And since I have been busy I figured it would be fair to give you an insight into some of the crap I have to deal with. Here’s a past major grievance:

1) Who the hell came up the Authenticator singleton over at the JDK team? What the fuck were you smoking? Seriously? Authenticator.setDefault() is one of the DUMBEST things I have seen in a long time. Why oh why not let people attach authenticators to HttpURLConnections if they want to on a per instance basis?

2) On the topic of HttpURLConnections, who came up with the brilliant idea to make transparentNTLMlogins the default and UNCHANGEABLE. Again with the IDIOT! Come on. This is just stupid. I know you were thinking “Client” but feel free to take your head out of your ass for four seconds and think “Server” instead. One of the major issues with NTLM is the lack of delegation and in some cases that delegation is easy to solve using intermediary accounts mapped to authenticated users’ roles. OK?

Well children, you will now get to see some bonafide code. This doesn’t happen often so enjoy. If you want to bypass issue 2 above then you only have to do the following:

try{
            Field f = sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.class.getDeclaredField(”tryTransparentNTLMServer”);
            f.setAccessible(true);
            f.setBoolean(urlConnection, false);
            f = sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.class.getDeclaredField(”tryTransparentNTLMProxy”);
            f.setAccessible(true);
            f.setBoolean(urlConnection, false);

        } catch(NoSuchFieldException e){
            //do whatever you normally do when an error occurs, you figure it out

            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
            //see above

            e.printStackTrace();
        }

That does the trick. No more transparent crap from that particular instance. I know that using the reflection API like that is considered bad form and that I am a BAD BAD BAD man. Fuck you. It works. I don’t care.

Now, let’s say you want to resolve issue one and you are running in a Tomcat instance: 

public class CustomAuthenticator extends Authenticator {

    HashMap<Long,PasswordAuthentication> credentials = new HashMap<Long,PasswordAuthentication>();

    public void add(String user, String pwd){

        cred.put(getThreadId(),new PasswordAuthentication(user,pwd.toCharArray()));

    }

//feel free to use some other way, like the thread name if you consider that unique, I don’t know and I don’t care
    private Long getThreadId(){
        return new Long(Thread.currentThread().getId());
    }
    private PasswordAuthentication get(Long id){
        return credentials.get(id);
    }

    protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
        return get(getThreadId());
    }
}

Synchronize to your favorite flavor. And then set it as default using the Authenticator.setDefault()-method of craptastic hell. This works just fine with Tomcat for example. Your mileage may vary. I don’t care. Consider this an excuse for my long absence. Over and out.

(And if someone remote related to jcifs reads this… feel free to use and abuse the #1 trick if you want)

The next person that starts talking about the “Concurrency Crisis” I will hit over the head with a multi-core frying pan.

I will try to make this brief and to the point: very few applications (note: applications, not games, not huge asynchronous data munching processes that live in some dark and half forgotten data center in the damp and unholy basement of Miskatonic Data Processing, Dagon St, Miskatonic) will benefit from extensive use of things like Scala. Yes, it’s a shiny new toy. Certainly. But listen to me and listen to me well: most applications are IO-bound. The slowdowns that most users react to have more to do with that (or for interpreted languages with crappy garbage collection - IntelliJ, I love you as an IDE but stop fucking around with the deallocation of memory, I hate it when you freeze up on me) than with the 0.1 seconds extra it takes to sort that list. Yes it sucks that we suddenly have to learn new ways of doing things (no, it doesn’t - learning is fun idiots), it sucks that concurrency is really hard. The silver lining? If you’re  using it you’re probably doing it wrong and for all the wrong reasons as well. You don’t need Scala to write normal applications. You don’t need it. You. Don’t. Need. It. Sit down for a second and think about it instead. So you have four cores. Or maybe eight. Make sure your application handles I/O efficiently long before you start wondering about whether to split that sorting over several cores.

Seriously. 2008. How the hell did this happen? It’s not supposed to be 2008 yet? Where are the flying cars? Where’s the moon base? And where is my household robot?

When I was a kid I used to hang out at the local library. Don’t do it kids, books are worse than drugs. Well, ok probably not but they’re pretty bad. You get a lot of really weird ideas from books anyway. (Especially if they happen to be written by Carlos Castaneda but that’s a completely different story altogether) Since I was one of those kids that wasn’t content with the “See Spot run” storylines of the young adult section - I mean seriously, what was the deal with Enid Blyton and food - I soon learned how to avoid the ever watchful eye of Sauron, I mean the librarian, and sneak into the adult section. No, it wasn’t that kind of adult, just because it’s Sweden doesn’t mean we have porn in the libraries, not even in the seventies. In any case I found a goldmine. And I spent a lot of time reading all sorts of stuff.

A lot of what I read was science fiction, there was Asimov and Bradbury, Heinlein, Simak and many others and to me those fantastic potential futures really made an impression. What if? they asked and so did I. Most of these books were written in the fifties and early sixties and it shows, they were all focused primarily on man’s conquest of space and the effects on humanity as a whole. Most of it was in hindsight pretty bad but some of it was just mindblowing, especially to a warped and fragile little mind as mine. Where am I going with this? Well, I was sitting in the living room just after Christmas, just thinking about this and that, and it struck me that something really strange happened in the seventies. Mankind has been very focused on conquest. Higher. Faster. Colonize. But suddenly it seemed, at pretty much the same time as we finally reached beyond our own fragile little biosphere into the great and unfriendly space beyond, we stopped. Humanity turned inward, towards itself. No longer necessarily focused on conquest (if we ignore the usual realpolitikal squabbles over scarce finite resources) but on consumption and communication. Now, we have always been a communicating species. I usually say that if you introduce a new technology within minutes you will see people using it to try to find someone to fuck, steal from or sell porn to. These days we can probably add gank to that but you get the point anyway.

This seems to me to be an inevitable trend. Space is unfriendly. Very very unfriendly. It’s not a solution, at least for carbon-based lifeforms with a very narrow niche in which we can survive comfortably. And perhaps this newfound interest in ecology and the environment will actually ensure that the planet isn’t a complete dump within the next 100 years. But what fascinates me the most is that this inward turn has made us conquer a new and still emerging landscape, one which is far more complex then most people realize. We are only 10 or so Moore’s law generations from having CPUs that have the processing power equivalent of a human brain. We are starting to see services becoming augmentions, by which I mean that we use Google and other services to quickly find, assess and comment information. Strip away IT from a company, almost any company, and see what happens? The productivity gains have been enormous but what we haven’t realized is that we are dependent on these tools and services in a way that surpasses any previous generation. A typist was certainly dependent on the typewriter but not anywhere near to the same extent. Tools could be rebuilt. My grandfather who was a fairly good carpenter could probably have put together a pretty reasonable toolset if someone happened to steal all of his existing tools. But we can’t do that. Our tools are so complex that we need to realize that this generation may be the first semi-augmented one. Will children born in 2008 fork personality constructs that do farm work for them in whatever MMO they are playing around 2025? Probably not. But I am quite certain that their way of interaction with each other and with whatever terminals they use would seem almost magical, in much the same way that someone who had never even heard of the internet in 1990 would find today’s reality more than a little confusing. “What do you mean google it? And what’s a facebook? And who is that yahoo?” We won’t go into space, at least not the one out there. There might be a mission to Mars. It might even happen in my lifetime. There might be commercial space travel that take morons on a short flight outside of the Earth’s atmosphere (a fool and his money is easily parted). But there won’t be any large scale space colonization. Other things might happen. Stranger things than I think that most of us can even imagine today. And if the creation of large scale online communities with today’s technology is anything to go by then I would be very surprised if we don’t start seeing fully virtual work places in the next ten years or so. Those who have played a lot of MMOs wouldn’t have much of an issue dealing with their office interactions over a voice link and through a virtualized terminal where you switch between some social area and your workplace. Pair programming would be an excellent example of something that could be easily achieved and which would work extremely well in a situation like that. And when that happens - who cares about time zones? Who cares about physical location? From a Friedman perspective, one could argue that this is already happening of course. But I don’t think it is. Not yet. Some of the infrastructure is there. The mindset is spreading. But most of the people in workplaces today are still brought up with the notion of an office, a physical space where you go which has some inherent value in being Elsewhere. Who will create the services? It’s not a question of whether the future will be distributed, it’s just a question of how distributed it will be.

Christmas time is closing in and the dark has pretty much engulfed us. But as the shining beacon of light that I am (universally loved by children and small animals everywhere), I figured I should give you a bit of a christmas present. I have spent some time finding some clips on youtube that I like. For various reasons. You will watch them and enjoy the glorious splendor of various eras of entertainment. And remember, in Soviet Russia the entertainment watches you!

Now, I’d to start out with my personal hero, a man who I would easily place at the top spot of Funniest Men In History Of Mankind. He is of course a completely awful singer. But the lyrics and bizarre dancing certainly make up for any lack in that department. As long as you are tone deaf. And if you dislike the works of the Marx Brothers then I just pity you. You are probably a sad little person.
And since Groucho himself references another Groucho character in that song (Cpt Spaulding) it’s no more than fitting that the next entry here is a song by one of my favorite bands of all time. The lead singer also has the good taste to look a little bit like me which has been commented upon so many times that if someone else says “Hey, you look like Joey Ramone” I am going to do a Blitzkrieg Bop on their head. In any case, here they do a song which in a certain sense reflects a song sung by Groucho in another Marx Brothers movie. But different.
And while we are speaking about funny, I don’t know I was alone in laughing my head off during the Germany vs Greece game in the last european championships. Beckenbauer. Now there’s a surprise. I was just waiting for Karl Marx to turn up. It would also have been great if Thomas Aquianas had been one of the referees but I guess you can’t have everything. Regardless I think that particular skit sums up everything that made Monty Python so funny. And again, it’s binary. Either you find it hysterical or not.
But I must say that there are some very funny comedians working now as well. But at the top of the list is Daniel Tosh in my book. (EDIT: Unfortunately the five Daniel Tosh clips are now gone gone gone from Youtube. You will of course feel very sorry. Also buy his DVD. No, really.) Now why does he get preferential treatment and five links, I hear you cry, pathetic person over there with no life. Because he is fucking funny. And evil. My fellow Jantean PN will get that reference perhaps, perhaps not - if one person gets it, it’s worth keeping in my book. And it’s the Supersuckers - The Greatest Rock’n'Roll Band In The World. If you haven’t seen them live then please, for the love of God, don’t. It’s hard enough to get tickets to their shows as it is and I don’t want to miss them.
Now, that pretty much wraps up my list of things that I have found on youtube lately. So the time has come to say good bye and what better way to do that than in the words of lock, stock and barrel. Merry christmas and see you next year!

Well, the whole discussion about why IAMCP decided to sue SIS is over. At least according to the press release that their chairman, the erstwhile illustrious mr Berti sent me earlier today. (It has been covered at least in Computer Sweden) It’s because of what happened with the OOXML vote. Color me a completely unsurprised shade of pink.

There has been some private conversation between myself and Valentino Berti as well. I won’t go into any detail on that, suffice to say that it’s reached a point where I am truly amazed. Now, in the interest of full disclosure  - and because some of you will find this amazingly amusing - I will tell you that I happen to work for an IAMCP member. Wow. How intensely funny is THAT.

To the matter at hand however. This whole story is bullshit from start to finish. The process that SIS used was subverted. It was subverted by members of the swedish chapter of IAMCP. Period. In this case IAMCP is sitting on two chairs and that just ends up with ass-on-floor. And if you are really curious about who participated and when they joined this this wonderful little resource should help you straighten things out. National Archive and Royal Library against. I’d really like to know why. Really really.

But anyway.

Let me be perfectly clear: I don’t care if it had been partners of IBM/Google/Procter & Gamble who had done this. It would be WRONG either way. The people who had been working within the process didn’t get a chance to have their voices heard, they were - for all intents and purposes - shouted down by new arrivals. If I were on the board of SIS I would do EXACTLY the same thing. Their choice was either to invalidate the entire process, basically saying that ISO standards are completely and utterly buyable, or to actually put their foot down and invalidate the vote, thereby removing Sweden from the equation. If it had been a nay-vote that got nipped in the bud, would IAMCP have been as keen on litigation? I think not.

In my opinion the legal action against SIS by IAMCP is nothing but scare tactics. Instead of letting the dust settle and actively participating in a process to change the way SIS works in a way that ensures that the people who end up voting have actually participated in the work, they took a completely different route. As a matter of principle apparently. Where they are complaning about how market forces are able to subvert the SIS process. Which is just hysterical. When are the market forces ok as an influencing factor? Only when you win? This is not OK. And I must say that with friends like the IAMCP, Microsoft really doesn’t need enemies.

Now, you may think that this is a one eyed view of the world. And that is your prerogative. If you seriously think that IAMCP is suing SIS over $2 500 dollars and an excuse I think that you probably might be interested in some real estate on Neptune, beautiful vistas and so on. Never mind the poisonous fumes.

For english speaking persons

I have invited the guerilla guys to contact me personally to be able to give the right information in an adult way.

I expect this to happen, so you will get the right resons for our action. It has actually nothing to do with the voting.

regards
Valentino Berti
Chairman IAMCP

This little wonderful nugget of a comment hit the post on IAMCP’s legal action against SIS last night. Got to love it. Adult way. Nice.

Listen Valentino. The process that SIS used was knowingly SUBVERTED, not by SIS but by Microsoft partners. The idea, and this is to a certain extent a gentlemen’s agreement, is that if you want to vote you need to take part in the process. No exceptions. I don’t care what way your vote was going to be cast, if you hadn’t been there for the discussions you have no place casting votes. Period. That is what “securely participate in a standardisation process” means. Read the standard, discuss it with the stakeholders (did anyone of your members bother to talk to the people from the Royal Library that are actually tasked with ensuring that documents are stored in a future proof way, they were part of the original group, voted no for some reason). That is the process. There is nothing else to it. Turning up and paying the membership fee when it’s time to vote can only be construed as “securely participating in the standardisation process” if your interest are to push the decision one way or the other for reasons that are hidden from the other participants. As a pot smoking surfer would put it: “Not cool, dude”.  So the reason you are doing what you are doing is because SIS’ board overturned the decision. This whole story is rotten borough through and through but this time with a Deus Ex Machina in the form of the board that actually had the balls to say that what was done wasn’t in line with the INTENT of the process. And Valentino, feel free to comment here and tell everyone your side of the story.

 And just for the record: I don’t think that OOXML was anywhere near a state where it could be fast-tracked through standardisation.

Yes. I suggest that you take a look at this little nugget, courtesy of the New York Times.

It is interesting though. Where will our applications end up? Will it be the network computer (for the seventy millionth time) or will it be the fat client?
The thing I wonder is if everyone involved is smoking crack. Are the intarwebs really working better? Search engines being gamed, malware spreading like wildfire, ownership of core networks moving further and further into the vast unthinking depths of telco land. This is not a market for networked applications. In fact I am considering if it’s not looking a lot more like a market in which distributed trusted networks (overlayed on top of a inherently untrustworthy network) will be the thing. I guess you could describe it as VPN:s but VPN:s somehow assume that there is an entity (or group) which strives to be private and that is not really what I am talking about; rather that groups of people, who may or may not even be linked to each other in any other way than that they have established some form of trust , start to look at sharing information. (It’s a thought still forming so you will have to bear with me for a while on that subject)
In any case - the idea that Google will succeed where so many others have failed is simply ludicrous. I certainly think that certain types of applications will move into the network domain, certain parts of applications will be managed centrally (See Excel Server for a very good example). But that enterprises would trust Google with their data? Or that Google could actually make a better Office suite than Microsoft in Javascript? Don’t be ludicrous. It’s not even a pipedream, it’s FUD. But not from Redmond for once in a while.
Sure there are people, some who I even know and respect, who claim that Google Apps will be the way of the future. I think they are full of it.
Look people, we are in the second half of the chessboard, growing our storage capacity exponentially, the concurrency crisis has only begun and we are starting to see how programming languages slowly mutate to handle a future where parallellism becomes more and more important. The idea that a networked application would somehow be necessary when storage and cycles are ultra cheap commodities is just dumb. If you can carry your desktop on your keychain and run it on pretty much anything, all your documents, applications, even your desktop - why would you need a networked application? (And if you think I am full of shit, think again) To share your documents? Don’t be daft, the wiki is the collaborative way and somehow I think that Microsoft latest posturing about the wikiness of Sharepoint shows that they have got the idea at long last (in spirit if not in practice).
Applications will become even more personal as they become personalized. They may become thinner, certain aspects of them moving into server farms elsewhere (enterprise controlled or something like S3, who knows), but they will become - to a certain extent - part of us, of what we are. Simple things have already started to turn up. Personalized menues based on how we work. But this is a niche where there is much to be done and where major things will start happening soon I think. Predictive searches for information, abstract generation, monitoring of inbound async communications providing context sensitive background information inlined. Something like that. And many other things naturally.

Not bad for a sunday night ramble I think.

 Oh yes. The robot quote. Bite my shiny metal ass.

Gather round children, the campfire is warm and cozy and there shouldn’t be any crazy axe murderers around this time of year. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a huge operator created out of the merger between two slightly less huge operators. They were called Orange and Blue. Well, they weren’t actually called that but they used those “secret cover names” internally to ensure that nobody understod what was going on when preparing the merger. The fact that you had to be dead to not understand it never dawned on the geniuses that came up with it. But never mind that. They merged and created a new operator which was first called Orange and then suddenly changed it’s name to Blue. It was all very tricky. They were also a rather closed system but when another operator in their market declared that their network was open to any device Blue made a decision. They declared that they were also open but that they couldn’t guarantee the performance of devices not sold through the Blue stores.

And everybody laughed and laughed. Because some people actually knew that some of those devices that Blue had sold were so extraordinarily crappy that they couldn’t be used with most DTMF controlled voice application services.

 The moral of this story is simple: don’t sell crap. And don’t buy Motorola phones. And don’t trust operators. And a lot of other stuff.

This must be the joke of the day. IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners) have decided to sue SIS (Swedish Standards Institute). Oh the irony.

Perhaps you don’t remember this story (or you lived in a cave for the last six months, eating nothing but rocks) so I will retell it. Once upon a time a couple of months ago SIS was preparing to move to vote on the OOXML standard. There had been a work group and they were done. But at the meeting were the vote was to take place there was a sudden influx of new SIS members. Curiously the vast majority of them Microsoft Gold partners. And they voted in favor of standardising OOXML. How strange. SIS has a board though and they looked at the result and the process and decided to throw it out, basically telling IAMCP that the way they had done things (ignoring the process and just turning up at the last minute to change the outcome) wasn’t ok. And now IAMCP is going to sue.

 Scare tactics. Listen IAMCP, you have a lot of members that could take part in the process. They could have done this in a way that fit the way that standardisation is supposed to work. Sit down with other parties and discuss the pros and cons of a format and write comments. Perhaps you learn something you didn’t know. The fact that the Royal Library (that is tasked with ensuring that documents are available for future generations) cast a NO vote tells you something, imagine if you had had the opportunity to actually understand their requirements and what they didn’t like about OOXML.

Let’s face it. You are behaving like assholes. And if it’s one thing that Microsoft really doesn’t need it’s more assholes associated with it.

I hope you don’t get the stupid idea that this is somehow becoming a habit (me writing blog entries every single day that is) because it isn’t. I just happened to have a little bit of free time for once. This one will however be short and sweet. Here is a little song that you will enjoy.