So the online game World of Warcraft is broken tonight, and it looks like a Web application running on Tomcat that’s built using the Spring framework is the culprit. These guys clearly need to familiarize themselves with the exception handling capabilities built into Spring so that they don’t spew their stacktraces at their customers. That’s just common dignity. Interestingly, it looks like they’re sending Oracle the wrong password, which is just weird for a production application.

Eric Umansky notices a couple of things about the most recent torture revelations that will turn your stomach.

The New York Review of Books has a piece on the coverage of the war in Iraq in the run up to the election in November. No surprises here, they find that news outlets pulled their punches for fear of persecution by people who beat them with the bias stick.

Here’s yet another urgent plea for help. I am working with someone who’s using a COM object from Microsoft called ServerXMLHTTP to call a Web service. I want to be able to write a simple console program to call a Web service in the same manner they’re calling it. Here’s the line of code they use in VB to instantiate the object:

set xml = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0")

The Server.CreateObject() method is an ASP/IIS thing, and I want to be able to run this code from a regular VB console program. Anyone know of a way to instantiate this object outside the context of IIS?

As is my custom, I’ve created a QuickTopic.

Update: Problem solved, I love you guys. (I’ve been working on this one for months, sporadically.)

Have you ever heard of a marketing executive that supported spending less money on marketing? Cindy McCaffrey, Google’s departing VP of marketing, deserves a spot in some kind of hall of fame.

Looks like the iPod Photo naysayers were right.

The military seems to have figured out how to contend with the constant attacks on convoys moving supplies around Iraq — transporting the supplies via air instead. It seems like this will reduce casualties, but what does it say about the success of the occupation that the military has decided that the roads are no longer safe enough for our convoys?

Oh, and here’s an Iraq question to ponder. When spinning the question about the lack of armored Humvees in Iraq, the military has made certain to point out that when we initially invaded, none of our Humvees were armored, and that now something like 2/3 of them have armor of one kind or another. It sort of makes you wonder why, given all this fresh new armor, our casualty rates continue to go up in Iraq, doesn’t it?

Well, Time magazine has insured that I’ll never subscribe to their publication.

Update: the thing that galls me most about the article is that Time uncritically accepts President Bush’s obsession with “freedom.” If I hear President Bush or one of his supporters sanctimoniously tell us that he believes in spreading democracy where people don’t believe it can happen, I think I’ll throw up. There’s more to building democracies than invading countries and promising to hold elections. Has democracy expanded in any country that we didn’t invade during President Bush’s watch?

So the military tested the missile defense system that’s supposed to be fully operational by the end of 2004 (that’s 15 days from now). The interceptor failed to launch. Need I say more?

Geof Stone, the author of a book called Perilous Times, is guest blogging at Larry Lessig’s blog right now on the topic of our threatened civil liberties. This is must-read material.

Also, on the subject of Larry Lessig, he’s stopped using a whitelist for spam control and started using a service implemented using a Bayesian filter. Glad to see he’s rejoining the good guys.