Jay Rosen has a good piece on how the Bush administration treated everything said by people who were against going to war as being without value. This really goes back to Josh Marshall’s piece from last September, The Post-Modern President. The administration assumes that if someone disagrees with them, then they don’t have any good points to make. This kind of thinking has led us to failure in Iraq, but I’m interested in it as a warning to everyone. I think that just about everyone faces the temptation of dismissing the things people who disagree with them say, and justifying it by focusing on their motives rather than on their argument.

As a Java developer, my temptation is to avoid reading about .Net at all, and, when I do read them, to assume that anything good the writers say about .Net or anything bad they say about Java is just a product of their bias. Cramming a mental crowbar into your head and reading that stuff with an open mind is difficult and unpleasant, but I know that doing so will make me a better developer. When I look back at all the things I’ve believed to be true over the course of my life, my overall level of confidence in my current opinions is reduced, and I think that would be true for most people if they did the same thing.

There was a time when I thought Macintosh computers were silly little toys. There was a time when I thought that nobody with any sense would use anything but a Mac. Now I use a PC running Windows XP (but I want a Powerbook). There was a time when I thought that a software developer had to be a fool to use an IDE instead of a good text editor and command line tools. Now I think that IDEs are amazing productivity tools for developers. I’ve been both vastly more conservative and vastly more liberal than I am right now. Dismissing people that I don’t agree with would truly be an exhibition of arrogance and ignorance, and that’s how I see it in other people as well.

I read an item at James Robertson’s weblog about hiring programmers that mentions that domain experience is more important than experience with a particular programming language. He also points to an item that argues that to test prospective programmers you should have them write a single page essay to gauge their ability to communicate effectively, structure things logically, and to rate their attention to detail. I’m pretty much an avowed generalist. I pride myself on my ability to learn new things, and think that the ability to learn is the most important ability for anyone to have. At the same time, the more Java programming I do, the more I think that if you took an experienced programmer in another language and threw them at Java, they’d still have a huge learning curve, and I think that’s true regardless of language. Every day I program in Java I learn more about the class library, more about frameworks I can use to save me time, and more about how Java applications should be written. It didn’t take me a long time to learn enough Java to work on other people’s programs, but my level of ability now, four years in doesn’t even compare with what it was two years ago. So the bottom line is that it’s probably OK to hire people who are smart if they don’t know the language the project is written in, but the project will probably fail unless there are some experts around to mentor them and police their work. I can see why, in these times when supply far oustrips demand when it comes to labor, companies are insisting on hiring people with specific expertise. There’s not much reason not to.

Jason Levine has posted a rundown of his anti-spam regimen. I run SpamAssassin with the Bayesian filter turned on and I also use the Bayesian filter in Mozilla Thunderbird to get rid of spam that makes it past SA. That winnows down the boatload of spam I get every day to maybe half a dozen messages or so. I hate getting even that much spam, but the only options beyond that are to use a challenge-response system or change my email address. I refuse to do either. As much as I hate spam, I hate the idea of letting some greedy scumbags take the online identity that I’ve established over many years away from me.

The New York Times reports that miserable bastards like myself are less likely to be bigoted than those happy people you hear so much about. Here’s the money quote:

The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments — like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he’s a member of a minority group. Why? Nobody’s sure. One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ”everything is fine” attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes — including malicious ones.

As the character Annie Savoy in the movie Bull Durham said, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”

First, the bad news. Then the good news.

A new industry association has been formed to promote reformation of the DMCA.

Back on May 26, I wrote about Eric Sink’s response to Microsoft’s announcement of a version control system that will compete with his company’s primary product. Today he follows up by describing his feelings on Microsoft’s product plans in more detail.

Today I found the dumbest bug in my code ever. I just wanted to get this date down. June 20, 2004.

If you get a chance, definitely read the speech on DRM that Cory Doctorow presented at Microsoft Research. The privilege of copyright holders to oppress the rest of us in the name of the mighty dollar is something that should worry everyone. Even if you never consume something copy-protected in your entire life, copy protection still affects you. I really think that most of this DRM business is an out and out attack on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence — their profits are more important that our freedom, and I mean that in a very practical way.

Jason Kottke issues a simple plea for software makers to include screen shots of their product on their Web site. I cannot agree with this more. When I go to look for software, whether it’s commercial, open source, or web-based, the number one thing I look for is screen shots. If I can’t find any, there’s a very good chance that I will research your product no further, regardless of how good it is.