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The military seems to have figured out how to contend with the constant attacks on convoys moving supplies around Iraq – transporting the supplies via air instead. It seems like this will reduce casualties, but what does it say about the success of the occupation that the military has decided that the roads are no longer safe enough for our convoys? Oh, and here’s an Iraq question to ponder. When spinning the question about the lack of armored Humvees in Iraq, the military has made certain to point out that when we initially invaded, none of our Humvees were armored, and that now something like 2/3 of them have armor of one kind or another. It sort of makes you wonder why, given all this fresh new armor, our casualty rates continue to go up in Iraq, doesn’t it? ...

So the military tested the missile defense system that’s supposed to be fully operational by the end of 2004 (that’s 15 days from now). The interceptor failed to launch. Need I say more?

Geof Stone, the author of a book called Perilous Times, is guest blogging at Larry Lessig’s blog right now on the topic of our threatened civil liberties. This is must-read material. Also, on the subject of Larry Lessig, he’s stopped using a whitelist for spam control and started using a service implemented using a Bayesian filter. Glad to see he’s rejoining the good guys.

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.

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. ...

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.”

Reading some of the software development weblogs lately, it seems like the anti-unit testing backlash has begun. It wasn’t too long ago that people were talking about becoming “test infected” and that Test Driven Development became an important buzzword, the idea being that you would write automated tests to verify that your code worked before writing the code itself, and then making sure that your code complies with those tests throughout the development cycle. I was a bit late jumping on the bandwagon and becoming test infected, but as soon as I really leapt into it, the value became apparent to me immediately. Indeed, one thing that has been confirmed repeatedly lately is that all of the most embarrassing bugs I’ve had to deal with have been direct products of having poor test coverage for a feature. Had I written all of the unit tests I needed to, I would have caught those bugs and not had to deal with customers contending with them. And the thing is, in every one of those cases, it’s not like I couldn’t foresee needing to write the unit tests I miss. Rather it was that cycles are short and there are too many things to do, and so testing suffers. Anyway, unit testing may be a fad to a certain extent, but it’s a fad that I won’t be leaving behind anytime soon. There’s no worse feeling than getting burned by a bug and knowing that a bit of extra work on the testing side could have saved you. ...

Probably most developers already know about O’Reilly’s Safari service, which, for a monthly fee, enables you to have a set number of books checked out of an online library and use them in electronic format. I had known about it for ages, but hadn’t ever subscribed until I recently started using PHP and JavaScript a lot more than I had been. I had never been attracted to it as a Java developer, because between experience, the books I own, JavaDoc, and source code, I can pretty much find the answers I need without additional reference material. In areas where I’m less experienced, though, Safari is incredibly helpful. I don’t want to go out and buy a shelf full of books for things that, hopefully, I’ll never have to use again, so Safar is a great deal. Just throw a few relevant books onto your bookshelf and go. Like I said, everyone but me probably already knew this, but if you didn’t, then go check it out. One other thing I had wondered about was the Safari business model. I had assumed that there was enough reference material freely available online for most things that Safari wouldn’t provide a significant marginal benefit. As I wade into the PHP world, though, I find that the online reference material is generally lacking. The PHP manual is pretty uneven, and most of the developer resource sites run by third parties are advertising-laden crapfests. Safari really hits the sweet spot there. I wonder how many subscribers they have? Any money they do make must be almost pure profit since O’Reilly already owns the rights to the books and the site must not be horribly difficult to maintain. ...