Nothing good has ever happened to me when the words LDAP have been muttered.

I can't connect to my company's LDAP server. So I can't keep the KDE address book current with the companies. (Which isn't such a bad thing, it's amusing to see people in there who have been gone for over a year).

Ontap.com (it's not the same site anymore), used LDAP to drive it's membership. Every other site (I should say, well designed site) uses a database for this. We used a LDAP server that hit a sql database.

Just as an example, if you logged into a normal site, the process would go like this. You send your username/password to the web server, it'd query the database server, and then pick a proper action. At OnTap, you'd send your info to the web server, which would then send to the LDAP server, which would then send to the SQL server, then back to the ldap server, and finally back to the web server. Then an action would be performed.

Pretty fucking stupid, huh? (All I really want to know on this one is WHY. I fear I'll never know the answer to that).

In the end, we were bought by another company that had it's shit together technically. (Financially was another matter) One of their tech guys there compared our system to "sticking egg beaters onto a catepillar tractor to make a milkshake".

He was right. And my apologies if I've ranted about Ontap and LDAP before (and I'm sure I have, but it's my blog, so there).

So today, when a boss-ling asked me to take a look at a project that uses LDAP and NT, I was a little nervous. Would it be a mess like ontap?

It would. It'd be the exact same setup, actually. I have to wonder if this is a Microsoft recommended setup, and why they're recommending this. It really doesn't make a lot of sense. Does anyone know this? Doesn't Microsoft think anyone knows SQL? We don't need that intermediate step. And if you do, learn SQL. Or get a new job.

Sometimes people will email me to yell about QT (nobody's yelled about java yet, but I'm sure that's coming). So someone 'splain this one to me, okay?

All this microsoft-ism reminds me of an article I saw on msdn once. I was digging around google, trying to find some information on doing funky stuff with JTable. More specifically, trying to find a way to make a JTable/DataModel do something that comes easily to a QListView. That's not the point to this. This is. While digging for this, I found an article on MSDN. Which piqued my interest... Microsoft hates Java after all. So I went there. And this article was touting the marvels of Visual J++, and how great it was that all the J++ visual classes were really wrappers around the common microsoft classes. And to show how great it was, he had an example of building a windows executable web browser in 20 lines of code.

This guy missed the point of Java entirely. And, when you take what's really the IE COM object, and throw that onto a frame, and do a few lines of codes for your menu clicks, that's not an application. But it is the microsoft way. And now I think I know why they do things they way they do.

I didn't post at all last month.

I could say I was on some sort of self-imposed exile from blogging; that I was trying to do other things than sit here and stare at 1's and 0's.

It'd be a lie.

I was just lazy like that.

Not to say that I haven't been productive. I've pretty much given up on the idea of my killer qt-based email application.

No, now it's going to be Java based.

[Tomas Perez just homered for the phils fyi. Realtime sports updates on buildhigh.com]

Why java? Why not? It's not the same java that I used 6 years ago with OS/2 (god was that really 6 years ago) that took 2 minutes to load the horrible version of Corel Office for Java. And didn't do much after it loaded. [I almost made a crack about it now taking 2 minutes to load limewire. But I timed it. 14 seconds. Kazaa Lite, for comparison, takes over twice as long to load].

So it took 6 years, but java got up to speed.

So, the LinuxWorld Expo is coming up in a few weeks. At my old job (the ontap which I blasted to hell a few entries ago), I actually go to go to a Linux World.

[The Padres just tied the Phillies. I'm pretty sure they're going to lose, so I'm shutting the TV off. Live sports updates end now.]

It rocked. It really was everything I had wanted in my geek programming existence. I got to talk to the guys who wrote PHP and mySQL, the apache and samba guys were there too. There was the obligatory microsoft troll at the samba meeting, but he seemed small and powerless. And this was, mind you, years ago. Linux wasn't nearly as mainstream as it is now.

The company I work for now is somewhat more stable, and I've worked with nothing but java on Linux/Solaris for the last year (mostly). So you'd figure this'd be a no brainer, right? Fat chance, hoser.

I know better than to even ask. It's kind of upsetting, because I really want to go now. I can probably appreciate the high level geeking there more now than ever before. I understand why threads can be bad. My email program does some neat tricks with shared memory across processes. I'm smart like that now.

But I'm not able to take advantage of it. And it kind of makes me sad. I don't want more money. I just want a job where I can code cool stuff and go to expos, and not have people freak out if error message texts aren't in red (it's easy to fix that people). Am I really asking for that much?

[Alright, the tv is off, but the bitterness remains. I'm angry at Mesa, sure, he blew the save, but also the economics of baseball just blow. Football starts in 4 weeks tho, and that'll ease the bitterness. At least until Testaverde has his first 3 interception game. Which should be week 2, I reckon.]

I do like my job. I like the people. The environment is okay. But I'd trade it all to work for a SUSE, or a IBM, or a.... uh... well, anyone who'd let me go to an expo.