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With The Simpsons movie on its way out (”Spider-pig, spider-pig, does whatever a spider-pig does”) there’s loads of cool Simpsons marketing out there at the moment.

On the official site you can create an avatar of yourself (and screen grab = not needing to register - woohoo!). I’m sure many of you saw the picture of the enormous ‘chalk’ Homer that has apparently annoyed pagans everywhere.

Anyway - if you haven’t already you should go watch the trailer.

As you may have seen, my main article today is a load of iPod competitors. It’s always fairly tough doing a piece like this and covering all the bases, but I think it’s a fairly decent summation of what is out there.

Personally, I remember having a Creative Zen Xtra Jukebox that was absolutely brilliant for its time - although it’s sat on a shelf gathering dust now because I borked its operating system trying to install an upgrade.

Still - it lasted longer than my shuffle which went walkies out of my pocket one day and is probably now attached to someone else’s lapel somewhere. I just hope they listened to Cola Bear’s classic track ‘Second Time Today’ before they wiped it…

Had a fascinating weekend visiting some friends and their kids this weekend, where I was introduced to the wonder that is Guitar Hero on the PS2.

I have to admit this one had passed me by a little since arriving with a bang of publicity, but when you see a 14-year-old rocking through Heart Shaped Box and Sweet Child of Mine, you can’t help but think this is a step in the right direction.

If you have had your head buried in the sand for the last couple of years, guitar hero’s unique selling point is that you are given a plastic ‘guitar’ controller with five buttons for the chords and a strummer. The notes (buttons) then roll towards you on a belt and you try to play the right buttons at the right time and strum to play the note.

I make it sound complicated (and I managed to make it LOOK complicated too when I had a go) but it really is massively entertaining.

The weekend also gave me another chance to look at how kids behave on computers having never been without them.

Now, without wanting to date myself too accurately, my computer education started very young and on a ZX Spectrum 48k with rubber keys - so I always believe that I am firmly planted in the computer age. I was an early adopter of the internet, online gamed back when it wasn’t a case of just plugging a cable in, and I had a pre-Windows PC.

However, take one look at an 11 -year-old girl building a web page (admittedly a very, very, very glittery one) as well as chatting with her mates on MSN and playing a game all at the same time and you can’t help but feel like a bit of a dinosaur. And what with having a sore shoulder from waving a plastic guitar around for a few hours, I can’t even suggest that the dinosaur is T-Rex.

A multi-year agreement has been made between Yahoo and eBay to bundle many of the two company’s services together.

Mick Weinstein of Seeking Alpha precedes his summary of blogosphere reactions with this noe. “Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players.”

Thoughts: I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals. As far as I know, nobody’s computer or even browser comes with Yahoo or eBay baked-in top-level (Firefox Yahoo inclusion is substantially more low key than that of Google) so I think this is going to be received as an extension of voluntary use.

Second, I’m not sure how limited the possibilities are here. Will people start using Flickr to upload their photos for eBay? Will future auctions be promoted on Upcoming.org? Maybe I’m being silly here, but the point is that Yahoo’s recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.

Some people have said this is just a trial balloon, that these two companies are really competitors, etc. But in the face of Google’s success and Microsoft’s largess I can’t imagine that Yahoo and eBay wouldn’t be able to work out some really powerful collaboration. The fact that Yahoo gets more page views than any other site online, has acquired so much hippness and yet is the dark horse in this space is amazing.

Antivirus programs are like buying a pair of jeans or shoes that someone else say is the most comfortable thing in the world. True for them but we are all not built the same. The same is true for our computers.

We all use them and demand different things from our systems. Some might like Norton and Mcaffee, other KAV, or AVG, Panda, or even Avast. Take your pick all of these have excellent capabilities. The one factor I love is free for home use! Avast and AVG are tops in my book

I used to be a norton guy until it failed me. I was not happy that I had been spending $20-50 every year for “premium” antivirus software. Then I discovered Avast and have used it for the last 3 years with no problems. But that is just my experience.

You can tweak the software to many idfferent levels of usage, automate download scanning, or skim it back to bare minumum. The choice is up to each.

But unlike a pair of blue jeans there are bench marks to show you which can detect the most viruses.; how good a pair of jeans or shoes are, are subjective test like how many viruses can it detect are facts.

Anti-Virus and Spyware app.’s are all pretty much up to speed on finding latest malware and virus’s and adding them to their definitions catalogs, so that Your computer’s program will detect and block, and/or remove unwanted programs/software or files.

If you DO NOT have active updating to your Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware, it is useless against newer versions of Malware and Virus’s. The question should not which one is the best, but rather which one works best for YOU. They all pretty much operate in the same manner, with access to the same data bases for current Virus’s/Malware.

Some people want performance from their computer, and weightier Prgrams like Kaspersky,Norton, and McAfee can block and/or interupt online gameplay with unwanted notifications and other things that bug GAMERS. Lighter programs using less ram, and taking less space on the Hard Drive may include versions like Avast(free), AVG, or Zone ALarm. It’s all a matter of preference.

I use Mcafee when I can, because of USABILITY and I really don’t care how much hard drive space it takes. With 500Gb on the HD and 4Gb Ram “who care’s?”

I know one thing, I wouldn’t buy Norton. I had a virus on my computer that would pop up saying that my system was corrupted and I should buy some antivirus. I couldnt get rid of it until I did a restore. I contacted Symatec and asked them why it didn’t fix it. They told me I needed to buy the upgrade or add-on. I was thinking, why should I do the same thing the virus was telling me to do. Sounds like Norton can be its own virus

I had the same problem as phxmark123. I believe when we buy software like Norton/Symantec, we should not have to pay for upgrades or add-ons.  It costs enough at purchase time why have to pay that each year thereafter.  Plus, I do believe they have a problem with the viruses maybe even from them……??????

Suzi66 that is a rumor/conspiracy theory that has been floating around for years. it goes that the major antivirus program companies have programmers that set around and make viruses just so that way they can sell their software. it is estimated that 3,000 new viruses are released every day. some are just variants of old viruses.

One of the best buys on the market in my opinion is the Defender Pro 15in1. It includes programs from several companies, including Kaspersky  anti virus. I like a number of the programs and have had very little trouble with them. The anti virus has worked well for me and I have contracted no viruses. It also includes anti-spam, PC Tune-up and a firewall which is also quite effective. It is available at Walmart and a lot of other stores. I don’t know if it’s the best, but at a price of about thirty dollars, it’s pretty good.

try windows live one care i have had it for almost a year it does not slow down my system easy to setup you can set it up to download updates and it never bothers you never had any bugs since or problems

As a result of the JBoss expose here and elsewhere, various trade rags have picked up the story. It made it onto slashdot. The comments there of course are equally hilarious and depressing. Amazing how many people fail to grasp the difference between an anonymous post and a fake persona post. Still, that’s to be expected from a bunch of spotty gentoo tuggers anyway.

Not to be outdone, JDJ had to jump in the fray. Needless to say, I strongly approve of their article. I’m hopelessly biased against JBoss so that couldn’t possibly surprise anyone. Cameron buying me so many drinks has also clearly affected my judgement, but oh well.

However, the real fun starts if one were to look at what else is going on at JDJ now. On the one hand we have a sane sensible article about happy community building and a mild waggle of the finger in the general direction of JBoss, and on the other hand we have….immature BEA bashing.

This farce started a couple of days ago, when JDJ ran an article about BEA ‘firing’ sys-con and electing to go with another publisher for an ‘official’ Weblogic magazine. BEA pointed out that sys-con’s Weblogic magazine is unaffiliated with them and suchlike and so forth.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that various head honchos at sys-con all simultaneously soiled their panties and suffered a fairly embarrassing bout of serious backdoor leakage. What follows is an amateur campaign of insults that would be quite newsworthy if it wasn’t trumped so thoroughly by those JBoss tards.

JDJ is now merrily in the process of running at least one or two disparaging BEA articles a day. These articles are hilarious. It’s like watching a three year old spastic child shaking his fists and expressing his anger by leaking from all orifices. Pretty it is not.

Another example is method ordering. There is currently a need for TNG to (internally) choose a different invocation order for the total set of test methods, but the design as it stands currently makes this change very difficult and tricky. Thus, another bad design!

On the other hand, there are plenty of other well designed areas which have been reused in some fairly unexpected ways, all of which points to decent design.

TDD for example has an interesting approach to design. It assumes, up front, that you can’t design your way out of a wet paper bag. You write tests that ensure the system does exactly what it’s supposed to do, nothing more and nothing less. You want to change things? You do it the brute force way by stomping all over your codebase and endlessly refactoring, it’s a lot more work but, in theory, any thoughtwanker can do it. Of course the downfall of THAT approach is that some portions of TDD STILL end up requiring someone intelligent, so you’re back to square one of needing someone smart, instead of swappable sweatshop bodyparts.

Yet at the end of the day, a depressing majority of java codebases look like a 3 year old had sat down in front of a large bucket of design patterns and plucked a fistful and hurled them in the general direction of some code. Proving that the tooling approach can, at best, only help the mediocre claw their way up to the average.

There are a ton of developers who can write a mean algorithm. They can identify a problem and manage to digest the salient points with enough success to plop out an implementation that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Interesting enough though, this has sweet FA to do with design. Yes, the piece of software performs its function beautifully, efficiently, and one could argue, elegantly. That says absolutely nothing about its design.

Java, specifically, goes a long way towards ramming down a set of design principles. Said principles are followed fairly blindly by most practitioners. The OSS world is awash with examples of people who have read the right books, but have absolutely no skill or talent at conceptualising or grokking the underlying principles behind the books. To them, the design pattern is an end goal, not a tool. To pick one example (out of thousands), look at Matt Raible’s OSS efforts. It has inheritance! It uses PATTERNS! It is LIGHTWEIGHT! Yet, I’d argue that it’s very badly designed (if you don’t believe me, just try getting it to do anything other than the very very basics.)

So what’s the acid test for a good design? I have no idea. The closest I could come up with is A good design allows your code to do things you never expected it to have to do. It’s not about ‘oh I’ll add an interface here so I can plop in different implementations’ when there’s no sane reason you’d ever need more than one implementation, for example. Having made that assertion though, I’d imagine it’s pretty clear by now that I have no solution or fix. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can try befriending a fowlerbot, working your way to the top, then perhaps running your genitalia over his beard in the hope of getting some use out of the smug bigoted little fucker.

For some inexplicable reason, I’m one of the external reviewers for this year’s JavaOne EE and Web tracks. The one thing that’s utterly perplexing about it is the dire quality of some submissions.

Tempting as it might be, I’m not going to name names. I’m not going to point out how many vendors pitches there are, or how much they suck. Instead I’m going to try and understand what on earth some submitters were thinking.

Do you really think that JavaOne attendees love to hear about how you solved problem X using your own technology, that nobody can actually use without dropping trow, bending over, and paying for the privilege of being molestered?

The open source crap is just as bad.  JavaOne isn’t some whore you can throw your dirty papers at for a quick show and tell. Nor is it a venue for you to idly gaze into your navel and pick out lint in public, musing on its quantity, quality, and what possible use it might have.

I don’t understand how hard it can be to put yourself in the shoes of the average attendee. The goal of this conference (and ANY good conference) is to help said user, NOT to help the vendor or presenter. The fact that you get to strut your stuff and waggle your genitalia at a few hundred people at a time is its own reward.

So given that the average reader here is a discerning (if somewhat mentally unfit) Java type person, with one finger on the pulse of the community, and another firmly in an orifice, I’d like to you know what you think. What would make a good talk?