You know what annoys me about Tomcat? This:

NOTE – If you use this approach, and wish to update your application later, you must both replace the web application archive file AND delete the expanded directory that Tomcat created, and then restart Tomcat, in order to reflect your changes.

Resin gets this right, why can’t you guys?

In a recent poll, a quarter of respondents said they believed that Iraq has used chemical or biological weapons during the war. I assume they’re the same people who think that Iraq masterminded the 9/11 attack.

I know that President Bush’s decision to tar those people who would examine the reasons why we invaded Iraq in light of the facts as they emerge as revisionist historians would stick in a lot of craws, being that it’s disrespectful to historians and to people who actually care about the truth. So I was just waiting for a real historian to write an op-ed explaining exactly what revisionist history is, and why there isn’t really any other kind.

William Saletan has a breakdown of John Edwards’ speech announcing his tax plan and it seems as though Edwards is putting forth a very interesting argument about the effect that Republican fiscal shenanigans are having on our economy. I’m glad to see that Democrats are starting to poke holes in the Bush record rather than just carping at each other. Yes, one of them has to prevail in the primaries, but they should all be working toward beating Bush in the general election as well. The Democrats have a disadvantage in that they have to do some infighting at first, but they have the advantage of all being able to land blows on Bush along the way. Hopefully some of the criticisms will stick when it comes down to it.

By the way, John Edwards really needs to work on the fact that his campaign home page is the #10 result from Google when you type in “john edwards” as your query. He comes in behind the host of Crossing Over and a run of the mill attack site put up under a convenient URL. Not good.

Aaron Swartz has published a cool toy on the Google Weblog that lets you preview the ads you’d have published on your site if you signed up for AdSense. Unfortunately, mine totally suck, they’re all for weblogging tools. I find that odd considering how little time I spend going meta. Talking Points Memo gets all ads for charity, and Rebecca Blood gets political and current events ads. I’m disappointed … what does Google know that I don’t?

Apropos of the Rob Enderle article that I pointed to the other day, Phil Greenspun’s proposed definition of professonalism for software engineers. Clearly Enderle prefers the old school definition.

This is a good thing.

Ed Cone interviewed Rick Boucher about Orrin Hatch’s bizarre comments on dealing with pirates, and he’s safely dismissive of them. Once again I’m glad that some people decided that Boucher belonged in Washington DC.

I’ve been using Mozilla Firebird as my main browser for the past couple of weeks, and at this point there’s probably no going back to plain old Mozilla. I had still been using Mozilla as my IMAP client, though, until a couple of people clued me into the fact that Mozilla Thunderbird has alpha builds available that are at roughly the same level of maturity as Firebird. I downloaded it earlier and I’m trying it out for email. I have to say that I like it pretty well, and once you install it, mailto links start working in Firebird as well. If I run into any catastrophic problems, I’ll report them.

Would it be wrong to refer to the foreign fighters who have gone to Iraq to assist the insurgents in kicking out the occupying US forces as a coalition of the willing?