Christopher Allbritton has written a remembrance of aid worker Marla Ruzicka, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq on April 16.

There’s a big gaping hole in my experience when it comes to software engineering, and that’s coping with scalability issues. I suspect that this is true for many software engineers. I’ve written lots of applications and seen them deployed, but only rarely have I run into problems with scalability, and most of those were trivial to fix (bad SQL is a common culprit).

The thing is, you can only get experience with this class of problems by being out in the real world and building applications that outstrip their capacity in terms of processor usage, or bandwidth, or data storage. On the application I’m currently working on, the database is getting fairly large, and I expect it to get a whole lot bigger over the rest of the year.

I’m already running into problems with latency on some queries. The problems initially started showing up when I was running certain queries with Hibernate, and I’m reading Hibernate in Action to make sure that I’ve configureed it optimally (and to bone up on my Hibernate knowledge in general). Now some reports are getting slower, and it looks like I’m going to have to turn myself into a MySQL DBA. Off I go to order High Performance MySQL so that I can make sure our database is running like it should.

Even though these kinds of problems are a pain, it’s also pretty exhilerating to deal with this sort of thing. For one thing, it means that the application is seeing lots of use, and for another, these are the kinds of problems that are interesting to solve, because they’re like detective work. Right now, I’m in the phase of problem solving where I’m trying to figure out the best way to instrument the application. There’s no sense in turning the knobs until I get an idea of exactly what I’m dealing with.

Don Park notes that integrating the Adobe product line with the Macromedia product line is liable to be a bear for engineering reasons.

Update: I’m willing to give the last word on this to Joe Gregorio.

Slate’s Robert Wright explains why liberals should read Thomas Friedman’s new book on globalization:

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blockquote> If the left is to develop a rival narrative, it will have to honestly address the realities of both globalization and terrorism. Friedman’s book portrays both acutely

Let’s say that as part of my job, I sent a report to my boss every week charting my progress. What would my boss say if, after a couple of weeks of bad reports, I decided to just stop sending the report? Well, the State Department has decided to stop publishing its annual report on terrorism after last year’s report indicated that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since they started publishing the report in 1985. In theory, voters are the boss in this scenario. Think we’ll do anything about it?

This weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Wake County Democratic Party as a delegate. The main purpose of the meeting was to elect new county officers and select representatives for the Congressional district meetings and various planning boards, and to go over a bunch of resolutions that make up a quasi-platform.

Democrats in Wake County are probably not as demoralized as Democrats nationwide. Raleigh has a progressive Democratic mayor, who was in attendance and is well liked (he’s up for reelection in 2005). Wake County is split among three Congressional districts, all represented by Democrats, and in North Carolina the Democrats expanded their majorities in the State House and Senate in 2004. North Carolina’s Democratic governor was reelected in 2004 as well. Even though Bush carried North Carolina, and the absurdly popular (among Democrats) Erskine Bowles lost his Senate election to Richard Burr, Democrats in North Carolina have a lot to be proud of.

The election of officers was uneventful. The main players headed off any actual voting by creating a power sharing agreement where the two candidates for chairman agreed that the party insider candidate would be Chairman and the up and comer (a Howard Dean supporter) would take one of the vice chair positions. So the entire slate of officers was elected by acclamation.

As for representatives to the district meetings, there are so many slots that every county delegate gets to be a district delegate. There were eighty-something resolutions to consider, ranging from recommendations for Social Security to minute changes to how the county party is run. I have no idea what happens to them when all is said and done, but given how they were treated, I think very little. A speaker read the names of each of the resolutions (we were supposed to read the resolutions themselves before we got there), and if anyone at the meeting objected to a resolution, it was dropped. I think 10 successfully made it through without objection.

Wake County is split among three Congressional districts, and all three seats are held by Democrats, and each of the House members was there to give a speech. David Price, whose tone is almost professorial, talked about “arrogance of power” among Republicans and lambased the Republicans for their all out assault on the Judicial Branch. Tom DeLay was mentioned, of course.

Brad Miller was the next speaker, and his speech was mainly about getting the Democratic old timers and the new people to work well together. He reminded everyone that most of today’s old timers were impassioned newcomers in 60s, and that everyone could work together to elect Democrats.

The third Congressman, Bob Etheridge represents a rural, agricultural district that happens to include the southeast corner of Wake county. So his speech was more about how the Republicans are riding roughshod over the middle class, and focused on Social Security, the bankruptcy bill, and the fact that our deficits are being financed by China. He also picked out some scary things from the proposed federal budget, like cuts to rural health care, that would play well in his district. His speaking style reminds me of a country preacher, with plenty of pauses for emphasis.

North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall was the other elected official who gave a speech, and hers was almost entirely a defense of federalism and the importance of state’s rights. For my entire life, I thought that state’s rights was a Republican issue, but now I see that it’s a power issue. The party in power in Washington wants to exercise that power, and the opposition at the state level wants to prevent it. So now we’re in a situation where Republicans want to expand the power of federal government, and Democrats at the state level want the federal government to butt out. I think this is the reason for the clash between Republicans in Congress and the federal judiciary. The conservatives in federal courts haven’t gotten the memo that the Republican party no longer cares about federalism, and the Republican Congress will not accept checks or balances.

The one thing every speech had in common was complete avoidance of any issues related to foreign policy or the war in Iraq. Democrats as a group seem to have decided not to get into it. (There were several resolutions about Iraq, but all of them met with objection.) I think that’s probably OK for Democrats running for House seats in 2006, but somebody is going to have to deal with it by 2008.

One other thing that really stood out is that the party activists are a tight group. Everybody seemed to know everybody. Even I, who have been to very few events, saw several people who I had seen before. I plan on going to the district meeting in May, which covers the North Carolina 2nd District, and I’ll report back from there.

Max Sawicky does a great job of demolishing some commonly held misconceptions about the estate tax.

Update: Aside from the effect on the federal budget, eliminating the estate tax is expected to result in 12% less charitable giving in this country.

Pete Prodoehl has seen some even fancier ASCII banners in his spam.

Whenever Jon Steward announces a segment from comedian Lewis Black on The Daily Show, he says, “When a news story falls through the cracks, our own Lewis Black catches it.” That would be my introduction to Eric Umansky’s weblog. Umansky has written Today’s Papers for Slate intermittently over the years, and does a fine job at it, but at his weblog, he picks up the obscure and telling stories that really illuminate what’s going on in the world.

For example, last week he turned up this tidbit about John Bolton that deflates any argument that Bolton’s lack of respect for the United Nations somehow positions him to be an effective reformer. Bolton’s biggest problem with the United Nations is his belief that the United States should not accept any limits on its sovereignty. Given that he believes that, there is no place for the United Nations or any other international organization where membership involves trading in some of a country’s sovereignty in exchange for influence in the affairs of other countries.

Anyway, without Umansky’s sleuthing, I wouldn’t have known that.

Back in the pre-Web days, heck, in the pre-WYSIWYG word processing days, a common way to make big type was the Unix banner program (here’s a link to the man page). In these days of HTML, HTML email, and Microsoft Word, the banner program has fallen into disuse, a relic of the moldy ASCII past. Imagine my surprise when I saw it repurposed by spammers. Over the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of spam with a message body like this:

#    #     #      ##     ####   #####     ##
#    #     #     #  #   #    #  #    #   #  #
#    #     #    #    #  #       #    #  #    #
#    #     #    ######  #  ###  #####   ######
#  #      #    #    #  #    #  #   #   #    #
##       #    #    #   ####   #    #  #    #

I don’t think it will take spam filters too long to catch on, but I give the spammers points for creativity.