Discursive

I've switched a number of books over to 8.5" x 11" format. Although this is not a traditional size for computer books (most computer books are around 7"x 9"), moving to 8.5" x 11" reduces page count for printing conserving resources and reducing cost. I've found it much cheaper to print books on 50-weight 8.5x11 vs. 60-weight 7x9. While, I'm comfortable with DocBook XSL, I dread FO, and the idea of configuring the XSL to create two-column FO is very possible, but wasn't something I wanted to jump into without first evaluating InDesign's support for columns.

I wasn't at MySQL Conf this year, but I heard that Tim's talk was worth watching. It is. As we continue to see the Internet fall victim to corporate consolidation, it will become increasingly important for us to listen to people calling for openness and an internet not dominated by a few, large corporate titans.

Sun's culture placed too much emphasis on engineering stature. Every time I'd talk with a Sun engineer off the record, they would tell me stories about how good ideas were often eviscerated by weighty luminaries with strongly held opinions. This problem is at the core of Sun's final years. It was a company guided not by solid economic reasoning, but by gut feeling and opinion. From JavaFx to Netbeans, you could tell there was no solid strategy in place for a platform which had every reason to become the dominant player of the last decade.

In the past few years, I've done my share of online presentations and online training. (You can call them "webinars" if you like, but I'd prefer not to add that word to the lexicon.) Here's the problem with online presentations: there is very little attendee/presenter interaction, and current technologies like WebEx and GotoMeeting provide little help. If you teach online classes long enough, you'll start to realize that this lack of connection, this lack of co-presence starts to wear you out.

It begins with "I hate maven.", and it goes on and on. This is a person who is trying to use the Sonar plugin, and who hates Maven so much he can't bring himself to understand the idea of running a repository manager, or even that he should think about upgrading to a version of Maven that was released two years ago.