So after spending last week messing around with the Hibernate-centric features of the Spring framework, this week I’m immersing myself in Spring’s implementation of MVC. I can unreservedly recommend Spring for wrapping your persistence layer (whether it’s a framework like Hibernate or straight JDBC), even if you don’t get into the MVC stuff. So far the MVC stuff looks interesting as well, but I’m just starting to dig into it. I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing lots of job listings that ask for Spring experience. I’ve been seeing Struts in job descriptions for a couple of years, and lately I’ve been seing Hibernate here and there. I’d be willing to bet that Spring will start cropping up in the next 6 months or so. (I just found a couple of job listings on Dice that mention it already.) Since I’ve intentionally neglected EJB and I’ve never had the opportunity to pick up Weblogic or WebSphere experience, corporate adoption of the open source frameworks that I have immersed myself in is a big part of keeping me gainfully employed.

Tim Bray actually read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the lies that were told to justify invading Iraq, or if you prefer, the intelligence gathering that led to our decision to invade Iraq. His notes are interesting.

Andrew Brown has posed a simple geek test on his Web site — do you use Notepad. I fall into the most geeky category of using an alternative and being obsessive about which one it is (vim, for what it’s worth).

In a New York Times article, an Italian cooking instructor takes on low carb mania and says that one’s relationship with food is what really counts when it comes to staying thin. She points to the more active lifestyles of Italians, the fact that they generally eat smaller portions than Americans do, and their general appreciation of food as reasons why Italians stay thin without going on the various diet du jour. If you prefer it in scientific terms, if you eat less calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. Everything else is just details.

The National Endowment for the Arts is reporting that people of all ages and from all demographic backgrounds are reading fewer books than they were in 1992 and 1982. Apparently the electronic media is to blame. It doesn’t look like anti-intellectualism as a political blunt instrument will fall into disuse anytime soon.

So right after I praised Barbara Ehrenreich yesterday, Mark Schmitt throws some water on her with informed criticism of her account of the origins of the “liberal elite.”

Just in case you haven’t read about it anywhere else, if you use Mozilla, Firefox, or Thunderbird, you need to install a fix for an exploitable security problem. (Windows users only, naturally enough.)

So, if you’re not reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s columns in the New York Times, you’re missing out. I’ll echo all sorts of other people and say that the Times, or any other paper, needs to keep her on full time. Here’s a snippet from her column today, which in my opinion explifies great achievement in column writing:

And the menace posed by the elderly can only get worse, as ever more of them sink into debt. What’s eating up their nest eggs? In many cases, drugs.

It’s even better in context.

I am so jaded by the depths to which the Bush White House has sunk that I couldn’t even summon up any outrage when I read that they have tried to coerce the Pakistanis into capturing big name al-Qaeda leaders during the Democratic National Convention. I suppose people ought to know that this is going on. Here’s the gist of it:

A third source, an official who works under ISI’s director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis “have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must.” What’s more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: “The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq’s] meetings in Washington.” Says McCormack: “I’m aware of no such comment.” But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Wired News has a story today on weblogger burnout. As Dr. Tyrell said in Blade Runner, “The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.” I suspect that that’s why low wattage bloggers like myself can continue indefinitely.