It’s time once again for my annual snow rant in which I tell you how irresponsible you are being by not cleaning the snow off your car. So here goes.

It is your responsibility to clean the snow off your car in its entirety, including the roof. If you cannot accept this responsibility, you should not be allowed to drive. It’s that simple.

Not cleaning the snow off you car causes others driving around you to have limited visibility and can even lead to complete loss of sight while driving if a large chunk blows off your car. This leads to panic, accidents and even fatalities. By not cleaning your car completely of snow you are actively participating in trying to hurt other people.

Now, I know we live in a world where people think everything outside of their car doesn’t exist. It as if inside of the car is a completely seperate world from outside of it. But the reality is that you share this world and the road with other people and you have a moral responsibility to help them be safe.

So there it is. Clean the snow off your car, including the roof. If you are too lazy, then please just stay home. Your job, shopping, or social activity just isn’t that important and the world will keep on turning without you.

I’m an ANT guy. I’ve been using ANT since 1999. It’s amazingly powerful, amazingly useful and very flexible… and I’ve never once written my own ANT task. Just using the ANT tasks available or out there in the community I have been able to build hundreds of software projects.

Now, of course, everyone says, “Go Maven”. So I went Maven… and it sucked.

See, I have very strong feelings about Frameworks. (Not to confuse you here, but Maven, like ANT, is a Build Framework.) The problem with 99% of all Frameworks out there is that they force you into a specific way of doing something. “But that’s the whole point,” you scream at me. And I agree, that’s the point… until the moment you need to do something else.

Now, I use frameworks all the time in my software development, we all do. There’s one listed over on the right side in my links section that I actually endorse. So am I not hypocritical for deriding frameworks in one breathe while using them in another? Of course I am, but here’s where i’ll caveat it… I use frameworks that provide the least limitation on me doing new things. Maven, as an example is a rigid framework. Doing something new with it is difficult challenge. ANT on the other hand, while limiting, isn’t nearly as limited.

So here’s AREI’s Framework Measurement Testing System. First, evaluate a framework for the project you are working one, say building a Java Swing application. Next, evaluate the framework for another, completely different project you might work on in the future, say building a Website. How does the framework stack up for both things? Finally, consider what’s going to happen when you need to take the framework beyond it’s scope into new places. How accepting of that path is it?

Here’s some examples:

I had an ANT script that would append together a bunch of .JS files and then minify the entire set. Worked like a champ. The project I was on decided let’s give Maven a try instead of ANT. So I had to come up with a way to do the same thing in Maven. Two weeks of work later I ended up just calling ANT from inside of Maven.

Anyway, this post was really meant as just a simple link to an awesome blog posting that unleashes some much needed fury on Maven. But I got a little carried away in the intro.

So in summation, Maven sucks. Pick a framework that you can change. Damn the man! Save Empire!