Looks like some military lawyers are joining the fight over Alberto Gonzalez’ nomination as Attorney General based on his torture memos. They, unlike the Bush administration, understand that our adherence to international conventions on torture and the treatment of prisoners is a way to protect our own troops in conflicts to come.

This is the most deflating thing I’ve read lately.

John Battelle has an optimistic outlook on Google’s effort to digitize the libraries of the world’s foremost academic institutions.

Even as the woeful lack of equipment required by our troops in Iraq to reduce the chances that they’ll be killed on any given day has been all over the news lately, the ongoing revelations of torture all over the place in Iraq and Afghanistan go largely unmentioned outside the pages of newspapers. The zealous application of torture by American soldiers and civilians at the behest of the White House should have been the scandal that brought down the Bush administration, instead it’s just more background noise in the occupation of Iraq. I blame human nature.

Rands posted an article today about a type of engineer that I like to call a castle builder. Basically, a person who owns one critical piece of functionality for a system, never lets anyone else work on it, and thus have ensured themselves not only job security but also the right to go about their work basically untroubled. This type of person is the worst sort of software engineer. In the article, Rands talks about how this person, who thinks they have ironclad job security, is on the road to getting fired because other engineers are secretly working on code to replace his and thereby make this engineer’s closed system and the engineer themself obsolete. What I find interesting about the article is that I nearly always find myself in the latter category by instinct. If some person I work with has written something that they don’t want to share, my gut instinct is always to rewrite it and get management to throw out their stuff and use mine. Always. Sometimes that instinct serves me well, sometimes not so much.

We’re already back to bombing Fallujah. I’m speechless.

About a month ago, I mentioned an Economist article that argued that Republicans beat Democrats because they’re the party of hope, and I said I needed to think about it before writing anything. OK, I’ve thought about it.

The Republican party is not the party of hope, but rather the party of ignorance and denial. So is the Democratic party, to a lesser extent. The Republican party’s message in 2004 was to tell us that those things that are not sustainable are sustainable, and the things that are sustainable are not sustainable. What’s the big reform the Republicans pushed? Social Security privatization. Well, the truth is that Social Security is pretty much fine. It’s sustainable. Republicans tell us it’s on the verge of collapse. On the other hand, they tell us that the occupation of Iraq is sustainable. It is not. They tell us that the current levels of deficit spending are sustainable. They are not. They tell us that cheap gas prices, increasing sprawl, and our current levels of carbon emissions are sustainable. They are not. Nor is Medicare, which the Republicans don’t seem to want to address.

How this gets conflated with hope is beyond me. The real message from Republicans is to the upwardly mobile suburb dwellers who drive their massive SUVs from their McMansions to their jobs and back every day that their lifestyle is justified and will be available to them, their children, and their children’s children. And furthermore that all those poor people out there don’t have their own McMansions and massive SUVs because they lack the character to go out and grab the brass ring. That’s not a hopeful message, but it certainly sells well to the massive crowd of people who enjoy their cocoon.

Bill Moyers:

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge — to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

You may wonder about the significance of the title of this post. Tonight I was deploying an update of our application to the production server, and to finish the deployment, I restarted Tomcat and Apache. When I tried to access our Web service, I received the message “No Host matches server name,” followed by the hostname of our Web server. I was very confused, because this clearly looked like a configuration problem. I knew our systems administrator had been working on the configs, and I figured that he broke something and the problem didn’t show up until I restarted.

Having no idea how to fix this problem and not wanting to call my boss or the sysadmin late on a Sunday night, I instead turned to my old pal Google. I entered “No Host matches server name” as my search term (in quotes). Nothing useful was returned. This happens fairly frequently when I’m trying to find out what specific error messages are about.

My hope is that when this problem stings someone else, they won’t go unsatisfied as I have. The problem was actually caused by bad file permissions on the WAR file for my application. I put it in the Tomcat webapps directory, but it wasn’t readable by the Tomcat user, so Tomcat failed to deploy it. Somehow that got turned into the weird message that I received. Anyway, hopefully when someone searches Google for “No Host matches server name,” they’ll see this post at the top of the list and not have to bug their coworkers in the middle of the night, as I did.

Tim Bray: “One thing is sure: the Wikipedia dwarfs its critics.”