Bruce Eckel has a good essay on language wars. He starts out talking about how hyper-enthusiasts from the Java world have migrated to Ruby on Rails and winds up asking whether Ruby is really better than Python or not.
From my own perspective, I can say that the days of hyper-enthusiasm are behind me. When it [...]
Truer words were never spoken:
I could, of course, point out that both the bought-and-paid-for columnists are right-wingers, but that would be interpreted as more Bush-bashing, and I apparently do too much of that. Although it is my firm belief that, in 75 years, any columnist who didn’t do a lot of Bush-bashing is [...]
The other day I posted about upgrading my mobile phone. I had originally decided to dump Cingular and go with Alltel so that I could get the latest Motorola RAZR, but I’ve had a change in thinking.
Currently, there are three RAZR models — the V3, the V3c, and the V3i. The V3 is the current [...]
There was much speculation yesterday about what sort of wiretaps the NSA was running, with the most plausible theory being that they were using some kind of wide-ranging filtering technology to spy on people en masse. Way back in 2000 there was much discussion of a system called Carnivore, under which the federal government would [...]
The reason I read Rogers Cadenhead’s blog every day is that his brain works completely differently than mine. It would never occur to me to go to Wikipedia and investigate whether Jimbo Wales (the site’s founder) edits his own article, but that’s OK, because that’s exactly the sort of thing Rogers does all the time. [...]
To me, the biggest question arising from Friday’s New York Times article outing the White House for authorizing wiretaps of Americans without seeking warrants is whether or not the wiretaps were illegal. Adam Shostack has a good roundup of the current thinking on this question.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales states specifically that the wiretaps would be [...]
I have some Java code that leaks memory and causes Tomcat to die with an out of memory error once every couple of days. After finding a way to reproduce the problem reliably in a JUnit test outside Tomcat and exhausting the obvious means that I know about to find such problems, I’ve jumped into [...]
There was a lot of excitement last week as the Bush administration supposedly capitulated to Senator John McCain’s demands and agreed to ban torture, even among progressive groups. I, for one, can’t find much room for enthusiasm, mainly because the White House has never actually admitted that the use of torture is a problem that [...]
Earlier this year, Yahoo caught a lot of justified flack for helping the Chinese government track down a dissident writer so that he could be charged with a crime for exercising a right Americans take for granted. DefenseTech notices that Cisco is deserving of similar criticism. They provide the infrastructure the Chinese government needs to [...]
Jason Levine nails a big problem I’ve had lately with Amazon.com but never thought to write up. These days it’s nearly impossible to tell whether an item is offered by Amazon.com or one of their affiliated merchants, and I think most people (myself included) would prefer to buy from Amazon.com itself when possible. I’m not [...]