MozillaZine reports that a minor bug fix release for Firebird will be out this week. Firebird 0.6 has been languishing for awhile, so it’s good to see that an update is forthcoming. The one crash bug that I have problems with all the time is that the form helper sometimes gets stuck if you use the mouse after the combo box appears and crashes the browser. I’d like to see that fixed.

Update: looks like one of the main reasons for the 0.6.1 release is the autocomplete bug that I complained about.

I just realized this morning that George W Bush, 43rd President of the United States, and I have something in common (other than the fact that we’re both white boys who are for all intents and purposes from Texas). One thing that I’ve surmised about President Bush is that he simply cannot negotiate with or even countenance people who he finds personally repugnant. I think that’s one of the key reasons why we aren’t doing anything about North Korea. We can’t just attack them (especially not right now when the military is busy), and I don’t believe President Bush can bring himself to negotiate in good faith with the likes of Kim Jong Il. Similarly, I think that was the key reason for Bush’s policy of freezing out Yasser Arafat. He thinks Arafat is a scumbag and he can’t bring himself to work with him. (Unlike our non-approach to North Korea, the decision to cut Arafat loose is looking pretty smart.)

I find in myself the same tendency to utterly avoid people who I think are of low character or who seem to me to be absent ethics. There’s no accounting for taste. President Bush surrounds himself with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others who seem extremely distasteful to me, but that’s beside the point. There are people in the world of weblogging (and general online writing) that I have become acquainted with online or in real life whose writings I simply cannot read, regardless of how many people point to them or how well regarded they are, even if I generally agree with them. That’s because in my perception, they’re major jerks. Indeed, when I do follow a link to their sites every now and then, it’s all I can do not to hop over to my own site, and write up a big rant about what jerks they are so that all the world (or at least, the minute percentage of the world that actually visits this site) can know what I know about the members of my own personal axis of evil.

That would be petty, though, so instead I just stew in my own juices. One thing I do know for sure is that my incredible revulsion when confronted with the idea of dealing with people I don’t respect would make me a bad President. I might make an OK dictator though.

Here’s the text of a spam I received today:

This is worth checking out… please pass it on.

—– Original Message —–
From: Amy Bryant
To: Sharron Kelly
Cc: Karla Anderson; [email protected]; [email protected]; Andrea Manning; Bill Barnes; Mark and Karen Whyte-Iowa; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; Laura Clark-Glacial
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 10:20 AM
Subject: concerned parent

There is a large problem facing our nation that we all need to work together to fix. My children have received pornographic emails and I want it to stop. I found this site, www.remove.org that stops Spam and pornographic material in emails. We need to make sure that everyone knows there is a way to stop these emails.

Please forward this to everyone you know so that we can stop this huge problem for good.

Thanks

Yes, it’s spam disguised as one of those well meaning but moronic emails that are so often forwarded around. That truly fills me with hatred.

Update: a reader pointed out that the spammers at remove.org are listed in an anti-spam category at dmoz. They want you to pay them $9.95 a year and I’d guess that the only spam you won’t get any more is spam from them. That might not even be true.

Russell Beattie has found a job listed on Monster that he really wants, so he posted it on his weblog and asked for any help people could offer in terms of networking. I’ve often been tempted to use this site for networking purposes, but other than mentioning it when appropriate, I never have. Believe me, I’ve been tempted though. (I have requested and received much useful advice, which I greatly appreciate.)

The big news today is the possible killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein in a villa in Mosul after a four hour firefight. Obviously there’s no way to know whether they are really among the dead, or what really happened at all, but the news I have read leaves me buzzing with questions. If they are dead, it’s a shame that we couldn’t capture them alive. They probably have a lot of information that we’d like, and I would like to see them held to account for the atrocities for which they were responsible. Anyway, on with the question.

Reports indicate that the fight included up to 200 US soldiers and took for hours, but they also say that there were only five dead and five wounded Iraqis. I also heard on the BBC that the bodies were charred beyond recognition. None of that seems to match up. How could 10 Iraqis holed up in a residence hold out against 200 soldiers? If there were survivors, how did they survive while the people who they were supposed to be guarding with their lives get burned beyond recognition? Anyway there’s probably no point in paying attention to the news right now since it’s almost certain that everything being reported is inaccurate.

I have a little voice inside my head that oftentimes speaks up when I read something good about some new technology. For example, someone said that TopLink looked impressive, and my little voice told me that Hibernate was fine and that I shouldn’t bother myself with a commercial product that’s probably bloated, overengineered, and messily implemented. Before that, when people told me about other persistence layers, my little voice told me that there’s merit to hand coding all your JDBC calls and that using a persistence layer is for the weak. I could cite many more examples, but you get the idea.

What I’ve learned is that I will get furthest in my career by doing exactly the opposite of what that little voice tells me. I think it’s a response to the rapidity of change in the IT industry and my fear of not being able to keep up. By arbitrarily reducing the number of things I need to know about, I can feel secure about the things that I do know. Unfortunately, listening to the little voice has often left me beind where I need to be in some cases. I was behind in learning how to use JUnit, behind in learning how to use persistence frameworks, and I’m still not where I want to be with EJB.

The reason I bring this up is that if you have a similar little voice, I’d advice you to pay close attention to it and then do exactly the opposite as well.

Steven Den Beste presents the detailed argument of why we went to war with Iraq, what we hoped to accomplish, and why the deceptions by the Bush administration leading up to the war weren’t a big deal. He and I have something in common — we know the real reasons why we invaded Iraq, and they didn’t have much to do with so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” I think Den Beste gives the Bush administration too much credit in assuming that they share his master plan, but he’s certainly right in saying that the real reason for the invasion was to shove the whole Middle East in a different direction.

Unfortunately, his view of the war, or more importantly, the politics surrounding the war, are a bit too academic. Bush faced a tough task in getting the war that he wanted, and that was convincing us that it was necessary. Tony Blair faced the same task with the British people, he failed, and he went to war anyway. The thing of it is, Bush could have chosen to reveal the real reasoning to the world (instead of the wink and a nudge approach that was taken), but he didn’t. He could have told us about how the situation as it stood with Iraq was utterly unsustainable (which it was), or about how improving the situation for the people of Iraq would create a chain of events that would improve the lives of many people in the Middle East (which it might), but he didn’t. Instead he told us scary stories about bogus ties between Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime and about the weapons that Iraq was supposed to have been amassing. Not retaining the technology to someday make, not letting rot somewhere hidden, but amassing for use by terrorists or for immediate deployment against Iraq’s enemies. The UN didn’t buy it, the American people did.

The Bush administration didn’t like the odds of being forthright with us, and so they went another route. Now it’s time to follow that route to the logical conclusion. You can’t start a war based on a premise and then come around after it’s over and say, “Who cares if that was bogus? Based on the real reason for the war, things are going great!” Well, actually, you can. The question is whether or not people are willing to go along with it.

President Bush decided that it was perfectly OK to start a war based on violations of UN sanctions without getting the approval of the UN ourselves. He decided that invading Iraq was more important than keeping our alliances in good repair. The reason people accepted that is that they were told that Iraq presented an immediate threat to the United States, and that Iraq’s weapons and their ability to hand them out were the basis of that threat. Regardless of how well the reconstruction goes (I hope it goes incredibly well, although signs are mixed at best right now), and regardless of how much it costs (it’s been very expensive, and will grow more expensive as we have to enlarge our military to cover our new commitments), and regardless of the long term impact on our military capabilities, there must be a political accounting for the things we were told before we went down this path, and for what it has cost us.

Those are the aspects that Den Beste ignores in his analysis. He’s right in that in terms of the real reasons for the war, all the controversy about lies in the State of the Union, and the Bush administration’s mistreatment of the CIA are completely irrelevant. But there are millions of people out there who supported this war based on the reasons that they were told, and not the reasons that were discussed publicly but outside the public eye, and who are only now coming around to the fact that they believed a line of BS and that the war has to be evaluated based on a different set of metrics.

New Eclipse features are arriving at a furious pace in the milestone builds of 3.0. My main Eclipse installation is using a plug in that won’t work with the 3.0 builds but maybe I’ll give 3.0 a try on a secondary machine.

Looks like all that prewar intelligence that were used to talk about Iraq’s weapons programs were just extrapolation from really old data.

Insert obligatory joke about bipartisanship here. The most surprising bit in the article: it was a Democrat who called a Republican a fruitcake. I would have thought for sure that it was the opposite.