Jason Perkins sent me a link to Mastodonte Referrer Advertising, a referrer spamming service, in response to my earlier item about referrer spam.

For whatever reason, I’ve not been pleased with “The West Wing” this season. At one time, it was my favorite show between seasons of “The Sopranos”. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks the show isn’t as good as it once was. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article speculating on whether the show has jumped the shark. I’ve read lots of other theories about why the show has fallen off as well. Honestly, I can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong, but there is a problem. Hopefully it will regain its footing, since I’m not ready to dump it yet.

Today, I’m looking at RSS parsers written in Java. Anyone have any suggestions? I’ve found Informa and a bunch of other RSS-related projects in Java. I’m still getting a feel for the landscape.

As regular readers know, I’ve been casting occasional glances at the battle between Anil Dash and the readers of the Little Green Footballs weblog. You also know that I have no respect for most of the bigoted drivel that finds its way onto the front page at LGF, and is pervasive in the comments section of that site. What I didn’t know is that a whole big drama unfolded between Anil and the weblogs feature at MSNBC. Anil has written a very long post that got me up to speed.

I just want to say that I admire Anil’s perserverence in confronting the readers of LGF head on. Not long after 9/11, I saw the direction that LGF was headed in and simply tuned out. When I’ve followed links to the site from other places, I see that things have only gotten worse. I reluctantly accept the fact that bigotry, hatred, and ignorance go unconfronted every day, and combatting those forces where I can is one of the many things I should be doing but am not. It’s a sad fact that most people aren’t interested in a lively exchange of ideas, or trying to see a problem from all sides, or trying to accept complexity for what it is.

Anil has a lot more patience than I do, and perhaps more hope as well, because the bottom line is that I simply write off his interlocutors rather than trying to educate them.

Several Democratic Congressmen are trying to prevent code developed by federally funded research projects from being released under the GPL because it might discourage commercial interests from adopting it. There’s an argument to be made there, but the Congressmen do a poor job of making it. They’re 100% correct in citing TCP/IP as an example that shows how government-produced technology can create massive returns in the private sector, but TCP/IP is a protocol, not a software package. People are free to implement TCP/IP under the GPL (as they have), the BSD license (as they have), and under commercial licenses (as they have). So the argument they make is utterly and completely specious.

I like the GPL, and I use plenty of software released under the GPL, but I don’t think it’s the right license for everything. For software produced as part of government research projects, the BSD license,or one like it, might indeed make more sense. The key is that volunteers working on public projects should be able to benefit from government researchers just as commercial concerns are able to. Hence, no proprietary licenses. At the same time, it should also be possible to integrate innovations that stem from federal research into commercial products without the burden of rewriting them from scratch to get around licensing issues. So, in this case, to me BSD makes the most sense.

TheServerSide.com, the SlashDot of the J2EE world, now sports a couple of RSS feeds. I can never remember to hit the site regularly, so having an RSS feed available will certainly make life ever so slightly easier for me. Now all I need is RSS feeds from KernelTrap and LWN. Oh, and a Cafe au Lait RSS feed would be quite nice as well.

From a reader: LWN RSS feed, KernelTrap RSS feed.

The Washington Post has a nice little compilation of recent lies and half truths from President Bush on various subjects. The most frustrating thing to me about the run up to war in Iraq is that the Bush administration refuses to make an honest, persuasive argument in favor of war. I read logical, well presented arguments in favor of invading Iraq in magazines and on weblogs every day, but what we get from the administration is crap. If they can’t effectively explain why they want to go to war, why should I believe that they can prosecute the war effectively, or that they’ll behave sensibly in its aftermath? These are frustrating times.

The New York Times ran a review of The Threatening Storm, by Kenneth M Pollack, this weekend. It makes the case for invading Iraq, but also provides a wealth of background information on the history of the region, and Saddamn and America’s (mis)conduct. I’m currently reading this book, and plan on saying a few things about it when I’m done.

I’m just going to rename rc3.org the John Gruber annex, because I can’t seem to resist linking to everything he posts over at Daring Fireball. Hell, I don’t even own a Mac and I can’t stay away. In any case, today he sheds some light on the MacWorld tiff.

An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0 was an article that was featured on Slashdot yesterday, which was largely a big rant about the suckitude of the Debian installer. Reading the review, I had mixed feelings. Personally, I’ve never had good luck with Debian. I know lots of people love it, and bully for them, but I have never been able to get a Debian system up and running to my satisfaction. I believed this was a personal failure until I succeeded two times with Gentoo, which is to Debian as Alaska is to Montana, in terms of frontier cred. Anyway, I agree that things that are dumb about the Debian installer could be improved, but I disagree with the article’s larger argument, which is that Debian should have an installer that my Mom could navigate (a la Red Hat).

As everyone knows, Debian is maintained by an organization of volunteers. When people working on the distribution support users, it takes away from the time that they could be spending to improve the distribution. Therefore, it makes sense for them to not make Debian open for anybody to install. If someone can’t make it through an installer that requires some attention and knowledge on the part of the user, then they should probably be using a commercial distribution that offers support for money or whatever. That’s one of the things I like best about Gentoo’s root shell installer. It immediately gets rid of people that are intimidated by that sort of thing, and prevents them from sucking up tons of attention on mailing lists or forums. The difficulty of the installer should be like those little signs in front of rides at amusement parks: “You must be this tall to ride.”

The target audience of Debian doesn’t need a graphical installer, so there’s really no reason to put one in. If you want the easy graphical installer, perhaps you should ask yourself why you chose Debian in the first place. Besides, with distributions like Debian and Gentoo, using the installer is more likely than not a one time thing, because you can upgrade the version of your operating system without bothering with the installer. I’m all for installer improvements that save time for the core users of a distribution, but revising the installer to open the distribution to a new class of users should not be entered into lightly.