The 2009 Crystal Ball

Last January, I hopped up on my soapbox and made several predictions in the technology field for the coming year. Now that we’re wrapping up the end of the year, I went to take a look at how well I did.

Prediction #1 – Sun is toast : yep, nailed it.

Prediction #2 – Windows 7 will rock : another gimmee; Windows 7 is very good and was what Vista should have been.

Prediction #3 – Google and Apple will turn out to be evil after all : probably debatable. Google definitely, and Apple is still working on it.

Prediction #4 – Microsoft won’t be the evil empire anymore : swing and a miss. They’re sure trying to sound less evil, but they’re still Microsoft. I guess Ray Ozzie is not going to be able to move the mountain.

Prediction #5 – Oracle buys SpringSource : I was pretty close. They got bought by VMWare instead, which makes zero sense. I still think I’ll be proven right, as you’ll see when I make my predictions for next year.

Prediction #6 – Microsoft buys ExtJS : no dice. Admittedly, this was a wildcard guess. I am surprised that someone hasn’t bought them yet.

So all told, I had four of my six predictions mostly on the mark, which isn’t bad. I’ll have to start working on my scientific predictions for next year over the holidays. I just need a few good cups of eggnog first.

Almost Perfect

I was at the Apple store this week drooling over the new iMacs. As I’m sure everyone knows, Apple refreshed the iMac line and released some really stunning boxes. My main computer right now is a 13″ Macbook Pro sitting behind a 23″ cinema display in a Bookarc. I also made a rather nice monitor stand to boost the display about two inches. It works awesome, is completely silent and plenty fast for dev work, but I’m still impressed by the new iMacs…. with one exception.

The good stuff first. The new 27″ LED screen is beautiful. The video card is an ATI 4850, which is plenty fast for most non-bleeding edge games, and it can be pretty cheaply boosted to 8GB of RAM. And Apple finally has quad-core CPUs! I can live with a dual core in the laptop, but if I’m paying for a chunk of metal that sits on my desk, it better have four cores. And the price isn’t bad considering what you get. A quad-core i5 bumped to 8GB is$2200.

If I didn’t have my current setup, and was the market for a new desktop, I would snap it up in a second, except for one small problem — I don’t like the glossy screen. I tolerate it in my current configuration because I still do all by Photoshop work a my PC with a good 20″ matte screen LCD. I’m sure most other serious Photoshop users have the same gripe. Apple has built their best desktop computers ever, and has handicapped it with a glossy screen.

I’m at a loss for why there is at least not a matte option, like on the 17″ Macbook Pro. My only guess would be they don’t want to cannibalize sales on the Mac Pros and 30″ displays. If I ever bought one of these, it would have to become my main computer and kill off my wintel box to justify the cost. That is not going to happen until Apple does right by their customers and ships these with a matte screen.

Stopping the Racket

The concept of Net Neutrality has really started to heat up recently. The geeks who understand the internet have been pushing for it for years, but it fell on the deaf ears for the past eight years. Now, with a new president, the FCC is finally taking steps to make it a reality. Yet low and behold, some in congress are now going to try and stop it.

So let’s talk about what Net Neutrality really means. Imagine if your electric company got in to the appliance business and the next day your refrigerator quits running. You take a look and nothing appears wrong. Being the wise troubleshooter, you remember to test step #1: is it plugged in. It is plugged in but you figure out it is not getting any juice from the outlet.

You check the breakers; they’re all fine. By this point, you’re pretty irate so you call the electric company. The third-world tech support person tells you they are sorry to hear about your problem, but there is just too much demand for electricity. You see, too many people are plugging in those amperage-hogging power tools, so they have to prioritize the allocation. If you want to ensure your beer stays cold, you either need to buy one of their refrigerators or pay a bit extra a month for the additional guarantee on quality of service.

This is effectively what the large ISPs want to do with your internet connectivity. An educated person would call this extortion, but to them it is colloquially referred to as “an additional revenue stream”. If two large Italian gentlemen in thousand dollar suits paid you a visit and said “nice computer you have there, it would be a shame if you couldn’t get electricity for it”, someone would go to jail. Yet when large publicly traded companies do the same thing, we’re supposed to call it the “free market at work.”

There are only two reasons to oppose Net Neutrality: ignorance or corruption. I’m attempting to address the first problem by helping people understand the swindle that is taking place. Everyone with a computer should be up in arms that we don’t have Net Neutrality already. There is not a lot I can do about the second part. The national ISPs are lining the pockets of our elected officials to have them ensure they can continue their extortion racket. And with the United States Senate, there are ample quantities of both ignorance and corruption.

So write your representatives, post on blogs, make some noise! Americans need to know this matters and we’re not going to be led like sheep to the slaughter by the ISPs in pursuit of greed.

Summer Is Over

This was basically a pretty lazy summer for me, as you can tell by the infrequency of my posts. That is not to say a lot didn’t happen; I just reached a pseudo-burnout state on technology for a bit. The geek equivalent of writer’s block.

The big news is the new job. I left my position at Orange Leap and returned to work at Bank of America in the Office of Architecture working for one of my favorite former bosses. It was a huge shift of the pendulum for me. At Orange Leap, I was spending 99% of my time doing heads-down coding. Start-up mode. Now, at Bank of America, it is completely the opposite. I’m doing enterprise architecture more at what one might call the “paper architecture” level. For me, that means zero coding, which has jolted me out of my slump since I’m still a geek at heart and need to feel the satisfaction of writing cool code.

One advantage to not being bound to code at work is I can invest in the code I want to write, not have to write. I had a lot of time to reflect on the state of the Java world, and have decided to invest my personal coding into Ruby instead of Java. I’ll have to eat some crow with my Canadian friend, whom I mercilessly harassed for his Rails habit at ExtConf, but it is worth it.

I’ll address the easy part first: why not Java? I not exactly giving up Java. I’m perfectly happy to be paid to code in it, and will probably use it for years to come. But I see a bleak future ahead with the pending purchase of Sun by Oracle. I can’t really think of a company I hate more than Oracle, excluding the dirtbags at SCO. Java will be monetized to the detriment of the community; count on it. And yes, there is some cool work being done with languages using the JVM as the base (Groovy, Scala), but I would like a clean separation from a possible Oracle impact.

The second nail in the coffin was the purchase of Spring Source by VMWare. This made no sense to anyone, in spite of Rod’s blog entry explaining the reasoning behind the madness. As I suggested in my prior post, this is just a small course adjustment to SpringSource’s final destination. VMWare will be acquired by one of the big players, and SpringSource was only acquired to serve as additional bait. Even my good friend who is very involved in the local Spring community is acknowledging this gig is up.

So with two of my favorite technologies headed for a gruesome destiny, I decided it was time to bust out of the box. Ruby was my only choice. Ironically, I was pretty passionate about Ruby a few years back before it was cool. I attended the 2nd RubyConf in San Diego, and the first two RailsConfs. I’ll never forget seeing Why the Lucky Stiff perform at the Chicago RailsConf.

I put down Ruby because work called for Java. I should have stayed up on it. But now, getting back in to it after a few years absence, I feel like a kid again on Christmas Day. Ruby and Rails have matured dramatically as a language and framework, respectively. The community is even more vibrant than before and the syntactic prowess of Ruby is a breath of fresh air after years of Java. I’m looking forward to burning my personal braincells on something as enriching as Ruby.

What about JavaScript? It is not going anywhere. Some of the first stuff I want to figure out with Rails is how to get it to play nice with ExtJS and JQuery. JavaScript really is the future, and Ruby on Rails feels like the perfect match for getting it to the browser in an elegant manner.

So Hello Ruby World! I’m looking forward to getting to know you again.