A Washington Post reporter describes troubles encountered on the way to his recent visit to Fallujah:

Fallujah byways are a hell of roadside bombs and ambushes. On Friday, an armored sport-utility vehicle carrying this Washington Post reporter and his driver was attacked close to Fallujah on the main highway to Baghdad. Four men in an orange-and-white taxi pumped dozens of bullets from AK-47 assault rifles into the vehicle for more than two minutes, each round causing a loud thump on the vehicle’s metal plating and reinforced windows. They shot from behind, from in front and from the sides, where their determined frowns and mustached faces were clearly visible, as they and we weaved down the highway at 90 mph. The fusillade stopped when the SUV, its back tires missing and its rear windows shattered, spun out of control. The gunmen sped down the road, evidently thinking their mission was accomplished. Neither the driver nor the reporter was injured.

Read the whole story, if only to read about their harrowing escape from town and second encounter with the taxi of death.

TheyWorkForYou.com blows me away. It’s a Web site that keeps track of the UK Parliament, and I mean really keeps track of it. Full transcripts of many Parliamentary debates are posted, and users of the site can comment just about anywhere. The individual pages for members of Parliament are incredibly useful. The site also has an extensive help system that explains what’s going on if you don’t know the ins and outs of Parliament. I don’t know if weblogs are going to change the world of politics, but sites like this one probably will. TheyWorkForYou.com is an amazing effort in the tradition of Fundrace and opensecrets.org. We desperately need an American version.

Nigritude Ultramarine. I’m doing this only because Anil Dash dissed the iPod in his gadget bag feature at Gizmodo, and I think the iPod is the best thing since sliced bread. If he wins the iPod, he’ll come to agree with me. The only thing that runs on electricity that I love more than my iPod is my Tivo.

Scott Rosenberg gets it.

Sometimes you just have to look at the way things shake out and think, “I win.” This happens to me so very rarely that this feling is utterly alien to me, but I can now tell you that it feels pretty good. After years of writing my own code to copy values in Java objects to relational databases, I realized that I needed to take a good hard look at what was out on the market and see if I couldn’t simplify my life.

There were a lot of object-relational tools out there, everything from TopLink to Castor to EJB’s entity beans, to the standards-driven JDO. After a very unscientific survey of the market, I chose Hibernate. It seemed like a good choice to me because I could understand how it worked without reading a whole lot about it, because it didn’t require anything but including a few libraries with your application, and because it had good XDoclet support.

As it turns out, the people deciding how EJB 3.0 should work agreed with me. I read an EJB book last year and found persistence as defined in EJB 2.0 to be horrifyingly complex. Apparently, the EJB 3.0 expert group agrees with me, as they’ve chosen Hibernate 3.0 as the persistence implementation for EJB 3.0. For me, that’s great news. I already know Hibernate really well, and am quite fond of it, so this puts me ahead of the curve for once. Supporters of other options are not so pleased. The author of the column, a JDO proponent (I wanted to like JDO, I really did, but the timing wasn’t right or something), is quite bitter about the whole situation. Unfortunately, he’s ignorant when it comes to Hibernate:

IBM and Oracle are two major players in the EJB app server space that one would expect to be at least leery of the EJB 3.0 expert group’s choice. However, as database vendors also, they probably prefer Hibernate to JDO because it uses the SQL syntax of the underlying RDBMs–which allows applications to be locked in to a specific database vendor. Members of the JDO community suspect that JDO’s portability across databases–preventing vendor lock-in–is a primary reason for IBM and Oracle opposing JDO. Maybe these vendors are willing to concede a portion of their application server market share to JBoss in exchange for having applications locked into their underlying database systems.

What the author doesn’t know is that migrating from one database to another is a no brainer with Hibernate. You just tell it to use a different SQL dialect and the conversion is transparent.

He also seems to be rather disturbed at the idea that Hibernate is not standardized. Given that Hibernate is licensed under the LGPL, that doesn’t seem like too great a concern. The fact that EJB 3.0 is going to be focused on persistence of plain old Java objects rather than the cumbersome entity bean approach taken in EJB 2.0 is a win for developers, and the fact that Hibernate is the mechanism they’ve chosen is a win for me. Today is a good day for your humble author.

Remember when we helped some Afghan warlords “liberate” their country from the Taliban? After five employees of Doctors Without Borders were murdered yesterday by the reconstituted Taliban, the group has decided to suspend operations in Afghanistan.

Not for the squeamish: the submissions for the Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest. The nominees leave me depressed about humanity.

You must read Dahlia Lithwick’s piece on the Justice Department’s release yesterday of information about what a bad guy Jose Padilla is. The current administration really doesn’t give a crap about the Constitution, and they’re not shy about reminding us.

Must read weblog post of the day: Eavesdropping on the president (from the Slacktivist, as is often the case).

Russell Beattie posted some useful Tomcat tips on Monday. For what it’s worth, I nearly always run Tomcat 5 in the Eclipse debugger using the MyEclipse IDE.