Brain Lint

The other day I’m drinking a Tropicana “100% Juice” Orange Juice, and happened to glance at the Ingredients:

100% Pure orange juice from concentrate (filtered water and concentrated orange juice) and Natural flavors*.
*Ingredient not found in regular orange juice

Now I’m wondering – what are these “natural flavors” that are different than “orange juice flavor” – luckily for all of us there’s a helpful 1800 number on the label! So I call, and ask, what’s with these extra flavors? The helpful woman asks if I have any food allergies that I’m worried about. I say no, I just want to know if some natural “dirt”, “asphalt” or “squirrel” flavor was lurking in my OJ. I authenticate as a non-prank caller by reading her my UPC Code, and then the answer is revealed:

The “natural flavors” are oils extracted from the orange peel/rind and added back to the juice.

Just today it occurs to me a followup question: if these flavors are “not found in regular orange juice”, how can they call it 100% juice?

I’d rather be programming than trying to make an application work – I hate losing days to trying to figure out why some fairly opaque application (or worse a group of them trying to interact) is not working – shutdown the server, change a config file, start up again and see if that mattered. Repeat until my brain feels squishy and I want to just curl up and take a nap. I’d feel better after programming for 20 hours than i do after having issues making something work that i need to test.

I was really impressed with the Turbo gears 20 minute wiki screencast. (eventually I’ll get around to checking out the Ruby on Rails screencast as well, though I’m sure it kicks a similar magnitude of ass.)

In 20 minutes, the screencaster (Kevin Dangoor) builds a simple wiki using a object-relational mapping library and a templating library, and even throws in some AJAX-like functionality into the client (which works in no time because the data to be displayed is already in a dictionary, ready to be rendered in any format)

Anyone doing development for the web should think twice about bringing the slow, expensive and overly complex J2ee stack to the party. Complexity is not a virtue.
One couldn’t get but a tiny fraction of the amount of work done in 20 minutes with J2EE. So why is the software industry so wedded to the Java train?