Going slightly mad

Emperor's New Clothes

In a software project, if some of people are misleading others because they seem trustful due to their position and/or their seniority, the project will go in a bad direction and legitimate critical thinking will be discouraged. 

What would one expect from a project in that people are misleaded? Useless effort and pain...

Be fair, be critical, be realistic - do not accept "Emperor's New Clothes" as a fact.

Rosia Montana

I do not know much about Rosia Montana... But I have seen the scorched earth of Rosia Poieni...
Gold mining is a short term solution for inhabitants... 10 years, 20 years... but after? How will Rosia look? Will that place - unchanged from Roman Empire era look the same... Will it be able to sustain life?

I do not know...

But I know that children are born in this country and they deserve a future. As much as we deserve a decent present.  

Skepticism

1. questioning, probing, testing.
2. disbelief, atheism, agnosticism.
One of the things that really annoy me is the dependency of people on frameworks and things they know in software.
I am mostly questioning people on why do we need new buzzwords in projects, what value they bring and why precisely those buzzwords and no other. I am amazed that they always answer by the book, not deliberately, but rather they repeat the hype...
 EG:

"We need Spring" (although we have no beans but a SPA)...
 "Why?"
 "Err... because of IoC :)"
 "But why Spring with Vaadin and not Guice or other?"
 "Err... Spring is good because it gives you beans and Guice is from Google hence is bad"
"Really... I was under the impression that it is POJO based"
"No, beans, beans are good."
"Why are beans good?"
"Because they have interfaces"
 --No Comment - Discussion with a Scrum Master with over 15 years of experience

 "DEB packages are a solution for our deployment problems."
"What problem would they solve?"
"I am spending too much time configuring the system at deployment"
"And how will the DEBs help you?"
"Err... Reduce time to deploy?"
"In fact you need a DEVOPS solution as Chef or Puppet, no?"
"No, those are not ok."
"Why?"
"I heard about them that are bad."
"With them you can deploy directly our WAR files on thousands systems at once on different configs without scripting... Isn't is a cool feature? Especially if we manage to sell and deploy our system."
"Err... Nooo, too much overhead"
"Well what if we will deploy on RedHat? They use RPM, you know?"
"Never in RH... It is evil..."
 -- No comment - Discussion with an Architect

Sincerely... The arguments are weak and based on marketing hype, rumours or hunches... But those are basically people that take decisions on software projects - so there is no surprise on the quality of software.

20 Years since Assembly'93

The source of 2nd Reality demo (which run on in i386) PC has been published.

https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

I have spent half of the high school trying to imitate this magnificent demo.

Java apocalypse

ROFL!

Kosovo

In my recent vacation I have been close to this tormented region.
Here is a movie about what happened there... Food for thought.