Oils aint oils

Someone once told me that the best programmers are not only lazy, but are also perfectionists. Thus, they are automate procedures solely because they are to lazy to do it the 'manual' way.

It follows that good software should be of the same model. It should do as much as it possibly can without any user interaction. Procedures such as downloading, installing, paying and updating should be a single user input if not less.

A perfect example of this is MyEclipse. It is not only a breeze to buy, register, install, start and use, but the whole concept of the product is create an 'out of the box' solution, which itself is a set of tools for making ones job easier.

The Yang (based on the assumption that the 'Yang' is the bad bit, perhaps Google could help me out here), the Yang to the MyEclipse Experience is Java Certified Training.

Let me outline the process as I have recently experienced it.

First you have to sign up at one place, pay at another.

Later (at some point) you will receive and email, which is pages and pages of a tiny tiny fixed font containing somewhere an ID number which you must tattoo to on your forearm.

Later again you must attempt to login at a site that is hosted on a 286 running BeOS on a remote island of the coast of Madagascar (complete with the expected reliability) and scan you recently tattooed arm.

From there you must locate the course for which you have already paid (Here's a tip, it is in the list under a different name) and navigate to its page, which looks exactly like all the other.

You will then need to provide every known detail of your life to the third party testing host, who appear to be based in Polland and are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank of Mexica.

After that you come to the time based trap system, you must make it from each stepping stone to the next in under nine seconds while Jack West and Shane Schofield shoot falling boulders made of gold and boiling oil with custom handheld M22 H&K fully auto hydrogen powered maghooks.

Then click OK to continue, and some time in the next month you will be booked in.

For a company that is prides itself of providing the infrastructure of the Internet, perhaps they could start using it.

I have done it now, and will never do it again.