Thursday, May 31, 2007

Manipulating Polls?

Well, I haven't blogged much recently because the EMF team has been as busy as the eager little bees in my garden:


Note that like features, this bee sucks, but clearly it's all for a good purpose. The EMF team has spent quite a bit of time splitting our small number of big features into a large number of small features. But enough of the feature bashing, I digress.

Of course I've also been busy making life hell for well-intentioned folks like Janet and Bjorn. You won't think a guy could get so riled up about updating a date in an about.html, but hey, people who know me know that a surprisingly little thing can induce a dramatically big reaction from me. Yep, I'm a volatile person and no effort to be perfect seems to work. I suppose that's a good thing. Imagine how annoying I'd be if I were any closer to perfection than I am now!

My real aim at blogging today is to complain a little. I've been told I'm awfully good at complaining. Just ask anyone. I'm watching the poll for best Java component with great personal interest, for obvious reasons, and am dismayed to see EJB3 garner more votes in the last three days than it did in total for the preceding three weeks. One generally expects a Poisson distribution for the arrival of votes, so spikes are definitely odd. Even the closest competition generally had spikes of votes arrive, whereas EMF has garnered its votes with the expected type of arrival rate. Since today is the last day for voting, maybe things will work out well for EMF, which I consider to be more of a vote for the Modeling project as a whole than a vote purely just for EMF. Hopefully the final audit won't result in big drop...

So am I manipulating the poll with my blog? I think so. I feel dirty now. Time to do something useful to get ride of this unclean feeling. A shower perhaps...