Ben Jao Ming

I’ve been coding a lot of ASP.NET lately using the whole Microsoft portfolio of dev tools, and I’m in total shock. I had expected to hate it, but not from rational reasoning, but rather because they made it. I thought it was sleek enterprise level stuff. But I was wrong… here are some obvious rational reasons to hate it:

• Runtime error messages are cryptic and un-helpful (see the title of this post). Often they’re just summarized into texts like “error in database constraint… could be null, foreign-key, primary key… please check all the code you’ve ever written”.
• System.Collections don’t support basic stuff like tuples and sets.
• DataTables can’t handle null values. I mean: They call this DRO!?
• I tried to edit some SQL in a Table Adapter. It suddenly switched the parameters for the auto-generated method without warning me – silently breaking the application and giving me hours of debugging.
• The design view for aspx files in Visual Studio is useless since it always requires manual editing afterwards
• I wanted to copy a database. Since the copy-function was broken in Enterprise Manager (You get an error message and using the “copy error message” function renders an “error copying error message”) I made a backup and wanted to restore it in a new database. The dialog for this operation silently switched the target for the restore several times – even the database files: to overwrite the production database. Pretty lucky to notice this, since it was hidden in another tab.
• Visual Sourcesafe isn’t a proper versioning system. You might as well just use a network share and depend on ntfs file locking. Where’s the collaboration!?
• There’s only a very limited amount of free or open applications available for it. And especially Umbraco which is the flagship of .NET CMS systems is full of errors and tells you to pay up as soon as you’d like the pro stuff – like say a proper development/deployment system.
• Umbraco crashed our IIS – all we did was use the copy-content function!? How exactly is it that a webpage is allowed to take down a whole server?

I could probably ramble on about this. The bottom line is simply: I would never choose their technology over stuff like Subversion, Apache, Java or Python. And the whole ASP.NET framework is far from Ruby and Django – but of course it’s a lot older… it’s so 2003. I would have filed a few bug reports, but I guess these guys don’t have a bugzilla. Too bad.. I’ll just have to leave my feedback on this public blog.

Apparently this article has been censored by the original host, because the big bad oligarch Usmanov put a legal firm on the hosting company of the author. That’s why I’m bringing it.

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September 2, 2007Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist

I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:

“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”

Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke “Gorbachev”, a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.

Usmanov’s pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the “Pardon” because of his alliance with Usmanov’s mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev’s side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.

Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World’s most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the “privatisation” process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.

Usmanov has two key alliances. he is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country’s natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.

Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin’s long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov’s role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom’s bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.

Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out – with the owners having no choice – the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.

All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist’s death, is set out in great detail here:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

Usmanov is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this is not particularly remarkable. Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving Usmanov please add a comment.

I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan. I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski’s name) of half of Mapobank, a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.

Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters – as tight-knit and homespun a football community as any – can be heard saying they don’t care where the money comes from as long as they can compete with Chelsea.

I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long term.

A lot of criticism has rained upon this campaign. Especially on the net on sites like digg.com and in the Mac community. People simply saw Apple as “green already” and thought of Greenpeace as attention-grabbers. Now that Steve Jobs has written that they’re disclosing their policy people are even more after Greenpeace in this second-guessing way going “see, Apple was green from the beginning”. So there’s actually a bunch of people who has more trust in Apple than Greenpeace. That seems like a pretty wrong bias, and I think the writings of Steve Jobs clearly prove that he has payed attention to the campaign. The green Apple on apple.com, the headline “A Greener Apple” and then the actual sentences:

Apple is already a leader in innovation and engineering, and we are applying these same talents to become an environmental leader.

See, that was exactly what GP wanted them to say in public. And now Greenpeace applauds this and gives thanks to all the people – Greenpeace isn’t taking the credit for this, they’re giving it to Apple and the Apple fans who used the campaign to tell Apple how much they’d like to see them as an environmental leader.

I sincerely hope that this will be a new beginning where Apple can set a good example and Greenpeace can cheer the other electronics companies to follow this example. We need everybody to follow troop:

• Using the precautionary principle to substitute everything that’s potentially dangerous
• Taking back all used products globally
• Designing products that last longer
• Making reuse and upgrade of products much more simple

We have limited natural resources and a very dirty business exporting toxic electronics waste to poor countries.

What does it all mean??

09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

I don’t get it

Postcards for world peace!