Surprising Things

Life is full of surprises. Most are good though a few are not. Imagine my surprise to learn that my blogs are used to teach science to grade school children. I kid you not. I was trying to figure out the cause of the huge spike in the page views for my blog and discovered that a large number of referrals were coming from an online grade 6 science curriculum. The subject matter is "Interactions Between Living Things and Their Environment" and my posting titled Predation, Parasitism, Commensalism, and Mutualism in the Garden and in the Community apparently fits right in. The pond is starting to thaw and the robins are back, so I'll soon have more good stories and pretty pictures for the children.


It's better than "Where the Wild Things Are" around here! In fact, speaking of wild things and surprises, check out this video of the fox I shot just last week.

Given that I'm not at EclipseCon, you might be surprised to know that my stupid modeling talk has not been canceled. Peter has been staying at my place since the beginning of February and I spent a lot of that time convincing him of just how unbearably stupid modeling really is. Ruby really liked to make him feel comfortable while I droned on and on and on.


As a result of this long indoctrination period, Peter is fully prepared to pontificate about the excruciating obtuseness of modeling to a wider audience. I'm sure you'll enjoy being both enlightened and entertained.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

I'm very glad to be reelected to the Eclipse Board. It is a privilege to serve and an honor to get this vote of confidence from my peers.

Of course anything that promotes the use of models to drive software development is good, so I'm thrilled that Microsoft has created the M Specification Community, I'm honored to be involved as a charter member, and I'm flattered to be characterized as a key open source leader.

The Bad

I won't be able to make it to EclipseCon this year for the ugliest of personal reasons.

The Ugly

The grim reaper stalks my home to claim someone dear.


Thanks to all the people in the Eclipse community who have been so understanding and supportive during this most difficult period of my life, especially Peter and Mitch.

On Being a Scapegoat

I've already blogged about the security problems caused by CDO and worse still, how CDO brought the world to its collective financial knees, but apparently the problems with modeling aren't isolated to that trouble making CDO component. Not at all! The problem seems to be a general Eclipse Modeling Framework shortcoming. It must be a fact because I just read about Microsoft's March Security Bulletin where the article makes it clear that "The problem stems from the way that the operating system parses and displays Windows Metafile- and Eclipse Modeling Framework-formatted image files." If that doesn't make your icicles shiver, nothing will!


Every community needs a scapegoat, so I say we pick on EMF. After all, if you have a really bad design, you can always blame EMF for generating it that way. Not only that, if you have really bad algorithms that perform poorly, you can always blame EMF for being bloated and slow. I've even heard that EMF isn't thread safe! Nothing distracts better than a scapegoat and EMF is really the ultimate scapegoat. If I'm reelected to the Eclipse board---you only have until Friday to vote for me---I promise to get to the bottom of this type of problem and root out the causes whomever they may be. No one will be safe from my careful scrutiny. We will reinstate public flogging to maintain order and discipline. Clearly I'm the no-nonsense candidate of choice.