Code Complete is one of those books that I’ve always intended to read, but I’ve never actually gotten around to buying it, much less reading it. Looks like I’ll be rewarded rather than punished for waiting, because Steve McConnell is posting drafts of the second edition online, so I can dip into it and see whether I want to read the whole thing.
Seth Ackerman has written a story for Mother Jones explaining how the Clinton administration was also complicit in willfully distorting Iraq’s weapons capabilities. On the whole, citizens are at the mercy of their government when it comes to topics like this, because the government really does have lots of information that we don’t, and can claim whatever it wants based on that information. That said, the level of due diligence that interested parties are performing and posting on the Web these days is just staggering. I’m not just talking about weblog triumphalism either. There are all sorts of non-governmental organizations and think tanks that are doing great work in dissecting the what the government tells us and what we can learn through regular reporting, and the easy avialability of this information enables individuals and groups to build on the work done by one another rapidly and effectively. That said, we’ll probably still get bamboozled regularly, but at least we can be more confident in our post mortems. The article also exposes Kenneth Pollack as a liar, or at least an omitter of key facts. That’s disappointing – it was Pollack’s book, The Threatening Storm, that made me certain that eventual war with Iraq was inevitable. ...
Paul Krugman’s column today is about free trade.
I confess to an interest in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. For all the denials of the movie being anti-Semitic, it sure seems like people get the impression that it’s anti-Semitic. Here are some of the articles I’ve read: Nailed, David Denby in the New Yorker Jesus H. Christ, David Edelstein in Slate Why Is The Passion of the Christ So Controversial?, a Slate dialog between Robert Alter and Elaine Pagels Andrew Sullivan's review Gregg Easterbrook's review Ed Cone's review
The New York Times is endorsing John Kerry in the Democratic primary.
IBM is donating some of the editors from their commercial IDE based on Eclipse to the Eclipse project. The upshot? Eclipse users won’t have to use plugins for editing JSPs, XML files, and other popular formats any more.
Microsoft’s security chief seems to suggest that patching holes is a bigger problem than having holes in your systems in the first place, due to laziness among hackers.
Everybody is linking to this comparison of the top 50 sites today with the top 50 sites of 1996. Obviously the fact that a .edu site was in the top 10 in 1996 is quaint, but what I find more interesting is that the Well (well.com) was in the top 10 back then. These days, it’s pretty hard to recall just how influential the Well (or more specifically, its membership) was back then. ...
Looks like the talk of open source Java is heating up quickly. As far as I’m concerned, Sun may as well change the license for Java, since they’re just about the only company in the software industry that isn’t making money from Java these days.
Rebecca Blood: 13 Ways to Save Orkut. I was heavily into Orkut for about a day and a half, but I haven’t been back again since then. Orkut did enable me to get in touch with a guy who I hadn’t spoken to or emailed in over 10 years, but beyond that I haven’t gotten much out of it. I haven’t done much with LinkedIn, either, but I have relayed a number of requests for other people, so it seems like some people are getting use out of it. ...