the corner office

I would say good riddance, if it wasn't for who's going to replace him. Thabo Mbeki is out, and Jacob Zuma is undoubtedly in.

There is a good article in the M&G about many people's views on Zuma's corruption charges being thrown out of court by Judge Chris Nicholson:

Let us be honest about this: many, many of us, believing that Jacob Zuma is a demonstrably inappropriate person to run the country and, knowing that the available political processes aren't likely to stop him, want the courts to spare us from him.

The more credible version of this thinking goes that the interests of justice would be served by the rigorous trial of a powerful man against whom evidence of corruption is stacked up thousands of pages high, and that South Africa needs to be shown that such men are not rewarded with high office. It is as hard to argue with that proposition as it is to agree with the blunter version: that he must simply be got rid of and the courts are the only remaining instrument that can achieve it.

But all of us have to admit that we hoped the criminal justice system would achieve what other organs of our young and flawed democracy cannot -- to save the country from its own worst tendencies.

In other words, many people have little faith in South Africa's democracy, and Zuma's ascendancy and Mbeki's fall from grace causes it to weaken further. At the same time, it suggests that within the ranks of the ANC, democracy is still strong. It's not a pretty picture for 'public' democracy, with voting against our de facto one-party state being little more than symbolic, but the real horror story would have been if the majority of ANC members wanted Mbeki out but couldn't get rid of him.

The real question is whether the ANC's internal democracy will be as successful in giving Zuma the boot in a few years' time, if he doesn't deliver, and just how bad things will become before that happens.

Greed and stupidity - a simplified view of how the world financial system got into the mess it's in now. Undeniably, the bankers, and now the short sellers, the speculators and other big institutions running scared are part of the problem.

But ultimately, it's also the greed and stupidity of ordinary people. The blame has to be shared by every person who took a mortgage or loan they couldn't reasonably afford to repay, every person who overspent on their credit card without thinking about the consequences. If people hadn't been willing to shell out such grossly inflated amounts of money just to 'get on the property ladder', would things be as bad as they are? No.

I don't expect that sentiment to get a lot of air time.

A lot of people are talking about the job losses in the city and saying 'good, serves the bankers right'. And as other people are saying, and very truthfully, there are plenty of office workers and cleaners and ordinary folk who will suffer and lose their jobs at these banks as well. I feel very sorry for them. Some of them.

I was reading one of the commuter papers this evening (I know...), and they had some write-ups about Lehman employees who face the chop. One of the people was a lady who has some kind of admin job at Lehman Brothers. Earns £24k a year, separated with 2 kids. Oh, and pays 75% of her salary on her mortgage. I don't know the lady's circumstances, but for crying out loud: surely if you're paying out 3 quarters of your salary on your home, you could get something smaller, get something more in line with your income, rent instead... anything to take control of your debts. I find it hard to be sympathetic. The irony... I couldn't help but think that this lady and people like her are part of the reason her employer's just gone under.

Jeez. Today was historic, and I, like most people, wonder just where it's all going to end up.

I have two thoughts.

First, where were the auditors during all of this? It isn't a talking point right now, but all those financial statements which, with hindsight, hugely misrepresented the financial health of some of these banking institutions, were signed off by auditors. I am sure there are some particularly nervous audit firms out there right now.

Second, I am extremely grateful that I work where I do. When I got a job in London last year, I was primarily looking for work in the city, but eventually took a job outside of banking. I would be lying if I said it was due to any particular astuteness on my part - I was just really excited about the kind of stuff my employer was doing. And I know better than to be smug, because you never know what's around the corner - but I will say that I don't envy the poor buggers in banking and finance IT who're now sitting without jobs or seeing their departments and budgets evaporating because of the credit crunch.

One or two of my devoted readers feel I'm too inclined to grumbles and rants these days. I can't think of anything particularly funny to write about today, so instead, I will endeavour to add a little erudition to my blog. Today I learned (don't ask) what a corrigendum is, and how it differs from the better-known erratum:

Per Wikipedia:

Erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) is a correction of a book. Errata are most commonly issued shortly after the original text was published. ... As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e. an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author's error.

See if you can slip that word into conversation somehow this week. I'll be trying.

Some tech things not worth their own blog posts:

• Java properties files are meant to be encoded as ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8. That's a bit of a pain and very counter-intuitive when you're using .properties for i18n resource bundles (and may well trip you up the first time you work on a multi-language app). Java's native2ascii tool (and the related maven plug-in) are very useful. I also learned/remembered why I far prefer server-side development to web stuff.

• Speaking of which, I've been playing with Apache MINA. It's way cool and Java's nio is smoking quick. A colleague asked 'how fast?', so I tried an experiment. I was able to set up two windows clients with 3,500 clients each hitting a MINA reverse-echo server on Linux, concurrently handling 7,000 open connections, and handling thousands of requests a second. And the server using a little over 30 megs of memory. You couldn't do that with normal Java thread-per-connection blocking IO. Async message handling is a pain though. ByteBuffers take some getting used to; I keep thinking there must be an easier way. Or at the least, a simpler alternative if you don't need the fancy things that BBs give you.

• Ubuntu 8.04 has a little thing called 'AppArmor' and it makes doing something trivial like running mysql with a non-standard user suddenly very non-trivial indeed (eg.)

• Google Chrome: zippy, but not my idea of pretty. I've only tried it on XP, it uses Vista-style window widgets, which really grates me. I don't see anything that makes it more compelling than Firefox. Competition is good, but I'm happy with Firefox.

The stamp duty holiday announced by Alistair Darling seems a blatantly desperate plea to buy a few votes. Apparently, this holiday is going to cost the government £600m. And the UK's population is 60 million. So basically, every person in the UK (ignoring the fact that not all of those 60m are tax payers) is coughing up 10 quid so that someone else can get up to £1,750 off of their next house purchase, if the house is cheap enough.

I'm not planning to buy a house any time soon. And even if I was, nothing in my neck of the woods (ie. Greater London) is cheap enough to qualify for the stamp duty holiday. So it seems rather unfair that I should have to pay for other people, many/most of whom pay far less tax than me, to buy a house.

What if I'd rather take that 10 quid and put it in the bank to save up for when I am ready to buy a house? OK, that's a typical tax-is-evil response, but you can look at it another way: if the money was going towards people going hungry or cold because of the recession, then one might feel less aggrieved. As it stands though, it's really just a pointless gesture which will do nothing to reverse the decline in house prices, do nothing to help those worst affected by the economic downturn, and will (hopefully, and probably) do nothing to help the government when they get the boot in the next general elections.