Fred Kaplan has an interesting piece today about why the Army uses so many helicopters despite their propensity to get shot down. He also sings the praises of the A-10, which was my favorite military aircraft by far when I was of an age where I gave a lot of thought to what my favorite military aircraft might be. I was also a fan of the A6 Intruder and any C130 derivative that was heavily armed.

I received four books yesterday that I’m looking forward to reading (or at least skimming). A benefactor sent me:

• Python in a Nutshell, which I wanted after reading a rave review on Slashdot.
• Java Cookbook: I already have the Perl Cookbook, and I really like this format. This will be particularly useful to me because most of my knowledge is wrapped up in Web stuff, and quick solutions to things like I/O issues that I don’t normally have to deal with will be quite handy.
• C# Essentials. I really don’t much want to become a Microsoft developer, but learning other platforms makes you better at programming for your chosen platform, and I need to be able to discuss .NET intelligently anyway. The ability to at least wrap your brain around other platforms is one of those software engineering cultural literacy things, I think.
• XSLT Cookbook. This was a special bonus. I should know more about XSLT than I do, anyway.

I’m still plowing through Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans, and I’m finding the book extremely helpful. If you’re a Java developer who hasn’t plunged into EJB yet, I recommend this book highly. Not only do I understand most of the EJB lingo now, but I am also confident that I have never worked on a project where I suffered because we did not go the EJB route. I was afraid I was missing out on something. In any case, if you want to get a job as a Java developer these days, understanding EJB is pretty much a key requirement, and this book will get you there in a hurry.

The other thing I need to work on next is building a good working relationship with UML. I can read UML diagrams pretty well, but I need to take my skills there to the next level, again from a skills development perspective. When someone reads my résumé, they’d expect that I’m good with UML, so I need to make that the case …

I just want to say that Ben and Mena Trott are living the dream. First, they came out with a nifty little product that caught on in a big way. Now, they’re getting funding, hiring their friends, and branching out by offering a hosted product. Congratulations, guys. Having the initiative to build a product and then build a company is a pretty grand thing. Ben Hammersly has a story about these developments, and of course there are lots of details to be found on weblogs all over the place.

The Register reports that some Florida spammers have filed a lawsuit against anti-spam activists for some stupid reasons that don’t bear repeating. Spammers are the scum of the earth. That is all.

So Gary Kamiya wrote a piece the other day for Salon that included a paragraph that sounds inflammatory, taken out of context. Needless to say, Bill O’Reilly (and others) have done exactly that — cherry picked that one paragraph and milked it for maximum moron outrage without even mentioning the headline of the article from which it was taken. Salon has challenged O’Reilly to debate Kamiya via email. Not only is this a cheap publicity stunt, but it’s also brilliant. O’Reilly is more than happy to invite people onto his show so that he can shout them down and then have them cut off when they start wiping the floor with him (as all competent participants do), but I doubt that he’ll accept an argument where the odds are closer to even.

Michelle Goldberg interviews Fareed Zarakia about his book, The Future of Freedom for Salon. I’ve been captivated by Zarakia’s Newsweek articles for the past couple of years, and the book sounds interesting and provocative as well. Here’s something close to a synopsis:

Freedom, Zakaria argues, comes not from politicians’ slavish obeisance to the whims of The People, divined hourly by pollsters. It comes from an intricate architecture of liberty that includes an independent judiciary, constitutional guarantees of minority rights, a free press, autonomous universities and strong civic institutions.

In America, all of these institutions have been under consistent attack for the last 40 years from populists of the left and right seeking to strip power from loathed elites and return it to the masses. “The deregulation of democracy has … gone too far,” Zakaria writes.

Much of what Zakaria writes will anger liberals. He criticizes 1970s reforms that opened up the closed workings of Congress to the public, arguing, “The purpose of these changes was to make Congress more open and responsive. And so it has become — to money, lobbyists, and special interests.” The World Trade Organization is opposed by anti-globalization activists in part because of its secretive, unresponsive nature, but Zakaria argues that’s precisely why it works.

Chandler 0.1 was released yesterday. I haven’t even bothered to download it because I’m not going to hack on it, and the UI is just a placeholder.

I didn’t know that Bruce Eckel had a weblog. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it has an RSS feed, but I can deal with that. I taught myself Java with the first edition of Thinking in Java, and consider it one of the best computer books I’ve read.

The Motley Fool has a pretty good pro/con bit on the retention bonuses that were supposed to be paid to the seven top execs at AMR (the parent company of American Airlines). The bonus disclosure was ill timed, coming one day after several of the unions that negotiate with the company voted in favor of pay cuts for the general good.

I really, really wanted to be like Tom Friedman, Paul Berman, or any number of other liberals who held their nose and said that even though the Bush administration lied to everyone in the entire world about the threat posed by Iraq and the real reasons why we wanted to go to war there, they hoped that the outcome would be a Saddam-free Iraq that would better serve its own citizens and serve as an example for other autocratic countries in the Middle East. Unfortunately, just as everything I knew before the war pointed toward the Bush administration completely blowing it, everything I’m reading now that we’re out of the conquering phase isn’t giving me hope either. Today there’s an article in the Washington Post that quotes “senior administration officials” on the virtues of beating a hasty retreat. This hardly surprises me given our conduct in Afghanistan, and the fact that every one of Iraq’s neighbors wants us to leave as soon as possible, which is itself a direct outgrowth of our pigheaded foreign policy going into the war.

I’d feel better if I read any rumors that reassured me in any way. Instead what I read about is the fact that the interim authority in Baghdad is a strongly pro-Israel defense contractor who may or may not turn things over to an Iraqi exile crook who’se been out of the country for 45 years. Then there’s the oil pipeline to Israel that I read about yesterday, and the four military bases we plan on setting up, and the fact that Iraq is rapidly moving out of the public’s attention.

Only history will judge whether there was any merit to our invading Iraq, it’s certainly too early to tell right now, but as the liberation buzz wears off, it’s looking like the hangover is going to be a doozy. For the sake of the Iraqis, who have suffered the pains of oppression and liberation, I hope that we stand by the implicit commitment we made when we kicked off operation “Iraqi Freedom” in the first place.