Tim Bray on sharecropping.

Update: Hanan Cohen wrote a piece last week that makes a similar point.

Matthew Baldwin explains why perpetual copyrights are a bad idea quite cleverly in a piece for The Morning News. I think it’s probably obvious to most people that allowing Disney to repeatedly extend their own copyrights even as they hypocritically plunder the public domain for fun and profit is a horrible thing, but maybe there are some people who aren’t yet sufficiently alarmed.

Jef Raskin (former Apple human interface guru) has an opinion piece about poor interface design when it comes to IDEs. He has some points that all UI designers should investigate, but I think that things are also not quite as bad as he makes them seen. Right now, we’re entering the golden age of Java IDEs and programming tools. Compared to when I started working in Java a lot less than four years ago, IDEs have improved by ordes of magnitude. When I got started, the IDE that made my life easiest was the Java Development Environment for Emacs. These days, there are a number of good IDEs to choose from. There are also helpful tools like XDoclet that reduce the amount of code you have to write and make your applications more maintainable as well. There’s a long way to go in the world or programming tools, but it’s a very competitive market and real innovation is happening all the time.

At the end of the article, he talks about the high barrier to entry for today’s programmers compared to the good old days of the Apple II. In response to that, I’d point out Python. Just the other day I posted a bit of Python code here that will ping weblogs.com and blo.gs using XML-RPC. It was ridiculously simple and straightforward, and with Python I could have just as easily typed that code into the built in interactive shell. I think that with the modern scripting languages in many ways we’ve come full circle to the days when you could boot up your computer and just punch in a BASIC program and see it run. Except now these languages ship with massive libraries that enable you to type in a few lines of code that make lots and lots of really useful things happen, instead of just printing the same thing over and over or drawing a simple shape on the screen.

Hey ColdFusion developers, turn those frowns upside down, you were right all along. The linked piece explains why it may not be such a good idea to port your CFML applications to Java. There are definitely some good generic points made about the costs in time and knowledge of dumping one platform in favor of another, but those apply whether you’re moving from J2EE to CFML or vice versa.

The really disingenuous bit in the article says that JSP is becoming more like CFML (true), so why bother moving to it (false). They’ve adding some syntactic sugar to JSP to make it more like CFML, which is a nice thing for developers (there are some great things about CFML), but that just means that you get all the flexibility, power, and most importantly, structure of Java with something resembling the ease of use of CFML.

One thing I’d agree with is that if you’re not going to use a framework of some kind and implement your apps following the Model-View-Controller pattern (or some other pattern that lets you keep all your business logic away from your presentation templates), there’s absolutely no reason to move from CFML to JSP. Crap is crap, regardless of the language it’s implemented in.

I have a huge number of author copies of various books I’ve written or have worked on. I’m in the process of listing them on half.com if you want a good deal on any of them.

Today’s Papers has a pretty good rundown on the current state of the African uranium scandal. Josh Marshall has been doing a great job on this story as well.

Salon has an update on the ongoing humiliation of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial today. Moussaoui, in addition to being a mentally ill would be terrorist, is also the poster child for the government’s efforts to shred the Constitution. The idea of military tribunals makes me ill, and I’m hoping that the government does decide to move the Moussaoui trial out of civilian courts to the secret military tribunals because it will illustrate clearly just what a flawed and disgusting idea that they are. If we are unable to secure a conviction in a real court and we move the procedure to a secret court where the prosecution gets to dictate the rights granted to the defendant, what does it say for the US justice system, other than that it puts us on par with countries that our president likes to refer to as evil.

Update: The Economist has an editorial about the military tribunals. The lede breaks it down pretty well:

You are taken prisoner in Afghanistan, bound and gagged, flown to the other side of the world and then imprisoned for months in solitary confinement punctuated by interrogations during which you have no legal advice. Finally, you are told what is to be your fate: a trial before a panel of military officers. Your defence lawyer will also be a military officer, and anything you say to him can be recorded. Your trial might be held in secret. You might not be told all the evidence against you. You might be sentenced to death. If you are convicted, you can appeal, but only to yet another panel of military officers. Your ultimate right of appeal is not to a judge but to politicians who have already called everyone in the prison where you are held “killers” and the “worst of the worst”. Even if you are acquitted, or if your appeal against conviction succeeds, you might not go free. Instead you could be returned to your cell and held indefinitely as an “enemy combatant”.

An article I wrote for OnJava.com was published on Wednesday. It’s called Creating Email Templates with XML, and it explains how to use JavaMail and the Commons Digester package from Jakarta to create email templates using XML (instead of property files). It’s the first thing I’ve ever gotten paid to write about Java.

Adam Curry has posted a follow up for his pro-RSS item that I commented on previously. I still don’t think he’s quite got things in hand, but I understand reticence regarding the pain of moving from one format to the other. As Tristan Louis demonstrates, though, moving from an old format to the new one in this case is pretty darn straightforward (being that both are based on eminently parseable and transformable XML). I feel like his worries about the format falling under the control of some nefarious entity are less well founded. And concerns about marketing are completely misplaced. Despite the inordinate amount of attention being paid to this project, it’s not really of interest to that many people. There’s about as much need for the marketing of the yet to be named syndication format and weblog API as there is for a huge campaign to kick off the release of an updated RFC for SMTP. It’s plumbing that most people just shouldn’t even have to think about. If you don’t write an aggregator or weblog publishing tool, move along.

I’m a bit confused by the fact that Mozilla is preparing the first alpha release for 1.5 despite the fact that it won’t be the new combination of Firebird and Thunderbird that future releases of Mozilla will eventually be. I thought that 1.5 release was where that transition was going to be made, but I guess that’s not the case. (It wouldn’t make much sense for the 1.5 alpha to be the old Mozilla Applications Suite and for the beta to be Firebird, would it?) Anyway, I’ve been using both Firebird for browsing and Thunderbird for mail for a few weeks now, and despite the fact that they’re theoretically pre-alpha, I haven’t had any problems with them to speak of. Thunderbird is still a bit rough around the edges in terms of fit and finish, but not in terms of stability. It hasn’t munged my IMAP email at all, and I don’t think it has crashed once.

Looking at the roadmap, I’m thinking that version 1.5 will concentrate on items 4 and 5 under the heading “a new roadmap.”