Nice guy Dave Johnson is getting railroaded by some halfwits from weblogger.com about the fact that his open source blogging tool happens to be called Roller Weblogger. They sent him the old cease and desist, despite the fact that they have no claim whatsoever on the term “weblogger.” Shove off, losers. By the way, the following link is for the Google index: weblogger.
I think I’m going to try to write my first Lisp code tonight. I need a macro for Emacs that’s something like “paste as multiline string.” I want it to turn several lines of text into several lines of text inside quotation marks with a plus at the beginning so that I can paste things like large SQL statements into my code without being forced to do the gruntwork of fixing them up myself. Surely it can’t be too hard. ...
Elliotte Rusty Harold has created a new API for processing XML in Java, called XOM. You can probably guess what it stands for. Anyway, I’ll probably check it out next time I need to process some XML.
I wasn’t surprised to read yesterday that the contestants on American Idol had to sign an onerous contract to participate on the show. If there’s such a thing as signing your life away, that’s basically what Kelly Clarkson and the other would-be idols did.
The Congressional committee investigating intelligence failures that led up to 9/11 released a report yesterday cataloguing the various pieces of information we had leading up to the attacks. While there’s certainly no guarantee that we could have stopped the attacks, we certainly could have done a better job.
Wired has a story about GlobalSecurity.org, a privately funded DC intelligence analysis outfit that is publishing commercial satellite photos of suspicious activity in Iraq. I confess that I had never visited the site before reading the article.
From The New York Review of Books: George Bush & the World. The best point made in the article is that President Bush has not articulated a vision of the world as we might wish it to be. The administration’s attitude toward the world seems entirely antagonistical – what positive changes do we wish to bring about and what are we doing to create that change?
It’s a challenge to keep up with events regarding Iraq. The Economist has a good article on what’s going on right now. I’m finding the diplomatic machinations on both sides to be rather interesting. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would just as soon get a war on, but I think that if the United States is going to start a war with another country, we should make a clear case that illustrates why we’re doing so. As the world’s lone remaining superpower, I think it behooves us to make it clear to the rest of the world that we aren’t capricious. ...
Last week I linked to Ted Neward’s suggestion that Sun turn Swing over to the Jakarta Project for further enhancement. This week, Marc Hedlund sidesteps that suggestion and instead recommends that Sun and the open source community come up with a way to bring Swing and JSP closer together in order to make it easy to create applications that have both GUI and Web interfaces. I’m in favor of anything that makes it easier for Web developers like me to create GUI apps. ...
Paul Krugman’s latest column knocks the ball out of the park.