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Captain Jake
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Jake's BorCon Report, Part I, Written on the Way Home2003-11-07 06:11:52 AM off-topic8 Now that the daily bloggers have registered their streams of consciousness ramblings with the hungry masses, it is time for a broader view afforded by age, wisdom, and an incredibly huge ego <g>. The Borland Conference is an entire world unto itself. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly such a world can physically be deconstructed in mere minutes after the annual diaspora of the faithful back to their homes, jobs and everyday lives. For a few days they have communed with other select members of a huge {*word*104} crowd, a community that is linked by active newsgroups, email lists, user groups and chats most of the year. People who haven't physically seen each other for a year or maybe have never physically met talk as if they were next door neighbors for their whole lives. Walk down an aisle in the cafeteria space. There's Team B member Nick Hodges, shorn of his hippie locks to give the illusion of conservatism. (We know he really harbors a deep distrust of Bush and his foreign policy but has to create a politically conservative appearance that won't blow his cover as a CIA agent investigating the far right.) There's Ray Lischner, Shakespearean cake decorator asking the tough questions on behalf of the downtrodden silent majority. There's John Kaster, secretly trying to figure out how to be even more efficient in his communications so as to seem even more gruff on the newsgroups, but thwarted by a constant stream of responsibilities and activities that distracts him from this task. There's the very parsimonious Dave Nottage, leather-clad loner contemplating the LONG plane ride home to Oz. Wait! Who's that over-animated, Australian idiom-spouting man wondering where his zillionth beer has disppeared to? Why it is Geoff Harris, rescuer of the Flashfiler legacy and founder of NexusDB. In past years I've used the metaphor that draws a parallel with Olympus, mount of the gods. At BorCon us mere mortals can talk with the gods of the Borland universe. The result is a plethora of great stories, fascinating facts and lots of odd little things. Speaking of odd little things, I sat next to Brion Webster and fellow blogger Robert Love at the closing keynote and prize distribution. Brion made a comment wondering why Blake Stone was standing there on stage holding his jacket next to his right side. I suggested to him that this was because Blake* actually has his {*word*145}s on the side of his body. O.K. I admit is a bit over the top, but I guess I was still annoyed at the corporatespeak non-answer he gave to Ray Lischner after Ray's big question that contained the interesting metaphor making Kylix the Terry Schiavo of the development world. Like many of Borland's customer's, Ray wanted to know why Borland didn't just come clean and announce that Kylix was officially dead. After the conference I had a chance to ask Ray what he thought was the reason that Borland hadn't pulled the plug. He had an interesting speculation, namely that Borland may have some agreement with TrollTech preventing an outright killing of the project. I have to admit that I asked a pretty tough question myself of the C++ team during the "Meet the Team" meeting for them, but we'll get to that later. That meeting was one of the most difficult "Meet the Team" meetings I've ever seen, as far as the team being grilled. The odd thing is that I had actually planned to go to the "Meet the JBuilder Team" but they had gone to a bar when there were more team members than customers at the meeting. Ray was at the C++ meeting but didn't ask the question that I wanted addressed, so I actually went up and...oh wait, that can wait for the chronological part of this most excellent treatise I now pen. [*By the way, Blake actually met his wife at a BorCon! So it really is a marriage "Made in Borland"!] Before I go on, it would probably be good to point out that Borlanders probably were glad that this one was finally over today. There seem to be two groups of very angry and/or disaffected blocks of customers 1) existing C++ customers that don't see anything being done to account for their existing legacy code, 2) Delphi programmers that want Delphi for Win32 to get more stuff before being laid to rest. I'll get to both over the course of my observations, but off the top of my head I'd have to say the C++ customers were very disaffected and wanted to make sure that Borland knew this, whereas the Delphi programmers are tempered by their e{*word*277}ment and interest in the stuff that Delphi for .NET will be getting. Borland has been giving Delphi more cycles attention than C++, but everyone can see that JBuilder is the leader in features and attention. Having said all this, I think Borland is poised on the cusp of an inflection point. Last year the biggest thing at BorCon was .NET and the e{*word*277}ment of this new direction drove the conference. This on the other hand is the first BorCon after the blitzkrieg acquistion burst that brought full coverage of the gods of Agile processes and methods into the Borland camp at the same time that IBM had grabbed the old guard at Rational. This might not e{*word*277} technophiles the way past conferences have e{*word*277}d them, but this is far more important and positions Borland very well in the high-end market that caters to senior software developers. Newbies and those weak-kneed lily livered milquetoasts known as daily bloggers might get e{*word*277}d the most by repackaging of prior technology, like we see in .NET, or by whiz-bang pyrotactics (spelling is intentional) and $250,000 production numbers (such as the Star Wars spoof at BorCon in 1997), but once you've done the same thing for a decade or more, you realize that method and process make more difference than what tools or technologies are chosen. I attended a lot of sessions on Agile stuff because I am getting more and more e{*word*277}d about the revolution, nay outright rebellion, that is the Agile movement. Out with the old (Rational) and in with the new (Agile). Ding, dong! The witch is dead! Some miscellaneous points in no particular order: Daily blogger Robert Love aptly demonstrated an interesting fact about fellow blogger Brion during the final closing session. As usual, T-shirt projectiles were aimed at the crowd, who were eagerly trying to be targets, when one of these said upper body coverings came directly toward us. In the ensuing mass of confused human limbs flailing in vain for the treasure, the desired item slipped out of sight. I thought Brion had sat on said item, but in a genuinely interesting and probably Freudian act, Robert looked down and found it between Brion's legs. Well, between his feet at least, but that just makes the psychological implications all that much richer, does it not? Things got even more like the Twilight Zone when Robert's name came up during the drawings for the prize bags and his prize was two bags full of four "C++ in a Nutshell" books. Cheap greedy bastard that I am, I suggested he donate one to the cause, and I now have a copy of said book for naught a penny. Alas, I have now attended 4 Borcons (three in a row) and I have yet to win anything at the final session. And yet a mere daily blogger cleans up. It is a travesty of justice, says I. Neither DevExpress, Mark Miller nor anybody from RemObjects had any kind of presence at the conference (though Dr Bob did a BoF on RemObjects). And of course there was the obvious absence of Turbopower for the first time since longer than I can tell. However, there were Turbopower there, as Falafel Software had a large booth with part of that devoted to ComponentScience, which is constituted of many former Turbopower guys. I had a chance to talk with Sean Winstead, who had the thankless task of winding down Turbopower in its last days. I asked about the future of SleuthQA. Apparently Aristocrat couldn't find any buyers willing to pay what they were asking, so SleuthQA resembles Kyliix, languishing in what is a persistent vegetative state, not really there but never officially dispensed with either. Sean suggested that AutomatedQA has products that more than adequately cover this space anyway (and that Aristocrat had not given then the resources to do better with SleuthQA). By the way, for those of you who like to know some social details, Sean is a tall bespectacled quiet guy that speaks in quiet measured tones. My unconscious mind apparently gets quite bored with the meager crumbs it gets from my conscious self and so amuses itself with various pastimes, some of which intrude oddly into my life. One of these pastimes is the forming of pairs than then often become interchanged when I am sleep deprived, stressed, etc. One such pairing is Chad Hower and Clay Shannon. I don't know why my mind has formed this duality in this particular case but I was reminded of it every single time I talked to Chad Hower, which was quite often at this BorCon. Chad lives an interesting life in the sense that he does a heck of a lot of travelling and in fact has moved the place he calls home quite a bit too. He winters in Cyprus and summers in Russia. Last I heard, Clay was living in Wisconsin, which he describes as void of interesting Delphi work. There must be something common between these two other than the fact that they both do Delphi, because these pairings my unconscious mind does are always rational in their origin, if not always in their continuance. Or so I like to tell myself. I was highly sleep deprived at BorCon, and in fact felt hungover the last day, though I hadn't drunk anything the night before. Maybe that was it. Another such pairing is Geoff Harris, the animated Australian (in fact I think this should be his permanent nick-name, "The Animated Australian") and Dudley Moore. This one I understand. But the Clay Shannon and Chad Hower pairing? Where is the logic there? But I digress. Again. In fact, this digression reminds me of a great Mark Twain quote that goes something like this, "Imagine you are an idiot. Now, imagine you are a congressman. But I repeat myself." How is Mark Twain related to this sleep-deprivation-inspired stream of consciousness? I guess you'll have to credit Clay Shannon for that link. It is too bad that Clay wasn't at BorCon. I'd like to meet him sometime. There aren't that many Delphi programmers that can really write. Or at least write that way. Tuesday night at the movies was The Matrix Reloaded, a movie that I like better each time I see it. By the way people, go to moviemistakes.com and look it up there. Interesting trivia and interesting mistakes. Anyway, Nick Hodges didn't show up, obviously because he was busy protesting the war in Iraq or engaging in some other such liberal pinhead type of activity. Chad Hower wasn't there, despite having borrowed my copy of The Matrix so his significant other could see it before The Matrix Reloaded and Wednesday night's viewing of Revolutions, a trifecta of theatrical triumph no doubt. But alas, though they were able to watch The Matrix on the big plasma screen they had for the Atozed booth, they missed Reloaded and therefore the trifecta. But these things happen, especially in such an action-packed time as BorCon. But as is always the case it seems, technical problems made the showing a half hour late and so we weren't done until almost 1 AM. In Chicago that is 3AM. Hence my current fatigue. More later, in the next installment... -- ***Free Your Mind*** |