There’s been a long running rant about how using Mono is um, bad. But I just don’t get it. Now we have Richard M. Stallman coming out against Mono and C# with an argument that sounds kinda like “we shouldn’t use it just because we shouldn’t.” Hmm, Ok. [ok, that is way too much of an over simplification and taking some things out of context. However, I'm still not sure what's bad: C#, Mono, or both?]

The odd thing about the post if that it focuses on C#, but none of the other languages that the the Mono CLR supports. Second, he goes on to state that “If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them [the applications] too.” Given that C# is an ECMA standard (as is the CLR itself), I think the conerns about not being able use C# are unwarrented. If we have to worry that the ECMA would allow Microsoft to pull rank on C#, then web developers should be rethinking thier use of JavaScript.

But the wierd thing is that Stallman doesn’t make the same point about any other langauage that the Mono CLR supports. For example, if Tomboy were written in the Boo programming language but remain on the Mono CLR, would evertyhing be ok? Why is there such a profound hatred of C# and not other lanagues supported by the CLR? Why not come out against the use CIL? Or is Stallman just not making his point clear enough?

As somone who uses Ubuntu 9.0.4 on a daily basis, I can apprciate what Mono has to offer from an end user perspecitive. I’m a HUGE fan of GnomeDo, which has turned out to be a better implementation of Quicksilver than Quicksilver. Then of course there’s Banshee, which is blosoming into an excellent media player. And also there F-Spot for photo management. I could go on, but the point is here that there are a lot of really great applications for GNOME that happen to be built on Mono.

Overall, I find that the post is weak on sound technical and legal arguments and high as a kite on FUD. Where’s the meat? Specifically, what can Microsoft go after that’s not GNOME if people start rewriting Mono applications in C++? Jo Shields has a lengthy, but excellent, post called Why Mono Doesn’t Suck. Jo’s post makes a lot of really good points about Mono if you don’t have a short attention span.

In the end, i think that a Mono is ultimately a good thing for Linux on the desktop. Anything that gives developers better productivity, and choice is a good. Part of being free is being able to make a choice: we should be free to choose whether or not we actually want to use applications developed with Mono.

For starters, the MAPI support is not installed by default, but it’s a post-install add-on. No big deal really, but it is misleading to say that it’s included in the release when it’s actually just in the repos. Next up is that fact that it simply doesn’t work. In fact, the Evolution-MAPI plugin is alpha quality at best. For starters, just setting up an account is busted. Each time I’d go to authenticate, Evolution would simply crash. Then I found this post which suggested using the IP address instead of the host name, which actaully worked.

When Evolution connects to the Exchange server, the initial load is PAINFULLY slow. The other thing is that folder structure is weird as well. In my case, my inbox was buried under 4 other sub-folders. The good news is that I can see email, with caveats. For example, replies or forwards are not prefixed with “re:” or “fw:”, even if they were in Outlook. Second, any meeting request acceptance or decline doesn’t get prefixed with “accepted:” or “decline:”, you just see the subject of the original meeting request. Which brings me to calendar and contacts. While I can see my calendars, they don’t get translated into my local time zone. This is kind of a problem. Contacts kinda work. I can see some of them, but for the most part, Evolution crashes before I can successfully select a contact.

Yeah, I know I should probably file some bugs. But be advised that if you’re upgrading to 9.04 to gain Exchange 2007 support, this isn’t the release you want. Here’s to hoping that things improve significantly in Karmic Koala.

One other thing to point out is that the Eclipse 3.5 release candidates are friggin’ snappy as hell. Startup times on all three platforms are very good and responsiveness is simply better overall. This is a release I’m really looking forward to.

Well, there’s not much else worth watching on NBC nowadays other than 30 Rock and Southland. I’d throw Heroes in there too, but Heroes is a mere shadow of its former self. You’re dropping the ball NBC.

Does this seem slightly ironic? The Semantic Web is built on the hypertext-driven nature of the web. Even though PDF is a readable and relatively open format, it’s still a rather sucktastic hypertext and on-screen format (especially when it’s published as a two-column layout).  PDFs are an agnostic means of publishing a document that was authored in something like Microsoft Word or LaTex. They are generated as an afterthought and most do not take the time to properly hyperlink these PDFs to external sources. Why is this bad? Given that we’re using the document web (or rather the “Page Ranked” web) of today, this makes it a bit more challenging to locate this kind of information on the web. In a sense, this is akin to not eating your own dog food. If knowledge isn’t properly linked into the web as it works today, it effectively doesn’t exist. Guys like Roy T. Fielding get this, and it’s most likely why his dissertation is available as HTML, as well as PDF variants.

As a friendly suggestion to the Semantic Web research community: please consider using XHTML to publish your research. Or even better, XHTML with RDF/A. Additionally, leverage hyperlinks to cite related or relevant works. It’s not enough anymore to use a purely textual bibliography or footnotes. The document web needs hyperlinks.

There’s a lot of cool and important stuff being worked on but this knowledge is not being properly disseminated. No doubt, in some cases publishing to two different formats can be a lot of work. But in the long term the payoffs are that information is widely available and you’re leveraging the Semantic Web as it was meant to be.

If memory serves me correctly, the Lowes at the Loop is actually a relatively decent theater. At least, three years ago anyway. First off all, all you can smell is the stench of pop corn. Second, the volume in the theater is simply way too loud. For a movie like Madagascar, there’s no need for it to be that loud. The child of mine simply did not approve. Lastly, the picture quality sucked! It didn’t help that they had technical issues with the projector which delayed the showing for 15 minutes. Once the lights dimmed and movie started, the color was just dull and washed out. Add to that the screen is smeared with candy and whatever other crap people throw at it. It was just a very unpleasant experience that ruined a decent movie and we had to leave half-way through because it just too damn loud.

The funny thing is that I think we have a much more enjoyable experience at home. I only have a 37-inch Sony Bravia XBR-6 coupled with a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-ray player. With just the TV and Blu-ray player alone, I’d say that the viewing experience is already better better than what we had at the Lowes. The family opinion is that the picture quality on the “teenie” 37-inch screen is far better than what we saw at the Lowes. Plus, there’s no funk on the screen. And the best part is that we have it all to ourselves without people on cell phones, etc.! While it’s true that a Blu-ray is more expensive than a DVD, prices are coming down. But when you consider that that two adult tickets cost $20, it makes the Blu-ray price pretty attractive. Anyway, my wife and I are pretty sure that movies will be viewed at home from this point forward, because yes, Blu-ray is that good.

Given the fact that Life started on a Friday night schedule had me concerned that NBC didn’t have high hopes for the show. Thankfully, NBC picked up a full season and moved the show back to Wednesday. So far this season, the writing and acting are so much better and the story lines are even quirkier. The show also go an addition humor boost with the addition of Donal Logue (a.k.a Jimmy the Cab Driver). The show has even got my wife hooked and it’s now DVR’d every week. Furthermore, I find myself watching Life episodes more than Heroes at the moment.

But now I hear that NBC is giving Jay Leno the 10pm time-slot for each day of the week. Unfortunately, Life  is one of those shows at risk in 2009, as are some other shows. Balls! Anyway, there’s certainly better things I can do than whine about a T.V. show, given the awesome weather we’ve been having here in the northeast.

As most folks know, Java 6 on Mac OS X 10.5 was a long time coming. It took Apple over a full year after the initial release of Java 6 to get it running on Mac OS X. Now that it’s here and working pretty much “ok”, I decided it was time to start running Java 6 as my default JVM. Then the surprise: Eclipse won’t run under Java 6 on the Mac. Why? Because Java 6 under Leopard is 64-bit. The current version of SWT on OS X relies on Carbon, which is 32-bit and we won’t be seeing 64-bit Carbon anytime soon. Support for 32-bit Cocoa is planned for later next year, but I didn’t see word on when 64-bit Cocoa or even just Java 6 support might arrive.

Eclipse is still a great IDE even if I have to continue to run it under Java 5. However, this is one of those things that is annoying each time a platform needs to make significant changes. But this time, you can’t put all of the blame on the Eclipse crew. Apple did an absolutely terrible job keeping the Java community abreast of what thier plans were with Java 6. In fact, it almost seemed that Java 6 would never appear on Leaopard. Coupled with the fact that Java 6 was now going to be only 64-bit and Carbon was not goning to see 64-bit support. But long story short, SWT and therefore Eclipse is always going to be hindered by OS changes to a greater degree than say NetBeans or IDEA.

No doubt business and project management folks ask questions that you may want to categorize as dumb or stupid. However, most of these folks aren’t as technical as you, and the questions maybe hilarious at times. My personal favorite:

“So, do you use pixels because some people don’t have fonts installed on their machines?”

(This one was from a project manger trying to figure out why a web developer used “px” instead on “pt” in CSS). These types of questions from this group are not the targets of this post. That will certainly be the subject of another post.

In this post, I’m focusing on the technical folks who fancy themselves software engineers capable of solving problems. My hope with this post is that people think about the kind of answer they are actually looking for while also considering how their line of questioning is perceived. To help out, I’ve categorized a group of question types that can be categorized as not terribly thoughtful without some qualifiers. Here’s a list of a few:

The “How Do I” Question

No doubt, this is a very popular category of question.  This question can often be valid a number of times especially in absence of adequate documentation. This may be because the API or programming language is new, or you’re working with a homegrown internal framework developed by one guy who has the details all in his head. In these situations, asking: “How do I…?” can be perfectly valid.

However, here are a few cases where it’s not. Take this question for example:

“How do I create a new URL in Java?”

Blink. Blink. A guy with supposedly 6 years Java experience asked me this question 5 years ago and I’m still amazed to this day it was even asked.  You might say that this could be considered a total newbie question and it’s okay. Even so, a newbie should be able to figure out the basics. A little research by Googling “create new URL in Java” would eventually bring you to:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/creatingUrls.html

A two second task and this guy could have snowed us for another day or two. It’s the lack of effort and research know-how that makes the question stupid. You’ve demonstrated that you don’t know what you’re doing and you aren’t capable of solving a trivial problem on your own by performing at least some investigation.

The developer might have been seen in a better light had he made an attempt at searching the docs himself and tried creating a new URL in some type of test case. Had he done that and perhaps asked something like:

“I tried following the docs here, and created a test case to validate my understanding, but I’m not getting the results I had excepted. How do I create a new URL in Java?”

Even though the question is exactly the same, it’s been qualified with some effort. Now I can tell the guy is really trying to figure this out, and more importantly, he wants to solve it but needs a hand. Granted creating a new URL is a weak-ass example, but showing some initiative helps make the question not stupid.

The “Will this Work” Question

It also make my blood boil when I get asked the hypothetical question that goes a little like:

“If I code X and pass it this, will I get Y?”

“Can I create a criteria to query to get this object?”

Here’s a thought: write a damn unit test to validate your question first. Asking, “will this work” without taking a stab at it, demonstrates a severe lack of initiative. What you end up with is a perception of trying to get other people to do your work for you. And that’s what makes this question stupid. Generally, a better what to phrase this is: “I’ve created a test case to pass X through Y, but it failed, and here’s the stack trace.” Now we’ve got something to talk about!

The “Why do I get this error” Question

This question can be absolutely mind boggling sometimes, mainly because you can spend a fraction of a second looking at an error and reading the error message back to a developer just as it was sent to you. My favorite recurring error is with Hibernate apps and some one gets a HibernateException and emails me the stack trace and is “confused” as to why they get the error. Just by scrolling down page to the very end, you can read: “TABLE OR VIEW DOES NOT EXIST.” About 90% of the time, the table name is misspelled in the mappings.

No doubt, sometimes this could be a perfectly valid question and sometimes. But as with all other points in this post, a little research goes a long way. Taking the “TABLE OR VIEW DOES NOT EXIST” error again, while your mapping files may be correct, a DBA may have not provided the developer appropriate grants to the developer. So the question could be rephrased as:

“Why do I get this error? I’ve checked the mapping files and verified the table and column names, but it keeps happening. Any ideas?”

Again, the developers done some digging, but still can’t get to the bottom of it. A developer who’s not thinking about developer grants is not stupid, he may not have considered it and may need a hand at exploring all angles of the problem.

The “What Should I do” Question?

No doubt, you’ve come across the type of problem that seems hopeless and you’re out of ideas. One question that’s generally not a wise one to ask is “What should I do?” A better way to ask such a question would be to have some basic ideas in hand and seek validation. Like:

“hey, I’m stuck on this but I was thinking of trying A and B out to see if that fixes it?”

You’re either going to hear one of three types of responses:

• “No, that won’t work” or “we don’t have time to do it that way”. Try this approach instead. (If you get a rude response to your idea or get simply shot down without any alternative options, fire up your resume).
• Yeah, that sound reasonable.
• Hmm, could work. If doesn’t, maybe try tweaking A with Z and see how that pans out. If that doesn’t work, lets come up with another strategy.

By asking “what should I do” with out any qualifier clearly indicates that you’ve completely given up and you’re not able to take the next step in trying solving your issue. This type of question can be a career-limiting move if asked to your projects team lead or architect. You’ve got to come to the table with at least something moderately intelligent. Otherwise, you’re company definitely paying you more than enough.

No doubt, developers are chronically faced with unrealistic deadlines and given problems that they can’t solve in five minutes. However, if you want to be perceived as a problem-solving engineer type rather that the “I can just bang out code given a spec” programmer type, you need to think about the questions your asking with respect to the answers you want. By providing more context to your question, the quality of of any answer will be greatly improved.