Brain Lint

Monday I went to the South Street Seaport in NYC with my old roommate Neil to see BODIES the EXHIBITION. It was fascinating. They took a bunch of bodies and used a ploymer resin technique to preserve them in a state that was as close to real as I can imagine. They also had a room full of circulatory exhibits where they used a technique to colorize and polymerize all of the blood vessels and them float them in some kind of liquid.

There’s a cool sounding Pixar exhibition at Moma too, unfortunately I only read about that today. Knowing is half the battle, as they say.

I was in an all-hands call, which as usual apparently for any company, was largely a waste of time and money. Anyways, as a prelude to hearing about some wonderful tooling/toolkits we should all standardize on, we see this chart:

The “chart” bothers me on so many levels. First I’m not sure why gartner feels that the average skill level of J2EE developers peaked in 2002. Why 2002? Is that when the smart, early adopters of J2EE started fleeing for the greener pastures of python, php and ruby? Or was the field swamped by “Sun Certified” J2EE folks who can memorize APIs but not actually solve problems? Secondly, by what measure are J2EE applications getting more complicated? Did the world get dramatically more complicated since 2002? If your architecture or platform (J2EE) is so complicated that you need to slather on more layers of “architecture” to fix it, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong in the first place? Complexity is not a virtue.

Lastly, as a developer thinking about skills that are applicable to another job down the pike, why would I want to learn an proprietary wizard-hand-held way of doing things when there are so many great open source solutions to the same problems that would be applicable at many more jobs down the road?

P6Spy is a great little tool that allows one to log all JDBC calls a Java application makes - allowing one to get a high level view of where some application bottle necks are (i.e. repeated, identical calls can probably be cached). Though it is included in applications like Infrared, it itself has unfortunately not been updated in over two years. I’ve never even seen mention of forking the project, just a few posts on its message boards sharing a few code snippets. It seems like it got folded into IronEye SQL, whose website is responding for the first time in weeks as I post this, coincidentally, but are apparently out of business anyways.

I’m posting an updated version that fixes a bug (impossible to deactivate logging of result set rows) and adds a new feature. The new feature is the addition of a category “resultcount” which will print out the number of rows fetched for a query in the format:

<p6spy preamble> <separator> <select query> <separator> "generated N rows"

Without further ado, the downloads:

• The Updated Jar File
• Diff of P6ResultSet.java
• Diff of P6LogResultSet.java

Here’s a couple of medical-related things that have bothered me in the last few days:

###The Flu Shot Cupboard is Bare
Despite last winter’s much lamented Flu Vaccine shortage and all its associated hand wringing about solutions for the future, I cannot find a flu shot this season. I go late in the day to Tuft’s flu shot clinic for students, and they’ve run out. I make an appointment for a flu shot with my real doctor and then a few days later get a call cancelling my appointment because they’re all out. No one seems to know when they’ll get more either. Where is the media outrage? Apparently the only way to get a flu shot this year is to work for a large company that makes machines for business across national borders and go to one of their under populated, over vaccine-supplied clinics.

Or line up early and often as if to buy bread in Moscow in the 1980s. Terrific!

###Having to Show Id to Buy Sudafed
I was at Target on Saturday, and as I was feeling a little under the weather (perhaps its the flu I can’t get vaccinated against) I decide to pick up some Target brand 12-hour Sudafed. Only thing is now you have to take a card with a picture of the item to the pharmacy, where they will not only id you to make sure you’re old enough to buy Sudafed, but also record the information in some database and make one sign some extra slip of paper. Sounds like a feel-good, zero-effectiveness way to win the war on meth-labs in Somerville. Are there even any? Then I guess its working. Did we have a problem to begin with?

If I buy a bunch of sudafed and a keg in the same day, which have equally onerous purchase registration requirements around here, I wonder which would generate a police visit first?

Sure, switch to the new Sudafed PE “eqivalent”- only there doesn’t seem to be a generic equivalent yet, so I’d be paying more to avoid the inconvenience of getting the old stuff.

All of that, and I bet people who run meth labs are still having no problem getting a hold of their Pseudoephedrine.

I’m always intrigued when someone spends time to write a book bending the span of human history through the proverbial lens of a particular substance. I thought Salt: A World History was actually rather good, so when I saw Coal: A Human History for $5 at the MIT Press loading dock sale, I knew my proverbial ship had come in at long last!

The book documents, as you might imagine, the history of coal, and how, hidden away in boilers 30 stories tall, it continues to drive much of our society even today. The Chinese first burned coal centuries before the west did, but never got the steam engine/industrial revolution thing figured the way the British finally did. After an initial false start (the rich hated the smell and got it’s burning banned for a couple of centuries, finally relenting when all the forests were chopped down), coal “ignited” the industrial revolution via the need to drain deep coal mines, resulting in the steam engine, then a whirling vortex of synergy between iron, steam engines, transportation and coal.

The book is very readable, written in a smooth conversational tone that goes down easy even in T-ride-sized nibbles. Any person moderately interested in history will appreciate the way coal is weaved into so much of modern western history.

It turns out there are numerous one-topic books of this nature - check out this Amazon list someone created a list of books about one thing.

I suppose there must be a size n where for companies that reach a size greater than n, there is always some part of the company with its head crammed firmly up its ass, in spite of the ground breaking work happening elsewhere. Apparently Yahoo is at least as big as that magical size.
Tonight, I wanted to check out the new weezer video on yahoo music. Only for a mac user, that generates a pop up indicating that Netscape 4.7 is required (screenshot here) That’s a positively pre-historic browser version - it’s eight years old for crying out loud. That would be like steaming down the “information superhighway” with a Victrola on the dashboard of my buggy, whip in hand.

This goes to spite the post I was formulating in my head praising Yahoo Farechase and the new Yahoo Maps Beta (which is arguably better than google maps, for now due to cool hover effects, multiple directions, and route numbers for rural roads in directions).

Then again, since I know Yahoo bought farechase, along with their new beta email (which i doubt beats gmail, because the tired old desktop email metaphor that everyone copies is not better) it may just be that “old” yahoo is stuck in some kind of 1999 time warp, and they have to buy innovation (like Flickr, for example) rather than cook it at home.

Or maybe the Yahoo music team is too busy “innovating” ways to break tools people create to get their content to get around to making it available in contemporary browsers.