Phil Carter: Comparing the junior officer evals of Bush and Kerry

I just noticed something odd: the book Programming Apache Axis, which Amazon.com says O’Reilly was to have published on March 1, isn’t mentioned anywhere on oreilly.com and is being reported as not yet released. (OK, I lied, the animal on the cover is mentioned on this page.) I’m hoping it’s a good book — I’ve been trying to do some stuff with Apache Axis, and both the docs and the library are pretty heinous.

Remember the other day when I found an AP article that described the practice among radical Sunnis of taking offense when their homes are raided? In this letter home from the Green Zone, we learn of an even more inexplicable aspect of Iraqi culture:

It is ingrained in the Iraqi psyche to keep a close hold on their own thoughts when surrounded by people with guns.

Something to think about next time you head out to Wal-Mart for some household necessities. Really this is an article for people who think that organized labor is an outmoded concept.

Anybody know how to write a regular expression that matches only if something isn’t between to other things? For example, I’d like one that matches “Dick Cheney is incompetent,” or “Dick Cheney seems incompetent,” but not “Dick Cheney is not incompetent.” In other words, match all sentences that begin with “Dick Cheney” and end with “incompetent” but that do not contain the word “not.”

Update: Someone let me know that what I needed was a zero-width negative look-ahead assertion, described here. (They actually sent me the code to do it, I had to look up the name, and report it here due to its hilarious length.)

Further update: Well, it looks like the technique mentioned before isn’t going to work for my actual case because I don’t know what the structure of the string is, other than that I know the beginning and end and one thing that might be in the middle. It’s going to have to be a two pass thing, it seems. To quote jwz, “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions’. Now they have two problems.”

The new Mozilla Thunderbird logo is very, very nice.

A java.net weblog entry today discusses RDD — Resume Driven Development. Don’t say you’ve never used this methodology …

Dan Bricklin is investigating the options available to the small scale entrepreneur wanting a career in software development. I’ll be monitoring his process closely.

I’ve been reading Iraqi weblogs lately, and I thought I’d give a brief survey of the ones I follow, in case anyone else is interested. They come from varying perspectives, and I find all of them fascinating. Some of them I find more depressing than others. One thing you’ll find is that the Iraqis who write these weblogs have mistaken impressions about America. I find them illuminating as well, because the impressions of America that Iraqis have are far more important than the truth in terms of whether or not we have any hope of leaving Iraq better off than we found it.

• Where is Raed? – Salam Pax’s weblog is, of course, the granddaddy of all of the Iraqi weblogs. He’s on hiatus right now.
• Raed in the Middle – The subject of Where is Raed? Raed is, at this point, for the withdrawal of all coalition forces from Iraq. Between the growing violence in Iraq and the latest developments in Israel, Raed is becoming increasingly hysterical. As he points out, he’s a secular leftist, not a conservative Islamist. The fact that we seem to have lost him completely is a bad sign.
• A Family in Baghdad – Written by Faiza, the mother of Raed (in the Middle). This is probably the most heartbreaking of the weblogs that I read. Faiza has grown children, a husband, and employees to worry about, and her worries come through in her posts. At this point she’s clearly anti-occupation.
• Baghdad Burning – Another of the old school Iraqi bloggers. Reliably anti-occupation, and reporter of rumors circulating among Iraqis.
• Healing Iraq – A pro-occupation weblog written by a dentist. He started his weblog explicitly to provide an alternative to the bad news reported by Riverbend at Baghdad Burning. He also has guest blogs.
• Iraq at a glance – The most reliably pro-occupation weblog I’ve found, run by another dentist, a friend of Zeyad at Healing Iraq. He also seems to be bigoted against the Shiites in Sadr City and elsewhere.
• Iraq the Model – Run by a doctor and two dentists. Also pro-occupation.
• The Mesopotamian – Yet another pro-occupation weblog. I think he has unrealistic expectations of what America can achieve in the short term, I fear disillusionment will soon follow.
• Hammorabi – Pro-occupation. Eager to see a return of public executions.

One thing I’ve seen all the Iraqi bloggers report is that they get email harassment from people who disagree with their viewpoint (including complaints of email viruses intentionally sent to them). The pro-occupation bloggers get email from anti-war types and vice versa. I think that’s sad.

When I checked the Iraqi blogs this morning, I was hoping to see reactions to the highway closings in Iraq, but nothing has been posted yet.

If you know of any other Iraqi weblogs I should be reading, please send email.

The ugly truth about information technology is that many IT projects are horrific failures, and it seems like the bigger a project is, the more likely it is to fail. Russell Beattie comments on a botched CRM upgrade that in essence killed AT&T Wireless. Why offshore? Because at least you’ll spend less money on that project that’s going to hurt your company anyway. I know that there’s a lot more to it, but the biggest problem is that people don’t like or trust the IT people they work with anyway, so it makes sense to pay them as little as possible. And they have a good reason not to like their IT people, which is that most of them are horrible.