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July 3, 2007
 

You don't always get what you pay for (IBM: $30m, 2 years; us: $3m, 1yr)

I just found out today, from the gentleman I did a consulting gig with a few years ago, that the company we did the architecture for (but who declined having us do the project), had IBM do it instead. That's not the interesting part (especially since during this time the company hired an ex-IBMer). The interesting part, as I was informed, is that IBM used our architecture (admittedly that's how it was explained, and we didn't get into details, but still), but took two years to do the project, and charged $30m!!! As I recall, we'd bid it at around a year, and I think around $2-3m! Either the project changed a lot, or that is just gross. I suspect IBM went in and did some massively overdone EJB implementation (this was a Java project, and I'd done a very basic prototype using Spring, Hibernate, and Velocity or JSP).

Filed under  //   Java   consulting  

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January 24, 2007
 

Java Books for Sale

I just posted a slew of Java books for sale on eBay. They are all priced between $3-6. Some are current, some aren't. Here's a listing (and the link goes to the eBay listing):



I will have more, on other subjects to come, but I've started to prune my library, in preparation for our move to Eugene.


For the curious, I use iSale on the Mac to post on eBay, it's superb. It easily filled in most of the auction on each book simply by me letting it search Amazon for the ISBN and importing the info (all automatically). The new version of iSale also has iSight support for taking quick pics, etc. But, the listing above was a simple hack by exporting my auction items from iSale (as CSV), plopping that in Excel and dropping out all but the eBay ID column and title column, then dropping that in TextMate, and simply wrapping those with the above HTML, trivially done by using TextMate's awesome column editing abilities (a regex search and replace would've done fine too, but this seemed even faster).

Filed under  //   Books   Java   eBay  

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