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Jay Rosen: Die, Strategy News

Josh Marshall’s analysis of the significance of Richard Clarke’s interview on 60 Minutes tonight is worth reading.

Today’s fun technical challenge is figuring out how to duplicate MySQL’s sha1() function in Java. You can use the Java MessageDigest class to create a SHA-1 hash of a string, but the MySQL version encodes the string as a hexadecimal number, and there’s the rub. After a few fruitless Google searches, I’m turning to the MySQL source code …

Today I devoted a good chunk of time to reading Lawrence Wright’s lengthy biography of Ayman al-Zawahiri republished from the New Yorker. It originally ran in September 2002. Anyone who’s interested in what we must do to defeat al-Qaeda and its ilk should read this article. Osama bin Laden gets a lot more press than Dr. al-Zawahiri, but in many ways his story is less interesting, and more importantly, less applicable to learning about the types of people that al-Qaeda recruits. The evolution of al-Zawahiri from young Islamist political activist to leader of global terrorism is enlightening. It includes of all the ingredients that people talk about when discussing the conditions that terrorism thrives under. Egypt’s dictatorship, which alternately encouraged and brutally suppressed Islamists, failed states where terrorists can hide out with impunity, and conflicts involving Muslims that are magnets for would-be martyrs. If we’re going to put a dent in terrorism in the long term, we have to find a way to eliminate the conditions that encourage intelligent, educated people to choose the path of al-Zawahiri. ...

Last April, the Bush administration told us that our share of the reconstruction costs in Iraq would top out at $1.7 billion. Nice guess.

Juan Cole (at Salon): Welcome to the quagmire. America’s favorite professor of Middle Eastern history published a one year anniversary piece on our invasion of Iraq. It’s a nice summary if you haven’t been following his weblog for the past year.

Scott Rosenberg’s latest column discusses a reunion of old school software developers who were interviewed 20 years ago for the book Programmers at Work, discussing the future of software. He’s also going to be writing a book on the same topic.

Boy, it looks like the Socialist victory in Spain opened the floodgates for bailing out on Iraq. South Korea is backing out on its commitment to send 3000 troops to Iraq. Poland’s President is talking about checking out early, and other countries have been making noises about throwing in the towel as well. One thing I’ve wondered about is whether the utility of the small deployments from coalition countries is magnified because when a country sends a small detachment, they send highly trained and/or specialized troops that can contribute at a high level. Only a small percentage of US troops are trained for the sort of nation building work that occupation of Iraq demands, the rest are people trying to adapt to the situation as best they can. You’d think that if Spain sends a few thousand troops, their skills would be highly relevant to the task at hand. In other news, Slate had a whole battery of Spain-related stories today. They reported that Spain’s Socialists aren’t socialists, that the bombings weren’t really about Iraq, and that Spain’s demands for keeping its troops in Iraq aren’t absurd or even out of line with what the Bush administration wants. Update: I made a mistake in mentioning South Korea above. They have refused to send their 3,000 troops to Kirkuk due to security problems, but they will still be sending those troops elsewhere in Iraq. ...

Brian explains why there’s a cult of IDEA. I use Eclipse these days because of the nice version control integration and price, but IDEA is the best IDE I’ve ever used. (Via Erik.)

I’m old enough to know that any sort of competition eventually becomes a race to the bottom, but that doesn’t change the fact that this inevitability discourages me.