Billmon is shutting off comments at the Whiskey Bar, for the same reason that so many people end up shutting off comments. Oddly, perhaps, I’ve been toying with the idea of enabling comments for some posts here at rc3.org. Generally when I pose a question, I get lots of really thoughtful responses, and it’s a shame not to be able to share them with everyone verbatim.
Apparently when a politician becomes a Presidential nominee, they’re judged by a different standard, and I don’t mean as regards fitness for office.
Microsoft is coming out with cheap, slimmed down versions of its development tools for dabblers who don’t have the cash to pay for the full version of Visual Studio. This weekend when I was fooling around with .NET, I used vim and the C# compiler that comes with the .Net framework, and it worked fine for a smaller app, but I don’t think that approach would scale well. If you’re a Java programmer, you can be incredibly productive without paying for anything but hardware. The entire Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, Linux, MySQL stack is free. Productivity enhancing frameworks like Hibernate and Struts (insert your favorite persistence and MVC framework here if you prefer) are free, as are plenty of other libraries that are widely adopted. The situation is the same for PHP and Perl developers if that’s your bag. I don’t think this is as big an issue for corporate developers, but if you’re a tinkerer, the ability to get all of this stuff for free is just amazingly valuable. Even outstanding tools like IntelliJ IDEA are relatively inexpensive. I guess Microsoft is recognizing that their prices for tools are a problem. ...
I’ve seen pointers here and there to a site called javadocs.org. When you type in a class name (or package name), it will bring up the JavaDoc for that class. What I find amazing is that the site is somewhat redundant, in that Google’s index is good enough to take care of this for you most of the time. For example, check out the first result from Google for these searches: actionform, hibernateexception, or arraylist. If you want to really be impressed, try out string, object, or vector. (Google doesn’t return the JavaDoc for those classes as its first result, but you can see it on the first page.) Including the package name in the search is just cheating, you get a guaranteed hit. I used to have tons of JavaDoc bookmarks, but the miracle of search engines (Yahoo is just as effective as Google it seems) has released me from that burden. ...
A couple of weeks ago I started using del.icio.us as a link manager. I run across stuff every day that I want to keep around for future reference and browser bookmarks just aren’t the right place for them because I use a different computer at work than I do at home (just like most everyone else). Also, for whatever reason, I’ve never been able to deal that well with bookmarks. They just become a morass of links that I never bother to go through again. I generally just remember the URLs of sites I use a lot and type them in myself. Anyway, I’ve really taken to del.icio.us, and I find that not only is it a nice organizational tool, but it does serve as a useful adjunct to rc3.org for links that are interesting but that I don’t have much to say about, and there’s an RSS feed for my links over there if you’re interested. What I’m finding particularly interesting is that the links I wind up saving over there are almost all about technical stuff. For whatever reason, the differences between my weblog software and del.icio.us seem to cater to different parts of my brain. I’ve been contemplating changing the software I use here, and now I’m starting to wonder how a different tool would affect how I decide what to write about. Update: Also, it’s worth pointing out that I can get a lot more done if I get rid of my own personal “not invented here” syndrome. I could have written something like del.icio.us for myself relatively easily, but not as easily as just signing up for the service. And I’m getting around the fact that I can’t see any stats on the del.icio.us RSS feed by running it through FeedBurner. The Web really does seem to be the API these days. ...
Looks like the Bush administration went 0 for 3 in the Supreme Court on terrorism cases. Once again my faith that the Supreme Court won’t let things get too out of hand is rewarded. (Don’t get me wrong, I disagree with the Supreme Court a lot of the time, but I still find it to be a moderating influence.)
Christopher Allbritton writes from Iraq: This is hard to write, but I've come to the conclusion that after a year of horror and insecurity, the average Iraqi doesn't want freedom. They want a set of laws that they can live with, do business under and raise their kids. If it takes a benign dictator to do that, then they’re more than happy to have one. Remember, the most beloved recent Iraqi leader, Abdul Karim Qassim, was more or less a benign dictator. I’m not sure why that’s hard to write or hard to understand. It’s just Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at a societal level. People want food, water, a safe place to live, and security more than they want the privilege of expressing their political will through elections. That’s not really surprising, is it? How many homeless people in the United States vote? Democracy is a totally unproven concept as far as Iraqis go, and they seem to feel that ongoing fear of their government is preferable to chaos in the streets. ...
So I’ve written a Web service that a customer is supposed to be using, but they’re using a specific Microsoft XML class to call it, and I had never interfaced with it before. We ran into some compatability issues, and I have to make some changes, but being that I’m Mr. Test Driven Development these days, I didn’t want to update the servlets until I had a real test written to make sure that my changes made them compatible with the MS stuff. So today I sat down, looked at a C# book I bought awhile back, and hacked out a .NET program to call my API, then figured out how to compile it with the command line compiler that comes with the .NET framework. I don’t have any interest right now in becoming a .NET expert, but it’s pretty cool to sit down with a new language and platform and make something work. ...
Garret posted about the problem of perchlorate contamination in water and milk over at Dangerousmeta, and a PR flack for the “Council on Water Quality” found his post and pasted a press release on the issue in his comments. Rather than deleting the press release, he wrote up a lengthy, well sourced, and well reasoned response. I’m linking so that anybody who Googles this issue will find the post and its comments, plus I find it interesting that responding to critics on weblogs is something that I wouldn’t have thought was happening yet. For what it’s worth, the Council on Water Quality is an industry funded organization. In other words, it’s an industry group representing business interests that pretends to be an activist group representing the views of regular people. ...
Bruce Schneier’s latest column points out that limitations of government power are a form of security, in reference to the Supreme Court cases on terrorism that are being decided this week.