What Passes for Proof.

According to this particular conservative, a mural is proof of Iraq's terrorist nature. You have got to be kidding me.  Hey -- when was that mural painted, anyway?  Here's news for you -- there are a bunch of middle eastern people out there who think that 9/11 wasn't exactly a tragedy. 

Intent doesn't equal action, and this is just a picture. 

STOP.  (thought bend right).

I'm gonna take back the previous paragraphs.  What does it really mean for this picture to be present in a government building?  I suppose it means that there is, at a minimum, some notion of tacit support for the events of 9/11.  Further, it can indicate a desire to achieve the same sorts of ends.   The question then becomes, does or did Iraq have the means to achieve those ends...

4:13:27 PM    

Asymmetric Thought.

I'm reading on various blog sources, particularly the BBC Reporters Logs, that the average Arab out there seems to think that yesterday's bomb in the marketplace was intentional, that the coalition forces are intentionally targeted at civilians. 

Please.

If the US/coalition forces actually wanted civilian casualties, there would be millions of them.  We don't, and there aren't.  So please discard this stupid notion that civilian casualties are intentional.  It is not even clear yet whose rocket/bomb it is!

The average Arab should think twice before assuming the worst about American thought, and proclaiming wars between civilizations, or that America intends evil. 

He should be worried that we will begin to think about him, the same way that he thinks about us.

1:00:37 PM    

Joey in Charge

10:29:27 PM    

Taxing Spam

10:22:59 PM    

Fibonacci and Recidivism

10:21:12 PM    

Before the Fight.

Here's a speech delivered to his men, by Lieutenant Timothy Collins.  I found it rather moving.

"We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country," he said.

"We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.

If you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins

"There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send.

"As for the others I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.

"Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there.

British troops await orders Click here for full story

"You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.

"You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing.

"Don't treat them as refugees for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.

"If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day.

"Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves."

UK TROOPS PREPARE FOR WAR Click here for images of UK troops in Kuwait

To his 800 men - an arm of the 16 Air Assault Brigade - he said: "It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive but there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign.

"We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.

"The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction.

"There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam.

There may be people among us who will not see the end of this... We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back, there will be no time for sorrow Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins

"He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity."

He said: "It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly.

"I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.

"If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family.

"The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please."

He warned the troops not to get carried away in the heat of battle.

"If you harm the regiment or its history by over enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer.

God doesn't want you for a sunbeam - he wants you for a soldier Father Nick Gosnell, chaplain to 16th Air Assault Brigade UK troops pray for peace: Click here for full story

"You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation."

Warning that the troops were very likely to face chemical or biological weapons, he said: "It is not a question of if, it's a question of when. We know he has already devolved the decision to lower commanders, and that means he has already taken the decision himself. If we survive the first strike we will survive the attack."

His closing words were resolute: "As for ourselves, let's bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now is north."

2:16:46 AM    

Baghdad Traffic.

It's odd to see the camera in CNBC...showing dawn in Baghdad, traffic flowing around on the streets.  Not too much traffic, to be sure.  I saw a pair of pedestrians, too.  I wonder where these people are going, and how badly they need to get there.  Somehow I don't think they're all soldiers...just regular people caught in the middle of all this.

Let's hope we can make the best of a bad situation.

1:27:42 AM    

Right Wing Derision.

Joey Gibson: " For all you folks on the left that can't seem to count, 30 countries does not constitute "going it alone".

I've got news for you, Joey.  If I were on the left, I'd be quite confident in my counting ability.  How many of those 30 are contributing anything?  Wow, damn, Eritrea is on our side.  By the way, did we offer them any additional food aid to secure that?  I wonder how many of the 30 would be there even in only vocal support if it were not for (call it what it is) bribes.  Gulf 1 was supported by a broad coalition of countries, skillfully built by a real leader (present Bush's father), and mostly paid for by them, to the tune of around 90% or so.

I find that when the Right writes, or speaks, it is generally done in highly derisive terms, as if they have a monopoly on intelligence.  Here's a clue for you -- make your arguments.  Try to put them in some sensible context.  Back up your facts.  Do that, and you'll win me (and a lot of other, dare I say -- thinking? persons to your cause).  Don't show up with the weak bullshit.  You'll get stomped, if you try it.

Speaking of stomped, I heard a typical example today on Bill O'Reilly's talk show.  He had a guest whose expertise on Mexico fairly far outweighed his own.  Bill was getting his ass kicked, knew it, and bailed out fast, cutting the guy off and dumping him off the air.  His explanation?  "Folks, you know that we want to get the other viewpoint on the air sometimes, but this professor from American University was just abusing the privilege"...and so forth.  I listen to Bill every once in a while because he zigs every once in a while when the Right thinks he should zag.  Guess my opinion of him went down a few notches today.

This administration would have you believe that the French are responsible for the current situation, and no other.  Reality shows that the very vast majority of the world's population out there thinks that Bush is a bigger threat to peace than Hussein.  Offhand, they're probably right.  Bush is seeking a greater peace, of course, in the long run, but his methods are being questioned.  As they absolutely should be, when the leader in question's skills at public speaking and speech-rendering leave vast doubts about his ability to analyze anything, let alone lead a country.

Is it really time to "pull together" and support the president?  I say that perhaps the left-leaning citizenry of this country owe the current holder of the office the same level of support and respect the right gave the precious occupant during his various crisis points.  The right discarded the notion of respect for the presidency during the last one, and has to live with that.

This morning a co-worker accused me of having morals equivalent to Saddam Hussein; of being on the same level as him.  He didn't exactly do this, of course -- it was instead a general indictment of peace activists, directed more or less at "the left", whatever the hell that is.  It was done with notes on a wall, in the context of noting the humanitarian record of Herr Hussein's miserable excuse for a government.  Yes, I am quite sure that a poll of "the left" would yield ample support for Hussein. 

I wonder who has killed more Iraqis -- the US, or Saddam Hussein?  My understanding is that at least 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the first gulf war.  They were soldiers, mostly, if you can call a dirty teenager with an empty gun in his hands and loaded ones pointed at his back a soldier.  Yeah, there are real soldiers in the Iraqi army, but not all that many.  I wonder how many Iraqis Hussein has killed -- probably more.  But we're certainly getting up there.

One argument I am getting tired of is the "radicalization" of the Muslim youth.  The idea here is basically that they see the US kicking the crap out of yet another "Islamic" country, they get all upset, and become further radicalized.  I don't give a flying fuck abut what any stupid militant Islamic idiot thinks, and the fact that they feel "insulted" by everything that's going on. 

I want to make it clear that, before I start blaming Bush too much, it's well understood that the inability of Arab and Muslim cultures to find a way to control their militant, violent internals has resulted in our militants gaining power.  You reap what you sow.

It's gonna be a long time before this war lets us go.  Has Bin Laden succeeded in starting a war of the cultures?  Possibly. 

Want to know how we win this war?  Before, during and after hostilities:

By being true.

By being honest with ourselves.

By being GOOD.

By having humility.

By caring for others.

Any American who cheers the deaths of Iraqis fully deserves the hatred the observation of that joviality will bring about.  This is, after all, a pre-emptive war.  It is not a war to be celebrated.  It is a sad inevitability -- a gamble that may, with enormous cost, result in positive changes in the Middle East.

6:35:13 PM    

Will the Real RSS Please Stand Up?

Of course, I am meddling in matters beyond my ken, but it seems to me that this and this should at least look vaguely alike.  They don't, and yet they're both RSS 2.0.  Yes, I understand about namespaces and all that crap, but just because you can do it with RSS doesn't mean that you necessarily should. 

The reason I am looking is that my Radio aggregator is acting up with FreeRoller feeds.  I though it was FM RadioStation but that doesn't appear to be the case.  Or maybe it still is. I don't know.  All I know is that I've got the same stories repeated over and over again in my aggregator, and it's buggin' me.

6:08:37 PM    

No More September Elevens.

If we are to take the administration's rhetoric at face value, can we conclude that there will be no further September 11 tragedies?  Once we have disarmed Iraq, we will once again be safe, will we not?  If Iraq is the source (or, as seems more likely, a potential future source) of weapons of mass destruction, can we then resume our old lives, in the dawn of its conversion?  Can we breath a sigh of relief?

Ah.  I thought not. 

It seems that there are further enemies, enemies elsewhere, enemies always.  Perhaps they will always be there.

Why not have the bravery, the rightness, to say so.  Say that our way of life is a choice, not an option or privilege that we discard at the first sign of danger. 

4:14:45 PM    

Algorithm- and Randomly-disturbed Graphics.

One of the things that's always bugged me about playing computer games is how square everything is.  It looks dumb.  You put a texture on that thing and it looks like a box with a crappy texture on it.  Sometimes the textures are pretty detailed, but it's still a flat surface.  Look around you.  How many flat surfaces do you see? 

The thing is, nothing around is flat, not really.  You just need to look close enough to find something different.

What I want to see is scene generation where increased level of detail is automatically generated at the polygon level, where you don't often have polygons.  You have algorithms for generating polygons, and algorithms within those algorithms, so as I get closer and closer to the rock wall of the cave, I can see more and more detail coming out, sparkles and stones and crystals and whatever else is in the designer and artists' minds.

If these nested definitions of "what is" are formed into libraries, it becomes easier to specify the general shape of a scene, what objects are in it and how they relate to each other, and then much of the detail becomes generated automatically.  The designer can limit her influence to what is different about the scene, the special things that need to go into it as features, or areas of interest, or beauty.

12:39:32 PM    

Icons and Panes.

When we take a window and iconify, we are creating a "small version" of it.  The icon is a representation of the window, and to some extent, the contents of that window.  Some windowing managers support the notion of a "rollup", which is just a title bar.  I don't see any advantage to doing this over what I get by, say, minimizing a window.  I've got the title bar right there on the bottom of my screen, where it can't be covered by something else.

Within an application's own views, in its more complex state, we don't seem to have progressed very far in finding intermediate representations of information.  By intermediate I mean something that is smaller than the normal, detailed representation, but doesn't take up the same real estate.  I have been wondering lately if this is due to constraining ourselves, in the large part, to rectangle-based interfaces.  Would other shapes such as ellipses make better use of real estate?

There is a notion of the "thing I am focused on" -- that can live at the center of the ellipse.  I can see somewhat less information before, and somewhat less after.  I populate those "corners" with other information (context) of value to me.

It's about focus and context again.  From a geometric standpoint, how do we most efficiently present multiple sources of information?

The Haystack project is an aggregator showing all kinds of neato information on the screen at once.  I don't think that's very helpful -- after all, I'm about to do something with some of it, right?  Why do I have to constrain myself to a little corner of the screen.  Where are the smooth transitions from one focus-and-context to another?

12:26:20 PM    

Indiscriminate.

This Haaretz article tells the sad story of two Israeli security guards who were shot by their own army.  These two guys were "identified as armed" and then subject to immediate execution by Israeli army personnel.  It's sad that they were mistakenly shot, but I find it astonishing that the news coverage doesn't take the next step and ask an important question.

Why is the threshold for killing so low?  They were identified as armed, sort of...trying to run away, trying to call for help...in a split second, Israeli army personnel became judge, jury, and executioner.  And execute they did.

When this rather low standard of justice is applied across a whole population, we need to wonder.  Yesterday "11 suspected militants" were killed by the Israeli army.  How many of them were actually militants?  If the security guard story had not come out, would these men have been labelled "militant" as well?

It seems to me that the working definition of "militant", within the occupied territories, is someone that the Israeli army has killed.

10:42:12 AM    

CAPPS II.

See this article for a bit of background.  Basically the TSA is going to use a bunch of information from various databases to determine how "rooted" you are in your community, and based on that and other factors, will determine how "risky" you are as a passenger on a flight.

My initial reaction to this was something like, dammit, how can they possibly want to do something so intrusive?  Now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm not so sure.  Such as system is passive, which I think is an important quality.  Taking some basic information like how long you've been in the community, what you do in your life, and basically determinining a "rootedness" factor, seems on the face of it to be fairly sensible.

I do worry about the consequences of being blacklisted by such a system.  If you have been graded "red", you're not allowed to fly.  If you're graded "yellow", you're subject to additional search.  People who are sufficiently "rootless" should be given ample opportunity, through voluntary disclosures, to improve their score.  Flying on commercial airlines is a privilege, not a right, I think.

For the very vast majority of passengers, I think this can result in major improvements.  For those who get flagged, efficient and fair means of getting off the list should be available.  In the long run, we'll all be safer and air travel will be more efficient.  Substantial cost savings should be available as well.

An immigrant from the middle east who's been here 10 years, has established residency, a family, a credit score, and a host of other roots should sail right through a well-designed system.  Someone who's just arrived here on a travel visa should not.  A green door/red door system like customs might help -- a boarding pass should be stamped with a security requirement so those who need additional screening can go through a separate line (avoiding the main lines) and be rapidly screened.  This could potentially result in the flagged people actually getting through security faster, which is totally fine by me.  I just want them checked!

10:29:31 AM    

FreeRoller?

There are a bunch of freeroller blogs I usually subscribe to, but it seems that lately they've been busting my aggregation.  I think something changed over there, or I've screwed with settings I shouldn't have.  Don't know.  Unfortunately I've had to drop the blogs in question -- just can't see the trees because of the forest of information that's been coming in (and duplicating itself).

9:51:44 AM    

Eclipse Again.

I LOVE Eclipse.  The more I get into it the more I rediscover some joy in coding.  Man, I know that sounds pretty cheesy.  The thing is, know and love the refactorings.  Control-hover over something with the mouse and click it.  Get into its CVS integration (we have a pretty massive, over 1GB CVS system, Eclipse lets me toy around with just the bits I want to).

We thought we needed source link folders, but we don't.  I have two big output directories that store everything from our build process.  I make them part of my classpath.  I then use the cvs checkout facility to get a specific part of our software.  I set up exclusion filters to get it the way that I want it...and I am in heaven when my build-debug cycle is cut to nothing when I can push a routine into a running VM (which is most of the time).  Good ole typeless Smalltalk could do this way back when, but I'll take anything I can get.

11:15:26 PM    

Focus and Context.

So what I was thinking about last night was focus and context.  This is in the UI sense.  Most software today does a really crappy job of keeping the information you need at your fingertips, in your thinking space, while you're working with it.  Part of the reason is that there's just a lot of it, and where would you put it all?

Let's think about programming for a second.  You've got the code you're actually working on.  But wait, there's more to it than that -- you are working on a project, mostly -- the project has a lot of parts.  While you're working on one part, you pretty much need to be continuously referring to other parts (as in, what's the signature for this method, what did I put here, there)...most text editors and programming environments make you flip from one page to another, one editor to another -- it's frustrating.  To see one thing, you have to lose your view of the thing you're really interested in working on.  Focus and context -- the focus is your work, and the context is the information you need to do that work.

Most editors and IDEs will allow you to split views, create multiple views, and just generally set things up somehow so you can see more than one thing at once.  I think it's extremely inefficient -- shouldn't the IDE/editor be handling all that for you?  Shouldn't it be providing a good sense of focus and context automatically? 

The amount of screen real estate devoted to focus and context should be variable in a continuous sense -- there should be a keystroke for "give me more context", and another for "less context please".  That might make certain adjustments for you, bring in new sources of information, make windows wider/smaller, and so forth.

If we break away from the concept of "Rectangle as God" there are more interesting, more organic organizations of information that might be more amenable to a continuously variable focus/context setting...Elliptical shapes and so forth.

I need to diagram some of this out on paper.

10:42:18 AM    

FM RadioStation.

65 of you read my little bitchin' about FM RadioStation and not one of you could tell me how to fix it?  Let's hope my post at UserLand gets a response.  I need my aggregator back.

10:35:55 AM    

AOP Patented?  Please.

There's been a few posts about that, mostly referring to this patent.

Karl Lieberherr wrote an entire book published in 1996 (PDF online at that link) that was the precursor to AOP -- except he called it adaptive programming instead.  It's a classic work.  I bought the thing years ago and schmucked my head against the wall trying to understand it.  Kiczales wrote the foreword to the book, for cripes sake.  He is fully aware of the prior art in this area, and seems to be ignoring it.  Or, he considers it to be sufficiently distinct from his own work that it merits not even a mention. 

I like the work they've done, but this is a bullshit patent and they know it.  It's like patenting wood construction with 2-and-a-half inch nails, when the prior art is with 2-inch nails.

5:00:41 PM    

Naked Objects.

Ted Neward has looked at Naked Objects, and finds it deficient.  I've been thinking about this problem for a while, and I think that the Naked Objects approach is correct in the long run.  Usability is a tough nut to crack.  You are always trying to balance flexibility and task specificity.  You want your software to excel at the tasks you anticipate the user will perform, but retain the ability to do things you didn't, hopefully easily.

There are some similarities between REST and Naked Objects.  In both cases, you have a relatively small number of verbs, and you try to do some fairly complex things with them.  There are a small number of gestures you can perform in NO -- things like drag, double click to edit, and so forth.  The thing is, most of the time when you're working with objects you are altering state (editing), or linking (connecting) things together.  Sometimes you're creating new things, and sometimes you're deleting things.

These common operations can and should be "written for you" or done for you, by a framework.  A common vocabulary can serve us well.  More specialized tasks can have more specialized interfaces.

So what I'm saying here is that a hybrid of the two approaches will probably turn out to be an optimal thing in the future.  You will let the basic behavior of the system happen by default, and will provide specialized, task-specific interfaces to get certain things done quickly, or provide non-standard behavior.

The REST/NO approach seems to play well with ad hoc information manipulation.  Repetitive entry tasks and/or unusual kinds of data probably won't.

You can always extend the basic "vocabulary" of the system to do more complex things, of course.

Put me on record as being pro-NO.  Of course, the data being manipulated should not necessarily be classic objects.  There are much more flexible means of manipulating and storing information than OO.

4:49:07 PM    

FM RadioStation.

No sir, I don't like it.  Why does everybody think that the Outlook-style single-message view is such a great thing?  It blows.  You have to read every item individually.  You can't follow the complete flow of messages.  Your screen keeps blinking and updating all the time as you get through things.  And what do you gain?  Nothing.

What I want is a list of new stuff that I'm interested in.  Show it to me in document form, in parallel.  Allow me to click on the title of any story in a list, then scroll to that story in another pane.  Simple.

So I uninstalled it.  But, it changed something about my Radio settings, and my news aggregator is messed up.  The aggregator no longer has the ability to retrieve just the new postings; it retrieves everything it can off of each weblog now.  Poop.  I am trying to figure out how to put back the old behavior.

So if you like FM RadioStation, beware -- you might be stuck with it for a while.

4:40:39 PM    

Email and the Shuttle.

NPR had a few sound bites from one of the engineers on the Columbia mission earlier today.  He was commenting on the fact that he thought that his "worst case scenario" emails probably made it in front of the right people, and were at least considered.  The more I think about it, the more alarmed I become.

Surely there aren't so many people working in the engineering groups at NASA that a newsgroup-like system might not be more appropriate.  Email is fine for point to point stuff, person to person -- but when you're sussing out a complex engineering problem don't you want to have a fairly wide group of minds look at it?

If the shuttle engineers had been using effective workgroup software, or a newgroup-like system, perhaps more alarms would have been raised.

Email is astonishingly good a hiding information in an Enterprise.  It speeds certain kinds of communications, and eliminates others.  Be wary.  The key piece of information you need to make your business problem go away, or your shuttle not blow up, may have been one too many email degrees of freedom away from you.

9:06:52 PM    

Stop Being Scared.

Interesting article: a realistic discussion about chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons.  What can they really do to you?  Sounds like they can hurt you, but if you take some basic precautions and you don't panic, you'll probably be fine.  Looks like it comes from a reasonably authoritative source, and it certainly has the ring of truth to it.

But remember -- as Patriots we need to be Panicked!  So sayeth our wise leadership, as the dog wags furiously...

4:38:14 PM    

The PointCut I want.

I am buried under performance issues these days, trying to figure out how to get Java software to run fast on multi-gigabyte sets of data, and do it all cleanly.  Currently profiling systems are woefully inadequate -- most of them choke pretty fast on big data (tens of thousands of classes, gigabytes of data), or they slow the server down so much that they're useless.  It's frustrating.

AspectJ and the like give me the ability to declare pointcuts that insert calls around routines.  I don't know if they do the opposite...I want to be able to specify methods, and have every call the method makes get wrapped.  I want to be able to get at timing information that tells me the performance of the things my method is dependent on, and I don't necessarily want to have to specify pointcuts into all that stuff.  I only care about it when it's being called from my method.

I think Sun should take performance a lot more seriously in its next release.  Something like the JRockit's manageability interface should be standard in every VM installation.  You really can't deploy a real enterprise application without doing this kind of analysis, and doing it in a development environment is pointless.

Which leads me to my next mini-rant.  We used to use JProbe for analyzing our software, way back when.  We bought a bunch of licenses were pretty generally happy with it.  It's pretty much useless to us now.  We need the ability to analyze our software in place in a customer environment, on their machines.  Our customers are Global 100 companies, and the networks that they have are on a completely different level than anything a little 85 person software company like ours will have. 

JProbe's draconian licensing policies mean that our developers, in spite of having a development seat, can no longer use JProbe at a customer site.  JProbe node locks everything now.  So that's the end of any future JProbe purchases for us. It's useless.

We have high hopes for JProfiler.

I am also very hopeful that Sun will get together with HP and transfer HP's eprof technology from HPUX VMs to everything else.  eprof + HPJMeter gives you some pretty detailed analysis of the running of your Java app, and it just plain works (unlike hprof).

hprof consistently chokes on our application.  Don't know why...just won't work.  eprof works great, but it's HPUX only...

2:22:50 PM    

Terror and Iraq.

Iraq does support terror.  It's not for any of the reasons El Presidente has been mumbling about on television lately -- today we find out that the Administration relied on documents that "proved" that Iraq had been trying to purchase high grade aluminum tubing that could have been used to make centrifuges useful in nuclear (not nook-yu-lur) weapons development, and that those documents have been fairly conclusively shown to be falsified.  No-one is suggesting that America falsified these documents, but the Administration certainly need to re-evaluate any decisions that were made based on them.

Like I said, Iraq supports terror. It supports terror against Israel, in a very direct way.  It has provided weapons and explosives training, and offers "blood money" to the relatives of suicide bombers.  That's about as direct as you can possibly get without sending Iraqi soldiers/saboteurs to do the job.  Any evidence linking Iraq to terror against America is indistinct, and indirect, at best.  There are other more primary parties to terror aimed at America (Saudi Arabia).

There's also the notion of the terror that we perhaps should be feeling...does North Korea have or not have a missile capable of reaching Los Angeles?  I fervently hope that there is just as much energy withgin this administration being devoted to the North Korean problem as there is to the Iraq problem.  I don't think there is; the country is sticking its head in the sand instead (the sand in Iraq).

The Adminstration has tried to downplay Israel through this whole crisis, not wanting to create a war between civilizations, if at all possible.  It strikes me that they are in the process of doing just that, inadvertently, through incompetence.

I gotta agree with Tom Friedman -- I guess there are valid reasons to go to war, but the Bush administration has made a huge mess of the preparations and international support necessary for such an endeavour.  Unless you believe that America has unlimited potential, unlimited resources, and can do anything and everything at the same time.  Unless you believe that there are no consequences to your actions.

Bush's simplistic, narrow world view has come full circle.  We need a serious thinker and serious planner at this point in history.  Desperately.  Gosh-gee-let's sock'em politics plays well on TV, but in real life you end up with a world that distrusts and despises you, an economy that's in the shitter, and a steady erosion of freedoms and privacy that we take for granted.  That's a lot to swallow from a man who should be showing some level of humility (or even judgement), given that more people in the last election wanted the other guy. 

12:55:56 PM    

Test-Driven Development.

TDD is being touted as the best thing since, well, just about everything.  I think TDD is nice for simple systems.  By simple, I mean software that does not contain distributed components and integration.  By distributed components I do not mean a web interface, or a simple client to a server. 

I deal every day with software, written in Java, that pulls information from (and pushes information to) systems that we have no control over, and are simply not designed to do it.  We do it anyway, as we've always done it, with a hell of a lot of hard work and brainpower.

There is no panacea for this task.  If we were interacting with databases it would be easy...databases are designed to support access from other software.  If we had control over the remote systems our task would be simpler.

So right now, TDD means nothing to me.  I can't simulate a huge corporate environment running our software, when the behavior of the third-party software we must integrate with is undefined in that environment.  Sometimes there's just no substitute for really hard work and painful observation.

I have yet to see any test methodology that would make headway in our environment.  For those of you working on simple systems that respond to the currently fashionable testing mechanisms -- bravo.  I salute you.  Now let me get back to work.

12:42:47 PM    

340 Furniture-Holding Horses.

I spent a week in Germany driving a diesel Audi A4 wagon.  Loved it.  Can't buy one here -- is America not ready for diesel?  I guess not. 

Audi's S6 Avant is my new dream car.  340 horses (the better to smoke a Porsche with ;) and you can put a bunch a junk in it when you have to.

I am pretty anti-SUV.  If I could buy the diesel wagon I would.  Station wagons forever.  I am astonished at my own inconsistencies. 

11:33:50 AM    

The Left Hand, and the Right Hand.

Iraq scraps missiles.  North Korea threatens war.  I am not entirely sure that we have our priorities right, here.

I was in Georgia yesterday, driving from Alpharetta to the airport in Atlanta.  Whenver I'm driving I tend to scan the radio dial, looking for something different...I guess yesterday was country music day.  Anybody who knows me knows that isn't really what I listen to on a daily basis, but hey, I figure I gotta see how the others live once in a while.

Two pretty nice songs later, and I'm getting into the hybrid country-rock that's on the station.  The DJ says, "and now I'll play the song that so many of you have been requesting, all day"...

It's a pro-war song.  The main chorus is something like, "Have you forgotten, Osama Bin Laden, how we felt that day".  I just sat there in stunned disbelief, knowing that there are thousands of people listening to this piece of crap song with something less than fully critical facilities. 

You can be pro-war, or against war, or whatever.  What you can't do is deliver politics in a country radio song.  To the dumb fuck who wrote the "song": It's a little more complicated than you make it out to be.  It truly scares me that this country is mostly made up of people who will sit there tappin' their toes to this little war ditty. 

Keep tapping when the soldiers come home in body bags.  Keep tapping when we kill a few hundred thousand Iraqis, and who knows how many women and children.  You perceive that your precious safety is at risk, and you want to turn this beautiful country in a warlike, fascist state to preserve precisely...nothing. 

We're not safer.

I've been checked for bombs and terrorist gadgets ten times over the past two weeks, taking over two hours of my time.  I can't honestly say I've missed a flight because of it, but I came within two minutes of doing so last Tuesday.

Here's the point: All theses "insecurity" measures do nothing.  They don't help.  Where is the balance our "leadership" is supposed to be providing?  I am not ignorant of the danger, and I'm not putting my head in the sand.  I choose to live my life exactly the same as before, to the extent that the chickenshits in this society will allow me to. 

Two weeks ago I got a letter from the parking company that runs the garage I park my car in.  They stated that, "due to increased risk of terrorism, we are reissuing all parking cards and cancelling all old cards.  You will need to provide proof of your parking contract."  I shit you not.  I have no problem with a business saying, hey, we gotta make sure there aren't any bogus parking cards out there.  There oughta be a fucking law that says, use terrorism as an excuse, in this context, is an offense. 

It is offensive.  I want a fucking apology from the Capital Parking Incorporated.  I doubt I'll get one.

And meanwhile the whining masses, perched atop their SUVs, bob their heads in agreement, in precise time, shuffling their legs in a strip-mall simulacra of military power, demonstrating their pride in a country they barely deserve to be in.

These are bitter days.

11:24:58 AM