, usually civilly. They are cool, and they'll deserve another good placing in the 2006 SA Blog Awards.

Personal:

• The rain this morning was insane. I love rain, and I love really heavy rain even more, ergo, it was cool.
  
• If we have lots more rain over the next few days that would be cool too.
  
• I wanted to cancel my cell phone contract and move to prepaid. My contract expired ages ago, but the bastards still want me to go through a 90 day notice period. I got very indignant but came home and read my contract, signed 6 years ago, and there it was in black and white. Rule 1: read the fine print. Rule 2: avoid Nashua Mobile if a 90 day notice period is an issue for you. In fact, avoid them anyway, because one of the managers was supposed to phone me back and never bothered. So Nashua Mobile are not cool.
  
• We watched Serenity last week. It was orders of magnitude more cool than normal cool.
  

SABC news tonight had a segment on the Cartoon Riots. They slipped up a bit, though. After an entire insert devoted to how upset people were at the publication of the cartoons, and interviewing pros and cons and ending with a non-committal-but-you-know-where-we're-leaning "does free speech trump respect for religions"? fuffle, they ended off with some filler footage of protestors, one of whom had printed out the cartoons and stuck 'em on a placard.

I think that classifies as an 'Oops'. Wonder if there'll be any reaction?