Oops! This really conforms the Accesibility rules

Today we found that one of our projects -which has been shown to a myriad of the client's top managers in the last few days- contains the following String in its home page:

We have an avanced search with filters, and a really really simple search for the intellectually challenged.

The funny thing is that this was found by a really simple minded tester who stated in his report:

Under the "Search for Postcards" heading on the home page, avanced should be
spelled advanced.

Oh dear... this is job of mine is so funny...

PS: If you don't know what accessibility is you probably need to read this.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist es una película/documental que se puede ver online en Google Video / YouTube / etc. Es muy difícil para mi hacerle una review que le haga justicia. Está dividida en cuatro partes bien diferenciadas:

• Intro.
• La religión.
• El atentado a las torres gemelas (+pentágono).
• El bizarro sistema financiero norteamericano y su ramificaciones mundiales.
• Conclusión final totalmente paranoide.
  

La intro dura unos 13.5 minutos, es una voz en off planteando una disquisición filosófica un tanto barata y densa desde mi punto de vista. Tómenlo como de quien viene, de alguien del palo de JP Sartre.

Creo que es una película que todos deberíamos ver, por más que no estés de acuerdo al menos te va a hacer pensar un poco y eso ya es más de lo que se puede pedir a la mayoría de los medios de comunicación.

Pensaba escribir una descripción detallada de cada capítulo, me arrepentí, quiero que la vean.

Blogging nonsense

Offending post: Saving the world with Google Ads

Oh dear... It seems that I spoke too soon 'bout the Google ads behaviour. The thing is that the service was not fully activated so the engine was not scanning the site yet. Now it is and it's showing the appropriate links.

My bad... cheers...

!!""==false

Dijo el gran filósofo contemporáneo César D.:

Not not string vacío es una buena forma de castear un string a boolean.

Paranoia en La bemol mayor and the answer to life the universe and everything

Estos dos artículos totalmente desconectados en Wikipedia me llevaron a escribir este post:

• El clave bien temperado.
• Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

En los links está bien marcada la parte que llamó mi atención, que no sé si referirme a ello como una suerte de paranoia simpática, estupidez o simplemente abundancia y exeso de tiempo libre. En el primer caso, un muchacho llamado Bradley Lehman -no se pierdan su sitio web, caripela por 10.000- asevera que Bach codificó el sistema temperado en la serie de rizos que decoraba el comienzo de una obra suya. Supongamos por un momento que esto es así, ya que la veracidad no está sujeta a nuestro análisis -nomeimportauncarajo.com-, el hecho es que este señor se puso muy minusciosamente a estudiar y a probar que en esos rizos decorativos -Bach no tenía Word- eran una codificación de un sistema de afinación. SEÑOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! VAMOS!!!!!!!!!! Yo estoy dispuesto a probar que una persona normal con trabajo, novia/esposa, una familia y amigos, en condiciones CNPT no haría algo así jamás.

Dejemos al señor Bradley en paz por un segundo, vayamos al segundo link. Acá la cosa se pone un poquito más grave, aquellos que no conozcan de qué se trata The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tienen bastante que leer, o al menos vean la peli -donde actúa una linda señorita llamada Zooey Deschanel-. Volviendo al tema, en la historia el autor plantea que la respuesta a la vida, el universo y todo lo demás es el número 42, y según sus propias palabras lo eligió a un complejo sistema astroteocríptico (?) conocido como "le pintó", o como diría mi buen amigo César D. "Se lo sacó del Culo". Ahora bien, hay gente que no contenta con la explicación, empezó a buscar otras como se ve en el link de más arriba. Acá no hay "tu tía" (?) PEOPLE! GET A LIFE!!!

Todo bien con la CIA, la NSA, la NASA, la MOSAD, la AFIP -un saludo para todos los muchachos del palo de la inteligencia- dándonos motivos para inventar -o no tanto- teorías conspirativas; pero ya esto me parece un poco demasiado. No sé... me da cosa gastar tanta mente brillante (?) en buscar el significado del número 42 o de los garabatitos de Bach.

Saving the world with Google Ads

It's weird but I could swear that every time I see one of those vertical Google Ads banners -like the one in this blog- it links to a World Saving Foundation, Poverty Extermination Fund Rise, etc. Again, what amazes me is that they are always the same, no matter the topic of the post you're reading.

It could be some sort of thing in the Google Ads algorithm OR -much more likely- there are A LOT of these organizations publishing their stuff what brings another question: Why are there so many of them? I think that anyone putting adds in Google Ads should be a decent company -or I'm just being too naive-.

Oh dear... boring post already...

Cheers

Putting was the goose...

Como todos los años Bumeran organiza su ExpoBumeran, oportunidad en que innumerables empresas, empresuchas y demás negreros de sistemas salen al mercado en busca de carne fresca de coder junior. Además, publican un Informe de Salarios de IT.

Este año parecen haber algunos cambios... sobre todo en la banda de los Java Senior, que cuentan con una banda muy muy cercana a los Java Junior, y en extremo estrecha. No me voy a poner a divagar en cuanto a quién paga mejor, la realidad es que hay tres o cuatro empresas en el mercado que están pagando muy bien (Verizon, Sabre, EDS, y paremos de contar), seguidas por algunas pocas término medio y una turba importante de ratas. El promedio que pueda salir de eso es bastante dudoso.

En fin, cada uno sacará sus conclusiones respecto del lugar donde trabaja, las comodidades que tenga y la relación laboral, sin embargo, no vendría para nada mal un poco de homogeinización salarial, así uno puede preocuparse por cosas más importantes y no que cualquier día pueda caer Verizon ofreciéndote el doble o el triple de lo que ganás por vender tu alma al diablo.

The best strategy game ever

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-COM

This was _the best_ strategy game ever.
Este fue _el mejor_ juego de estrategia de la historia.
(More translations needed)

That's it.

Why does everything suck?

Well, this guy has some answers. I think it's a pretty good blog but be sure to chew each post a couple hundred times before you rant against him.

Cheers!

The world has changed! (during last quarter)

My boss kind of dragged me into 'brainstorming' room and told me just that: "The world has changed last quarter". It was the opening phrase for the explanation of the company's changes, but by that time my mind was already far away playing with the world change idea. I'm beginning to think that's true. From January lots of things changed, a lot:

1) Last year everything was about getting more Java EE guys, now they are twiddling their thumbs in the bench.
2) Most RFIs (aka RFPs) have something about UI, social networking and the like.
3) One of our first costumers, Mainframe based wanting to go J2EE, is now requesting UI services.
4) Basically a couple of billion dollars are backing a wave requesting _just_ UI and Integration services.
5) Last year I was a Senior J2EE Engineer, now I'm a Senior UI Engineer.

Not only my life was radically changed, the market is pushing really hard in a totally different direction than before, and it all happened in the last 4 months.

Many say that this is bubble 2.0, and I partially agree in most cases, I just hope that it has a better ending than bubble 1.

There is a lot more to discuss about it... maybe in another post -I need more beer-, and I'd really like to know what you think, what's your personal experience.

Cheers!

Tiny bit of corporative marketing

I'm not a big fan of corporative marketing and we all know the company I work for is really into it.

That being said, I thought this might me an interesting event, Google and the major social networks are behind this and I'm pretty sure they'll be able to gather interesting people.

So, here's the link: OpenSocial Hackathon

I don't know if I'll be able to go though.

Cheers!

Caveat geek: Now you have to be sweet too...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/15/bejeweled.proposal.ap/index.html

Yes! Now you'll have not only your boss, but also you girlfriend asking you to code for her. Enjoy!

Java vs. C(++) vs. Lisp (?) vs. [Put your geek addiction here]

First of all, you should know that I get paid for putting Java code together and trying to get into production. Those of you that have a similar job need no further explanation.

I don't really think Java is neither the best nor the worst thing out there, its just a fair language with a lot of effort, money, marketing and open source code under the hood.

So, what is this post for? You see, where I work we _try_ to follow Evans' DDD most of the time, and there is this guy who joined our team a couple of months ago... he's a nice person, but he also is what you would expect to find if you crack open an Oracle DB: He loves stored procedures, JDBC (no ORM trash), hates overpatternized (?wtf) business code... you get the picture. So you could imagine, Banks here in Argentina have been using stored-procedure-only access to the DB to provide extra performance and security, Mainframe is still kicking most J2EE apps asses and so; explaining why we should use DDD to this guy wasn't a task for the weak.

After a while, all the talking with this gut got me thinking about a topic I had buried some time ago, the same thing that made me go and try Rails and friends: How come the Mainframe is still the best darn thing out there to do Client-Server apps? Most Java Enterprise editions are development/deployment/configuration nightmares, so I usually fantasize about something simpler.

From a development point of view, you could have hundreds of Junior devs coding EJB2 interfaces with well defined DTOs and everyone should be happy if the specs are good enough, you'll end up with a big, well priced, working product. This scenario is considered BAD, EVIL, NASTY. Everyone wants to code Spring supported DDD code (xml/annotations nightmare?). I also know small teams coding in Smalltalk (niiiice, though not nice enough :(). The thing is that it is hard to get complex -in some ways- with objects, so this guy I was talking about wants to do as much as he can inside the DB and then having just one layer that does a bit of business logic and puts everything in the response. I don't really like it, but I can't say I don't!! It rings so many bells, including Paul Graham's! The guy would even hack lisp code in a running production server, it doesn't get much more agile than that!

So, summing up a little bit. I want your opinions, thoughts, feelings, about non traditional architectures such as: Paul Graham's ViaWeb (lisp hacking), Google's Map Reduce architecture, and so on. What have I been researching?

Facts:

• Rails (sadly) sucks for important -this depends on you- things.


• *ails also have a tendency to suck.


• JRuby runs better that Ruby itself. Thanks guys coding JVMs! And JRuby team too.


• ('nuff said 'bout ruby)


• I don't care about a language "easyness", I want effectiveness and efficiency.


• The Gmail team is hiring software engineers that know a lot about C++ and TCP/IP (Python is just a plus).


• A really big etc.

I've just realized that this list is too large and will defer it to a later post.

So, I want to know if YOU could make something better than J2EE (and the like), not easier, not nicer, not lighter, not heavier, not rocker(?), not fancier, but just better.

Cheers!

Yet another blog

What?? Someone's opening a new blog? how come?

Yes, I know there are all sorts of things out there in the bush. Every single communication channel is completely flooded by people expressing themselves, their ideas, thoughts, feelings, intelligence, stupidness, stubbornness, and so on... you get the idea, so why on earth would I want to open another blog? Well, maybe because this is just the beginning, the wave is still too far away and perspective has proven to be tricky most of the times. Anyway, I prefer not to dive into anything right now since it is too late and I'm way too tired, but to give you an idea of what will come, this blog lacks of a specific topic or purpose, I'll rant about anything that comes in handy but there is the possibility that technology related posts tend to show up often, so be aware. That's pretty much about it, thanks for stopping by.