What's it all about, Alfie?

It's pretty big news today - Amazon received notice from the rights-holders of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm that forced them to remove the un-licensed copies from user's Kindle readers. I can certainly understand the folks saying that this is a serious blow to e-books: that they aren't the same as books... you can't sell them after you've read them, you can't donate them to a library, there are a lot of things you can't do. But they say now that you can't even really be sure that they ever really belong to you.

It's a fair critique. But Amazon's business is really the publishers and the customers. They are a middle-man. No way they could exist without both groups. Take one away and the other will leave. There's nothing they can do about it.

So they have to strike a compromise here. That compromise, it seems, is still developing, but it appears that the new compromise is going to be "if you have it, it's yours" - like the Apple AppStore. It's fair, but this also means you can't transfer it to another device - which can be a pain to many as devices fail and need to be replaced.

It's a tricky line to walk, and while I'm not interested in losing my books, I have to understand that when I buy them in this electronic state, where the laws have clearly not caught up to us, that I'm accepting a lot of the risk here. In 50 years the laws will have caught up and this will all be settled - one way or the other. Until then, it's a little bit of the buyer beware.

Sad, but true.

I've seen this pass around late last week, and finally decided that it wasn't a big issue to get it and see if it's as nice as they say. Certainly, it's more for ObjC developers, and boy do I wish I was one of them, but not today, and maybe not for a while (bad day today). It's nice to see the guys from Panic giving like this.

Anyway, it's here and probably worth getting even if you use it only occasionally.

Today has been a challenge for me. I haven't had a really good day, but I have to admit, in the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been the worst either. It's been a day where I've been fighting my instincts to do "more" - a kind term for stepping on people's toes. More VM problems - I've just had it with VMs for web servers - I've asked for dedicated machines for the web servers (UAT and Production).

I've also run into a most 'unique' situation with chat. Seems we had a custom chat system created - based on IRC, but extended to allow for all the compliance issues that might arise in a trading shop. No surprise there.

No, the surprise is that we have no documentation on the authentication system at all. It "just works", but if it stopped working someday, there's not a scrap of documentation to say what it should be doing as a place to start to see what's going wrong.

This lack of design docs bothered me - I just wanted to be able to code it up so that my web app with alerts could chat them to the users. It's a simple thing, really. But you would not believe the kind of run-around I seemed to get.

Some folks just said "don't use it". Well... it's a little late for that - it's in production, not going away, and I need to chat to something. Saying it's horrible is a judgement call, but I still have to work with it. I just want to know what it's doing!

Several hours have passed and I've just asked over and over to talk to someone at the shop that built this. I just need to know what it's passing around and I can take it from there. It's not magic, it's code. But rather than try to guess looking at the code, I wanted a simple design doc - or even just a protocol explanation.

Hours later and nothing. I'm guessing this won't be over soon. I have no idea why.

It's just very draining. Very. I'm tired and I want to go home.

This morning I noticed that iMovie '09 is updated on Software Updates. The list of changes includes:

This update improves overall stability and fixes a number of other minor issues. The issues addressed include:

• Fixed a problem with incorrect rotation when working with video created by iPhone 3GS
• Resolved instability when adding multiple beat markers in some languages
• Corrected an issue where iMovie could become unresponsive after using fine-tuning controls beyond the stabilized portions of a clip

The update is recommended for all users of iMovie ’09.

Well, with the mention of iPhone 3GS I had to get the update 🙂

This morning I was upgrading Firefox and I noticed that WordPress has been upgraded to 2.8.1 and I went over to HostMonster to see if SimpleScripts had the update - sure enough, it did. I'm not exactly sure why the availability of this update didn't generate an email like the previous one did, but no matter, I spent the few minutes updating the WordPress installs on my HostMonster account.

I do think this is a great thing - HostMonster and WordPress. Very nice.

This morning I noticed that Firefox 3.5.1 is out with the same suite of stability and security fixes inside. Not bad, it's been a week or two and so the attacks begin. I'm glad I don't write browsers or I'd get a serious case of paranoid coding. I'd be looking at all my code thinking how some 15 yr old idiot, sitting in his parent's basement, in Russia, is going to attack my code. Yikes. I can live without that.

They found a crashing bug that's been in the code for a while and so issued a fix for that right away - snapshot 47. Nice guys. Thankfully, the crashing bug isn't something I've run into, but it's nice that they are really pushing the envelope of user testing and finding these things.

Today was a day where I was coding all day long. In the middle of the addition to the code so there wasn't a lot of design, and not really near the end where there were a lot of tests. It was a day where I was just heads-down coding.

There were a few tests in the middle - when I got to the point that I was able to send emails from my alert system. But those weren't nearly as interesting as the conditions I could check for were pretty simplistic and I knew there needed to be a lot more complex ways of looking at the data before I was done.

Not a lot to say... just coding.

This morning Software Update let me know that iTunes 8.2.1 was ready for me, and so I installed it. The update notice said something about syncing with iPhone OS 3.0 devices, but that's already there, so I have a feeling it's either in anticipation of the iPhone OS 3.1 - or they are plugging a hole in the jailbreakers or Palm Pre syncing that they left exposed and wanted to plug.

In any case, it works great for me. Could not be happier.

UPDATE: Holy Cow! I could not have been more on the money: the update is confirmed to break the Palm Pre. This article points out the details, and while I can feel sorry for the Pre, they essentially used undocumented APIs and they got caught at it. Tough break.

Well... today I lost about an hour messing around with some code I had refactored to make a little factory of sorts so that it could be shared amongst two classes that had no common class ancestry. It was that or a lot of copy-n-paste, and there was just too much code to do that. So I did the refactoring and then a lot more coding and then hit the tests.

It wasn't the coding, but the testing that gave me fits. Specifically, because I did so many changes, I just did the standard Ant build and then deploy to the Tomcat server. There was a problem in setting this trigger on an H2 in-memory table, and for the life of me, I could not figure out why.

So I dug into the code, and what I found was that I was the victim of incomplete dependency checking by Ant. I should have rebuilt a few more classes that were effected by the refactoring, but Ant wasn't smart enough to do that. I'm not complaining, but when I look at Ant, I really see something made by a group of people that didn't like Makefiles.

I've used Makefiles for years and it's a far better system than Ant - even for Java, and while it doesn't claim to do dependency checking on it's own, there are tons of tools to create those dependency checks that are air-tight in their completeness.

So once I did a clean build, things started working again for me. It's something that I've had long conversations about with friends - the way the Java Lobby seems to be unsatisfied with the existing state of things, and rather than just make a 'makedepends' for Java, they have to XML-ize it, and make a new Java-based, Java-built tool that claims to do these things, when it really only does them slightly worse than the 20-year old tools that everyone else knows.

It's what I dislike most about Java. Not the language, but the people that are it's fanatical following. Spring, Faces, J2EE, the list goes on and on.