An Impossible Occupation: Scott Anderson writes a first hand account of the Israeli incursion into the West Bank. He accompanied some elite Israeli paratroopers who were part of the forces that entered Tulkarm, and the story captures the views of the soldiers toward the occupation, how they conduct themselves in battle, and what it must be like to find yourself behind enemy lines for weeks. I think it’s telling that despite the IDF’s numerous precautions against violating the human rights of the Palestinians, the fundamental injustice of the occupation prevents them from getting any credit whatsoever. I wonder how the soldiers feel about settlers who feel it is their religious obligation to reclaim “Judea and Samaria” from the Palestinians.

Thomas Friedman: Global Village Idiocy. Friedman trots out some old saws here, but he also makes some good points. The Internet is just a medium for transmission of information, nothing prevents people from publishing garbage or from trawling for garbage. At the same time, the opportunity is there for people to test all of their assumptions against something that more closely resembles reality. That’s an opportunity that most people haven’t had in the past.

The Economist has an article on the guy behind the Red Bull phenomenon. I’ve never had it, but they do indeed seem to have quite a following in the geek set.

NewsForge interviews Mozilla project lead Mitchell Baker and finds out what’s left before Mozilla 1.0 is released. I’m still using it pretty much exclusively as my browser, and at this point I can’t imagine going back to Internet Explorer.

The pipe bomb guy was trying to make a smiley face on the map with the locations where he planted the bombs.

Information request: anyone have (or know of) any implementation horror stories with any of the following products?

• FatWire
• FileNet Web Content Management (formerly eGrail)
• Starbase eXpressroom
• Stellent Content Management

For that miniscule subset of my readers that use Emacs, JDEE, and Ant, here’s a pointer to an Ant task that builds a JDEE project file from your build.xml. It’s offered by i3SP.

This is what the NRA might refer to as good return on investment.

Tony Judt has written perhaps the definitive article on the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, The Road to Nowhere.

Shawn Bayern has written a brief introduction to the upcoming JSP Standard Tag Library for theserverside.com. I like anything that enables me to avoid having to write code for myself. In some ways, it looks like the JSTL is going to make JSP a lot more like Cold Fusion (except with all of the power of Java in the background). That’s a good thing.