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Matt Haughey has some suggestions for improving Wikis. I like Wikis an awful lot, but I confess that I’ve never used one that was also being used actively by many (or even a few) other people. However, I have one set up that only I use, and I find it very convenient for note taking and brainstorming. I’m still waiting to be a member of a team where everyone really takes advantage of the Wiki for creating design documents and so forth. For that to happen, I do think Wikis will have to improve. ...

At the dentists office earlier today, I was reading Business Week and came across a short interview with Scott McNealy about the future of the IT business. He compared data centers to airplanes, and basically made the point that companies don’t build airplanes, they rely on plane manufacturers to do so. It just so happens that when I got back to work I saw a weblog entry discussing McNealy’s point: Pre-Integrated Airplanes. I don’t think the analogy holds up very well, but that being said, I think we are seeing a trend in the industry toward turnkey manufactured, integrated systems. How this is playing out is bad news for Sun. What we’re seeing is that people are using commodity hardware, and more and more often, commodity software to abstract away everything that doesn’t provide business value. For example, I recently encountered a company that is in the business of making software to provide a specific network service. A big chunk of their product is a Web application written in Java. They don’t sell a WAR file though. What they sell is a rack mountable Linux box running Apache, Tomcat, webmin, MySQL, and a bunch of other open source packages and a few hundred kilobytes of code that they produced themselves. So if you want to deploy this service in your company, you buy their box, give it power and network connectivity, and you’re off and running. If you’re Microsoft, Sun, or Oracle, I don’t see how such services are good news. Open source software is the commodity software part in this stack of components. It’s free, it’s totally hackable, and you don’t have to sign any kinds of licensing deals to use it, as long as you abide by the license for the software itself. An alternative to appliances like these are Web services and Web applications, which are also often built on a foundation of open source software. My advice to Scott McNealy would be to be careful what you wish for. ...

Fred Kaplan: Bush’s Many Miscalculations Painful as it is to recall those planes smashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon two years ago this week, it's nearly as heartbreaking to think back on the moment of nascent harmony that ticked in the wake of the attack--until President Bush decided to reject the opportunity that History thrust before him. Remember? The French newspaper Le Monde, never one for trans-Atlantic sentimentalism, proclaimed, "We are all Americans." The band outside Buckingham Palace played "The Star-Spangled Banner" during a changing of the guard, as thousands of Londoners tearfully waved American flags. Most significant, the European leaders of NATO, for the first time in the organization's history, invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling on its 19 member-nations to treat the attack on America as an attack on them all--a particularly moving gesture, as Article 5 had been intended to guarantee American retaliation against an attack on Europe. But the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures--and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

Phil Carter has pointed out recently that the reason the public doesn’t like the Patriot Act and resists new administration requests for legislation giving it additional power to “fight terrorism” is that people don’t really trust it on the civil rights front any more. Regardless of the invasiveness of the proposed legislation or the benefits it might provide, people generally oppose it because the administration has squandered all is credibility on the civil rights front. I think we’re seeing something similar with Ticketmaster’s new plan to sell some event tickets via auction. Everybody hates Ticketmaster, so anything that Ticketmaster does must therefore be bad, right? Contrary to the widely held view, I think that their idea for auctioning concert tickets is a darn good one. The only people who seem to be able to accurately price concert tickets are scalpers. Concert tickets go on sale for a certain price, a large number of them are snapped up by scalpers, and are then sold to the public at a price often several times face value. If people are willing to pay $250 for a concert, why should the people putting on the concert get $50 bucks and some guy who’s willing to flood the phones or pay homeless people to wait in line get the other $200? I’m not in love with the idea of Ticketmaster raking in more cash, but it sure beats supporting a cottage industry of ticket hoarding scumbags that add no value to the system and yet scrape large profits out of it. In fact, as a long term trend, if artists are able to make more money from people willing to pay huge amounts to sit close to the stage, maybe that could subsidize the concerts to a certain degree for the people who have worse seats by reducing the rate at which their ticket prices go up. The article proposes that all seats be sold in an auction format rather than just the good seats. I imagine that might happen if the auction for the good seats works out well. ...

One of the file sharers caught up in the most recent RIAA dragnet was a 12 year old girl who lives in a housing project in New York. The RIAA was kind enough to let her off after wringing only $2000 out of her mother. I don’t think I’m going to be buying any more CDs from RIAA members. Update: Emmett Plant is organizing a pledge drive to raise $2000 and give it to the family. ...

For all the complaints about the Patriot Act, the truth is that it isn’t very well understood. Slate is trying to change that, and has put Dahlia Lithwick on the case. She’s written the first part of the four part series, which discusses Section 215 (the section that authorizes the government to subpoena your records simply by claiming that the search protects against terrorism). It raises red flags for me because it’s not subject to judicial oversight and is completely secret. ...

Paul Boutin explains why the RIAA’s amnesty offer is bogus.

Gavin King is offering $100 to anyone who can prove that pure JDBC calls are significantly faster than Hibernate in the Hibernate Performance Challenge.

Via Don Box: In general, I would be very hesitant to encourage anyone to pursue this career path. Like writing a book, the only people who should do it are those who can't not do it. I'm hopeful however that there will be many generations worth of funding for those few people who absolutely must live in the world of executable abstractions. Whether we'll outnumber (or out-earn) doctors and lawyers is another matter altogether. He also uncovers the great secret of interviewing programmers. The secret to hiring good IT folks is to differentiate between those people who want a paycheck and those people who can’t see themselves doing anything other than working with computers. The other secret is that the only people who can tell the difference are people who fall into the latter category. So, once you’ve polluted your organization with people who just wanted a job, you’re basically relying on luck to see you through. ...

Here’s an article that bears extensive further consideration: Why getter and setter methods are evil, by Allen Holub. I confess that I’m a huge user of getter and setter methods, for any number of reasons. In my own code, I use getters and setters exclusively when accessing member variables in the classes in which they are defined to make it completely obvious that I’m not dealing with a local variable or an argument. That problem is just as easily addressed, though, by adopting a naming convention for member variables. I also commonly find myself using systems that are heavily dependent on accessor methods – both Struts and Hibernate are heavy users of accessors. That said, the principles in the article could still be applied by ignoring the accessors where appropriate and using the objects in the manner that he describes. What I wish is that the article came with some sample code that illustrated the abstract points discussed within. Maybe Holub’s forthcoming book will include such code. Holub’s other article (on the extends keyword) is interesting as well. In fact, in reading the two together you can see how you might design programs more flexibly by leaving all of the accessors out of your interfaces but putting them into your implementation classes, and then being disciplined about using the interfaces as much as possible. ...