The Porter Method

So one of the nice loopholes in the National Do Not Call Registry (see Exceptions here) is the exemption provided to political organizations. Now as my loyal readers know I took the plunge and went all cellular a few months back. I ported my existing home phone number (which was actually a VOIP number through Packet8.Net) over to my cell phone. Now those of you with cell phones know that you typically pay for a finite package of minutes per month. Thus Telemarketing calls are definitely undesirable since not only are they using up your valuable time, but also your expensive cell phone minutes.

Since I had my phone number changed a couple of years ago and did not leave a forwarding number at the old phone number, I do not receive many undesirable calls. After switching to cellular I have started putting down bogus phone numbers anytime I’m required to fill out a form requiring this information (unless I can thing of a really good reason they need to contact me via telephone).

I thought I had all of my bases covered by using this technique along with being on the National Do Not Call list, but recently I started receiving phone calls (automated and real people) from anyone even contemplating running for mayor here in Mobile, AL. I wondered how they got my phone number and how I could get it removed from their list (I ask each of the real people to remove me, but the automated ones just don’t listen), and after a couple of days it finally hit me.

They must have acquired my phone number from my voter registration card. I must have put down an actual real number on that stupid thing. Of course it does have a warning on it saying if I sign it after knowingly putting down false information I can be convicted and imprisoned for up to five years, but I’m willing to risk it. So I am submitting an updated voter registration card with a bogus phone number in the hopes that I can stop the hoard of phone calls from these political groups.

I’ll let you know how it goes (and if I end up in the slammer because of this).

OK, so better late than never. I’m finally getting around to writing up the rest of JavaOne 2005. I had really intended to write up the day’s events every night before going to bed, but things were just too busy.

The keynote started with Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy taking the stage. He is quite a charismatic speaker and seems to be a good person to have representing the company in the public space. He announces the aquisition of SeeBeyond Inc. by Sun. SeeBeyond is an Enterprise Application Integration company that has a suite of tools for working in the EAI space. This stuff is definitely going to be big. I will definitely have to focus more on the EAI world (which I am doing now through my work with the open source Business Integration Engine and as a Beta tester for BizTalk 2006).

Next Olivier Piou, CEO of Axalto, talked about the status and impact of the JavaCard technology. There are currently 1 billion JavaCard devices out there and Piou expects that in 3 years there will be another billion JavaCard devices (the ID cards for JavaOne have embedded JavaCard chips in them).

The keynote then kind of diverges into a socio-political slant in which Sun makes a strong statement regarding their desire to opensource the Education and Health Care industries in order to improve these two areas for everyone. They show an interesting video about the Brazilian health care system and how Java technology has improved the overall system.

Fabiani Nardon, CTO of Brazilian National Health Care System, comes up to talk about the progress they have made using Java. 2.5 Million lines of code developed in 4 months. Very integrated with using JavaCard technology to store medical information. She mentions that they have been talking with Africa about how to share what they have built and learned to improve their health care system.

Next the idea of opensource education is brought up. This is something I am all for. I am convinced there are plenty of poor teachers and poor educational systems out there. Someone knows how to get information into people’s heads, so we should find them and use their methods and materials to teach our children. As part of this initiative they mention the JEDI (Java Education & Development Initiative) project from the Phillipines, the BlueJ project, the GELC (Global Education Learning Community) project, the MIT OpenCourseWare open source curriculum, and the Sun Student Developer Community.

So you are like most fresh, young college graduates. You have your degree in hand, you have a head full of skills, and you are ready to solve all of the world’s problems using your ability to wrangle and line up lots of little bits….and of course you would like to be paid for it.

But, you can’t seem to find a job anywhere. Reason most often given? You don’t have any experience. Ah yes, the old chicken/egg problem.

Well you are in luck, today ONLamp.com has a fantastic article about how you can get real world experience (and improve your skills in the process) while you are searching for that paying job.

Their article The Virtual Internship: Taking Control of Your Future by Becoming an Open Source Developer makes many good points about how you can get some street cred while you are still waiting to get hired on somewhere.

I highly recommend checking it out. And don’t just sit there, get involved in some project somewhere. Some good places to start searching for ideas are SourceForge and the CodeHaus.

Another great post from Joel Spolsky of www.joelonsoftware.com. This time he is trying to quantify the dramatic difference in productivity and creativity a truly exceptional programmer can have versus your run of the mill “I write code just to pay the bills” mediocre programmer.

Hitting The High Notes

Well worth a read.

I only know of a couple of companies that seem to have been founded on the premise that Joel states at the beginning of the article. One is Fog Creek Software (Joel’s company) and the other is ThoughtWorks (where the great Martin Fowler currently hangs his hat). They have blogs over at ThoughtWorks too, definitely worth checking out.

I would love to hear about other companies founded with these ideas in mind. If you know of any others, post a comment. It is nice to see companies succeed based on the main idea of creating an enjoyable environment for their workers.

I have been working with BIE (Business Integration Engine) trying to set up a proof of concept at work. I had a file format that did not have a built in parser in BIE. I thought about writing a new parser, but it seemed a better approach would be to convert the file into a known format using a bit of scripting magic.

So the plan was to use some regular expressions to convert the file into a nice fixed width format (which BIE can parse out of the box). After seeing that one of the loyal users of BIE had contributed a Jython plugin action that allowed me to perform Jython scripting inside my workflow, I decided to try and use it for the regex parsing (since I’ve wanted to play more with Python anyway).

Well I must say that Jython did not do my bidding if you will. I could not figure out (or find good examples showing) how to do regular expression parsing using the built-in Jython libraries (I believe it uses the Jakarta ORO project).
So after looking at the code for the Jython plugin, I decided I would take Rod Cope’s advice (from his awesome Groovy presentation at JavaOne 2005. You can find a link to download the presentations here, his is TS-3402.pdf) and write a plugin for Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org).

It turned out to take less than an hour, and now BIE supports Groovy scripting inside workflows. Next on the agenda will be to add support for BeanShell and Rhino (which I’ve used in some Ant scripts with great success).

You can download the plugin here: Groovy Plugin for BIE

We also have set up a wiki for BIE here: BIE Wiki