So for the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about the range of possibilities for Republicans who are dissatisfied with President Bush by trying to put myself in their shoes. It’s obvious to me that President Bush has done a horrible job, and I think that many Republicans have their doubts about him as well. I could go into the reasons why, but you already know what they are. I’ve been trying to think about what I would do in 2008 if John Kerry is elected this year, and he does a terrible job (by my standards) for the next four years.

The odds are very low that I’d vote for a Republican for President, especially if the nominee were an orthodox Republican. No matter how bad a job a Democrat does, I’d be very unlikely to vote to hand the country over to someone who I had fundamental philosophical disagreements with. And, given that I would be unwilling to vote for a Republican, cognitive dissonance would almost certainly compel me to rationalize Kerry’s faults because I’d be voting for him anyway and it’s hard to make yourself vote for someone you detest.

So, I have to say that I can understand where many Republicans are on Bush, because I’d probably be in the same place if the President were an incompetent Democrat.

Courtesy of Jeanne d’Arc, something to think about:

The second thing that bothered me, even though it was coming from people who felt the power of that call to progressive values and didn’t try to spin it away, was the emphasis on Obama as a “star.” Folks, this isn’t American Idol. I do not want to hear one more time that we witnessed the political birth of the first African American president. He will be or he won’t be, but Obama’s career plans are the least important thing to care about here. (Although Atrios, as usual, has his eyes on the prize, and points out that a little money thrown in Obama’s direction would increase his influence — a very good thing.) I’m trying to imagine anyone ever listening to RFK or Dr. King speak and respond by saying, “Well, that’s certainly going to do wonders for his career.”

How about what it would mean to the country to act as if we really believed in those ideals?

So one of my coworkers asked me if I had an example Struts application he could look at so he could get a feel for Struts. He’s an experienced Java developer, but doesn’t seem to have had much experience with J2EE. I had the Struts source on my hard drive, so I emailed him a zip file with the Web application files (JSPs, configs, and so forth), and the source to the supporting classes. He had already downloaded the Struts distribution, so he set about figuring it out. After he asked a few questions, I realized that if you aren’t intimately familiar with the structure of a J2EE web application, there’s a lot in there that’s not all that intuitive.

Not long after, he complained about not being able to build it. I told him he needed all of the supporting JAR files for Struts in addition to struts.jar. I realized that there are a lot of Jakarta JAR files that are packaged with just about every open source framework that most people aren’t familiar with. On my latest application where I’m using Hibernate and Spring, it seems like there are about 40 supporting JAR files.

Anyway, he started putting all of the JAR files into his classpath environment variable, and quickly overran the size that Windows allows. So at that point I asked him why he didn’t use an IDE to manage his libraries. He had NetBeans installed, but I told him I’d never used it — I told him I used Eclipse. He downloaded Eclipse and after unpacking it, immediately ran into problems.

I went over to check it out, and saw that he expected his source files to already be available within Eclipse. I told him that Eclipse preferred to manage files itself, and that he needed to create a new project and import his files. When I tried to drag the files into Eclipse, it didn’t work. I quit Eclipse and saw a bunch of Eclipse project files in the source directory I was trying to import, and realized that he had set the workspace directory to the directory where his files already were. That’s why he expected to be able to see them within Eclipse. Makes sense, right? Needless to say I had to explain that he needed to set his workspace directory to someplace clean and then import his files to that directory.

Once we created a new project, deleted the default source directory, created a new directory for source and then moved the output directory elsewhere, we added all the external jars to the project and got everything to build. Then he wanted to know how to edit the JSPs, and I had to explain that you could import the JSPs and config files into Eclipse, but that there was no special facility for editing them or managing them in any way built in. I abashedly told him that I used MyEclipse for that stuff, and that it was only $30. I didn’t have the heart to go on to explain that they have a Web tools project for Eclipse that’s just getting off the ground. I then explained that you could write an Ant build file to deploy the application to Tomcat and that there was a Tomcat launcher plugin for Eclipse, but that didn’t help much, since hasn’t used Ant.

All of this stuff seems like such second nature to me that I was amazed when it took so much work to get another developer up and running even to such a minimal extent. On the other hand, it did make me feel like I know some stuff that not everybody knows.

Novelist Jane Smiley has had several letters published in the New York times over the past few years, and she confesses to writing the paper every day. Out of the hundreds she must have sent, nine have been published. Clearly she needs a weblog, where you can blather every day and get published every time.

Scott Rosenberg makes a good and obvious point about software today — it decays. In response to an economic argument that software does not decay in the same way that manufactured goods do, he points out that installations of software do become more and more iffy over time. Beyond that, hardware marches on, as does other software. You can grab Netscape 3 from Evolt and run it, but will it really work very well on a new computer running Windows XP? Or you can run Firefox on Windows 98, but will you be able to use that USB 2 DVD burner that you’ve been wanting? And how about that new Bluetooth phone you have? Will you be able to share data with your desktop apps? These considerations are less important when it comes to large business applications, but they’re still there. Generally there’s enough money involved that you can write adapters to tie your old applications to the latest and greatest front end rather than migrating to something new, but isn’t that true in industry as well? I doubt that automotive factories or power plants upgrade all of their machinery very often. New factories or plants get built with the latest technology (just like new applications) but the old installations go on in maintenance mode forever.

Andrew Brown: Where the money went. A must read.

So today I was surprised to see Google return a “service not available” error when I attempted a search. I was so surprised, in fact, that I wanted to take a screen shot of it. I didn’t have my favorite free screen shot tool installed on my computer at work, and I didn’t remember how to capture a screen shot using the built in facility, so I naturally tried to search for the tool I wanted to download using Google. Of course that failed, so I immediately closed Firefox and opened Internet Explorer to try again. That gives you an idea of the relative reliability of browsers as compared to Google — before IE finished launching I realized that what I wanted was a different search engine, not a different browser, and not long after that I realized I could get the screen capture tool at irfanview.com.

I’ve since read that the problem is a new email virus that finds domain names in the address book on the infected computer and then uses search engines to find other email addresses at those domains. Apparently so many computers have become infected that the virus is actually working as a denial of service attack on Google. I’m still not sure this Internet thing is going to work out.

You know you’ve really arrived in the software industry when the trade mags think it’s important that you’ve changed jobs.

One of the picodebates in the world of weblog syndication is whether aggregators belong in your email client (like NewsGator) or in your browser (like the aggregator that’s going to be built into Safari). The Mozilla group seems to be voting for email, given that Thunderbird is going to include an RSS aggregator in the next release. On the other hand, there’s also an RSS aggregator for Firefox, so I guess you’d call the Mozilla group agnostic, or maybe confused. That’s the open source world for you.

Think Mozilla isn’t gaining traction? Check out this anecdote.