Posts

James Galbraith has a piece in Salon on the much-criticized job growth prediction made by the Bush administration at the end of last year. Unfortunately, after reading it I didn’t really get the point that he was trying to make, other than that he believes the current employment problems are structural rather than cyclical and that it will take a commitment to some policy that he doesn’t exactly define to fix them. Hopefully some of the economists with weblogs will decipher this a bit. If they do, I’ll link to them. ...

So today I’m trying to get Apache and Tomcat to talk to each other, and I’m having a boatload of problems, as you might expect from two incredibly widely used open source packages that are written under the auspices of the same larger project. It didn’t help that one of the first things I found during the ordeal was a weblog entry from Russell Beattie complaining about the same problems I was having, more or less. I’m a major newer is better type person, so I’m trying to use Apache 2.0, Tomcat 5, and mod_jk2. I think mod_jk2 is the source of all my problems – I’m about to try to compile mod_jk and use that instead. ...

Ginger Stampley, an actual Houstonian, has posted a followup on my entry on judicial elections.

As promised, I’ve put up a page listing the feeds I currently subscribe to. This isn’t a list of all the sites that I read, just a list of the stuff that’s in my newsreader. I’ve also added a link to the right hand navigation that points to those pages. My subscriptions are still in a state of flux because I’ve had to rebuild the list from scratch a few times in the past few months. The ability to add this list to the site is a big advantage of a server side newsreader. I’ve never had the self discipline to create and maintain a list of sites I read – such a list would go out of date pretty rapidly. The ability to automate the whole process is a big win for me. ...

For awhile I had made downloading the full text of my posts an option on my RSS feed. Tonight, I switched things over so that the full text is provided by default. I’ve gotten to where I don’t like it if other sites don’t put the full text of their posts in their feed, so I decided to do the same thing for my readers.

Edd Dumbill has written an O’Reilly piece on the current state of Mono, the open source implementation of .NET for Linux. I’m quite excited by Mono. I’ve been meaning to learn C# anyway, and the ability to port that knowledge to the Linux environment is exciting. More importantly, this is going to provide a route by which Windows developers can port their knowledge into the Linux world.

Coming back to one of my old obsessions, the New York Times reports that our soon to be deployed missile defense system is still an incredibly expensive joke. My experience in software engineering tells me that this is a death march project with a hard deadline that is going to be a huge flop when it’s released, err, deployed. And that’s aside from the fact that the system’s ability to serve its intended purpose is completely implausible. Update: Here’s Fred Kaplan’s take. ...

I don’t drink single malt Scotch, but after reading this article, I’m thinking I probably should. This article describes my tastes pretty well, except for the Connecticut and Zinfandels bit: My obsession with the stuff is a story of extremes. As a kid in the suburbs of Connecticut in the '60s and '70s, I was weaned on all things bland and homogenized: Wonder Bread, American cheese, iceberg lettuce, fish sticks, and, in high school, Budweiser. I never liked beer until I tasted the robust, hoppy ales of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Big California wines--bruiser zinfandels, with a touch of loaminess--followed. Sourdough from what was alleged to be a yeast culture born before the Civil War tantalized me with what I'll call its ... offness. Off like certain cheeses. Off like Asian sauces ladled out of barrels of decomposing fish. I became a freak for all things "off." When you put something strongly flavored or "off" in your mouth, your most primitive instincts tell you to spit it out, yet the perception of danger heightens the senses and makes the pleasure more intense. A design for living, that. For what it’s worth, I didn’t drink beer in high school and I’m still OK with drinking cheap, watery American beer if the occasion suits it. ...

The Economist leader this week is about income inequality: The preoccupation bordering on obsession with economic equality that one so often encounters at gatherings of anti-globalists, in the corridors of aid agencies and in socialist redoubts in backward parts of the world reflects a "lump of income" fallacy. This remarkably tenacious misconception is that there is only so much global income to go around. If the United States is consuming $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year, that is $10 trillion worth of goods and services that Africa cannot consume. But goods and services are not just lying around waiting to be grabbed by the greediest or most muscular countries. Market economics is not a zero-sum game. America consumes $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year because it produces (not counting the current-account deficit of 5% or so of the total) $10 trillion of goods and services each year. Africa could produce and consume a lot more without America producing and consuming one jot less. It so happens that the case for more aid, provided of course that it is well spent, is strong–but the industrialised countries do not need to become any less rich before Africa can become a lot less poor. The wealth of the wealthy is not part of the problem. ...

There are still nearly eight months to go before we get to vote for our next President, and there’s a lot of campaigning to be done until then. During that time, we can count on wall to wall coverage of the horse race – not who would make a better President and what the candidates believe, but rather how the candidates are doing at campaigning against one another and how likely they are to win. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that personally, I’m riveted by the horse race, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how the things President Bush and John Kerry do will affect their likelihood of winning. That said, I’m going to refrain from commenting on them here, for the most part. The main reason, of course, is that you can get that stuff anywhere. I could tell you what I think about Kerry’s off mike moment, or Bush’s decision to start running negative ads already, but so can Chris Matthews, or Josh Marshall, or the Daily Kos, or any number of other people. I’ll leave that to them. The other thing I’m going to try hard to fight is to talk about or link to people talking about how the candidates are misrepresenting their opponents. These guys have millions of dollars and legions of people looking out for them on the Internet. John Kerry has a new weblog on his site devoted to debunking attacks on his record. It’s not that I’m not going to talk about the campaign, or politics, I’m just going to try to stick to actual issues. And I’m going to try to enjoy baseball season instead of campaign season. Update: One thing I am going to try to do this weekend is get the current subscription list from my server based RSS reader posted somewhere on this site. So that you can see how I’m keeping track of the horse race – and baseball. ...