I do know that this annoys me to no end.  I’ve been programming (off and on) in Java for a dozen years, no exaggeration.  It has a low cost to entry and low learning curve for those who already know C++. Development tools are robust, free, and easily obtained.  The resulting programs from development run in a ton of environments without having to be “ported”, so the one application runs in Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever, with little or no modification needed.  It is a great concept!

But… from the start there was all this political storminess above it. Then Microsoft deliberately “poisoned” Java by making their own JVM that wasn’t quite compatible, had features and classes that weren’t portable to other operating systems, and then began to make normal, 100% Java programs, fail.  Microsoft was sued, Sun won, Microsoft changed the name to “.NET” and no longer pretended to be Java.  But that left a bad taste in many developer’s mouths, including mine, because even my programs were getting funky results when run on some Windows workstations but not others, because of which version of the Java Virtual Machine was running, was it Sun’s, was it MS’s, was it one of the other offshoots?  Write once, run anywhere, failed.

But that was years ago. Java is still around, and since MS doesn’t have a JVM anymore, most Java programs lately haven’t had any problems.  One of my favorite games is a Java program, and I play it on multiple platforms with no real regard to what OS is underneath. I’ve gotten back into writing in Java, and I’ve been attempting to create an Android App.  And then this happens.  Will Google have to completely rewrite Android OS? Will all the developers have to rewrite their Apps?  Sounds like only Apple will win in this scenario.  And what will happen to desktop Java?  When Oracle took over Sun, I feared that Java would soon be swept under Oracle’s carpets and forgotten, but now I feel a little like I wish they had.

Java wasn’t and isn’t perfect. Applets in webpages never really felt like they were part of the page (a fact which admittedly had good points, too), and were displaced by Adobe’s Flash for games and animation.  I’ve never been a fan of Flash, either on the developing or consuming end, and the past few months with the Flash plugin on my Linux machine causing me no end of trouble… but I digress.  Adobe never intended Flash to be a general application programming framework, nor did they intend to participate in any free and/or open source community.  With the more recent advent of HTML5 and the canvas tag, with generalized drawing ability, and the in-browser ability to stream movies and music, Flash is no longer needed (in my book anyway).

So why the fuss?  Because Java has a valid role in our online lives, but seems to be in a very politically delicate state.  C and C++ don’t have these issues, they are solid, there are a multitude of compilers and development tools for them, and in general a program compiled on a similar machine will work on other similar machines.  Perl, PHP, and Python are open source, widely distributed and supported, and even if there is a political core breach and one of these projects implodes, a branch could easily take over the community support.  Not so with Java, or at least not nearly so easily, because Oracle will want their share, their trademark, their IP, their licensing fees.

In a fit of … well, something, I thought that I could help change the world and establish something to “repair and replace” Java.  A compiled bytecode system with garbage collection, designed to be clean, light, and portable.  Removing from the beginning things that are Java’s failings, and making sure, from the beginning, that the project would begin and remain open to the community.  Thus was born the PortJ Project.

… and that about covers it.

Because of the relationship with the winery, I can supplement the single mead with good (grape) wine, so I DO have a plan B, and even if the mead isn’t ready by this Faire, that doesn’t mean it will be wasted, there will be other Faires/Fairs/Events, not to mention the acceptance had thus far tasting mead alongside the wines at the winery.

But it would be very cool to have three flavors ready by August 4th.  For that, though, we’ll just have to wait and see what the mead decides to do.

Now, the theatrics!  I bought a 20′ by 10′ pavilion that will have to be … dressed up.  I’m thinking I can get 2″ (id) PVC to cover the steel poles, and distress the PVC and paint it to look wood-like.  I can add this kind of ‘wood’ in several places, including places that do not have steel structure, possibly using it for a railing to distinguish the space. I’ve found reasonably priced small oak barrels to dispense from, they even “engrave” (actually: burn) logos on them!  I can use empty wine barrels for the bar easily enough, and a narrow back table for the barrels to display and dispense from should be easy to find.  Then, of course, I need a costume, and a merry band of buxom pouring wenches!  (Not sure how I’m going to fill those positions…)

I’m pondering building a character for myself, roughly period, to go into the costume.  I can re-try the leather helm pattern (last attempt was way too small), maybe add horns for that viking flare!  Haven’t done the RP thing in a long time, though.  Not in real life, anyway.  Come to think of it, the online RP I was doing I also haven’t done in many years.  No time, really, too much work to do… but now RP is profitable, thus not “wasted” time (fiscally speaking).  AND it’s fun.

Can’t wait.

But I’ve found that the irregular beat of the barometric pressure slamming both ways within hours is giving me deep sinus/optic headaches, near migraine levels. Today I can hardly think straight. I can do break-fix type things, but in this state of mind-ache, I don’t have oomph for much more than that.  Caffeine helps, sleep would probably be better, but work is.

This weekend we’ll be bottling wine and mead at the winery. I plan to be a big help, but I hope my head and body will cooperate.

My new dayjob is a much more broad focus than the last, but after a week of digging and learning and stretching my tech-muscles, I’m starting to feel the old inner-guru-ness I used to feel before I started my own computer business.  THAT, all by itself, makes the whole transition worth it.  I mean, I touched lightly on it a few times while doing side-jobs for clients of my previous employer (lots of disclaimers about They don’t do this and won’t support that and it is not Them it is Me personally, etc. etc.) … but without regular focus on the tech repair/maintain/upgrade world, I never quite got back to the FEELING.

…and now I have.

And there I find a little corner of happiness: VirtualBox.  This nifty little piece of software emulates a computer, basically in a software sandbox, so on my Linux desktop machine, I can run Windows in a window.  Since my desktop is a nice piece of hardware, with lots of ram and a decently powerful processor, I can easily match the end-unit performance of many small business desktops in the virtual box.  This will allow me to test things like User creation and management, system imaging, and possibly even test my own (yet to be written) online backup software.  I do wish I had access to better funding for this refresher/skill development process, because I’d really like to have more hands-on experience with Active Directory and Roaming Profiles.  Not that I can’t figure these things out pretty quickly while on-task (one of my basic skills), but having top-level access to my own server and full setup would give me more of a running start, and give me more confidence in putting these skills into a resume.

But I digress.  The happy moment with Virtual Box came when I told it to use the host computer’s CD/DVD drive, and inserted the Windows 7 disk I burned when re-building my laptop.  I clicked ‘Start’ to start up the virtual machine, and it immediately booted from the CD (ok, DVD-RW, but same concept).  I didn’t have to run around trying to find the right tweak, I didn’t even have to explicitly specify that it should boot from the disk: It just worked.

Makes me happy.  Now I can play with system imaging and restoration, which is a big part of Desktop Support, even if it is a mostly background and behind-the-scenes part.  The best part of system imaging versus re-install from scratch is that you can create a system image with all the updates and all the software already installed.  Generally a desktop system with full updates and software will still be between 8gb and 16gb, because there is no user data like pictures or movies or music.  This will allow me to have a system image on a flash drive, possibly a bootable flash drive, for easy single-system restoration.  I’m also reading up on PXE-boot system image restore options, but again that starts actually requiring a budget, so: Not right now.

That’s about it for today.  Going to dive into the job lists one more time before I pick up that Android Developer book and fire up Eclipse.

It takes a lot of energy to consciously decide to be happy, hopeful, and upbeat, in a situation with no income and bills to pay.  It also takes a lot of energy to heal.  That’s leaving me with not much energy to spare.

But so many directions are left to be explored, and it so EXCITING to think that with this little ‘free’ time I have I might be able to pull off something like a little Android App that might make the whole job hunt moot.  Or the fact that the summertime idle resources of the winery are of a capacity that I could replace my previous income with mead (supposing that I could sell it, of course). Or maybe any one of a dozen other work-for-myself ideas.

Just lack a bit of energy to follow up on these ideas. I’m hoping I’ll get back enough energy, and kick this cough, before I run out of money, to actually put some effort into at least ONE of the exciting possibilities, before I have to put all my effort into job/money/food/life hunting.

While it would have been nice to step right into a job, my contacts haven’t quite been able to make that happen.  No fault of theirs, but I am now finding myself back in the job-hunt grind.  I sorta feel like posting my resume to anywhere for anything is like chumming the water I’m swimming in, with the hope that the biggest shark will come take me.  Because there is no telling when or if I’ll get a response from any of the submissions, or how long I’ll be treading water waiting.  But part of this feeling is due to the odd way my memory sometimes decides to work: situationally.

If you remember the days when we remembered phone numbers and dialed them manually, do you remember needing to hold a phone to remember a number?  It’s kindof like that, only it encompasses extra things like emotional stress.  I remember, now that I’m looking, how stressed I was at the end of my previous job search two years ago.  But it is stranger than that, because my memory links the events together without the intervening time, so it FEELS like I’ve been job hunting NOW for over 18 months.  I haven’t, I know it, but that part of my memory doesn’t care.  I am consciously deciding to be hopeful, reminding myself that it hasn’t been two weeks yet, that I still have benefits coming for a little while, and I just got my second interview of this hunt as I was writing this sentence.

It’ll work out somehow.

Now if only it were a job offer, and that offer was full-time with benefits.

But it was a great interview, and now I know that I’ve got several things right about the interview process, I have skills that are desired in my chosen field, and even though I was nervous as hell I was able to not let it effect the interview.

I’ve surprised myself in taking it as well as I have.  I’m not overly stressed, no more stressed than rush-hour traffic made me on a have-to-get-to-San-Rafael-but-880-isn’t-moving morning.  It is a more persistent stress, but not omnipresent and not as intense, if that makes sense.  Sure, maybe it will grow if I don’t fill the employment void shortly, but I’m not there yet.

I’ve got feelers out for the kind of work I know I do well and can do well no matter my ‘season’, and I’ve got options like actually getting the Well Rounded Geek show off the ground and possibly monetizing that through Well Rounded Geek Support.  There’s gigs on Craigslist that I could use to build a customer base and just be the tech support guy building a business for myself.  I could put together a Kickstarter campaign for the littleish viral game idea I’ve got swimming in one of the pots on the back-burner.  I could do the Craigslist thing for the Weekend Webmaster business concept, though I’m not sure I can pull that off full-time.  Webmastering has a long tradition of subscription-like fees, making for a nice stable income once the customer base is large enough and the customers are kept happy.  It also has low facilities needs.  My issue is that I’m not too good at the Art behind web design, and I’m not very good at selling myself, which is to say that I am NOT a salesperson, and I’ve never really gotten a hang of placing a solid dollar value on my work, which I’ll need to have if I go into it by myself.

But I see now I’m rambling.

I guess what it boils down to is that I’ve learned a lesson somewhere along the way: Change Happens. Your reaction to it is all you can really control.

The owners of the content, who put the content on the web for consumption, probably want me to be there, to see their ads and increase their revenue, but if Adobe doesn’t want me there, I’m not. Even as a programmer I cannot fix this problem, because Flash isn’t open source or even open spec, I can’t even TRY. Even on the devices I have that are supported (Linux desktops/laptops), I’ve had updates that break the functionality. Specifically: I can no longer fast-forward or rewind Youtube videos, if I do the video freezes and the audio is all that plays. Why? I don’t know, it worked last month.

Don’t even get me started on the updates that are “Ready” every time I turn on my work computer, but then won’t install because I’m not an administrator.

Then there’s the “Web Designers” who have been seduced into thinking that Flash is an alluring premium addition to their palette. They take the headers, the menus, and just about anything else they could/should use a simple image for, and make them Flash apps. Which brings me to the catalyst of this rant…

Today I got an email from one of my (day job) customers, saying they have an error on their website. I look, and it is a message from their Flash menu basically saying to anyone who goes to their site that the menu is not authorized to run on that domain name. This to me is an obvious poisoning of product, since the domain name DIDN’T CHANGE, only the hosting company did. But what really gets me, what really bugs the hell out of me, is that it’s just a simple menu.

A SIMPLE MENU!

I’ve built better looking menus in a couple hours with STANDARD ECMAScript and DOM methods, multiple times (because I keep losing the results in some archive somewhere, but that’s just me). What can a Flash menu do that a Javascript/ECMAScript menu NOT do? I’ll tell you: hide little goodies like this poison “warning” and prevent website OWNERS from changing web hosts or web masters.

Especially since the HTML5 specification supports audio, video, and 2d graphics primitives, and that Java is FREE and open-spec if not open-source and can do everything Flash ever did, if maybe a tiny bit slower. The only trouble on that front is the poisoning of Java that Microsoft did, but that’s a different rant.