As I feared, things are going poorly in Afghanistan, and it seems like we’re in real danger of just ignoring it. The idea that Afghanistan will stabilize without outside powers keeping the peace is a fantasy. I’m glad that the US is working with the Afghan government to develop a proper military, but creating such an organization is going to take a lot of time and diligence. Something has to tide them over in the meantime.

The New York Times assesses the lack of progress toward defusing the conflict in the Middle East by the Bush administration today. These paragraphs get to the heart of the matter:

“The Bush administration finally has to get real,” said Henry Siegman, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It has avoided dealing with the most fundamental aspect of the conflict. There is no formulation under God’s sun that can get the parties to stop the violence, that can get the Palestinians to stop the violence, if this administration will not face up to the simple truth that stopping the violence and establishing the security of Israel is not something that serves any Palestinian goal whatsoever.

“The only way is to promise a clear political future, and not in the eschatological future but in the foreseeable future,” Mr. Siegman said. “If we’re not prepared to say that, then no matter how clever the formulation, no matter whether you call it the Tenet plan or the Mitchell plan or whatever, it’s not going to work.”

Anyone watch The West Wing tonight? It looks like Aaron Sorkin is eager to run Bartlet versus Bush in an imaginary election.

The development tree for Mozilla 1.0 is closed. The long awaited release is imminent. Has it really been four years?

I’ve come up with a new software development methodology called buzzword-oriented programming. The idea is that the development team writes code that implement all of the buzzwords associated with a particular project and then the only work is to integrate the various buzzword components together to complete the project. Discounting the time it takes to implement each buzzword, the process is fast, easy, and utterly unobtrusive. In other news, Grady Booch is pushing something called aspect-oriented programming, which is not explained in this article despite the fact that it’s the article’s overall topic.

Salon has an article on GnuPG, a relatively new open source version of the venerable PGP public key encryption package. I’ve entertained a longstanding fascination with PGP, having used it since not long after it came out. Unfortunately, I’ve lost all of the public keys that I’ve generated, and I’ve never been religious about using it or distributing my public key. These days, even if I had my old keyrings I wouldn’t be able to remember the passphrases. I think the fundamental problem is that use of encryption has not yet reached the tipping point — there aren’t enough people using it to make adoption of it widespread. I see people using digital signatures to sign their mail every now and then, but I’ve never bothered to verify any of the signatures, because most email correspondence is too trivial to worry about it. In my opinion, digitally signing your email is a signal that you’re a big geek (in a good way), although I imagine that the people who do it are in it for the principle of the thing.

Tapestry is yet another Web application framework for Java.

It doesn’t seem like there were many surprises in the Energy Department documents obtained by a FOIA request on Monday. This pretty much sums it up:

A first review of the 11,000 pages of documents bolsters the contention of Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups that the Bush administration relied almost exclusively on the advice of executives from utilities and producers of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy while a White House task force drafted recommendations that would vastly increase energy production.

Of the corporations that met with Abraham, all but a few were large contributors of unregulated soft money to the Republican Party during the 2000 election cycle. A dozen of the companies that had meetings with Abraham contributed $1.2 million to the GOP, mainly for Bush’s election. Ten of the 12 gave more soft money to Republicans than Democrats.

This is fully reflected in the energy policies proposed by the Bush administration. I don’t think the fact that they favor production to the exclusion of conservation is a surprise to anyone.

Apple is soliciting feedback from PC users.

It’s impossible to keep up. I’ve been working with Struts for the past month, and now there’s WebWork, which is supposed to be an improvement on Struts.