So there’s been an ongoing discussion among Java bloggers over which IDE rules, IDEA or Eclipse. I became so curious that I downloaded Eclipse and used it as my development environment for about a week, then I installed IDEA 3.0 and have been using it for the past couple of days. I love Eclipse — it’s got awesome CVS integration and it’s an absolutely beautiful application. Indeed, SWT (the GUI library developed as part of the Eclipse project) is incredible and Eclipse is the best looking Java application ever. It has a lot of other nice features as well.

That said, IDEA is better. IDEA just has so many features that make your life a little bit easier as a programmer, and they all add up to it being an amazing product overall. I’d tried IDEA before, and I never got how cool it was, because I just opened it and started typing code. That’s not the way to go. If you want to know how good an IDE is, go and find the code that you have to work on every day that has the gnarliest classes you’ve ever written (or even better, that were written by the worst programmer that ever worked in your group). You know that guy who got laid off because all the code he wrote sucked? Go grab his code and load it up as an IDEA project. Then just start refactoring. The first thing you’ll notice is that IDEA is going to tell you a lot about what’s wrong with the code. The second thing is that it’s going to offer to fix many of the problems for you. Eclipse is good in this regard, but IDEA is great.

I’m a hardcore bash/ant/Emacs/JDEE user. Or, I was. I have to say that both Eclipse and IDEA are better than my old environment (although there are still some Emacs tricks that really should be incorporated into these IDEs). IDEA, though, is the best.

I imagine that it’s articles like this one that have gotten Abou El Fadl into trouble with his fundamentalist, misogynistic brethren.

Everyone who watched The West Wing on Wednesday got a lesson on why the Pentagon really does have to pay an absurd amount for many trivial seeming objects, but the truth is, of course, much more complex than that. The Project for Government Oversight has a chart listing some absurd prices that the government pays for various spare parts. And lest you think that this is just because the government has unusual requirements, the year to year increase on pricing for those parts is included as well. For example, how does a linear microcircuit that cost 11 cents in 1997 go for the handsome price of $5,788.76 in 1998?

The other day I made a small change to this site — if an item has a title (and they all do since I created the RSS feed for the site), I print it in the page title on the permalink pages. The number of hits I get from Google to those pages has gone up a ton. I actually don’t know whether that’s a good thing, since people probably aren’t interested in one of my entries here when they’re looking for “pictures of starving people” or the documentary “Journeys with George,” but I’ll take the additional readership. If nothing else, they get a useful link out of it most of the time.

Does anyone else see the irony in Larry Ellison complaining about the complexity of IT products?

So, some right wing bonehead linked to my site the other day, and managed to misrepresent a relatively simple item in three ways.

His neighbors are most likely foreigners, judging by the way he wrote that they “don’t know a whole lot about US politics.” So either they are naturalized citizens who have decided to learn nothing about the political system of their new country (unlikely) or they live in an area where Democrat politicians have gotten some sort of same-day registration law passed that makes it incredibly easy for them to commit voter fraud (likely).

He is correct that my neighbors are immigrants. My neighbors know as much about US politics as most Americans who don’t pay any attention to the news (in other words, most Americans). His speculation that I live in a state where we have same day voter registration is wrong, and he probably could have figured it out himself had he read what I wrote in the first place, where I specifically stated that the registration deadline was Oct 11. I have no desire to commit or encourage voter fraud, my neighbors are naturalized citizens who are strongly opposed to the Bush foreign policy agenda, and have every right to vote in any election.

They know nothing about politics, yet they know they hate George W. Bush. We’re obviously not dealing with free-thinking indivualists here, aren’t we? Never mind, the Democrats will be there to run their lives and tell them how to think.

Whoops, again we have a misrepresentation. I didn’t say they know knowing about politics, I said they don’t know a whole lot about US politics. I have never told them who to vote for, I just know that if they did vote, they’d vote for Democrats because they don’t like the Bush administration’s foreign policy. If being a single issue voter discredits you as a voter or citizen, it’s news to me.

Apathetic, clueless, easily-led immigrants who commit voter fraud. The ideal Democrat voter.

My neighbors are not apathetic, nor are they clueless, and they certainly didn’t commit voter fraud. I don’t have any interest in taking on every right wing cheap shot artist out there (as if there are enough hours in the day), but I don’t appreciate my writings being used as the springboard for moronic insinuations and half assed speculation. Judging from the fact that the site in question has only sent two referrers my way since he published the item, I’d guess that it’s not particularly well read anyway, and I sort of regret giving him this publicity.

I imagine that the photographer who took this picture is quite pleased with himself, and is a fan of Gothic stained glass no doubt.

So the other day the New York Times wrote an article about a federal effort to create a monster database of data about all Americans that various government and law enforcement agencies can access without a warrant. The effort is being led by the creepy John Poindexter (former head of the NSA under Ronald Reagan and scumbag at large), and in addition to being incredibly invasive and offensive to everyone who believes in the most basic civil rights, is also completely misdirected.

The simple fact is that resources for analyzing information are limited, even for the federal government. This became completely obvious in the months after 9/11, when it was gradually revealed that we had more than enough information to track down the hijackers, but we didn’t have the resources to piece it all together. This new system is aimed at gathering huge additional amounts of information, and there’s some pie in the sky plan to sift through it with greater efficiency than we can currently manage. I just don’t think it can work. At some level, information has to percolate to decision makers in usable form, and generally that means from a real person who they trust to make decisions.

Getting back to baseball, I read an article a few months ago about how the Oakland A’s don’t scout high school players for the draft, they only scout college players. This is a pretty arbitrary way to decide who to scout, but it still works to the A’s advantage, because even though it eliminates a huge pool of players from consideration, it enables them to decide among the smaller pool of players with a much greater degree of confidence.

Spying on every single American and trying to pull needles out of the haystack (even in an automated fashion) is simply not going to be as productive as focusing on likely suspects. And trashing the civil liberties of every American in service of possibly slowing down terrorism is foolish in the extreme. There are countries out there that successfully monitor all of their citizens. Iraq is one of them — of course the intelligence services in Iraq are monstrous, and they spend nearly all of their time spying on Iraqis, and they have programs by which all citizens are encouraged to spy on their neighbors and family members. East Germany was another fine example of a country that had a working program for spying on all its citizens. Are these the countries we want to emulate?

We can do better than hiring criminals to spy on us.

I find the accounts I’m reading of the capture and interview of the confessed Bali bomber, Amrozi, to be deeply unsettling. According to every story I’ve read, the terrorist laughed it up with Indonesia’s national police chief, and even congratulated the police on their cleverness in capturing him. He apologized for the trouble he’s caused his family, but seems completely unrepentent at having killed hundreds of people, and indeed seems to find it all quite humorous. All things considered, I prefer my terrorists sullen and bitter.

President Bush today renewed the nation’s national emergency status for another year. Being in a state of national emergency extends the power of the executive branch, so why not extend it, right? This, of course, is the same man who went around the country stumping for Republican candidates most of last month, and whose Chief of Staff told the New York Times that Bush held off on announcing his Iraq war plans to the UN until September because “you don’t launch a new product in August.”

Update: Umm, cancel the outrage. It turns out we’ve been in a state of emergency since 1994. It’s still lame, but it’s been lame for awhile.