Saturday, March 08, 2003

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