If, as has been asserted in many places recently, the real reasons for our invasion of Iraq were obscured by the bogus “WMD” argument because disclosing the real reasons would doom the mission to failure, then the real reasons were the worst kept secret in the history of the world. My vote still goes for selling the American people a product they would buy.

My vote for the best Tour de France wrap-up is the Daily Peloton’s Jambon Report.

There’s a new mozdev project that will hopefully enable people to write Java applications that use Mozilla (and XUL) for their interface. I assume this will be something like the hooks that let people write native GUI applications for Mac OS X in Java, and it seems like a good idea to me, particularly since Mozilla is cross platform just like Java is.

I only just now got around to reading A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, a collection of astute observations carefully documented by Clay Shirky. It’s not hard to arrive at the reason why there isn’t a comment facility on this site by reading it. I have no trouble with the technical issues, but I have a big problem with the social issues. The other day I was reading Anil Dash’s site, and in the comments for one of his items, someone had asked a question that really had nothing to do with the entry. It was just a general question addressed to Anil. If that were my site, I would have to go through and delete all such comments hastily, because they would offend me aesthetically. I don’t want to have to do that, so there’s no comment section on this site. It’s not that I don’t want to hear from people, on the contrary, I love hearing from people. I just don’t want to have to be the janitor for some kind of spontaneous community that exists to serve its own ends, and happens to have gathered on my site.

Matt Haughey pointed out the best 3k download I’ve ever seen: the Flash Click to View extension for Firebird and Mozilla. Instead of your browser showing Flash movies automatically, it replaces them with an empty box. To see them, just click on them.

It seems to me that whenever law enforcement begins using some new technology, I always have a negative reaction. All too often, technology makes it easier to invade people’s privacy or deprive them of liberties that they may have once cherished. So it’s good to see an information technology project in the UK that I think is actually an absolute positive. When child pornography is discovered, it’s been someone’s job to see whether the pictures are of a new victim or an existing victim, and to try to suss out hteir identity. Unfortunately, that generally meant that the person had the soul crushing task of scouring a database of child porn to try to make the determination (and I can imagine that such a process is incredibly inaccurate). So the British government is using pattern matching software to analyze new images and compare them to images in the database using a facial recognition algorithm. I heard on the radio this morning that they system even makes it possible to do things like identify siblings, which was much more difficult before.

Unlike the stupid idea of trying to identify terrorists in public places using facial recognition, the scope here is much more reasonable and much more likely to be effective. Nobody’s rights are being violated, and the system seems to have a real chance of helping to prevent the exploitation of children in this way. A system like this is also much better suited to enabling law enforcement agencies around the world check their photos against the central database, which is really useful given that there are no barriers to trafficking child pornography digitally.

Fred Kaplan has a list of recent questions that Democrats in Congress have proposed that we ask the administration. All of the useful ones were voted down (by Republicans, of course). I understand the need for secrecy in war, but none of these questions would provide information that should be hidden from us or from Congress. The allergy to accountability persists.

I just found out about the MyEclipse IDE for J2EE development today. It’s not a bad little package and it’s darned affordable.

I’ve paid a lot of attention here to the deceptions that were employed to goad this country into war, and not enough to the negligence on the part of the civilian leadership in preparing for the aftermath. Phil Carter published an item that discusses the poor planning and why we should have known better. Unfortunately, the historical lessons that showed that a large force was necessary for successful occupation were ignored in order to prove a point about how the military ought to be used. This, to me, is yet another huge reason why people ought not vote for Bush. The bottom line is that he placed his trust in people who place a higher priority on validating their preferred war fighting doctrine than on protecting American troops or successfully liberating the Iraqis.

The Houston Chronicle has an article about the ethics of bicycle racing, inspired by the widespread interest in the code that cyclists follow after the leaders waited for Lance Armstrong when he fell on Monday. I’ve followed the Tour de France since Lance Armstrong became ascendent, but this is the first year that I’ve really come to appreciate the ins and outs of the race. This year more than ever I’ve to appreciate it as being in many ways the most magnificent event in sports. If you’re interested in the race, you can’t go wrong with the Tour de France blog, either.

Update: the Houston Chronicle replaced the story about cycling’s unwritten rules that I liked to above with one about Tyler Hamilton’s stage win today. The article was originally published in the LA Times and can be found here on the Cincinnati Post site.