Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Video is necessary. Lawrence Lessig wrote what follows this. He's absolutely right. Is more safety always better? Who the hell is going to argue for less safety? Petty fascism is the perfect term for what's happening out there. It happens when security guards abuse their positions. It happens at borders when somebody makes an innocent crack and "offends" a border guard. The consequences for the individual can be immediate and extreme. The instigator or abuser can almost always claim that he was simply doing his job, and in the very worst of cases, "might" have overreacted a little bit. A friend recently told me that his friend had made a little joke crossing the border to Canada. The Canadian customs officials disassembled the inside of their car, removing panelling and so forth, seats, and many other things, in order to find "contraband". No contraband was truly suspected, of course -- it was just revenge for offense taken at something said. At the end of the demolition, they were sent on their way, car still disassembled, with a warning never to "mouth off" again. That kind of petty power trip is something that I have had recent experience with. We were a group of professionals out enjoying ourselves...suffice it to say that in this case, the police officer in question picked on the wrong group of people. We complained vigorously after the fact to the police chief, event organizers, and succeeded in having sanctions taken against the officer. In all my life I'd never seen a police officer truly abuse his power until that day, and my perception and trust in police officers has been harmed as a result. I think it is absolutely imperative that we install video cameras at all these security checkpoints. The only way we can guarantee courteous and respectful treatment from TSA personnel is if we videotape their every move. INS and customs officials do this now, and I think it works very well. It keeps government people in check when they are given power. It provides precise information for determining who is at fault in any given deteriorated situation. Both sides will be on their best behavior. If we're going to be searched, let's be taped. back in the .... Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this "war"? Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental. If we must detain Arabs, must we do so inhumanely? If we must frisk every air traveler, can't we at least build in checks to the system to assure that it is not abused? If we must fight to defend America, can it at least be America that we defend? I'm all with Dave that this space will be the space for political action in the future. If only the future comes soon enough. [Lessig Blog] 3:13:07 PM

Refactoring vs. Visual Studio. It's been a longstanding peeve of mine that the Microsoft toolset has been generally better than the Java toolset. The MS stuff just seemed to perform better, have a more fluid UI, have great capability, and so forth. Recent tools have come a long way and I don't feel like a second-class citizen when I'm working in the Java world any more. The first of the "good" IDEs was JBuilder 4, and things have gotten a lot better since. The thing is, I have been playing a bit with Visual Studio for .NET. I think that the Java land has finally pulled ahead, with support for refactorings. I've been making a lot more use of them over the past couple of months. There's just nothing there in Visual Studio at this point in time. There may be some plugins for VS that do the refactorings; I don't know. So I'd say that at this time, the Java environments are some of the nicest and most advanced IDEs out there. Enjoy it while it lasts. Competition is a good thing. 3:01:21 PM