My company is trying to get FogBugz 4.0 up and running on one of our servers, which happens to run a Linux distribution that’s not supported by Fog Creek Software right now. There’s also a limitation in the product, described here, wherein the maintenance script (written in PHP, naturally) can’t connect to your FogBugz instance if it’s running on a secure server. Well, I went in and replaced their code (which uses raw socket calls), with some code that uses the PEAR HTTP_Client package that handles SSL properly.

That says something for the power of scripting languages, if nothing else. I was able to go in and work around a problem with their software just the same as if it were an open source package. I think our sysadmin is even going to send them the patch (not that they’ll use it). Anyway, it was easy to fix, our software works properly now, and I get to gloat a little bit. A good day over all.

Borland is migrating JBuilder to the Eclipse platform. I wonder what features they’re going to add to make people want to pay extra for Borland’s offerings. I used to work for TogetherSoft and then Borland when they acquired TogetherSoft, and I found Eclipse (and IDEA) to be more usable than JBuilder or ControlCenter (TogetherSoft’s modeling-oriented IDE).

Remember how I compared the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to the FDIC and FSLIC? Well it looks like the pension defaults from United Airlines and others are going to precipitate something like the savings and loan crisis.

Ed Felten has a great example of the chilling effect that the litigiousness of the copyright industry has on all sorts of creative expression.

So today I needed to do something seemingly simple, compare two Sets. This functionality isn’t built into the Java class library, so rather than write my own I thought I would check out the Commons Collections. Sure enough, the functionality exists but when I downloaded the package, I was shocked to discover that the archive was over 4 megs and the JAR file you’re supposed to include in your own project is 547 kilobytes. That’s a lot of overhead to compare two collections, I’m writing my own method to take care of the problem.

Update: this method is trivial to write. For some reason I had thought that some iteratiion was needed, but of course all you need to do is compare the sizes of the two sets and then use the containsAll() method that’s built into the Set interface.

I still intend to write a rocking package to maintain this site using Ruby on Rails, but I find that I’ve encountered learning bottleneck. My copy of the pickaxe book sits gathering dust as I expand my knowledge of PHP to work on a reporting project, plow through Hibernate in Action (a great book that I’ll review later), and learn as much as I can about optimizing MySQL for performance. I can remember being in school and taking several classes at a time, but these days it just seems like I don’t have the energy to try to pick up so many things at once, especially when combined with getting my work done. On the other hand, I feel like I’m really getting good at developing applications in PHP. I foresee some crash improvement of my JavaScript is going to slip into the queue ahead of Ruby as well, so who knows how long my vanity project will have to wait.

Here’s how out of the loop I am. I was watching a DVD of the Bourne Supremacy last night and was shocked to discover that DVDs include previews that you can’t skip or fast forward through! People were probably getting outraged about that years ago.

One of the questions that people seem to be unable to answer easily is, what constitutes torture? Slate has published an interactive guide to US use of torture, which includes a list of various techniques we apply and the legality of them. For me, I answer the question by considering a hypothetical. Pretend that insurgents in Iraq (or in Afghanistan) capture a US soldier who they believe has knowledge of an imminent airstrike that could very well hit civilian areas. These insurgents believe that unless they find out what the targets of those airstrikes are, their wives, children, or neighbors could very well be killed. What interrogation tactics on their part would we consider acceptable in interrogating that soldier? Of course the truth is that the insurgents probably wouldn’t adhere to any standards of treatment in that case, but that’s beside the point for this scenario. I can tell you that almost none of the tactics we read about from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or other hellholes around the world would be acceptable to me if applied to American soldiers, just as they are not acceptable to me when applied to our detainees.

My friend Jef Poskanzer has published an extensive tutorial on filtering mail to fight spam. The article is targetted at Unix administrators running Sendmail.

Update: Another friend mentions grey listing as an alternative for blocking spam at the server level.

Java Developers Journal author Timothy Fisher blogs that all the cool open source Web applications are written in PHP, whereas Java developers seem to focus on writing frameworks. I think there’s a big reason for that. Let’s say that I want to put up a blog or a message board for my own use. I can spend $10 or $20 bucks a month and get a shared hosting account, unzip an archive containing a PHP application, run the database setup script, and I’m off and running. It’s cheap and it’s easy. If I wanted to use a Web application written in Java, I’d have a much tougher road ahead of me, both in terms of finding a hosting provider and getting things up and running. That’s the strength of PHP. So if I want to write an open source application that’s going to see wide adoption, I should pick PHP. Even if people write the best message board software ever in Java, it’s not going to be as popular as PHPbb, the administration overhead is just too great.

On the other hand, most of the Java developers out there are writing applications that lend themselves to the use of frameworks. I’ve worked on several internal projects and a couple of products that have used Hibernate for persistence. Using Hibernate has saved companies I’ve worked for more money in development time than any popular PHP web application ever will. So the reason why the open source development effort in each camp falls out the way it does seems completely organic and natural to me, and intentional efforts to change things don’t make much sense.