Gail Norton has named a lobbyist who has campaigned for oil drilling in ANWR as her special assistant for Alaska. That’s disgusting. It’s difficult to imagine how the White House could be more sold out to corporate interests.

Mike Loukides’ wrapup of JavaOne is good if you didn’t actually make it to the conference (like me).

Struts 1.0 was released last week. Struts is a framework for building Web applications in Java.

Java Server Faces is a proposed framework from Sun for building Web applications in a somewhat standardized manner. It’s still at the proposal stage right now, and it’s unknown to me whether the building of Web-based GUIs really needs to be standardized at this point. The best practices are pretty well known, but even so, they’re still evolving. I don’t see this proposal being widely adopted, even if it’s pushed by Sun.

For the record, MSNBC did not doctor a Wall Street Journal news article, as reported by The Register. According to Lee Gomes at the WSJ, MSNBC ran an earlier version of the story that appeared in some editions of the paper rather than the latest version of the story which appeared on the WSJ site. You have to take things printed in The Register with a grain of salt.

If you’re a Java programmer and you do your coding in Emacs, you must check out ECB. It provides a multipane window layout similar to most IDEs. (It also works with C, C++, and Lisp.)

People have known for years that Hotmail is powered by FreeBSD, so why did they deny that they use Open Source software internally?

The death penalty has been in the news a lot lately, and thus has been a lot on my mind. This morning I was lucky to find a pointer to Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article: The Dramaturgy of Death. Wills deconstructs ancient and modern rationales for the application of the death penalty, demonstrating just how absurd they are. It’s clear upon reading it that people support the death penalty for visceral reasons, and only later come up with “rational” reasons in an attempt to justify their primal urges.

I’ve been thinking about laugh tracks this week, and realized that I know almost nothing about them. Apparently laugh tracks are, to a certain degree, shrouded in mystery. Anyway, TV Party has a history of laugh tracks that isn’t half bad.

All roads led to the Urban Legends Reference Pages. I’ve seen two pointers to this site to debunk urban legends this week, and I’d never seen it at all before. The writeups for the two stories I’ve read (about the 1895 exam and standard railroad gauge) have been excellent. Bookmark this site so that you can quickly and easily quash those whacky emails that your non-net savvy friends and family members are constantly forwarding to you.