Several voters in Sweden attempted to embed Trojan Horses in their hand-written ballots in a recent election. One tried SQL injection in the manner of this famous XKCD comic and another tried cross-site scripting. The attacks failed to cause any damage, but succeeded in amusing me. Hat tip, Bruce Schneier.
I think this is an insightful observation by James Fallows, on the effect of talk shows:
Among the many things wrong with talking-head gab shows, which have proliferated/metastasized in the past generation — they’re cheap to produce, they fill air time, they make journalists into celebrities, they suit the increasing political niche-ization of cable networks — is that they reward an affect of breezy confidence on all topics and penalize admissions of complexity, of ignorance on a specific topic, or of the need for time to think.
I find this to be true even on shows I love, like The Daily Show. Even sitting across from a tough interviewer, it’s easy for a pro to spew a constant stream of B.S. that the host or other members of the panel simply can’t stop and refute.
Apache committer Jon Stevens says it’s time for the Apache Software Foundation to consider dumping its Java projects. Paul Querna says that developing open source software in Java is a trap because there will be no Java implementations other than the one offered by Oracle.
The piece of news that is triggering this reaction is that IBM has announced it is going to work with Oracle on the OpenJDK implementation and will no longer contribute to Apache Harmony, an effort to create an open source, compliant implementation of Java. In announcing that change, IBM said that they were abandoning Harmony because they believed that Oracle was never going to give them the test tools necessary to certify that Harmony was a fully compatible implementation of Java. This announcement, along with Oracle’s lawsuit against Google, makes it clear that Oracle is not going to support third party implementations of Java. They’re going to discourage them.
As a practical matter for people in the business of developing applications using Java, I don’t think this changes all that much. I use Java every day and I’ve never given any thought to Apache Harmony or the Java Community Process. If this move were to discourage open source activity on the Java platform, it will hurt developers down the road, but my guess is that nearly all open source Jave development is done using the official version of the JDK. That’s not likely to change anytime soon.
At one time, I thought a lot of Java developers would shift to Ruby on Rails. I no longer think that’s the case. We won’t see a mass migration to PHP at this point, either. I suppose we could see people moving to Scala and other languages, but they’re still niche players. So I think Java is going to continue to be what it already is. No longer the belle of the ball, but still the platform businesses use to build their Web applications.
Update: Just read Steven O’Grady’s blog post on this topic.
This year, like many people it seems, we took the plunge and subscribed to a summer CSA. CSA stands for community supported agriculture and the idea behind it is simple. You pay for a subscription and in return you get a weekly delivery of locally produced food. There are a lot of variations on the model. Some CSAs let you pick what goes into your box, others choose for you. Some include food produced at a single farm while others gather food from multiple local producers and create the boxes. Around here there are CSAs that include vegetables, fruit, bread, eggs, and meat. There’s even a seafood CSA.
The CSA we joined was associated with a single farm, included vegetables and eggs, and required us to pay in advance last winter for the whole summer. There are plenty of others that let you pay every week.
The first question everybody asks is whether you can tell the difference between vegetables from the CSA and the vegetables from the supermarket. My answer is, I don’t know, because most of the vegetables we got through the CSA we don’t normally buy at the supermarket. Our main reason for joining the CSA was to break us out of our food routine. One of the great triumphs of the summer was an awesome dish out of spaghetti squash. I had never eaten that vegetable at all before. And many of the other vegetables we got were not on our regular shopping list, even relatively mundane things like yellow squash and zucchini.
The more common vegetables we got were really good. The tomatoes that arrived through the summer were fantastic — as good as you get in a really good restaurant. We braised some turnip greens that we got through the CSA and they came out better than any I’ve eaten at restaurants. Early in the season we made a lot of great, simple salads with the mesclun greens that came from the CSA. Overall, the quality was high. What we really appreciated, though, was the variety.
You may have heard the most common complaint about CSAs, and I’ll echo it: vegetable fatigue. This comes in two forms. The first is that someone brings you a box of vegetables every week, many of which may be unfamiliar to you, and you feel guilty if you can’t find a way to cook all of them before they go bad. We wasted very few vegetables over the course of the summer, but handling the constant influx of vegetables wore on us at times. I was happy to have a friend who likes cucumber more than we do.
The second form is fatigue with specific vegetables. On a farm, some vegetables grow better than others from year to year. When a particular vegetable is growing well, you’ll see it for many weeks in a row. For us, that meant a lot of squash over the summer. It also meant five straight weeks of okra toward the end of the season. I like okra, but nobody likes okra that much.
I think we’ll be better prepared to deal with vegetable fatigue next year. We now have a list of really good recipes for vegetables that we didn’t have going into the season and we’ll have a better idea of which vegetables will be arriving as the season progresses. I’m already looking forward to certain vegetables with short seasons that we won’t see again until next year.
That brings me to the final really cool thing about the CSA — learning more about which vegetables grow in which seasons. I had no idea that when it starts getting hot, you’re done with greens until the fall. When the lettuce was gone, it was gone. And around here, it’s gone before the tomatoes start to ripen. The traditional American salad of tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers is a testament to the climate of California and our ability to ship fresh vegetables coast to coast. There was no overlap between lettuce and tomatoes in our CSA. Suddenly, Middle Eastern salads like fattoush and Italian salads like insalata Caprese and panzanella make sense. They’re made using ingredients that all grow at the same time.
Spending the summer as a CSA subscriber was a lot more educational than I would have predicted. It’s a great way to expose yourself to varieties of produce that you may otherwise never get to try. At the same time, it’s a commitment to learning and cooking new recipes that many people may not have the time, energy, or interest to take on. If it’s something you think you might enjoy, I’d encourage you to give it a try.
Felix Salmon on today’s job report, which showed a gain of 64,000 private sector jobs and a loss of 159,000 government jobs:
The U.S. does not have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for job growth to resume. Already we’re at the absolute limit: any longer, and most of the unemployed will be long-term unemployed and, to a first approximation, unemployable. This country simply can’t afford an unemployable underclass of the long-term unemployed — not morally, not economically, and not fiscally, either.
Ezra Klein puts the numbers in context:
Take the report’s “good” number: 64,000 private-sector jobs. That’s about 35,000 less than the 100,000 or so jobs needed to keep up with population growth. It’s about 180,000 less than the number of jobs needed to get back to 5 percent unemployment in the next 10 years. It’s about 257,000 less than the 320,000 jobs needed to get back to 5 percent unemployment in five years.
A representative of the W3C says it’s too early to start using HTML5. Scott Gilbertson of WebMonkey argues to the contrary. Given the pace at which Internet Explorer users upgrade, if you are opposed to using HTML5 now, you’ll probably still be opposed to it a decade from now:
The fact is HTML5 is here and you can use it today, you just need to use shims, fallbacks and workarounds for older browsers. Yes, that’s unfortunate, but that situation isn’t going to change any time soon. If IE8 — which lacks support for most of HTML5’s features — has even half the longevity of IE6, we’ll still need fallbacks even when 2022 rolls around and HTML5 is, in the W3C’s opinion, finally ready.
In the meantime, developers are building awesome things with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Check out PaintbrushJS, a new library written by Dave Shea that enables you to apply filters to images using CSS and JavaScript. Not only can you change the way images appear on the page, but you can also allow users to save the filtered images.
Obviously we can’t just migrate to HTML5 wholesale yet (unless we’re creating Web sites optimized for iOS and Android), but the time to weigh whether using HTML5 and compensating for old browsers makes more sense than using older techniques that work in all browsers has arrived.
I’ve been transfixed by the Stuxnet worm since I heard about it. If you’re not up on all things Stuxnet, check out Bruce Schneier’s blog post explaining what we do and don’t know about Stuxnet and how it works. Here’s why people think Stuxnet was created by a government agency:
Stuxnet doesn’t act like a criminal worm. It doesn’t spread indiscriminately. It doesn’t steal credit card information or account login credentials. It doesn’t herd infected computers into a botnet. It uses multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. A criminal group would be smarter to create different worm variants and use one in each. Stuxnet performs sabotage. It doesn’t threaten sabotage, like a criminal organization intent on extortion might.
Read the whole thing.
Update: Security researcher Steve Bellovin’s Stuxnet post is informative as well. (Via @medley on Twitter.)
Let me be up front. I am hostile to the Tea Party movement. It gravitates toward leaders who seem to me lack any seriousness of purpose in terms of fixing the country’s problems. The tea partiers, like most people, are frustrated with the current economic situation in America, and the long term economic trends that are working against the middle class in this country. Beyond that, though, I feel they generally do a terrible job of diagnosing the country’s problems, have no clue what causes those problems, and have no good ideas when it comes to fixing those problems. And their leaders are lying demagogues who are happy to ruin the country if it helps line their own pockets.
For the lowdown on the Tea Party movement, check out Matt Taibbi’s article, Tea & Crackers, in the Rolling Stone. If you’ve been following this phenomenon, it won’t surprise you, but it captures the essence of the movement pretty well. I think this description fits:
The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can’t; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.
Anil Dash made a similar point in his Ignite talk, Defending the Indefensible. Do read the article and watch the presentation, they’re both great.
There is a question that remains, how should progressives react to the Tea Party. One thing most articles about the Tea Party leave out is the context. Yeah, they are hung up on social issues, but the Tea Party is also reacting to the economic changes in America over the past few decades that have radically changed the future prospects for many Americans. As jobs have disappeared and industries have waned, there are parts of America that are shadows of what they once were. The town I come from almost certainly has fewer stoplights now than it did when I was in high school. The chemical plant that was the town’s best employer when I was a kid has been sold off in pieces to a variety of companies, none of which offer the benefits or pay that the original company did. In the end, these sorts of changes are the real source of the energy behind the Tea Party.
People from across the political spectrum are justifiably frustrated with these problems and the many other symptoms of long term decline that politicians are not addressing. The framework of employer-provided health insurance is collapsing. There’s no willingness to do anything all about global warming. And whether you support less immigration or more, our current immigration policy is a joke. Last week Ken Silverstein, the Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine, explained why he’s giving up. He’s as angry and disillusioned as anyone at a Tea Party rally.
So proceeding from the position that the Tea Party is generally wrong on the facts but understandably frustrated, here are three recommendations I’ve seen recently. Stanley Fish argues convincingly that ridicule is not the answer:
Commentators who explain smugly that O’Donnell’s position on masturbation (that it is a selfish, solitary act) is contradicted by her Ayn Rand-like attack on collectivism, or who wax self-righteous about Paladino’s comparing Sheldon Silver to Hitler and promising to wield a baseball bat in Albany, or who laugh at Sharron Angle for being in favor of Scientology (she denies it) and against fluoridation and the Department of Education, are doing these candidates a huge favor. They are saying, in effect, these people are stupid, they’re jokes; and the implication (sometimes explicitly stated) is that anyone who takes them the least bit seriously doesn’t get the joke and is stupid, too.
Matthew Yglesias argues that people who are obviously wrong on the facts are the ones we should argue with first:
Sometimes I think that smart people actually spend too little time responding to the dumbest forms of arguments. It takes a certain kind of hubris to think that I’m going to persuade people who adhere to strong arguments that they’re mistaken. By contrast, I really do think I can persuade people that their bad arguments are wrong.
And finally, Clay Johnson argues that Washington is, in essence, a closed system and that we should work on local issues instead. Here’s his summary of the problems in Washington:
To an extent the Tea Party and the Deaniacs from 2004 have something in common. They’ve caught on that their government is not representative to them, and feel that the Federal government is more accountable to “special interests” like big corporations and labor unions than it is to them. But Washington is actually more accountable and responsive to the rituals, rules, and limitations of Washington than it is even the big corporations and labor unions.
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Matt Raible on Java frameworks
Matt Raible takes on the argument that the age of Java Frameworks is over. One interesting aspect of the Java ecosystem is that there’s always some new thing out there that we’re supposed to be migrating to. And they’re nearly all just terrible in terms of productivity. Now apparently, we’re supposed to be looking at Java EE 6. I don’t even know what that is, but I’m sure it’s awful. In the meantime, I continue to plug along with Spring and Hibernate, using them in the simplest way I can.
Here’s a snippet from a post on migrating from Spring to Java EE:
Where do I sign up?