Those of us who see the destruction and devastation all around us find it difficult to condone what others pursue as “a good business practice.” We have heard for years about stock market players (in particular mutual fund and hedge fund managers) pursuing short term gains to juice their overall portfolio. We have watched corporations which were once the model for the world sell their future down the drain in order to make a fast buck this quarter (think GM and its pension plan.) Hell, we the tax payer, have had to bail most of them out this year, yet their executives still demand multi-million dollar compensation packages.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it has finally hit agriculture in an end-of-the-industry way. I’ve watched it happening for the past couple of decades. I’m not talking about the huge corporate farms poisoning the world in order to make a fast buck. Eventually the excess population would be weeded off and the remaining people would simply quit buying stuff from supermarket chains. Perhaps China would claim jurisdiction over the corporate executives who poisoned so many. After all, in China they have public executions for people that poison consumable products.

What is happening now is a perfect storm which will leave the land unable to grow enough food and no trick of technology will help it. I’m not some alarmist tree hugger. I’m simply someone whose made a living over the past 20+ years being a problem solving analyst. I can find nothing which will solve this problem. But I can find historical evidence to back up my statements though.

The information is a bit hard to find on-line without buying DVDs, but the History Channel has run at least one show covering the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and how the continual irrigation to grow things in a desert lead to “salted earth.” You can even find textbooks covering the subject of irrigation failure. http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115CH17oldirrigation.html

Irrigation, however, is only a tiny portion of the problem. In fact, irrigation was the first warning sign we were headed down the path of short term gains destruction. Today, all the stops have been removed and we are running flat out towards world wide starvation, all for the sake of a fast buck.

As always, MBAs are at the root of this problem. After having trashed every industry they have touched, they moved into agriculture. First it was just the equipment manufacturers, then it was the packing plants, and then into livestock production. Since they couldn’t control enough that way, they bribed the politicians with lobbyist dollars to change the tax laws. Just about the only way to pass on a family farm to your heirs became the LLC-trust tool. If you didn’t use it, the government would take 75% of the estimated value of all assets in death taxes. The LLC-trust tool eventually puts all family farms under the control of a corporation, and guess who runs the corporations? Nice huh?

Most of you will have no idea this is going on. Most of you simply see the advertising on the product packaging showing a hard working family farmer, his picturesque little plot of land with a big red barn, and perhaps a small family. Wide open spaces, happy livestock, and a person who is one with the land. Subconsciously you buy into this because you want to believe it. The simple fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. Every year Willie Nelson and a bunch of others put on an event called Farm-Aid, but every year, fewer and fewer understand what is behind it. The simple truth is, they are trying to save the last few remaining family farms which actually live up to that picturesque marketing image. Most of them have “gone corporate” in some fashion. Sometimes they simply are forced into a contract to raise livestock in an un-healthy manner (watch the documentary Food, Inc. for some memorable images of this.) Other times the LLC-trusts they are forced to do business with force them into a raping of the land.

When the trusts first started out, they weren’t a purely evil thing like they are today. The entire focus and charter of the trust was the care and husbandry of the land. Back then the trust would partner with a farm family on a 50/50 or similar basis. Buildings and equipment on premises were maintained, and soil tests were regularly done on the land to ensure it was improving every year.

Today, the MBAs have put the industry in a death spiral. The entire focus is squeezing every risk free dollar possible out of this goose until it quits laying golden eggs. Massively high cash rents are requested, and bottom feeders pony up. There is no soil testing nor soil care plan. The bottom feeders over plant and provide the soil with no additional inputs. The soil is strip mined in the truest sense of the word, only this kind of strip mining doesn’t leave a gaping hole in the ground. You “see” this strip mining in the average yield movement or relative to fields around them.

Of course now, it is illegal for a realtor or anybody else to request the five year average yield report from the ASCS office. Only the owner can be given that. Why? Because once land has been had by a strip mine farming operation it is worthless. Nobody living locally will purchase it. The realtor has to sucker in an “investor” from far away promising the new owner the same continued high dollar cash rent which will pay for the land in no time. Most banks in or near a farming community will no longer issue a loan to anyone who says they expect the farming operation to pay for itself via cash rent. They’ve gone down that road before. Five years into the loan the land is ruined and absolutely worthless. The bank is left holding the bag in most cases. A bunch of money spent with lobbyists got the law changed so the buyer now has to take the realtor’s word for the yields when the current owner refuses to cough up the ASCS documentation.

I’ve been watching this happen a lot lately. In an effort to try and squeeze out every last nickel from the golden goose of LLC-trust land, the farm managers have ceased doing any and all maintenance on the property. They got the cash rent jacked up extra high because the farm came with on-site grain and equipment storage. A functioning grain dryer was also pointed out. Well, the grain bins have gone past their life expectancy and the dryer ceased functioning two years ago, but the rent hasn’t come down. The new trend now is to tell the tenant that they have to provide their own storage and drying facilities. The original farm family would roll over in their graves hearing this, but today it is considered “good business practice” by the MBAs and Farm Management Teams.

Perhaps it is easier for me to see living out in the farm area part time. I’ve watched one farm which, while not the best in the world, used to average 120-160 bushel per acre corn and 35-42 bushel per acre for soybeans. The farmer who had it died. Things changed hands a few times until it ended up in some kind of trust renting to a strip mine farming operation. The first few years they had the farm the auger cart made many trips across the fields hauling grain away from the combine. It was not uncommon to see the cart weighting for one of 4-6 semis to return from an elevator. Two years in, the auger cart was making far fewer trips and you got to see trucks waiting for hours to get filled. Just over a year ago I watched as the combine, the auger cart, and the first truck all left the bean field at the same time. Ah, but a big farming operation like that can play the insurance game filing claim after claim. The insurance companies don’t mandate inspections and proof of good farming practices. They simply cash the premium checks and hope for the best. In the mean time, everybody’s premiums go up around the country.

Once upon a time, these operations were an isolated case. Now they are common. In fact, the MBAs that run much of the Ag industry magazine business are starting to hold them up as shining examples of “best farmers” due to the size of their operations and the equipment leasing business they give the large equipment manufacturers.

What is overlooked in all of this is the fact the land cannot be magically healed once an operation like this is done with it. The land will have to lie fallow for three to five years getting treatments of manure and lime. That won’t get it back to healthy, but it will get it back to where some legitimate farming practices can begin to tend it.

The strip mining practice isn’t just an American problem. Most of the large operations have grabbed as many dollars as they can in this country and raced down to Brazil ( and a few other places) buying up cheap land and stripping it bare. The Ag magazines are always running stories about large farming operations which exist on multiple continents. Think about that. A farming operation existing on multiple continents. Obviously not that picturesque family farm you see on the packages in the supermarket, so how come they are legally allowed to use those images?

From time to time you will add various image files from somewhere on your system as background images. At some point in the future, you may want to understand how to get them out of that combo box list labeled “Picture:” below.

The poor man’s cheat is to simply rename the file from A.JPG to B.JPG and the entry will “appear” to be removed from the list. The truth is, the entry is still there, but only verifiable entries are displayed. The information which populates this particular combo box is squirreled away in the file plasma_disktop_appletsrc. Under Karmic Koala (9.10) KUbuntu it can be found under .kde/share/config. Please note that the leading “.” is actually part of the name and indicates a hidden directory. If you are going to search for this file from Dolphin you need to turn on the little checkbox which tells Dolphin to show hidden files.

Once you have opened the file in your favorite text editor, you need to search for userswallpapers. That is the variable which contains the full path and file name of every item which will show up in that combo box. Simply delete the entry or entries you wish to remove.

We all get these phone calls. Well, this week I got another one. Here’s how the phone call went:

Caller ID: (312)-646-7089

Caller: this is blah from blah-blah-blah. I see you have some Linux in your background and I’m looking for a good Linux person, do you have time to talk?

Me: I’m kind of busy now, but, what is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about your background and seeing if you were keeping yourself open for new opportunities.

Me: What is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well, as I stated, I’m looking for someone that is good with Linux and I saw you had some Linux in your background. Are you good with Linux?

Me: What do you mean by good?

Caller: You have a good day now. <click>

I expect these types of phone calls when it sounds like the person on the other end of the line has American English as their fourth or fifth language, not when the person sounds like they were born here. This guy obviously has about thirty two seconds of total IT experience and is trying to make a living with it. Anyone who actually understands the very first thing about IT knows just how absurd this guy sounds. They also know that this is the last person who should be recruiting geeks on the phone.

Since it appears that there are a lot of people working in HR for corporations, and as technical recruiters for consulting firms, let me add a few minutes to your education so you don’t sound like such a genetic misfit when you call a geek on the phone.

Linux is an Operating System. When it is actually running on a computer the combination of operating system and hardware are called a platform. “Good with Linux” is not a job title, it is a sub-requirement of an actual requirement. When you call up a geek and ask them if they are “good with Linux”, if they are even remotely qualified to fill the position you are trying to fill, they are going to ask you “what do you mean by good” or “what is it you’re looking for” or, they might choose to let you know just how far out your ass you are speaking by asking “what is it you are really looking for?”

Job Titles for geeks tend to include: Business Analyst, Technical Analyst, Technical Writer, Programmer, Programmer Analyst, Systems Analyst, Systems Administrator, Performance Analyst, Security Admin., etc. Each of these open requirements could have a sub-requirement of “good with Linux”, however, the definition of good is relevant to the skill set required for the actual job title. “Good with Linux” is a completely different set of skills when you are talking about a Programmer verses a Systems Analyst. A programmer needs to know about various tools, libraries, and languages for the development of software on the platform. The required set of tools + libraries + languages will be different for each and every shop looking for a programmer that is “good with Linux.” You cannot just drop a C++ Qt programmer into a Python Gtk shop.

Likewise, “good with Linux” has completely different definitions for Systems Administrators at a shop to shop level. It doesn’t matter if the “good with Linux” Systems Administrator you are talking with is a living god with the Tivoli tool set if the shop that put out the requirement doesn’t use Tivoli.

I didn’t publish the name of the person, or the company name, mainly because I didn’t bother to remember them. Caller ID helped out with the phone number though. Hopefully, the waste of oxygen who called me will read this, for it will exponentially increase their value in the universe.

I’m sure they eventually found someone that claimed to be “good with Linux.” I’m sure they presented that candidate with a glowing report. I’m also absolutely certain the time each client site manager spent reading that resume was nothing more than minutes of their life they will never get back.

I’ve actually been pondering this question for a while. I haven’t done any significant amount of numbers research, but it does look quite possible. I mean, Target should go after Amazon.com since Amazon has infringed on many of Target’s more profitable markets. Unlike most of the other brick and mortar chains in “blue collar to low end white collar” shopping world, Target has a reputation for having stores which are clean and bright and workers that actually feel a sense of pride about working there. Walmart, on the other hand, has states attempting to get legislation banning it from opening any more stores, not to mention documentaries put out about the horrors of the company, along with news stories about illegal alien cleaning crews…not going to be the type of chain anyone wants to see get bigger.

Kmart, what can one say about Kmart? For many of us, it was the place our parents had to shop. The chain was big in many areas which had been factory towns at a time when the factories were closing down due to jobs being sent overseas (sound familiar?) This was long before they had “Big K” and “Super Kmart” locations. It was a place you went for blue collar basic clothes, dress clothing which was mostly polyester, and cheap-enough-to-let-the-kids-play-with sporting goods supplies. Both JC Penny and Sears had better dress clothing, not good, but better. Along came a movie named “Rain Man” and Kmart became the definition of un-cool. It began to crumble financially, then somehow, Sears, a company which invented the catalog business then went bankrupt at it, had enough money to buy Kmart. Not too many weeks ago there was a story on the WBBM noon business wire about Sears being in financial trouble yet again. It’s kind of sad, because the addition of appliances and what could now actually be called a valid tool and automotive section has helped the larger Kmart locations at least look like they could be turning around.

In order to do something different, you have to have vision. It took a while for me to understand why Target got into the $9 hardcover book fight with Walmart. I’ve come to the conclusion that the retail analysts you hear interviewed on business radio and TV simply don’t have a clue. Target isn’t after Walmart because Walmart will implode on its own. There are too many lawsuits, too many news segments, too many documentaries, and too many governments passing “living wage” and “big box store” laws aimed directly at Walmart for Walmart to remain a viable company. Few companies in this world have a lower reputation for employee respect than Walmart. Quite simply, the days are numbered for that company. When the economy comes back all of the way Walmart will simply go away. It’s done the “dine and dive” on too many taxing bodies and retail site owners.

A visit to the Kmart web site doesn’t show any evidence that they have gotten into the $9 hardcover fight. I don’t expect they will. I firmly believe Walmart did it as some flash-in-the-pan marketing tactic, in part to take news cycles away from the Bruce Springsteen music CD backlash. Given Walmart’s reputation I cannot see a lot of independent author/publishers doing an exclusive deal with Walmart. They have a long history of shafting their vendors and you can even find articles about it in magazines like Kiplinger’s. A store with a good reputation, like Target, could make the entire thing work.

I’ve kind of covered the economics before, but you might not have understood. As an independent self-published author, I can get a 5.5 x 8.5 hard cover book with dust jacket of roughly 400 pages printed for around $4 per copy if and only if I have an ink print run of roughly 5,000 copies. Under the current author-publisher-distributor-bookstore model, I would front the entire print run for over eight months before I saw a dime from a book store. I would also be paying a lot of shipping charges for returns from chain store locations. The $20K for the print run would have an additional $8-12K in marketing expenses along with $2-4K in shipping. I would be financing that one way or another for at least eight months before I received payments from the book stores which may or may not cover the cost of the print run, let alone the other expenses. The list price on that book would be $24. The distributor would take a 55% discount which would mean $10.80 per copy (less withholding for potential future returns) would get sent to me. Anywhere from 5%-20% of that print run is going to come back “damaged” if it was stocked in an actual retail store. Trust me.

At the end of eight months on store shelves approximately 4,000 copies would be in sellable condition, the rest would have to be given away or pulped. So, I would take up to $36K out of pocket for eight months in the hopes of receiving $43K back and netting a whopping $7K. For the sake of argument, we will assume I had the cash on-hand and wasn’t financing part of this on a credit card at 20%. Publishers want a “run-away-best-seller” not just so they can make a fast buck, but because they want less than 5% coming back as returns.

Let us take a look at the $9 hardcover market. I still have the printing costs, but there are no returns. There is a one time freight shipping cost of less than $1000 to ship to a Target (or other chain) distribution center. Terms are net-30 or net-45 depending upon how negotiations went. I sell the books for $6/copy and get paid for all of them. $30K - $21K = $9K in under two months. Granted, I would be doing a lot less marketing. I would probably be willing to spend about $2K (what most major publishers actually spend marketing a new book by a new author) on getting reviews done, but the rest of the marketing would be up to the retail chain which has its own massive Web site and is creating sale flyers every week.

The downside for Target is they would have to hire 5-10 “readers” at the corporate level. These people would have to actually read at least a few chapters of every submitted book and decide what to stock on the shelves. I believe currently much of the stocking requirements are driven by automated reporting from book sales rating services much like the recording industry has/had for record sales.

Of course, Target (or the chain store that does it) could take it one final step. They could strike right where Amazon lives. The country has many printing firms which use actual ink and specialize in book print runs of less than 50,000. If target had the readers making choices, and the self-publishers had everything ready to go, Target could simply sign a contract with the self-publisher, pay $2.25/copy to the self-publisher for every copy they print, and contract directly with a printing house. They would probably need to contract with one near each distribution center, get them unified in equipment, and split the print runs across each location to minimize shipping costs. You know Target (or the chain which does this) is going to get a much better price than the self-publisher for printing. The printing will be done with actual ink so it won’t be a tacky and disgusting POD book like many being sold on Amazon today.

In truth, once Target finishes heading down this path, I see Kmart/Sears following suit. Anyone who has shopped those two chains knows that they are both used to having exclusive slices of overlapping markets. For those of you who don’t have to do your own shopping, let me spell it out: If I want Irish Spring scented Speed Stick, I have to get it at Kmart. The powered or talc scented stuff I have to get at Target, or the other way around. Both chains carry the product line, but each store appears to have certain scents you can only get there. As consumers, we are used to having to make more than one stop to get everything we need.

There are certainly more than enough self-publishers out there for both Kmart and Target to have a couple thousand titles which are only available in print form at their store. The really bad stories would be relegated to using POD and being sold on Amazon. The ground breaking works of fiction would most likely still sell via the traditional channels since there would be a much higher rate of return. Of course, we are only talking about general fiction and young adult book types here. Reference, research, professional, etc. would all still do best going through regular channels, since the margins are usually higher on those, I don’t see that changing. Fiction, however, is quickly becoming a commodity.

Oddly enough, the timing is just about right for Target/Kmart to make a play into the general reading market. There are a lot of print shops that would drool to get the business, and eBooks are poised to take the bottom end of the market out. The paperback novel is quickly heading the way of the buggy whip. Quite simply $9 hard cover and $4 or less ebook pricing will vaporize the $4 paperback market. (Out of politeness, I won’t say what it will do to the $10+ paperback market.)

One or both chains should have no trouble adding ebook sales to their Web site. I just received an announcement from what used to be ShortCovers. They have changed their name to Kobo and spun off from their parent company. I found this paragraph interesting in the announcement:

Through its new strategic partners, Kobo has distribution in the U.S., Canada, UK, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and other territories. Core to Kobo’s strategy is making eReading available through partners everywhere and as such, the company will be working to enable a broad range of retailers, device manufacturers, and operators who will benefit from our leading eReading service.

I don’t know what all of the ins and outs are with the deal. I do know that Borders is one of the investors, which struck me as odd given the above paragraph. Perhaps they have come to the conclusion that it’s better to take a small cut than try to lock the market? I don’t know. It definitely sounds like the new company is looking to add more retailers and views itself more as a bundled service they could offer than a competitor.

I do know that Amazon has had a ToolCrib site selling tools to customers. I also know they have some other site selling housewares since I was searching for a wall lamp on-line and that store came up. Everybody knows they have been into books, movies, and video games for a while. I haven’t dug to find what else they sell, but when they branched out to compete with other retailers in traditional markets, they basically offered up the challenge for those retailers to venture into Amazon’s market.

The real question I have right now is: Will Barnes & Noble create their own on-line video rental business to compete with Block Buster and Netflix, or will Target do that too? You see, most of us already have to go to Target and Kmart to buy things like pit stick, socks, and undies. We could drop off our rentals while picking other things up. There would only be outbound shipping charges for the rental service. These chains have a lot of 24hr locations now. For people like me in the boonies, returns might not be so easy, but being able to drop them off and midnight and know they were scanned into the system at the same time would be nice. I would think it would reduce the number of damaged DVDs as well.

Barnes & Noble has a different problem if they want to go into the rental business. The “drop off” feature won’t have the 24hr benefits. I would hazard a guess they would move towards more of the traditional video rental business, not because it would make money directly, but because it would keep customers in their stores longer. BN doesn’t stock milk, eggs, and undies. Not a lot of people read books today. Most people who buy movies from a retail store (instead of on-line) tend to buy them from a store they are already in.

Ah well. It will be interesting to see if Target takes the gloves off and tries to drive a stake through the heart of Amazon in 2010. The chain certainly has the financial muscle and marketing savy to take them out, especially if Kmart follows suit. Of course, the natural extension of exclusive titles is for each chain to have its own book club.

I have always pondered this question. I ponder it seemingly every week when I listen to the news. No matter how large of a crime a lawyer participates in, it seems they never get disbarred. Let’s take a story most of you have been familiar with.

Back in 2005 we started seeing articles like the summary posted here:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093005.htm

(search for Navistar once you get to the page.)

In a 2006 Business Wire press release we read the following:

As part of the review of accounting issues, the company’s audit committee has completed an independent investigation into the propriety of accounting and auditing confirmation matters relating to vendor rebates in fiscal year 2005. T he investigation was conducted by an independent law firm and found no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct.

You can find the article here:

http://ir.navistar.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=199251

Not long after this, October of 2007 in fact, we started seeing articles which contained the following:

The independent investigation also identified instances of intentional misconduct that resulted in some of the company’s smaller, but in some cases material, restatement adjustments. “ Most of the individuals who were involved in instances of misconduct are no longer employed by the company,” Navistar said.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10045683/c_10023908

In October of 2009 we started seeing articles like the following:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Navistar-SEC-settle-apf-2643276182.html?x=0&.v=2

One cannot follow this progression without asking why did the SEC not disbar all of the attorneys involved in the 2006 statement. It’s rather obvious they were either willing participates in a cover up, or simply saying what they were paid to say without performing much (if any) of an investigation. The timing of the 2006 article made it appear as a rather obvious attempt to stop investors from bailing on the stock. It soon became obvious nobody was buying the bullshit, hence the back peddling in 2007.

My concern here isn’t with the sear sizzled books fresh from the barbecue, nor with the “deal” the SEC did on our behalf allowing the company to not admit any wrong doing (even after the company issued a statement saying evidence of it had been found.) No, My issue here is that the SEC didn’t serve the public interest by forcing disbarment of all lawyers involved in the 2006 release. We are never going to stop corporate fry cooks (accountants) from serving up mouth watering financial statements which have no basis in fact until we make it a death penalty offense. That is simply a given. We cannot begin to hope such frauds will be uncovered if the offenders can simply pay lawyers to say things which have no basis in fact in order to continue duping investors. At a minimum, the SEC settlement should have demanded disbarment for all.

So, even though you know better than to weight down an editor with a project environment bolted onto it, you have decided to learn/use Eclipse. At least, for some project (perhaps a Source Forge project) someone has mandated that you use Eclipse. Since your desktop OS is Ubuntu, that means you need to get Eclipse running on Ubuntu. You open up Synaptic and see quite a few packages with Eclipse in the name or description. Most importantly, you find the Java Development Tools and know that you will be doing your development with Java.

You try installing this, and click OK on the additional dependencies which are flagged as needed. After a bit you exit Synaptic and find Eclipse on your KUbuntu menu. It starts up. You tweak a few settings (like changing delete line from CTRL-D to CTRL-K so it matches Kate) then decide you are ready to start learning. You’ve already done a bit of Java coding and really aren’t into plunking down yet another $40 on a Java book which is going to burn half of its pages regurgitating the free Java language information, so you search around and find the free Eclipse and Java tutorials here:

http://eclipsetutorial.sourceforge.net/

Mark Dexter has done quite a job putting together this tutorial. While I have a few issues with some of the things taught, I find this to be a completely remarkable effort. As someone who authors advanced technical books, I know the level of effort it took to create such a series of lessons. (My issues are more philosophical than technical.)

You download and run the first tutorial without problems. There are some minor differences between the version of Eclipse he is using and the current 3.5.1 shipping with Ubuntu, but you manage to work your way through the tutorial as long as you don’t leave it on pause too long or run too many in sequence since there seems to be some kind of resource leakage in the video playback software used by both Opera and FireFox. (It appears you need to restart the browser after every fourth lesson or so. Putting a lesson on pause while you go to lunch is a definite no-no.)

Once you have complete this tutorial, you feel pretty good about your Eclipse installation. It seems that things went well and you believe you have all of the correct packages installed. Then you start the persistence tutorial. Once you get to the portion of the tutorial which tells you to open the generated XML file and view it in Design mode, the wheels come off the cart. The file gets opened up in raw text mode, not even “source” mode. There is no syntax highlighting nor is there a pair of tabs which will let you toggle between modes. Frantically you pause and back up the lesson to see if you happened to have missed something. No, even after you watch that little piece five times, you cannot find anything you didn’t do correctly. Life is sad.

Desperation sends you searching on the Web to find any and all places mentioning Eclipse, XML, and Ubuntu together. You find quite a few message threads with a phrase like “Are you using the version of Eclipse found in the distro? That has never worked for me…” Life is sadder still.

You download the Eclipse Java kit from the actual Eclipse Web site and install it into a local directory. This kind of sucks because it is no longer on the KUbuntu (or Ubuntu) menu and you need to create a shell script in your bin directory to invoke it. You also have to nuke your hidden “.eclipse” folder since the two versions don’t like to play nice. After you start it up though, the XML file opens just like it should. Thinking that it is simply a missing jar file you painstakingly compare the jar files in the Ubuntu distro plugins directory with the local version. A lot more than one are missing. It’s more than 50 and less than 200 which simply aren’t there. More angst. Do you just try to copy them in via sudo, or do they need other files in other parts of the tree?

More frantic Web searching, but now you are searching for Eclipse, Ubuntu, and missing files. If the deities your worship choose to smile on you, one of your searches will lead you to this site:

http://blog.yogarine.com/2009/10/eclipse-plugin-packages-for-ubuntu.html

There you will find someone who really went above and beyond the call. The went out and created debian packages for all of the missing files they could identify, and they did it for the current version of Ubuntu/KUbuntu. In case the blog is not accessible for some reason the source you add to Synaptic is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/yogarine/eclipse/ubuntu karmic main

Then you need to import his key from the command line:

wget http://www2.yogarine.com/eclipse-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Finally you can perform the installation from the command line:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pdt

Something like 111Meg later, your installation completes. This installs a lot more than you need for the tutorial, but everything you need for the tutorial will finally be where it is supposed to be. You find this out when you start up Eclipse from the KUbuntu menu, open the XML file, and see the designer come up.

Whoever Yogarine is, they are awesome!

One thing worthy of note: Even after you apply all of these patches/fixes/missing files, when you click on Help → Software Updates → Find and Install, the process will die with the following:

Network connection problems encountered during search.

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo”.

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Hopefully someone will find a work around for this.

There have been many disturbing trends in IT lately. It seems nearly every firm on the planet is using illegal aliens flown in on vacation visas instead of legally authorized workers. Even those companies selling super secret armored vehicles and other technology to the DOD have their entire IT department awash with non-citizens which haven’t even applied for a security clearance, let alone been granted one. It appears that high value military technology is there for the taking if you have an operative willing to work for $10/day.

Oh, there have been many arguments made that the super secret stuff is off on double password protected encrypted drives, but when the regular systems have had to have modifications to handle black ops shipments and warehousing, is there really any portion of the system that doesn’t need full security? I mean, just how smart does the $10/day terrorist spy have to be when the bill of lading module has a comment in the source like:

20090401 rrr Modifications to support black ops warehouse in Kuwait City

They simply have to know how to search with a text editor to find all of the modifications made to support that warehouse and they know how to identify any other black ops or DOD warehouses. Hell, they even know the city to begin looking in if they want to blow up an awful lot of supplies. Since most shops have a standard requiring most developers to put their initials or name in the main comments at the top, they even know who to get friendly with to find out more information.

What is even more disturbing now is that the argument “oh the directory is encrypted and requires an account with access they don’t have” is about to become completely bogus for most installations. The trend the Gartner Group is paid to market now is “data center outsourcing.” If any of you have read “Infinite Exposure” you will have a good understanding of the war and de-evolution that brings to the world. Even “Infinite Exposure” didn’t take into account just how little military suppliers actually care about the lives of those in the service. You will find most of these shops already in the process of whoring out 100% of their data centers to a third party which uses non-citizen labor.

We are not talking about swapping out staff, but the physical migration of the data centers into one or more monster data center owned by the company with the outsourcing contract. The people working in that data center have the IT operations of multiple companies, and some equipment for training/hot spare situations. Now, the al-Qaeda operatives don’t run any risk of getting caught stealing sensitive information like the complete schematics for all of the new armored vehicles. They are the people performing the disk to disk backups on the SAN. They simply take one of the backup copies (or an extra one they made) and plug it into the SAN used for training/hot spare. On that SAN, their account has the privs of God. No security alarms will go off as they burn their free time attempting to crack the encryption. Those directories which relied on super secret accounts with super secret privileges as protection are sent to other cells in a matter of seconds once the drive is mounted.

They might even download an OpenSource tool to crack the encryption. It won’t be hard. Most companies have paid the Gartner Group for the marketing glossies packaged as “industry analysis” which tells them they should be running their entire company on low powered $800 PCs. This means the drives on the SAN which actually are encrypted aren’t going to have 512 bit encryption because the hardware can’t do it. While the SAN itself may not offer up the encryption password, it may very well offer up the length of this password as a string of “*” characters. If you can tell the downloaded encryption hacking tool exactly how many characters are in the root encryption password (or seed) as some call it, you dramatically shorten the cracking time.

When does the DOD step in and stop these data center migrations? Are they even aware of the security breach which is about to happen? (if it hasn’t already)

Since the “moderators” on the Publish-L newsgroup wouldn’t allow this post unless the correct descriptions of certain companies were removed, I have posted it here.

eBooks are pretty useless for any information which requires more than one font, an image, or anything resembling formatting. I have had many “professional” services attempt to convert books from “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series into ebook format and the final product was a useless puddle of bits.

The current “industry standard” is to use EPUB. I’m sure EPUB will succeed because like PDF, it is the poorest possible choice for a “standard”. Industry leaders and MBAs alike always embrace the poorest possible decision. The EPUB format we have now will not be compatible with the EPUB format we will use in 2011. The standard was rushed and from an IT/Geek standpoint it is bad bad bad bad unforgivably bad. Even Microsoft, father of most bad things to hit IT in the past 20 years, hasn’t written a poorer specification.

In this economy, people who spend $300+ on a reader are going to spend the bulk of their time reading through the 200,000+ “free” titles which come “bundled” with the reader. Unless there is _specific_ information they need from a book you have put out only in EPUB format, they aren’t going to spend any money on an EPUB format. “If” you happen to have a novel or other “lit” type book which happens to be getting a weekly mention on both Oprah and CNN (think “High on Arrival”) you will see “some” eReader owners plunking down cash on it.

Most books will be “zero value” which get put out via EPUB format. The readers are currently being hawked as portals to this large free library. Most marketers for the devices are also promising to continue expanding the “free” library. In less than two years each eReader supporting the EPUB format will have in excess of one million titles available for “free”. There are currently over 200,000 “classics” available. Each year there will be a new round of books which fall off the copyright protection merry go round plus there will be a new batch of books cranked out by publishers/authors which are released “free” in EPUB format.

Some of the new “free” books will be released in their entirety, and others will be released as a group of chapters. Those of you who think the current tech weenies will continue to be appeased by “first chapter free” sites are smoking something that isn’t sold over the counter. I have one technical book I will be releasing for free in PDF format once it has gone through editing. This will be the entire book. Due to the horrible limitations of EPUB, it will not be released in EPUB format. The book supports/covers an OpenSource Java class library which currently has over 5000 users/downloaders on SourceForge. The PDF will be bundled with the next major release of the library so new developers will have a much easier time getting up to speed with the library. Why did I spend 4 months of my time writing the book? I needed to use the library for a project and there wasn’t a single stitch of usable documentation. Why would I give such a book away for free? OpenSource users pay for nothing. Period. If it has anything to do with an OpenSource project on SourceForge, they expect it to be free and will simply look for a different library or tool rather than pay for a book. The book, however, is another book in “The Minimum You Need to Know” series. The rest of the series doesn’t cover OpenSource libraries from SourceForge. When the PDF gets bundled with the next downloadable update, I will have 5000+ developers that are now familiar with “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series. It may be two weeks or five years, but eventually they will need information on one of the topics covered by the series. If they liked the book they got for free, they will first look at my book series because they “know” it.

My current novel “Infinite Exposure” has been released in eBook form. I give away the first 18 chapters in both EPUB and PDF format. That version ends with a paragraph explaining that the readers have been reading a promotional version and they must purchase a retail version to find out how the book ends. Those who are curious enough about the book will spend the money. $4 for the eBook version or $24 for the hard cover (there will never be a paperback version.) Once you upload a “free” PDF version of your book to a couple of the “free” book sites you will find a strange thing happens. Set up a Google or other monitor for your title and have it send you updates. Every couple of weeks I find a new “free” book site has not only the PDF copy of the book, but has taken the time to either scrape and paste reviews of the book onto their site, or to provide links to book reviews. Some of the sites are kind enough to provide some kind of download count information. The “I want everything for free” crowd appears to number in the hundreds of thousands, if the counters are accurate. How many were simply download bots as opposed to actual people reading? No idea. When was the last time any of you put out a marketing packet/kit which was willingly _pulled_ 100,000 or more times? I’ll wager many of you paid money to send marketing out via one or more email marketing services only to see no sales and be completely unable to verify the hit counts they were sending to you in the weekly emails. I spent about half an hour chopping the novel off at a logical point, generating the PDF, and uploading it to two sites. Every couple of weeks I find it listed somewhere else. More importantly though, I find the glowing reviews listed along with it.

Microsoft, a company which has produced absolutely worthless software for decades, has trained most people to accept “good enough” as the way it is. Hell, Microsoft has to have years of great days all back to back along with the alignment of critical star configurations in order to have a product which can aspire to be “good enough”. Anybody who has had to endure pathetic products like Word, Windows, Vista, (the we are gonna charge you for these bug fixes Windows 7 “release”), Bob, Money, or the countless other “products” pushed out the door by Microsoft has found their attitude adjusting towards “good enough” being a forward looking goal rather than a fall back position.

The only publishers I see making anything at all out of the current EPUB trend are the publishers with a “long tail.” This “tail” can extend both forward and backward, if you happen to have some kind of trademarked series such as my “The Minimum You Need to Know” or, as other publishers have with “for dummies”, “for idiots”, etc. (I haven’t checked lately, but I believe “for Complete MBAs” is still available. That would cover dummies, idiots, and Godless genetic misfits without infringing on the other trademarks.) I expect it will take up to a year for all 5000+ current users of that OpenSource library to pull down updates. I haven’t done much tracking to see how many new adopters are coming along, but there are continued improvements to the library, so there will be at least a trickle of new users each year. Every copy of my $45-$90 titles which goes out the door after the release will pretty much be payback for the time I put into generating this marketing material. Note that I didn’t write the book specifically to be a marketing tool. I had to do the research anyway, so why not do just a little bit more and write a book? The application I was going to write got done inside of four months instead of one month, but it got done, and I wasn’t on a delivery schedule.

Roland Hughes, President

Logikal Solutions

http://www.logikalsolutions.com

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com

http://www.infiniteexposure.net

I read Mark Peters article in “the Writer” magazine today and had to take some time to comment. It’s not that I’m offended by the definition of this phrase:

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/metric_buttload/

I just think the definition is completely wrong. You see, I’m a child that is old enough to remember the 70s because I wasn’t old enough to actually live it at the time. I missed out on the summer of love and the “free love” craze, and haven’t quite gotten over missing out on a time when you could have all the sex you wanted without dying from it. Life just isn’t fair!

More importantly, I remember the gas rationing, gas lines on the news, and the governments ill-fated attempt to force the God-awful metric system down our throats. I believe it was during eighth grade math when they really started to shove that at us. Once the national test scores for math plummeted through the floor boards, they quickly re-adjusted the curriculum so we didn’t have to be bothered with such things again. It wasn’t that we couldn’t learn it, we just outright refused. Trying to force a bunch of farm kids who can tell you the acre size of a patch of ground by glancing at it to start talking in square kilometers was a bad idea from the beginning. We dealt with CCs and grams because we had to get through physical science, and, if the scale already had the notches cut in it, we simply didn’t care about the units. We had grown up all our lives knowing that a bushel of soybeans and a bushel of corn were different sizes. We had no trouble wrapping our minds around the fact 16 fluid ounces was only a pound when you were talking about water or something very close to it. If you wanted us to start weighing herbicide in grams and pesticides in CCs we could care less, just provide the correct scale and measuring cup and 24 will be 24 to us.

No, where the “gubmint” really screwed the pooch was making the auto industry start using metric. This was a classic government operation, meaning, it was a debacle from start to finish. A “ phased in” approach meant that we now had to have two sets of sockets and wrenches with us at all times. Yes, we probably each owned four sets, but they were scattered out across multiple tractors and trucks around the farm. On a good day you could find a complete set in the tool shed where they belonged, but we didn’t have that many good days. Even today, more than 20 years later, you still have to have two complete sets of tools to work on a %*&%(*ing car, on top of the specialty tools!

Ah, but the “gubmint”, in its infinite wisdom, was thinking about all of the European tourist dollars they could get if the speedometers all had kilometers on them. They were also thinking about how wonderful it would be to export American cars to European markets. Obviously they weren’t forward thinking enough to simply mandate every vehicle sold abroad come with a complete set of SAE wrenches and sockets. I mean, at the time, $40 would get you a pretty nice set in a carrying case. Today, roughly $20 will get you a Walmart special set of knuckle skinners. I’m sure if Ace Hardware had suddenly started moving 70,000 sets per year of its Ace brand wrench and socket sets via Detroit that the prices would have come down even sooner.

No, the “gubmint” didn’t think this whole “metric conversion” thing through. Randomly changing nuts and bolts on the vehicles we had to fix pissed us off, but putting Kilometers Per Hour on the speedometer along with MPH told us just how screwed we where. You see, we had just had the gas rationing, endured the Chevy Citation, and watched the incendiary Ford Pinto on numerous news reels. Our “ gubmint” had just told us we couldn’t have a Chrysler 300 with a massive V8 engine which came stock with factory installed dual quad carbs. We had just been told we could no longer have a car, under factory warranty, which would seat six comfortably and do close to 180MPH. That was simply un-American. Now they were trying to play the numbers game with us and change the units at the same time. They wanted us to only have the capability to go 160, but they always ran out of air when they said the units…trying to get us to agree that trimming the limit 20 wouldn’t be so bad. All we had to do was get behind the wheel to know we would never have a fast car again. There before us in blue and white on black was living proof that 160 was only about 120 MPH, and that was considered a ho-hum family sedan, not a fast car, let alone a muscle car.

Shortly after that, they tried to make every car ride like a rail. Detroit kept cutting corners and using more “European Engineering” to lighten the load rather than make a more efficient engine. First came the coil springs, then the struts. Kids these days have probably never ridden in a car that rides like a real car. No matter how much money you throw at it, coil springs and struts do not give you the ride of four leaf springs and a shock. I still have a full sized Jeep Grand Wagoneer with an AMC 360 V8. I can fire that thing up and take it, unfeeling, down roads which throw drivers of modern vehicles through the windshield. Even my 2006 Buick Rendezvous rides like sh*t compared to that thing and a Buick is supposed to have the “boatiest” old-man ride on the planet.

No, I think you need to update the definition of “metric buttload” to what it really is. Something trying to sound like a whole lot more than what it is. Distance runners love the metric system! It’s a lot easier to run 8K than it is 8 miles. HR people love talking about salaries in terms of K meaning a thousand when those of us in the computer field know that K = 1024 and we know they stiffed us on our paycheck because we only made 80,000 instead of the 80K we were promised.

Perhaps we could call “Metric Buttload” a Maadoff Performance Measurement?