It's election time: Lets bash the poor!
Starting this year and continuing next year, Germany entered a series of state-government elections that will find its culmination in the federal elections next year. OK, given the fact that both major parties were to weak to dominate the politics and (fortunately) to stubborn to put their differences aside, the last three years were a low-intensity election campaign.
After the technocratic reign of Gerhard Schöder (who not only managed to trash the social security systems by granting tax breaks for the rich and boosting the replacement of ordinary jobs into a new low-wage job sector (low wage jobs are exempt from paying taxes and from contributing to the social security system), the Social Democrats got massively slapped for their right-wing politics. As the "social" party's actions were indistinguishable from the actions the conservative and neo-conservative parties would have done if in power, these parties got slapped in 2005 as well (for not only allowing but actually actively supporting this policy). With both major parties throttling each other, the government was finally busy just blaming each other than doing yet another reform. This way, the country at least got a break.
But with the formation of a new left-wing party to fill the gap the declining social-democratic and conservative parties, everything is open now. The new party already is strong enough to win a massive number of seats in the parliaments - and it's movement still growing. To the traditional parties that used to be in power since the end of the war, this possible loss of influence is horrible. Loosing 20% of their market share within two years is a shocking experience. And shocked people tend to react in strange ways. But listen:
Of course, (despite the fact that banks are crashing and the weak dollar is a deadly thing for the export-oriented German economy) we are at the beginning of a boom. (Remember: Its election time, so truth is one of the few things you can't expect from the propaganda system right now. If you'd only listen to the media coverage, you would have known that we have been at the beginning of the boom since the dot-com bubble crashed.) And so, officially, the number of unemployed people is as low as never before in the last 20 years. Right now, the official number tells that 3.413.921 are officially unemployed. This is the number you'll hear throughout repeated by politicans and media all the time. But reading the statistic tells a different story: 1.531.940 people were "employed" in so called trainings and employment incentives and therefor do not count as unemployed. The effect of these trainings is proven to be equal to nothing, but hey, we cannot afford the negative image of 5 million unemployed people.
(Compared to March 2005, the number of people receiving well-fare or unemployment support did not change much; it went up from 7.977.502 in March 2005 to 8.027.980 in April 2008. But we are in a boom! You just have to believe in it and it will become true.)
According to the report of April 2008 a total number of 8.027.980 persons depended on additional well-fare subsidiaries for their survival. Given the official 40 million people that form the German workforce, this means that 20% of the people out there either have no jobs or cannot live from the minimum wage jobs they have. Of course, Germany does not have minimum wage laws, as this would harm the market. Therefore in some regions where hourly rates of 2 to 3 Euro for full-time jobs have become common.
The social-democratic* changes of the poor-laws already introduced lowest-wage work throughout the country. Nowadays, it is common (especially in the declining traditional industries) to find yourself replaced by temporary workers or subsidized workers from one of the many employment incentives. Why pay 15 or 20 Euro, if you can get workers that are forced to work (quitting or getting fired means you would not get well-fare support anymore) and that are guaranteed to not complain? And of course, these forced-labor workers have no union-rights, no job-security or any other protection a regular worker might enjoy.
The negative impact of that policy now starts to become widely visible. The costs for the social security explode, as the income generating high-wage jobs erode and cost-generating low-wage jobs grow like cancer.
In that situation and with a clear road to destruction ahead, what is the most stupid thing you can do? Right: More of the same bad medicine. The latest plans (as usual paid for by the Bertelsmann foundation, a neo-conservative think-tank of the worst kind) outline a model where everyone who receives well-fare is forced into a low-wage job. But as there are not enough of these jobs, the industry should be allowed to participate on these programs. Of course, the industry would never ever think of replacing their regular workers with these slaves. Never, especially as the plan forces the industry to offer the products created by this system not under a minimum price that is equal to the price of the product when created by regular workers. Or in other words: they get a guaranteed profit margin for all the troubles they have.
Of course, this only speeds up the decline of the whole social system, and makes sure that the Inverted-Robin-Hood principle comes true: Take it from the poor, give it to the rich. Or as all criminals know: It is easier to extract small amounts of money from a million persons than to extract millions from a bunch or rich persons.
The study itself talks about the positive effects a similar system had in the US. Hmmm .. funny, Michael Moore tells otherwise. And even such old studies like Gabriel Kolbs "Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution" (1962) tell us, that only one third of the unemployed are covered by social security and that 35-40% of the families in the US were forced to live below the maintainance standard (which is the minimum income needed to maintain a sustainable living) a while 12-25% even lived below the emergency standard (which is the minimum income needed to survive for a short time) (Source: Wikipedia). Well, if the future our politicans want to achieve looks like the past and current state of the U.S., then our society will be back in the same dark times as before the war, with extreme differences between the poor and the rich and no or only minimal connection or exchange between these two worlds.
What a brave new world we build.
* I use the term 'social-democrat' loosely here, as the words 'social' and 'democratic' should not to be mixed with the party or social system we have today. Calling the 'social-democratic' party social is like calling the roman-catholic church a progressive think-tank.
After the technocratic reign of Gerhard Schöder (who not only managed to trash the social security systems by granting tax breaks for the rich and boosting the replacement of ordinary jobs into a new low-wage job sector (low wage jobs are exempt from paying taxes and from contributing to the social security system), the Social Democrats got massively slapped for their right-wing politics. As the "social" party's actions were indistinguishable from the actions the conservative and neo-conservative parties would have done if in power, these parties got slapped in 2005 as well (for not only allowing but actually actively supporting this policy). With both major parties throttling each other, the government was finally busy just blaming each other than doing yet another reform. This way, the country at least got a break.
But with the formation of a new left-wing party to fill the gap the declining social-democratic and conservative parties, everything is open now. The new party already is strong enough to win a massive number of seats in the parliaments - and it's movement still growing. To the traditional parties that used to be in power since the end of the war, this possible loss of influence is horrible. Loosing 20% of their market share within two years is a shocking experience. And shocked people tend to react in strange ways. But listen:
Of course, (despite the fact that banks are crashing and the weak dollar is a deadly thing for the export-oriented German economy) we are at the beginning of a boom. (Remember: Its election time, so truth is one of the few things you can't expect from the propaganda system right now. If you'd only listen to the media coverage, you would have known that we have been at the beginning of the boom since the dot-com bubble crashed.) And so, officially, the number of unemployed people is as low as never before in the last 20 years. Right now, the official number tells that 3.413.921 are officially unemployed. This is the number you'll hear throughout repeated by politicans and media all the time. But reading the statistic tells a different story: 1.531.940 people were "employed" in so called trainings and employment incentives and therefor do not count as unemployed. The effect of these trainings is proven to be equal to nothing, but hey, we cannot afford the negative image of 5 million unemployed people.
(Compared to March 2005, the number of people receiving well-fare or unemployment support did not change much; it went up from 7.977.502 in March 2005 to 8.027.980 in April 2008. But we are in a boom! You just have to believe in it and it will become true.)
According to the report of April 2008 a total number of 8.027.980 persons depended on additional well-fare subsidiaries for their survival. Given the official 40 million people that form the German workforce, this means that 20% of the people out there either have no jobs or cannot live from the minimum wage jobs they have. Of course, Germany does not have minimum wage laws, as this would harm the market. Therefore in some regions where hourly rates of 2 to 3 Euro for full-time jobs have become common.
The social-democratic* changes of the poor-laws already introduced lowest-wage work throughout the country. Nowadays, it is common (especially in the declining traditional industries) to find yourself replaced by temporary workers or subsidized workers from one of the many employment incentives. Why pay 15 or 20 Euro, if you can get workers that are forced to work (quitting or getting fired means you would not get well-fare support anymore) and that are guaranteed to not complain? And of course, these forced-labor workers have no union-rights, no job-security or any other protection a regular worker might enjoy.
The negative impact of that policy now starts to become widely visible. The costs for the social security explode, as the income generating high-wage jobs erode and cost-generating low-wage jobs grow like cancer.
In that situation and with a clear road to destruction ahead, what is the most stupid thing you can do? Right: More of the same bad medicine. The latest plans (as usual paid for by the Bertelsmann foundation, a neo-conservative think-tank of the worst kind) outline a model where everyone who receives well-fare is forced into a low-wage job. But as there are not enough of these jobs, the industry should be allowed to participate on these programs. Of course, the industry would never ever think of replacing their regular workers with these slaves. Never, especially as the plan forces the industry to offer the products created by this system not under a minimum price that is equal to the price of the product when created by regular workers. Or in other words: they get a guaranteed profit margin for all the troubles they have.
Of course, this only speeds up the decline of the whole social system, and makes sure that the Inverted-Robin-Hood principle comes true: Take it from the poor, give it to the rich. Or as all criminals know: It is easier to extract small amounts of money from a million persons than to extract millions from a bunch or rich persons.
The study itself talks about the positive effects a similar system had in the US. Hmmm .. funny, Michael Moore tells otherwise. And even such old studies like Gabriel Kolbs "Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution" (1962) tell us, that only one third of the unemployed are covered by social security and that 35-40% of the families in the US were forced to live below the maintainance standard (which is the minimum income needed to maintain a sustainable living) a while 12-25% even lived below the emergency standard (which is the minimum income needed to survive for a short time) (Source: Wikipedia). Well, if the future our politicans want to achieve looks like the past and current state of the U.S., then our society will be back in the same dark times as before the war, with extreme differences between the poor and the rich and no or only minimal connection or exchange between these two worlds.
What a brave new world we build.
* I use the term 'social-democrat' loosely here, as the words 'social' and 'democratic' should not to be mixed with the party or social system we have today. Calling the 'social-democratic' party social is like calling the roman-catholic church a progressive think-tank.
Free the Slaves: Pentaho Charting Expressions are now a independent project
Charting in the Classic-Engine is currently implemented as a set of report functions and expressions. A chart-collector function produces the data-set and a chart-expression then uses the dataset and produces a JFreeChart object for it. The JFreeChart object is then directly renderable by the reporting-engine and produces some nice Vector-graphics output.
For historical reasons, these charting expressions have been held captive by the Pentaho-Platform. In the early days, when the land was rough and largely unsettled, a important project required to include charts. As some of the demos in the old JFreeReport-extensions project showed how to integrate JFreeChart into the reporting engine, it was the most obvious way to head into that direction. And so the first chart expression was born.
Over the years, more and more chart types were added and whenever a new feature was needed, it was added as well. At some point, the chart expressions started to depend on some core classes of the Pentaho-Platform, and thus what started as "strange packaging strategy" suddenly became a severe dependency issue, as now the chart-expressions were unable to run without a configured platform in the back. This rendered these expressions unusable outside of the platform and thus unusable for anyone who used the reporting-engine as embedded component.
Fast forward. Some months/years later, the trouble-maker dependency has been removed. But sitting in the same project as the platform code, there are only policies and documentation notes that protect us from having such a rouge dependency again. And in the real world, policies and documentation hints do not actively protect the code - they just make the reasoning for having to fix the newly introduced flaw easier.
But the new found peace was still an uneasy one: Changes in the way the reporting engine handled functions and generated content propagated slowly into these expressions (as the release cycles of the Engine and Platform do not (and cannot) match). At the same time, new properties of the expressions were added, which somehow appeared to work (well, they did not crash :) ) with the older engine but due to stricter validity checks on the existing contracts were bluntly rejected in the later engine and report-designer. And there the release cycle hit again: We did not see the troublesome contribution until the first bug-report came in. At that particular point, a fix would have either broken the engine's or the platform's backward compatibility promise.
And of course: Adding code to a large monolithic project is a lot more cumbersome than adding code to a small andsimple (the Chart-Expressions are not simple. Although they have not yet reached the gnomish-threshold, the massive amount of knobs and levers and other properties in them makes them a complex system) focused project.
So let's see what we have:
There is now a new project in the reporting-engine Subversion-Repository under svn://source.pentaho.org/pentaho-reporting/engines/classic/legacy-charts
The project contains a copy of the chart-expression formerly found in the platform. With Platform 1.8, the platform JAR will no longer contain the chart-expressions and the sources for them will be removed from the platform-project. The platform then switches to the expressions found here.
The first official release of these expressions will be named version 0.8.10 (to be in sync with the reporting-engine).
The freed chart-expressions take 72 KB (compared to ~450 KB of the pentaho-plugin.jar) and stick with JDK 1.4 (they _should_ even work with JDK 1.3), instead of requiring the bloatware JDK 1.5.
As initial bonus for early adopters, all chart-expressions now can control the item-label's visibility and handle null-values and invalid datasets a lot more gracefully than before.
For historical reasons, these charting expressions have been held captive by the Pentaho-Platform. In the early days, when the land was rough and largely unsettled, a important project required to include charts. As some of the demos in the old JFreeReport-extensions project showed how to integrate JFreeChart into the reporting engine, it was the most obvious way to head into that direction. And so the first chart expression was born.
Over the years, more and more chart types were added and whenever a new feature was needed, it was added as well. At some point, the chart expressions started to depend on some core classes of the Pentaho-Platform, and thus what started as "strange packaging strategy" suddenly became a severe dependency issue, as now the chart-expressions were unable to run without a configured platform in the back. This rendered these expressions unusable outside of the platform and thus unusable for anyone who used the reporting-engine as embedded component.
Fast forward. Some months/years later, the trouble-maker dependency has been removed. But sitting in the same project as the platform code, there are only policies and documentation notes that protect us from having such a rouge dependency again. And in the real world, policies and documentation hints do not actively protect the code - they just make the reasoning for having to fix the newly introduced flaw easier.
But the new found peace was still an uneasy one: Changes in the way the reporting engine handled functions and generated content propagated slowly into these expressions (as the release cycles of the Engine and Platform do not (and cannot) match). At the same time, new properties of the expressions were added, which somehow appeared to work (well, they did not crash :) ) with the older engine but due to stricter validity checks on the existing contracts were bluntly rejected in the later engine and report-designer. And there the release cycle hit again: We did not see the troublesome contribution until the first bug-report came in. At that particular point, a fix would have either broken the engine's or the platform's backward compatibility promise.
And of course: Adding code to a large monolithic project is a lot more cumbersome than adding code to a small and
So let's see what we have:
- The chart-expressions share no code with the platform and do not depend on the mere existence of the platform
- The shifted release cycle gives me headaches
- Adding code to a heavyweight project is no fun
There is now a new project in the reporting-engine Subversion-Repository under svn://source.pentaho.org/pentaho-reporting/engines/classic/legacy-charts
The project contains a copy of the chart-expression formerly found in the platform. With Platform 1.8, the platform JAR will no longer contain the chart-expressions and the sources for them will be removed from the platform-project. The platform then switches to the expressions found here.
The first official release of these expressions will be named version 0.8.10 (to be in sync with the reporting-engine).
The freed chart-expressions take 72 KB (compared to ~450 KB of the pentaho-plugin.jar) and stick with JDK 1.4 (they _should_ even work with JDK 1.3), instead of requiring the bloatware JDK 1.5.
As initial bonus for early adopters, all chart-expressions now can control the item-label's visibility and handle null-values and invalid datasets a lot more gracefully than before.
MQL-Editor - civilized this time
Are you tired of having to work with crappy UI-toolkits like the Sucker's Widget Toolkit? Do you prefer a working out-of-the-box experience that runs the same way no matter what Operating System or hardware you use? Tired of having to cope with compatibility and native library issues?
Me too.
That's why I spend the day rewriting the MQL-Editor in Swing. The original editor was written using the abomination called SWT. But getting SWT code to run cross-platform is a nightmare and usually ends up in a lot of screaming and throwing stracktraces on each other. As I wasn't able to get the thing running on my Linux-Box without exceptions. After once more tracing it down to the class of "SWT does not work with Swing" problems we faced over the last years, I cannot bear it anymore.
NO MORE SWT!
As the MQL-Editor is a thin layer on top of the Pentaho-MetaData system, rewriting this functionality is faster than trying to cope with the bad design of SWT. And above all: It is guaranteed to work within 24 hours, and it solves all the SWT-vs.-Swing integration problems by killing SWT. That's a clear message, isn't it?
So here we are. The Swing version covers all the functionality of the original dialog and adds some extra validation of the input (so that it is impossible to continue with invalid queries).
Grab it at: svn://source.pentaho.org/pentaho-reporting/libraries/mqleditor
Debugging, Farming ... still no peanut-butter ..
Three days of hunting a bug in an application. An application that took the paradigm of loose coupling, combined it with Java's already incredible (bordering to insane) powerful reflection and introspection mechanisms, and then added a set of generated classes (by using on-the-fly-inline-assembly) on top of it. An application that could have done the very same thing with boring, almost dangerously conservative tailored-to-fit data-structures (the total opposite of the weird over-generalization found there). Whenever I have to use a Java DISASSEMBLER to debug a simple problem, then there is something seriously wrong.
But since yesterday I have hope again. After being in a second hand bookshop in Frankfurt, I found salvation. There it was, buried between old books of dubious origin: A original 1970's print of John Seymors Guide to Selfsufficiency. John Seymor wrote a whole series of books describing how to create a self-sufficient living style including do-it-yourself farming and house hold crafts. These texts are introductory writings and surely not suitable to grab the book and start being farmer the next day - but they give a good overview for the novice. After the book, you know at least where to start to search for more information.
Sadly, John Seymors book omits the most important and most profitable art of farming: How to plant and harvest peanut-butter. So I have to continue my journey for the secrets of Peanut-Butter-Farming ..
But since yesterday I have hope again. After being in a second hand bookshop in Frankfurt, I found salvation. There it was, buried between old books of dubious origin: A original 1970's print of John Seymors Guide to Selfsufficiency. John Seymor wrote a whole series of books describing how to create a self-sufficient living style including do-it-yourself farming and house hold crafts. These texts are introductory writings and surely not suitable to grab the book and start being farmer the next day - but they give a good overview for the novice. After the book, you know at least where to start to search for more information.
Sadly, John Seymors book omits the most important and most profitable art of farming: How to plant and harvest peanut-butter. So I have to continue my journey for the secrets of Peanut-Butter-Farming ..
The total brain-dump
Extract the brains of all reporting and charting developers, put them in a large blender, turn it on, wait, turn the blender off, and fill the brains back into their original containers to extract the new ideas. Repeat this process as often as needed.
The last two weeks were by all accounts insane. It all started very innocent, with a call to fly over to Orlando to bring the features of version 0.8.10 to the people of Pentaho.
The scenery was well set up. The charting team finished the first major step of the new charting engine, so that we now have a solid and well-laid out fundament for generating charts. Mike created Mantle, a new UI for the Pentaho Platform. Finally the solid infrastructural backend the platform provides becomes a face that is appropriate in the wake of the 21st century. Using Mantle instead of the old UI feels like driving a Ferrari vs. a horse chariot. You have to see it, feel it! In the meantime, the Reporting-Ease-Of-Use sprints were still on their way, changing the Report-Designer from a developer-centric tool into a by far more business user friendly designer.
The two weeks were filled with dialogs like this: 'Look, thats one of the new things we put into [project]!' - 'Hey, I could use that in [Project] to do do [mind boggling feature].' - 'Wait, when you do that, I could use that to do [feature] over here.'.
So what did we create?
After these two weeks, I really have to wonder: If we, with just a few developers, are able to drive development so fast, why do Monster-companies like Business Objects, Cognos and so on (with thousands of employees) appear nowadays nothing more than sitting ducks for targeting practice. Not that I would complain about it, as 65 million years ago, swift and agile critters already out-paced slow and huge adversaries. Let's repeat that game ..
The last two weeks were by all accounts insane. It all started very innocent, with a call to fly over to Orlando to bring the features of version 0.8.10 to the people of Pentaho.
The scenery was well set up. The charting team finished the first major step of the new charting engine, so that we now have a solid and well-laid out fundament for generating charts. Mike created Mantle, a new UI for the Pentaho Platform. Finally the solid infrastructural backend the platform provides becomes a face that is appropriate in the wake of the 21st century. Using Mantle instead of the old UI feels like driving a Ferrari vs. a horse chariot. You have to see it, feel it! In the meantime, the Reporting-Ease-Of-Use sprints were still on their way, changing the Report-Designer from a developer-centric tool into a by far more business user friendly designer.
The two weeks were filled with dialogs like this: 'Look, thats one of the new things we put into [project]!' - 'Hey, I could use that in [Project] to do do [mind boggling feature].' - 'Wait, when you do that, I could use that to do [feature] over here.'.
So what did we create?
- Mantle no longer needs a explicit XAction to run reports stored in the new unified fileformat. As long as your report does not require complex preprocessing or uses bursting, you no longer need to write and maintain a separate XAction.
- Mantle now provides a Pageable HTML preview for the reports of the platform.
- The engine now has a clean and controlled way of defining parameters. The report definition contains all information needed to build the most marvelous UIs on top of it. Which brings us to:
- Mantle can parametrize reports and generates a sensible, fully and easily customizable (without using XSLT! I cant bear that stuff!) parameter UI.
- The new Charting System now becomes integrated into the Classic-Engine. (For now, this support will be called experimental, as we need the freedom to twist the code and XMLs whenever we feel the need for it.)
- The Interactivity-Extensions blew away the innocent (and also the not so innocent, of course) bystanders. The ability to inject any HTML/Script code into the resulting HTML files now allows a whole class of new reports. The Swing-UI allows similar features.
- The Report-Designer now comes with a fully featured formula-editor, that makes Office-(Open and MS alike)-users feel at home.
- We all agreed (with full heart) that SWT is a big WTF and should not have been born in the first place. SWT brings the insanity of low-level APIs combined with the inability to provide sensible platform independence (the main argument for running Java!). Swing is our future here!
After these two weeks, I really have to wonder: If we, with just a few developers, are able to drive development so fast, why do Monster-companies like Business Objects, Cognos and so on (with thousands of employees) appear nowadays nothing more than sitting ducks for targeting practice. Not that I would complain about it, as 65 million years ago, swift and agile critters already out-paced slow and huge adversaries. Let's repeat that game ..