I'm going to write a few thousands patents. The patent business is more profitable than actually doing real work. The laws of copyright (SCO v Linux/IBM) and patents (this) must be re-addressed in order to limit the role of the lawyers.

The contract developer will work out of NY, live in NJ for 2.5 months. Longer-term work possible in TO. Send me resumes.

Profile: Strong Java developers (3+ yrs) good at OOP, EJB, Message Queues (Weblogic MQ, Webmethods), Servlets, Creating web services. Good at reading, understanding, and reusing existing large code bases. Experience with retail banking a plus. Understanding of source code control, i.e. SourceSafe and especially CVS. UNIX, Sun Solaris in particular. WebLogic, knowledge of older versions such as 5.x and the ability to identify incompatibilities between 5.x and newer versions. Understanding of J2EE up to version 1.3. Understanding of container managed persistence. Knowledge of Oracle TopLink and its predecessors is a big plus !!! Ability to properly utilize opensource components from GNU and Apache; must be able to identify scenarios and specific appropriate opensource components. Ability to work w/o a specific IDE, i.e. they should be able to work with Java tools using command line and a simple text editor. Strong taste aversion to sloppy source code. Most importantly, ability to improvise and utilize tools at hand, to identify tasks w/o constant supervision.

Jack is exactly between Jim and Joe. The perception is that Jack is more like Joe than Jim. I often also have that perception. I am wrong. In fact, we all exist along a curve that stretches from Joe to Jim and Jack, in the middle.

Now, where are you? And where would you like to be? I hope I'm between Jim and Jack, slightly closer to Jack.

Quote: Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. said yesterday it has turned down an offer by billionaire Eugene Melnyk to buy Maple Leaf Gardens.

I'm not a movie gower. Takes a lot to peak my interest.

Done.

Reservations. Saturday night. Maybe sunday. And a third trip to Marineland Canada.

ummm! cool!

I'm starting a new DEV shop in TO. Please send resumes ASAP.

REQs:

• Biztalk & C#
• Java & Weblogic
• XML, XSLT, Cocoon
• WSDL & Web Services

Quote: "I had been hoping, and actually expecting, that the attacker would turn out to be some adolescent cracker with no real connection to the open-source community other than a willingness to stand down when one of its leaders asked. But no; I was told enough about his background and how he did it to be pretty sure he is one of us -- and I am ashamed for all of us."

Another Quote: "Stick to the facts; Microsoft, a convicted predatory monopolist, is funding a lawsuit against its only serious competition to the tune of more than six megabucks, and their money is the only real income SCO has."

The SCO v. Linux war escalates to namecalling and DOS attacks. Or is that sinks?

We are looking for Developers with at least 4 years experience in Java Swing and multi threaded applications. 2 years exp in GUI Design and development are required.

In addition, it is essential that they possess strong object oriented design, implementation, and debugging skills, with exposure to design patterns. Experience in P2P (JXTA) applications or JNI a definite plus.

Tell Brian I referred you. Thanks,

Brian Mohr, On-Site Recruiter, Texas Instruments / E&PS, 214.567.5733

Made it home last night.

Of course, my Linksys wireless router was failing when got home. Screwed around for an hour. Nothing worked. Reset the router. Nada. Called Rogers. Nada. Called Linksys. We screwed around for a good half hour before we finally got it right when we re-configured the MAC Cloning.

Flying home at 3PM. Can't wait.

Last night we went to the club district on the Beaches of Jacksonville.

Today, I'm relaxing on the Jacksonville beach. Writing project plans.

I'll be heading home tomorrow.

Ate at a restaurant on the beach of Jacksonville last night, First Street Grill. Jacksonville is a really large city in terms of square miles. You can drive several miles to get anywhere and nowhere.

I bought a 12-can case of Busch beer last night. Not really impressed with any American beers. Any suggestions? Hoping to get to Dave & Busters later in the day.

Didn't make it to Dave & Busters. Went to Olive Garden instead. Was OK. Had Amber Bock. It's a good beer and the best American beer I've tasted yet.

Last, today is the first day that I've ever used a Wifi connection that is not my own. In fact, I used two different Wifi networks to get onto the Net. Wifi is cool. Too bad it's not popular in TO yet.

I've managed about 65 different people over the years. Most everyone of those employees has quit or been laid off for reasons not tied to their performance or character. Only a handful remain today with the company I hired them at. A sign of times or a sign of my bad?

Usually, if someone is struggling in their work or has social issues in the workplace, then I address these issues directly with the employee and the issues either disappear or the employee quits. Only once have I ever had to fire someone and I handled the situation as positively as I could. This person has been sending me crap mail and has even dared me to share his emails with others. So, here goes. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

email #1

You may have notice that of late, I'm posting a lot of pics of the RV and family. Well, the ultimate in cheap geeks (that would be me) has actually bought himself a digital camera. The hp photosmart 120 is a $150 CDN, 1 megapixel digital camera. Yes, I'm cheap and not at all a gadget geek. I still don't have a DVD player or a TV or VCR less than 5 years old. Even my laptop is 2 1/2 years old.

I can see where the camera doesn't have the greatest depth. When you zoom a pic, it immediately becomes pixelated. I can only imagine the pics I'd get from a better camera. But before I get a better digital camera, I'm still in the hunt for a $100 digital camcorder :)

Sam Ruby kicked off an interesting thread that re-iterates my preaching over these many months.

Quote: "Let's turn this thing around.  Instead of requiring one to make their XML RDF friendly, let's make RDF XML friendly.  Or, at least make RDF meet XML half way."

The Blaster Worm is causing real havoc. They even have the Scobleizer taking support calls.

Wasn't able to blog about Bissell's Hideaway as the Internet was without power, at least in the Eastern half of North America on Thursday. Stayed there on Tuesday and Wednesday night, leaving early Thursday for some meets downtown Toronto with the Dude crew and Cogient.

Appropriately named, the Hideway is hidden deap in Niagara (near Welland), just off of Hwy 20, south-west of St Catharines. If you can find it, the Hideway is well worth the effort taken. Clearly the best campground my family has yet to experience. A one-acre pool with water slides and a great park. Only 30 minutes (more if the bridge is drawn, as I experienced) from downtown Niagara Falls and Marineland. It's a little more expensive than your regular park ($50 CDN).

With Toronto in the dark, it didn't take much encouragement to call Bingemans for a weekend RV escape. I've called Bingemans a few dozen times before and never gotten thru to anybody but their answering machine. I guess the power outage had its benefits.

On the way out of town, I stopped in line at the Sunoco, Mississauga Rd. and Steeles for 100 liters of regularly priced gas (no price gouging at this pump).

Bingemans was good, but not great. Firewood was awful. Facilities were great, but it was about a 1/2 km walk to the waterpark (1 km thru the park). Change rooms were 200 m from the Camper's pool. There's a Tim Hortons about 1/2 km away, which was nice. Half the sites are excellently carved into the trees and Grand River, half are in an open field (we were in the open field). Onsite pizza was dreadful, as was the rest of the food.

Bingemans is in north-east Kitchener, Ontario, home of the Oktoberfest. Close to Sportsworld and African Lion Safari. We visited the Safari today before heading home. Brayden (my son) loved all the animals. He was in happy zone today.

Fortunately, I've been on vacation for the last 10 days. I stopped into Toronto on Monday (A.C. Nielsen) and Thursday (various). Experienced first hand as it took me hours to get back to Brampton from downtown Toronto Thursday evening.

Blackouts like Thursday's take us out of our element. Our reaction in the new element tells us a lot about ourselves.

• There's the many car drivers who drove pedestrians north from downtown T.O. to York Mills and higher.
• There's the drivers that honk, yell and give the finger at any driver in their path.
• The citizens dropping off water to the policemen.

I think everybody can look back on their own behavior and learn something about yourself. To the free taxis up Yonge street and the waterboys, you can give yourself a pat on the back.

More voices from a dark Toronto.

I'll be back in town sometime Thursday. Won't be answering email in the meanwhile. I can be reached via SMS email at 4168027968@txt.bellmobility.ca.

I agree with the verdict, just not the amount. Patents are suppose to be available for use at a reasonable royalty. A half billion is not a reasonable royalty.

source Don Park.

This is my son and daughter at a friend's son's birthday party, two months ago. Hard to believe they fight all the time :)

Click the photo to zoom.

"What is it?"

"They called it a laptop."

"Can you post to blogs and email with it?"

"I don't know, but it has a Flight Simulator and a dongle."

"It's OK, I have a power point presentation."

All together, "Dude!"

1. Pie
2. Echo
3. Necho
4. Atom
5. Feedcast
6. None of the above

None of the above winning again. How 'bout The Feed Formerly Known As X (FFKA)or NOTA (short for none of the above) or PEW.

Need one. Ideas?

REQs

• forward to SMS (via email)
• SPAM filter
• all via POP3
• logic always on
• not client based
• not Outlook based
• Appointments
• WAP enabled

Just finished a 4 month stay at A.C. Nielsen, where I was paid to surf the Web. The organization failed to deliver any requirements within the 4 months, leading me to a lot of Web surfing, prototyping that went no-where, forgotten designs and job hunting. Reminds me of my experience at Bell Sygma (now called CGI), but amplified in the extreme.

Note: Busy employees don't have time to look for work elsewhere.

The company has often been named one of the best companies in Canada to work for. I agree, if you want to work 30 hours per week and do nothing the rest of your life, this is the place you want to be. If you actually want to accomplish something, then I'd suggest not joining the ranks.

On the other hand, they are hiring like mad. Unemployed developers in Toronto should send their Curriculum Vitae. If you send it to me, then I can likely get you better in-roads. They've already hired a few of my friends and more are close to landing positions. I thank them for providing jobs in such a economy. Thanks!

Reservations for Tuesday and Wednesday night in site West 21.

Kinda expensive, but it looks great and might be worth checking out. Got a lot of favorable reviews on the Net. The pictures on the Website don't seem to do it justice.

Being properly Scobleized, I've been asked what it exactly means. Well, remember The Matrix? So, Robert is like Morpheus. He gives you the choice of the blue or red pill. Then, once you've taken either (doesn't matter which), he sticks a 120 volt cable in the back of your head. Pretty cool!

Microsoft is great and Gates reports to Scoble. Dude!

DRM 0.9 (early draft)

Wed, August 11 2003, by RV Dude.

Contents

• What is DRM?
• How it Works
• Example
• Authors
• Version
• Copyright and Disclaimer

What is DRM?

This document describes the Discussion RSS Module XML vocabulary for extending RSS feeds to include discussion of RSS entries. This is not really an invention but a formalization of what many bloggers are already doing. The XML vocabulary equally applies to any syndication format that may be extended, i.e. RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and what comes out of the Pie project.

How it Works

Add the following extension to your RSS channel or RSS item to point readers to the location of your RSS formatted comments feed for the entire channel or for individual channel items.

<drm:discussion xmlns:drm="http://tempuri.org">http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/comments.xml</drm:discussion>

The target XML file should have the same format as an RSS file, but the items in the RSS file are the individual comments related to either the entire feed or the unique item. The above comments.xml file is a good sample.

Example

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:drm="http://tempuri.org">
  <channel>
    <title>iBLOGthere4iM</title>
    <link>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/</link>
    <description>RV Dude's Blog</description>
    <drm:discussion>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/comments.xml</drm:discussion>
    <item>
      <title>Redmond</title>
      <description>Spent Thursday in Redmond with an upstart company that some of you may be familiar with.</description>
      <drm:discussion>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/20030808130513.xml</drm:discussion>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Authors

RV Dude.

Version

Last Version: xxx

0.9 - Wed, August 11 2003 Draft

Copyright and Disclaimer

This document is released into the public domain. The document is provided without warranty.

References

http://jevon.blogtrack.com/index.php?itemid=376

Honoring Dogbert:

• "You will have to reduce your expectation of co-workers in order to avoid frustrating yourself here at XYZ Corp."
• "Don't put much detail in your design, cause when we get the requirements we are likely to throw out your design anyway."

I'll have to send these to the master.

I'm beginning to realize the value of "Properly Recognizing Effectiveness." What does this mean? It means, finding out who really is effective in your organization and dealing with each employee's actual effectiveness, not their perceived effectiveness.

Quite often, managers will think that employees who smoke or play hockey with them are more effective than those that don't. It's perception. We always perceive ourselves and our friends to be more effective than we and they really are. Getting around our biased perception is key to running a great organization.

If we reward employees for smoking with us [their managers], then we reduce the value of actual work. If employees pick up on the reduced value of actual work, then they will certainly spend more time working on [impressing] their boss and less time doing actual work.

I've witnessed this in action. An employee was thinking about quiting the habit (smoking), but when every non-smoker (and no smokers) in his department was laid-off, he decided that he couldn't afford to quit smoking (with his boss).

On the other hand, we must be sure to publicly recognize true effectiveness. If you see that an employee is truly effective, then make sure other employees know what you know. Thank him. The hope is that other employees will take up on his lead. Do not thank an employee for being effective one month and fire him the next, regardless of realities.

MHO.

Very disappointing. It's a great site, wonderfully laid out. Unfortunately, lack of control and proximity to Toronto makes this campgroung undersirable. The residents are the problem here.

• Too much crap on the beach (dog and geese),
• Loud music competition till 1:30 AM,
• Garbage everywhere,
• Rude neighbours walking thru your lot instead of around,
• Dogs unleashed, and
• Dogs leashed but still on your property.

The overall problem is management of the property. If the management would cease putting up with abuse, then the site would be great. Unfortunately, its public, run by the government.

This was my house, in Kitchener, when I was 6 to 9 years old. I took the picture last weekend when I was RVing near Kitchener.

We moved to Kitchener from North Bay and after Kitchener we settled in Oshawa, where my parents still live today.

The top 10 lies told to Guy Kawasaki by entrepreneurs seeking investments: 

1. Our projections are conservative. 
2. IDC, Yankee Group or other research firms say our market will be $50 billion U.S. by 2003. 
3. Big names are about to sign up with us. 
4. Key employees will join as soon as we're funded. 
5. We have ''first mover'' advantage. 
6. No one else can do what we do. 
7. Several venture firms are already interested in us. 
8. Oracle or Microsoft is too slow to be a threat. 
9. All we have to do is get one per cent of the market. 
10. We're glad the Internet bubble has burst.

The top 10 lies venture capitalists tell entrepreneurs:

1. I like your company but my partners didn't.
2. If you find a lead investor, we'll invest in you.
3. I'm just a phone call away whenever you need me.
4. None of the companies in our portfolio competes with you.
5. We don't want to run your company.
6. Other companies in our portfolio will use your product.
7. We didn't invest in e-commerce or B2C (business to consumer software firms).
8. We successfully co-invest with company x all the time.
9. We'll help you recruit managers.
10. I look young for my age but I have lots of experience.

Quote: "How dorky is an application used by three people that hits one of my sites 10K times a day? Sometimes I wish the kids would just grow up. Or if that's not possible, at least leave home. Or if that's not possible, die."

Keywords: grow up.

Jon Udell has been expressing some RDF favors/disfavors on his blog.

• Chicken and egg
• A killer app for RSS

MHO is that RDF has been around for six years (too long) and failed. In 1997, I began hearing about how RDF is going to change the Web within the next few years. Still six years later I'm hearing how RDF is going to change the Web in the next few years. How long do we continue to believe the RDF dream?

Winer

• This shit never dies

Diego

• how to know when you support a format

An interesting conversation between Winer and Diego.

Design is just one of those things that developers, in general, struggle with. Beyond the fact that most of us developers would prefer to skip the design process altogether and jump straight into coding, most developers can't design anyway.

I don't claim to be a UML expert. Whenever I join two classes with any type of association, I always find myself reading thru the online help to figure out exactly what type of association I should be using. I don't think its all that hard to verify use of UML constructs. On the other hand, I have never read a UML document that didn't make me doubt the author's willingness to exert his brain.

Here's a list of top funny UML constructs.

1. Used the public, protected and private visibility of an attribute to denote if the attribute was a dependent or independent attribute. Similar to identifying primary keys in an entity-relationship diagram. Increasing the protection level added a key (get it! primary key) to the left of the attribute.
2. Used a generalization between a note and a class on his class diagram. As if the note was inherited by his class.
3. Used a generalization between a custom image and his class on his class diagram. As if the custom image was inherited by his class.
4. Put (abstract) in the class name inclusive of the braces to indicate that the class was abstract, rather than selecting the IsAbstract checkbox (in Visio).
   Additional note. The class name input box and the IsAbstract checkbox are on the same property page.

By the way, the development organizations where these mistakes were made did not have any UML references available to its developers. No wonder the technical publishing industry is dead. But this also explains why so many software development projects end in failure.

Looks like the winner (with a capital L) is going to be Feedcast. Can you say "a bunch of geek's just picked the name Feedcast?" O-Boy!

This is where the left-brained, right-brained argument wins. If a bunch of left brains pick a name, then it'll surely appeal only to the left-brained. The problem is that the customer is almost always right-brained.

funny

source Daniel Von Fange.

I just accepted a full-time positions as a Senior Lead Developer at Opence.

Think of the waterfall model. Now Salmon while spawning swim upstream. So, this model is the opposite of the waterfall. By the way, this technique is by far the most widely adopted that I know of.

Have you ever written the specification or design from the already complete component? This is SSDM. Doing things the wrong way. Nearly every software development organization that I have ever worked for practiced SSDM when I joined their ranks. I was able to convince some to do otherwise and many of them reverted to SSDM when I left.

I'm not condoning the Waterfall methodology, I am the author of my own methodology, based on RAD and Spiral Development. But Waterfall is still better than SSDM.

Cool tools. Found it on my Dude, New Stuff.

source Thinking Chaos, Thinking Fences.

Quote: "If these developers don't come to terms soon, they risk losing a lot of the gains made over the last few years as Microsoft or IBM or someone bigger than all of them will come in with a protocol that serves their needs and that will become the standard," Gartenberg said. "Fragmentation is bad for standards, and now is the time for them to come together on something."

Bingo. By the way, this is a great article.

More, look at what Microsoft did to HTML. The extensions are so numerous that nobody but Microsoft is capable of writing a good browser anymore. Look also at SOAP, which should be renamed COAP (as in complex). Microsoft and IBM did great to turn a simple protocol into something now feared by developers. The market has responded with REST-like XML APIs, another simple protocol, but a source of confusion.

• Quit my job (done).
• Visit w/ Microsoft's .NET team.
• Accept a new job (no, not w/ M$FT).

Picture is of my ex-cube at A.C. Nielsen.

Do the following. The last usable version of Netscape RSS, the original RSS, is verion 0.91. Get a 0.91 feed that uses Netscape RSS, not Winer RSS (one that requires the netscape.com DTD). Now get any RSS 1.0 feed and any RSS 2.0 feed. Now compare them with a thorough viewing of the XML structure and tag names. Tell me, which is the fork and which is the upgrade?

Note, the only bias in my post is the title that is pro-RSS 1.0 anti-RSS 2.0 and my not Winer RSS statement. I'm just asking the reader to make his own decisions. You'll be surprised.