Tuesday, September 09, 2003

On CAPPS II. CalPundit writes a bit on CAPPS II.  I respond to one particular commenter: It doesn't make sense to use that 200 million when multiplying out the percentages because it says 1-2% of "passengers" will not be permitted to board. So, considering I am reasonably positive that I am among the ninety nine percent of the passengers who will be permitted to board, I consider this to be prudent. At the worst an individual might get arrested for something they are unaware they are wanted for. Actually now thinking about the 200 million adults, if they are in the red, they probably know it and possibly think twice before booking flights anyway! Posted by Jack Murray at September 9, 2003 11:32 AM Jack Murray's comment is absolutely typical for the right on this issue. It boils down to this: Yes, this is going to suck for a certain number of people. Yes, it's going to screw with their lives. But who cares? We're fighting terrorism! As long as it doesn't happen to ME, everything is GREAT! No Republican will ever volunteer his daughter's life (or himself) as a sacrifice when the innocent child of another is killed through a misapplied death penalty. No Republican will ever volunteer to take the place of a foreign-looking guy who's "tagged" by one of these systems for further inspection. This probability-driven approach to life is reminiscent of the worst of Stalin's, or Saddam Hussein's, society...your welfare depends on staying out of sight, avoiding being noticed. Perhaps Jack feels that he is sufficiently similar to everyone else that he isn't in any danger of being singled out. The point is this: We create a country out of a constitution and laws that are designed to do the right thing. The most important thing in this country is for honest men and women to live in freedom. There is no higher goal. If you ask me, everybody should get the hell off of the safety bandwagon. There is no such thing. None of the "counter-terrorism" efforts currently being made amount to anything. Jack thinks it's acceptable to inconvenience, annoy, harass, and even arrest MILLIONS of people, in the name of "safety", when those procedures have little to do with guaranteeing any of that. He'll think it's acceptable right up until one of his neighbors gets into a fight with him and takes revenge by reporting him to the FBI, whereupon he finds himself to be a lifelong member of the "Red Travel Club", without appeal. Welcome to bus life, Jack! Just like in Russia! What's my solution? Ditch this entire stupid CAPPS program. Ditch requiring ID to fly. X-Ray the damn bags, and put marshals on most flights, anonymously. Arm the pilots, if they want to be. Stop harassing innocent people. Stop pretending that some guy in Boise needs to be just as paranoid about security as a guy in NY. Stop making the guy in Boise PAY for security he doesn't need, and will never need. 10:13:44 PM     | comment [] | trackback []

Interdependency vs. Reuse. The proliferation of pseudo-standard Java libraries, such as the various commons libraries, has me a bit nervous.  On one hand we've got some extraordinarily useful stuff out there -- byte code engineering libraries, XML handling, mathematics, you name it.  We Java programmers have riches that no other environment has, right now.  We even have handy tools like maven, which are designed to have a look at what's being built and automatically download dependent libraries.  I've never personally used Maven other than to build someone else's project; I'm not really a command line kind of guy, on a day-to-day basis.  In my day job, we use an ant build system for the baseline and release builds, but nobody uses it incrementally (we all use Eclipse, except for this one guy who insists on using JEdit, and we all laugh at him but he's really good so we don't laugh too much). It's just way too easy to pluck one or two bits of functionality out of a huge library, and drag a huge mess of dependencies and the accompanying work into the VM.  Most of the time those .class files are going to sit there out of reach and you won't have to worry about them -- the VM isn't going to be doing much extra work.  But are you sure?  Have you watched the classloader to see what it is doing?  The internal dependencies of libraries are a funny thing.  You never really know what you're going to be bringing in, when you touch something that you think it quite simple and quite isolated.  Back in the Day, we used to have these funny things called linkers.  You old guys know what I mean.  You'd compile your stuff down into object files, link with library files, and voila, you'd have your nice tight executable.  All is well.  The thing is, the main function of a linker is the throw away the things you don't need (well, there are other things too, but it's still a main point).  When the compiler and linker know what's being used, there's a lot of optimization that can take place. Java, with its dynamic linking capability, is another story.  You never really know what's going to be used.  We have optimizers (like yGuard) that can do some of this optimization for us, throwing away some of what we need.  Still, it's an uncomfortable thing.  Too much gets dragged in; things just get too complicated. The bottom line is, you've got a huge library of base functionality sitting there in J2SE.  Consider using it as much as you can.  Logging?  Unless you have some pretty specific requirements, just use what's in there.  Same goes for XML, regular expressions, collections, and so forth.  Come up with a damn good reason before going outside the base kit. Second, before pulling in something huge, evaluate your level of usage.  Do you really need the whole thing?  Can you just pull out a small part of it and use that?  Seriously consider a little cut-and-paste reuse.  You might just be able to get by quickly and easily, and not create additional dependency problems. Third, be sparse in your use of code from another library.  Restrict yourself to the smallest set of interfaces, and the smallest set of methods that you possibly can.  Cutting these dependencies will pay dividends later, when that library morphs in a way you didn't expect, which happens with distressing frequency.  I don't begrudge library authors their right to change; they can and should.  It's simply a matter of balancing the cost of the various methods of adapting, copying, or reusing library code.  Keep in mind all three methods, and make conscious decisions. 9:52:29 PM     | comment [] | trackback []