Another Friday Afternoon Grab Bag

Well, having even less in the tank than is usual on a Friday afternoon, I’ll keep this brief. My grand plan of taking the red eye, then working a full day ran into a bit of a snag last night. As is my habit, I was sitting in the aisle so as to be able to occasionally strech my legs a bit – this proved to be a costly error. I have no idea what sort of stomach ailment was visited on the poor woman sitting in the middle seat next to me, but she must have gotten up 10 times to hit the head, waking me up each time. So net net, I’m operating on maybe an hour’s worth of sleep.

Despite that, the sessions today went ok, I think. I was visiting one of our clients to get a look at a latest and greatest product set, and apart from some niggling usability type concerns, I come away fairly impressed. More on this later.

1. In other news, for anyone who questions just how dedicated I am to the Red Sox, I remind you that I am missing the Great American Beer Festival back home; 1669 beers on tap, that I could be sharing with Mr. Raible and friends. How much do I love the Sox? 1600 beers worth, apparently.
2. Matt also mentions that he’s planning on attending the Denver Tech Meetup, which is excellent news. Attendance is pretty good, with 15 folks signed up in just a couple of days. Should be a great mix of companies – with some great people, and I’m definitely looking forward to it. As an update to potential attendees I confirmed the venue last night (while getting another couple of my discs into the Supper Club rotation ;).
3. Via DeWitt comes the following debunking of Alex Rodriguez’ MVP credentials: in games decided by 6 or more runs, A-Rod’s hitting an eye popping .420 with an unworldly 1.295 slugging percentage. Great stuff. But how about the close games? Those decided by 1 to 2 runs? A rather pedestrian .255 with an .810 slugging percentage. Big Papi, on the other hand, hits a paltry .231/.835 when the game’s out of hand. When the game’s tight, however, he’s your man: .318/1.119 in games decided by one or two runs. And while I may be off by a homer or two, I believe that 20 of his 46 dingers either tied the game or put the Sox ahead. You tell me who’s more valuable.
4. Via Ryan comes word that calendar.google.com is now resolving, although it’s merely pointing back to Google’s quasi-portal page.
5. While I’m talking about Ryan, I’d like to give him full credit for inspiring the title of my upcoming Zend Conference talk, which I’m calling PHP: Simplicity and Less Code. What he and his gang of confederates are building over at lesscode.org is remarkable.
6. I’ve got a lot of respect for Mr. Tim Bray, so when he says the following:
   

   It hasn’t escaped the Prague gang’s attention that the management of IBM and Nokia and some other companies, as well as lots of analysts and prognosticators, and apparently all of ZDNet, thinks NetBeans ought to dry up and go away; that the Java world really needs One Big IDE. I mean, that’s good enough for Microsoft developers, why shouldn’t it be good enough for Java?

   So we kicked that around a bit, and surprising though it may be to some, sometimes the analysts and executives and journalist can, believe it or not, be wrong.

   I listen. Not least b/c I’m presumably one of those analysts referred to (or maybe I’m just flattering myself). While I certainly don’t believe NetBeans should “dry up” or “go away,” I’m a confirmed believer that the Eclipse/NetBeans divide is not beneficial for the Java development world. As I told Tim at NetBeans day back at JavaOne, I’m not against having competing IDEs; I agree more or less with Jonathan Schwartz’ contention that Eclipse is better because of NetBeans and NetBeans is better because of Eclipse. But having two separate and incompatible plugin architectures forces ISVs to choose between the environments – often at the expense of NetBeans – a choice that they do not have to make in the Microsoft world. That, to me, is a shame.

7. If you’re interested in both databases and Ruby on Rails, I highly suggest you read this, and compare and contrast it with this. Why am I not surprised to find two minds of this caliber agreeing that constraints can be good, and more features doesn’t always mean better design?
8. One last note, if you’re interested in the industry analyst business you might give some of my colleague’s recent threads a read (1, 2, 3, 4). They’ve been pretty widely picked up, and I’m beginning to hear rumblings that validate his contentions from customers and other folks in the tech biz. I personally try to keep my ambitions limited in scope, but I do think the next few years are going to pose some challenges to industry analyst incumbents. Sooner or later I think some of their pay walls will have to come down.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I have at this point. I’m totally used up, and need to start making my way down to my buddy’s place in Back Bay from where I anticipate catching tonight’s HUGE game. Enjoy your weekend’s, and don’t miss any of the baseball. GO SOX.