"Jerry" is a spamtard

In fact he may well leave a spam comment on this post, touting his list of bridalwear sites. As "Jerry" in all likelihood doesn't read English the irony will be lost on him. I'm talking as though "Jerry" is human but probably he is a bot: I seem to remembering reading that somebody had cracked captchas a while back. Certainly "Jerry" has been the only spamtard persistent enough to spam every single post on this site, even my very first one (which possibly makes him the first person to visit that page, ever). "Laptop Battery", "Peter W" and "Eda" are lightweights by comparison.

This sorry state of affairs is my fault. I have allowed comments without moderation because I would rather zap the occasional spam than moderate all the comments. But, until Joel Garry alerted me, I had failed to notice that spamtards were spamming old posts. As Joel said, some of the stuff was nasty, really explicit pr0n sites. So, moderation for older posts is now in effect - it's already caught a couple.

In the meantime I have a large housekeeping task. One post - on multi-core licensing, bizarrely - has over 150 spam comments, and as I have already said, "Jerry" has spammed every single post. It is unfortunate that Blogger does not provide the functionality to delete comments in bulk, despite being desired for several years. So the only option is to delete each spam comment individually, which as Bill Scott has observed, is a rather user hostile design.

The question behind all this is why Blogger doesn't provide the functionality. It's not like it would be hard to offer a list of all the comments with a check box and a Delete All button. The Google forums (they own Blogger) have lots of questions but no useful advice. It is especially puzzling when compared to the excellent way GoogleMail handles spam.

Now I am off to zap a few more comments. With a song in my heart and a smile on my face, naturally.

Which one would you read?

The digest from one of my LinkedIn groups included a plaintive cry from Bruce Newman, VP of the Productivity Institute, regarding their weekly newsletter. One of the articles in the current issue has been read far more often than all of the others and he would like to know why.

Here is the list: which one would you choose to read first?

• Why Even Good Marketing Fails - And How To Fix It
  
• The Problem Of Self Examination
  
• Knowledge Management Systems: It's Not What You Know...
  
• It's All In The Details
  
• People Drive ERP Systems' Performance
  
• Defining A Company's Identity
  
• A Violinist In The Metro -- Washington, D.C.
  

If you are most intrigued by the last title then you are not alone. That's the one which has so troubled Bruce.

To me its appeal is clear: every other title is either vague and bland, or explicit and dull. Only that title arouses the reader's curiosity: it must be about busking in the subway but surely a business tech newsletter cannot publish a piece on such a subject. I expect that the sort of people who subscribe to a newsletter published by The Productivity Institute have inboxes stuffed with mailings about ERP systems; they must appreciate the chance to read something different while still apparently working.

I feared the actual article might not live up to the promise of its title. But fortunately it's worth reading. And the lesson is applicable to VP Bruce Newman's predicament.

Peaking behind the knowledge curtain

After threatening for years to start a blog Martin Widlake has finally put fingers to keyboard. Some of you may recall that I am a fan of his UKOUG presentations. His writing is entertaining and insightful too. Despite his blog being called Yet Another OracleBlog he has not written much on Oracle, but I expect that will come.

In the meantime Martin has revisited "The knowledge curtain", a concept he discussed in one of those UKOUG presentations. The curtain is that barrier of misunderstanding which separates users and IT staff. It is one of the main reasons why some IT projects overrun or exceed budget or fail to fully meet the users' expectations.¹ The good news is, the barrier is just a curtain. It's not a wall topped with barbed wire, it's not a shark-filled moat. I won't give away Martin's analysis: you can read it for yourselves

This does seem like a good time to mention something Rob James said at a BCS SPA meeting from a while back. In a discussion about rules engines he observed that these days it is not uncommon for the IT department to have a better understanding of the business than the users. The users only know what the business rules should be: the IT staff know what the computer systems actually do.

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1. Whereas the occasional IT catastrophes, the ones which make the headlines, are usually due to a single error.

Real data persistence

Scientists working scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California have developed a chip which can pack data at densities thousands of times greater than current technology. The chips use a "crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube". These chips can store a trillion bits of data per square inch and, due to the nanotubes' thermodynamic stability, can retain the data for a billion years. Now that's what you call persistent.

Apparently the technology could be on the market within the next two years. All we need now is a device for maintaining a Locoscript to Whatever convertor which will last for a similar length of time...

Sun belatedly launches Java App Store

Over on O'Reilly Timothy M. O'Brien reports on the launch of Sun's Java App Store at their JavaOne conference. It seems the store will work¹ on the same principle as the iPhone App Store: Java developers upload their apps so that other people can download and pay for them. It's Sourceforge with a cash register. Only it's still in Beta and they haven't decided yet how best to actually collect the money. I can't help feeling that this is emblematic of Sun's general failure to monetize Java for themselves.

As O'Brien describes it the launch seems a maudlin affair, with the triumvirate of Scott McNealy, Jonathan Schwartz and James Gosling talking about how great Java is and what a great future it has. Then the future turns up on stage, in the form of the imperator novus himself, Larry Ellison. Larry says some things about how great Java is and what a great future it has. I note that he picked out JavaFX, Sun's RIA offering which is widely regarded as floundering in the wake of Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight. O'Brien quotes Larry as saying "we're looking forward to is seeing libraries coming out of [the group] that are JavaFX based", and "Thank you James [Gosling], suffering programmers will [thank you] for the rest of their lives because they don't have to program in AJAX any more."

Also, Larry says that "Other than the database which was based on the SQL language which was our origin, everything that sits atop the database, all of our products are based on Java." Is ApEx still a skunk works project?

Update

The Register has its own jaundiced take on Larry's spiel. They also have a more measured take on the technical implications of in switching the Fusion strategy from AJAX to JavaFX.

Update 2

Lucas Jellema has already blogged about this keynote in some depth. He has the advantage of being at JavaOne, rather than gathering stuff second hand.

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1. You can find the Java App Store here but - at the time of writing - it is still a private beta so there is not much to see.

More on Oracle-Sun

The Oracle-Sun bandwagon rolls on and there are still more questions than answers. The Guardian asks some of them: Will Oracle kill MySQL? Will it continue Sun's drive towards open source? Can Oracle cope with being a hardware company? Why is Larry still so driven?

Elsewhere Business Week asks a similar set of questions plus some sharper ones for the individuals involved: How many Sun workers will lose their jobs? Is a culture clash coming? Or, as the Guardian's Jack Schofield observes, Sun's customers may feel they have "gone from My Little Pony to Ming the Merciless".

Schofield describes the Oracle-Sun deal as "IBM's goof". Maybe Big Blue secretly agrees, because it has chosen this week to announce an intensification of its support for PostgreSQL, through its relationship with Enterprise DB. According to Matt Assay, IBM's plan to embed Postgres Plus Advanced Server technology into DB2 9.7 "basically allows applications written for the Oracle database to run on ... IBM's DB2".

In another part of the open source forest, MySQL customers try to figure out whether the deal is good or bad news. Although former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos reckons most of them hadn't noticed that Sun bought MySQL and probably won't care that Oracle now owns Sun. Anyway, IT World has rounded up the debate (including a quote from Pythian's Paul Vallee).

According to Reuters, Steve Ballmer cannot understand the thinking behind the deal: "I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company." Well, ignoring the obvious software assets which come with the deal, there are some major benefits to acquiring Sun's expertise in information management systems, as Andrew Orlowski points out. Unsually for commentators in general and The Register in particular, he has some nice things to say about McNealy and Schwartz's stewardship of Sunover the last few years.

"Yet by betting on some clever systems thinking during the down years, and backing their R&D departments to come up with the goods, McSchwartz ensured such disasters were survivable. The result is a lot of in house expertise in virtualisation and threading, that can make a difference with real workloads.

If Oracle isn't completely dumb, it will appreciate quite what an incredible asset it has acquired - because this know-how can help every part of its business. Peoplesoft cost Larry $10.3bn. Sun looks like a bargain."

So Oracle buys Sun

There had been rumours but it is still a surprising development. What does Oracle get for $7.9bn (a billion more than IBM was prepared to pay)?¹ Surely stomping on MySQL can't be worth that much? Certainly Oracle already has enough web servers in its portfolio without taking on JBossGlassfish too. Perhaps what Larry really has bought is just the ultimate payback for all those cracks about Armani suits from Scott McNealy at OpenWorlds over the years.

More seriously, Oracle has staked a lot of its future on Applications. So having control of Java, the language of Fusion, has an obvious appeal. I imagine this news will disconcert some of the Java heads. I have known some who preferred to use Eclipse over JDeveloper, despite acknowledging that JDev is the better tool, because they wanted to remain free of proprietary frameworks. Well its all vendor specific now. Will Oracle continue with the OpenJDK initiative? There doesn't seem a lot of point spending all that money on getting Java only to proceed down the path to giving it away. On the other hand the past few years have seen much fanfare about Oracle's commitment to open standards and they will want to keep on board as much of the Java community as they can.

The notion of Oracle as a hardware vendor is an intriguing one. Oracle will be able to offer appliances such as Exadata without the trouble (and loss of potential revenue) incurred by partnering with a hardware vendor. The flip side is that hardware vendors may be less happy to accommodate Oracle on their boxes.

Which is where Linux comes in. Initially I thought that this acquisition might change Oracle's attitude to Linux. After all, as it no longer has to pay for Solaris licences, cost is no longer an issue. But Linux does have a couple of things going for it. One is that it provides a platform which will run Oracle on any vendor's hardware. The other is that the costs of maintaining it as an OS are defrayed amongst the thriving Linux kernel community. Oracle aren't going to kill off Solaris just to save costs: it has too big an install base (apparently there are more Oracle databases running on Solaris than any other OS). But I think Linux will remain Oracle's favoured platform. We might see a few Solaris utilities plundered and ported to Linux.

The staggering thing is that this is not Oracle's biggest acquisition. It paid more for PeopleSoft and BEA Systems, which is an indication of just how far Sun's stock has fallen in the last few years.

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1. Or is it $7.4bn? Or even $5.6bn, a billion less than IBM was prepared to pay? Sources vary. Isn't the Internet a marvellous thing!

J G Ballard: an appreciation

From time to time radio programmes and newspapers come round to discussing the most important post-war English language novelist. To my mind there is only one candidate. Ballard was one of that select band of writers whose world view is so singular that it has become an adjective. We can describe a motorway flyover, shopping mall or stretch of industrial wasteland as Ballardian and instinctively expect our audience to know what we mean.

Ballard was attracted to these alienating structures not because he hated people, precisely the opposite. Ballard was a very sociable man who loved life. What Ballard disliked were people who relinquished their individuality to become part of some wider, blander community, whether it be the Home Counties conservatism of the expats in the Shanghai of his childhood or the zombie-ite consumerism of New Labour's Britain. He enjoyed individuals who rejected conformity and gave free rein to their enthusiasms, even if that led them into self-destructive psychopathology. The brutal concrete of a multi-storey car park or the glittering perfection of a science park on the Cote D'Azur serve simply to emphasize the humanity of the protagonists.

As a writer he was a superb stylist. Sometimes his relish for incorporating the language of modern professional writing - physics journals, medical advertising, corporate press releases - teetered on the verge of parody. But his books were always full of striking images and precisely targeted metaphors. He also had a sly sense of humour, for which I think he was under appreciated.

Although Ballard was pegged as a science fiction writer he was never interested in the technology so much as our response to it. His stories almost never deal with the struggle to get a man on the Moon but rather the isolation of the astronaut after he has returned to Earth. He always had an ambivalent attitude to technology, being in favour of things which increase our sense of vitality - cars, aircraft - and distrustful of those which deaden sensation - word processors, fitted kitchens. His awareness of the built environment extended to the virtual environment of television and advertising. He was one of the earliest writers to analyse the modern obsession with celebrity, seeing it as a logical development of globalised media. I think he was vindicated by the narrative arc of Jade Goody; Reality TV is very Ballardian.

Now Ballard has lost his own battle against cancer. I've been reading his books for over thirty years and the news that there will be no more is hard to comprehend. The obituaries will dwell on Empire of the Sun, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. I will always have a soft spot for Vermillion Sands, a collection of short stories set in a futuristic holiday resort situated in the middle of a desert. The melancholy surrealism of the golden sands and blue skies provides a backdrop for a series of psychodramas involving the usual panoply of damaged eccentrics. Ballard applied the techniques of science fiction to produce works with a haunting poetry. It's lovely, evocative stuff. His autobiography, Miracles of Life, is a fascinating, inspirational read too.

J G Ballard 1930 - 2009. RIP.