Salon has an interview today with Bev Harris, who has spent the past year investigating flaws in electronic voting machines and the politics of the people who run the voting machine companies. I’ve seen her site and read lots about her, and I’m still not sure what I think about her reporting or what she’s reported. I think she’s someone people ought to be aware of, though.

Russell Beattie points out that the fact that you can build all sorts of fancy MVC-based applications in server-side Java doesn’t mean that you have to use that architecture if you prefer not to. You can always do things the PHP way with straight JSP and taglibs if you prefer it (and be just as productive as well). JSTL gets you to an almost ColdFusion-like level of simplicity. However, there’s a darn good reason to use Struts or another MVC framework on your projects — it makes things easier to maintain and expand down the road, and I haven’t worked on many applications that didn’t need to be maintained or expanded at some point.

Why are Karl Rove and his minions in the right wing press mounting a full court press of lies and distortions against Wesley Clark? Because he’s already leading their man in the polls.

SpamAssassin 2.60 is finally out. I installed it last night and it didn’t clear up the biggest problem I have — out of memory errors when I try to train the Bayesian filter. However, it does seem to be an improvement in other regards, and since the spammers are always trying to circumvent its rule set, it’s best to run the latest version at all times. Between SA and the Bayesian filter in Thunderbird, I get rid of just about every piece of spam I get without reading it, but when I read mail in my shell account (while I’m at work), I see the mail before Thunderbird goes over it with a fine toothed comb. If I can get the Bayesian filter in SA working properly, I may never see spam at all.

I was a bit disturbed to read this morning that the US government has decided to open every industry but oil in Iraq to foreign ownership. That struck me as a very poor idea (and a huge overstepping of our privileges as occupying power), and I was pleased to see that Juan Cole agrees.

So, relatively soon, I think I need to decide what to do with the software that “powers” this site. It’s a mishmash of Perl and PHP code that’s been written on an as-needed basis and some of the original parts date back to spring, 1999. As you have probably noticed, it’s missing some of the whizbang features that all the other kids have access to these days, like comments, trackback, categories, and other things along those lines.

The question at this point is whether it makes more sense to use one of the many fine weblogging packages out there to maintain this site, to add features to the current software, or to write all new software that has all the features that I want. I already have Movable Type downloaded and covertly installed in a directory on my Web host, I think I’m going to figure out whether it will meet my requirements. I looked at it the other day and found it lacking in some ways, but it may be worth settling on so that I don’t have to maintain this software myself.

Dr Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor has done some quantitative analysis of suicide terrorism, and found the following:

I have spent a year compiling a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 to 2001 — 188 in all. It includes any attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others, although I excluded attacks authorized by a national government, such as those by North Korea against the South. The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion (they have have committed 75 of the 188 incidents). Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

You’d think it would be impossible, but Sun’s EVP for software manages to boast about Sun’s Linux offering and spread huge amounts of anti-Linux FUD within the context of a single interview.

The Homes & Gardens piece on Hitler’s mountain retreat that has been floating around on the Internet made the New York Times today. I found the scanned article so wierd and fascinating that I mirrored it myself in case it went away. You have to give the New York Times props, in the article they come clean about their own friendly description (from 1938) of Hitler’s mountain hideaway.

Mark Hershberger has published a method of blocking virus-laden emails using procmail and ClamAV. If you’ve set up your own installation of SpamAssassin, this approach probably isn’t out of reach for you.