Posts

Billmon posts today about the Bush cult of personality. As I’ve said before about John Kerry, one of the things I like best about him is that he doesn’t have one.

Fred Kaplan has a useful piece throwing some water on the estimate of Iraq war dead pubilshed in Lancet this week (and that I discussed yesterday).

So I got an email from the local Democratic party telling me which judges to vote for in the non-partisan judicial election, and it also noted that when you vote, if you vote a straight party ticket, you will not vote in the judicial elections because they’re non-partisan (makes sense), or in the Presidential election. Why wouldn’t voting a straight party ticket include the vote for President? I wonder how many votes are lost due to this bizarre provision. ...

Bush endorsed Kerry today. Here’s the proof straight from the horse’s mouth: And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not the person you want as the Commander-in-Chief.

Jim Henley endorses John Kerry on the basis of his willing to address Americans as adults when it comes to terrorism.

So I had this big plan to write a new weblogging tool in Java based on the Spring framework. The idea was that I’d use the project to get rid of some of my old creaky code and to learn Spring inside and out. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), it didn’t take me very long to learn Spring and I started using it on real projects before I got too far on my weblogging tool. I don’t want to spend my own time writing a Web application in Spring when I spend most of my work time doing exactly that. It’s not smart from an educational standpoint, and besides that, nobody needs to spend all their time doing more or less exactly the same thing. Then this morning I read a rave review of Ruby on Rails, an MVC framework for this year’s “it” language, Ruby. I think I’ll tell myself that I’ll write a blogging tool using that. ...

So somebody in Iraq has made off with 380 tons of high explosives. Wonder what sort of people would have stolen something like that? Update: Josh Marshall is all over this story. This blog entry from Eric Umansky is tangentially related as well.

William Gibson, in the process of dissing any conservative fans he might have, has this to say about Ronald Reagan: If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I'd certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan's presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.

Here’s a bit of free advice to laptop makers … putting the headphone jack on the right side of the laptop is dumb. That’s where just about everybody has their mouse, and driving your mouse over the headphone wire every 5 minutes or so is annoying. I’m really surprised when computer makers don’t think about this stuff.

So I’m working on a Web service for a client. I have a suite of unit tests that work properly, but when the client tries to access the Web service, the request fails. Before I made some changes to the service (including upgrading some libraries that shouldn’t matter), both my tests and the customer’s client worked as expected. So I’m left with the problem of figuring out how my tests differ in their operation from the customer’s client application. The best way I know of to figure this out is to log the full incoming requests and see how they differ, but I don’t know how to do that. Do you have any ideas? (The web service runs on Tomcat 5 and Apache 2.) ...