Today’s Worse Than Failure is actually a meditation on the Mythical Business Layer in software; it’s a concept often hauled out in “enterprise” situations. Here’s a great quote, on the subsidary concept of a code-free “rules engine” supposedly set to encapsulate all the business logic:

Yes, I realize that the Enterprise Rules Engine — the ultimate example of a soft-coded business layer — has become my go-to example for bad software. But it’s for good reason. The ERE truly represents the absolute worst kind of software. It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.

We realize this post appeals to — and is understood by — a tiny fraction of our audience, but we’re pretty sure that tiny subset is nodding in furious agreement already. Don’t miss what they have to say on persistence, either; the Waterloo of any framework is typically the database, and it hasn’t escaped the notice of the author.

So, Vonage lost another ruling, which means we may end up having to change phone providers sometime.

Here’s what happened: Vonage made a success of VOIP precisely because it’s not an incumbent carrier. It has nothing to do with patents, and in fact if Vonage had a deeper bankroll we feel pretty sure they could prove that. Sprint, for its part, doesn’t even really care about the patents: they just want Vonage out of the marketplace precisely because Vonage did something they couldn’t or didn’t do: have success with VOIP.

As soon as Vonage goes under, if they fail, expect Sprint and the remaining oh-how-we-hate-’em telcos to offer some kind of crippled, locked-down, drastically less useful VOIP product that will cost more than Vonage’s offering. Further expect no one to enter the marketplace for fear of lawsuits from these telcos for quite some time.

As Techdirt put it in the link above:

[The incumbent carriers suing Vonage] were unable (and unwilling) to create the services that people wanted — and now they want to shut down the company that actually did innovate — and they’re likely to succeed. That’s not how the patent system is supposed to work.

Here’s something that surprises us: Thunderbird can’t seem to find the content for any email sent to us by a client who uses Groupwise. We see the mail, and we see (empty) attachments, and can even view the (encoded, illegible) source, but there’s no way to read the mail.

Outlook has no such trouble. Content pops right up.

Way to Fail!

Update: It turns out, “show attachments inline” will “fix” this. But still: Icky for both Tbird and GW.

We should note that the MIT student arrested for having a “hoax bomb” at Logan Airport this week was NOT in fact trying to get through security. She was at the airport to pick up a friend, not to take a flight, so she wasn’t subject to TSA’s tender ministrations. The cops took it upon themselves to arrest her anyway — again, even after ascertaining that her sweatshirt posed no threat to anyone, and was in fact an engineering project.

You know what’s cooler than robots? Theremins. You know what’s cooler than that? Robots that play theremins:

Thank you, and good night.

The first line of this story is amazing:

BOSTON – An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

It was only a “fake bomb” if anything that is not in fact a bomb can be legitimately termed a “fake bomb.” What she was wearing was a piece of tech art that did in fact have circuity and a battery, but the girl’s an MIT EE student. They do things like that.

By AP logic, apparently, our CAT is a “fake bomb.” So’s our cell phone, our computer, our iPod, our briefcase, our watch, and our left foot. Dumbasses.

N.B., too, that we’re talking about Boston, the same city that went absolutely bugfuck crazy over some other “fake bombs” that turned out to be promo devices for a movie. Here, just as before, the cops made no attempt to determine if she was a threat; they just arrested her.

More over at BoingBoing, including a photo of the garment in question:

Looks like the “improvised electronic device” consisted of a circuit board and a common battery that caused her sweatshirt, which had painted writing on it, to light up. Authorities referred to the paint as “putty.”

The hoodie reads “Socket To Me / COURSE VI.” A BB commenter familiar with MIT stuff says, “Course VI means she majors in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science.”

This is yet another example of absurd hysteria that very nearly got an innocent student killed. That is, by the way, the angle the police are taking — they don’t see anything wrong with having arrested someone who wasn’t committing any crime. They have, of course, charged her with “possession of a hoax device,” so apparently the Boston folks haven’t learned their lesson yet. In a comment at BB, Teresa Nielsen Hayden said:

Boston has a long dishonorable history of overreacting to unfamiliar objects, then claiming they were “hoax devices,” which are illegal under Massachusetts law. This is nonsense. A hoax bomb is something that a reasonable person could believe was a bomb, and which its owner claims is a real bomb in order to scare or coerce people in its vicinity.

Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him — as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics — and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a “hoax device.”

[…]

(Just a month after the Great Mooninite Scare, the Boston Bomb Squad managed to come up with an encore: they blew up a traffic measuring device that had been put in place by the Boston Transportation Department.)

Judging from their record, charging someone with possession of a hoax device is Boston’s way of announcing that they’ve once again mistaken some harmless bit of electronic gear for a bomb.

As always, security expert Bruce Schneier has more, including a link to a better shot of the obviously benign device — it’s a breadboard, some LEDs, and a 9-volt, for crying out loud.

For a while now, folks in the Mac world have been agog about Parallels Workstation, a tool that allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows in a virtual machine, thereby allowing Macs access to whatever Windows-only software they need to run, but in a protected environment where Windows malware can’t hurt the rest of the machine. It’s a good tool.

Eventually, VMWare released a competitor, and given their background in virtualization, Fusion quickly became a better (more stable, more efficient) tool than Parallels. We bought a copy with our new MacBook Pro.

Well, said MacBook Pro developed an early fault, so it had to be swapped. No problem; moving machines in the Mac world is dead easy. There’s no need to reinstall software packages from disks or disk images, since the proper way to handle apps on a Mac is to create an “application bundle” that looks and acts like an executable, but is in fact a special class of directory containing the app and all its support libraries, executables, etc. What doesn’t go in the bundle is any sort of configuration information; that gets stuck in either your home directory’s ~/Library folder (for user settings), or in the computer’s own /Library folder (for global settings). It’s a nice, neat system, and one that makes managing a given machine MUCH simpler than the morass of crap you deal with on a Windows box.

Well, comes now VMWare, who are apparently eager to fuck it all up. When we tried to fire up VMWare today for the first time on this new computer, it behaved as expected and requested we paste in our license again. Several apps have asked for this in the last few days because license codes and authentication are stuck in the computer’s /Library folder, which we didn’t bother carrying over — it just wasn’t worth the hassle, since we have all the codes handy anyway, and the standard Apple behavior is that anything missing in Library should be reconstituted from the application bundle. (Remember, we have our personal settings in our own ~/Library, so we didn’t walk away from those.)

Except plugging in the code didn’t work. VMWare just sat there, doing nothing — no error or anything. We called the support line and got a singularly clueless drone who knew zero about Macs despite working support for a Mac product; his first suggestion was that we uninstall and reinstall (how Windows! And ironic, considering what came later!). It was us, actually, who discovered the problem: in our Mac’s console log, we found VMWare errors complaining of a path not found.

2007-09-21 14:30:19.062 vmware[4078] launch path not accessible

Yup. VMWare apparently sticks things it can’t afford to lose in /Library, and standards be damned. The support drone also told us that — get this! — Fusion also sticks some executables in /Library, such as its uninstall routine and a few other goodies. “That’s just how we designed our software,” he says.

The mind boggles.

There are guides for this sort of thing, you know. It’s not just an oral tradition. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and VMWare, for whatever reason, chose poorly. We’re now waiting for the 160 megabyte download to finish so we can re-install the one package brain-dead enough to require it. Thanks, VMWare! Not even Microsoft screws up on the Mac this well!

This morning, we had a software design meeting via the Internet, between Heathen HQ in Houston, the CEO in Dallas, the Ops guy down in Sugarland, and the dev folks in India.

Usually, the CEO leads, sharing a preso via GoToMeeting. That alone is pretty nice; we’ve seen many meetings get totally ruined with maybe-it-works virtual meeting software, but GoToMeeting just works. It’s nice.

When it really got wacky was when we handed control over to India, so S. could show us what he’d been working on. Now, for background, we should note that we put a new consumer-grade PC on the Heathen network last week for India to access here in Houston, since it’s not practical to move multi-gigabyte files halfway ’round the world on the fly. Another Citrix product, GoToMyPC, allows them to use this machine more or less like it was there in India. It’s neat. Windows being Windows, we can even watch what they’re doing in real time, since they’re really just remote controlling the machine.

So it turns out the screen S. wanted to share with us was in fact his GoToMyPC screen, which shows on our monitor exactly what’s on the monitor on top of the Vista box at the other end of my desk. The screen has travelled from here to India via GoToMyPC, and then back to here as part of the GoToMeeting.

And it gets even wackier when we realize that the screen is also a Virtual PC screen, not the host OS.

Sometimes, there actually IS evidence we live in the future.

SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.