Posts

I’ve put forth the theory (which I didn’t come up with on my own) that the main root cause of terrorism of the al-Qaeda variety is not poverty or even lack of dignity but rather the absence of outlets for legitimate political expression. A Harvard study seems to confirm that theory. Interestingly, the theory shows that the correlation is on a curve. The most free and most repressive societies experience the least terrorism. The fact that the countries with the most freedom tend not to suffer from terrorism is right in line with what I’ve thought, but the fact that the most repressive societies also suffer less from terrorism also makes sense. The government controls people’s lives to such an extent that they can’t really organize terror cells. ...

So lately I’ve been on the front lines of the Web services war. Well, it’s not really a war since I’m not fighting anyone, but it feels that way. Here are a few of my findings so far: It's not uncommon to find Web services that don't adhere to any "standard." I wrote a web service for a client to use that was based on a web service they were already using. It was totally ad hoc. SOAP is a pain. I've sat down and tried to figure out SOAP several times, and have never come away really understanding it. I still haven't gotten used to writing SOAP services using Axis that I can call using the Axis libraries. The idea of writing SOAP services that will be called from .NET applications totally freaks me out. REST is fun. If you're going to deploy a Web service from scratch, it sure seems like REST is the way to go, mainly because it's just like all of the other Web apps you've written except you don't have to deal with presentation stuff. Even if you do follow the "standards," integrating with your clients is still a major league walk through the swamp, same as it ever was.

Reading a review that tells you the headphones you already own are the best always brings on a little glow on a Monday morning. I think the writer should have included Shure in-ear headphones in the review. I have a pair of Grado SR80 headphones, but I’ve been thinking about a pair of Shure E2c’s to carry around with me as well.

All the way back in 2002, Josh Marshall recommended a book about the German invasion of France in 1940 called Strange Victory, written by Ernest R. May. The book basically turns the conventional wisdom on why France fell so quickly to the Germans in World War II on its head. Before reading it, I had thought that the French lost because they were vastly outgunned, unprepared for war, and had staked everything on the ridiculous Maginot Line. According to May, who goes back to contemporary accounts to reconstruct the events leading up to the battle of France and the battle itself, France (and Britain) were instead done in by their command style and poor use of intelligence. The Germans used intelligence analysis and wargaming to come up with the only plan for invading France that could possibly work, and the French failed to anticipate that plan and positioned their troops in the worst possible configuration to thwart that plan. Then, once Germany invaded, it took the French days to determine what Germany was up to and respond to it. As they say, by then it was too late. The story itself is quite gripping, but as with any good history book, there are plenty of lessons to be learned that we can apply to the events of today. The book gave me a healthy new respect for the degree of uncertainty under which war planning occurs. In that light, I’m inclined to regard our efforts in Afghanistan as much more successful as I had been before. After we invaded Afghanistan, I was unsatisfied with what we had achieved, in that the warlords are still in power, much of the country is outside the control of the central government, and elements of the Taliban are still operating. While I do think we could have done more against al-Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of routing the Taliban, I think that what has been achieved in Afghanistan is notable. Part of my change of heart involved reading Strange Victory and part of it has to do with looking at Iraq. Given the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m sure that the people planning for both wars thought that Iraq would go even better than Afghanistan. It has a better educated, more modern populace and we were sending in a lot more troops. Just as Iraq has been a remarkable failure, Afghanistan has to be qualified as a remarkable success. It could still fall into chaos, but Afghans are clearly better off than they were under the Taliban. The book also gave me a healthy respect for what war leadership takes. I don’t have any more sympathy for the Bush administration, which seems to have a preference for fixed ideas and assumptions based on political convenience rather than common sense that would make the French government of 1939 envious, but I do see how any government can fall into the patterns that the Allies did in 1939 and the US and UK governments did in 2002 when they were preparing for the war in Iraq. In any case, if you’re into history in general and military or diplomatic history in particular, I recommend this book highly. ...

Do you think the computer algorithm that ranks the news stories at Google News and chooses the pictures that accompanies them chose this one?

Gmail is rolling out access to email via POP to all users. Here’s the info, you may have to be a Gmail user to see it. I don’t think I’ll back up my Gmail messages via POP, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to.

I have purged most of political weblogs from my Bloglines account since the election, but there are a few that I do still read. One of my favorites is Winning Argument, which is brilliant in both concept and execution. If you’re not reading it, you should be.

Most developers I’ve worked with lately take advantage of open source software when they can to make their jobs easier. Using somebody else’s library to parse XML or to connect to an HTTP server or manage a database connection pool is a lot quicker than writing that stuff yourself, and is probably more likely to be less buggy than anything you’d write anyway. One aspect of open source software that I think gets less attention is that it’s a great learning tool, and not just if you contribute to the projects. Diving into the code for some of the libraries I’ve been using lately (particularly Spring) has significantly changed the way I program. Here’s a concrete example. I’ve never been one who does a lot of superclassing when I program in Java, because I thought it was messy. But in Spring, they extend classes all over the place, and I’ve started taking that approach in my code to a much greater extent. All of a sudden, now that I have a fairly robust set of classes that I can extend, I can get things done a heck of a lot faster than I could before. I used to be allergic to those sorts of tall object hierarchies, but now I’ve come around to the opposite point of view. Interestingly, I didn’t go into this wanting to learn how Spring does things and adapt to it, rather I was just trying to figure out how the framework did something and couldn’t help but absorb some of the design choices they made by osmosis. I’ve long thought that the worst developers I’ve worked with are those who look at the same set of code (that they probably wrote in the first place) and don’t get the chance to learn by looking at work done by their peers. Utilizing open source software, and studying the source code to solve problems, can take the place of working on a large team, which is something I haven’t done for some time. ...

Firefox 1.0 is out today, and the download site actually seems to be working pretty well.

Howard Zinn: The Optimism of Uncertainty. Something actually encouraging.