Posts

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. –Bjarne Stronstrup (originator of C++ programming language) (via Interesting People)

Here’s some desktop wallpaper for Independence Day, courtesy of the National Geographic picture of the day archive.

The Volano Report measures the network performance of various JVMs. At work we use the Sun JVM on Linux with Tomcat. That has to be a worst case performance scenario of some kind.

How many things have to go wrong for two jet airliners to collide in midair out in the middle of nowhere? Looking at the data that’s coming in, the answer seems to be an awful lot. It seems like the list of mistakes starts with the fact that a key air traffic warning system was down for maintenance, one of the air traffic controllers overseeing the airspace where the collision occurred was on break, and the air traffic controllers warned the Russian pilot late and didn’t warn the DHL pilot at all. Both planes were also supposed to have on board collision warning systems, but apparently only the DHL plane had the system. The DHL pilot did the best he could – his collision warning system told him to dive and he wasn’t told any different by air traffic control, which did tell the Russian pilot to dive. It’s easy to think that if any one of the conditions that contributed to the collision were different, disaster would have been averted. I comment on this crash only because I’m somewhat fascinated by failures of complex systems, especially those that have as many safeguards built in as air traffic control. ...

Tim O’Reilly has written a long piece for O’ReillyNet, ahead of the OSCON, called O’Reilly Network: The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors. In it he reiterates the point that most software is written for use, not for sale, and that open source software makes the lives of people writing software for their own (or their employers’) use much easier. He also takes Microsoft to talk for their full-on lobbying campaign against open source software on every front, and makes the allegation that lobbying by Microsoft is putting pressure on people within government agencies that advocate open source software. Overall, it’s worth reading. (Via Camworld.) ...

The Economist has an article on the wrangling between the US and its allies over the International Criminal Court. It provides an interesting perspective in favor of America submitting to the court’s jurisdiction, but I’m still not convinced. (I had written a much longer item, but it wasn’t particularly coherent. I’m still thinking hard about this issue.) Steven Den Beste lays out the fundamental argument against the ICC, and I find it to be persuasive. He accurately expresses the nagging doubts I’ve had about it since the beginning. One thing that I meant to comment on yesterday was how two news stories that were in the headlines correlated. The first being our resistance to the ICC, and the second being an attack by US aircraft on a wedding party in Afghanistan. We don’t really know what happened in Afghanistan, but what we do know is that one or more American aircraft unleashed an attack that killed a pretty large number of Afghan civilians – more than the IDF did in their assault on the Jenin refugee camp earlier this year. In any case, the case seems ripe for a war crimes trial in front of the ICC. Maybe the attack resulted from criminal negligence, or maybe it was an awful mistake. The question Americans have to ask themselves is whether we want that to be decided by a panel of unknown makeup in Europe? I don’t think I do. Another thing that this reminds me of was the caning of the American teenager in Singapore in 1994. I was strongly opposed to our government allowing the teenager to be caned, because no matter how stupid it was for Michael Fay to spray graffiti on a luxury car, I didn’t feel like America should allow its citizens to be subjected to punishments in other countries that we wouldn’t impose upon them here. I’m just kind of mulling things over here … ...

Currently, I’m reading Bruce Eckel’s book Thinking in Java, for the second time. About 2 1/2 years ago, I got a new job where I’d be a Java developer, despite the fact that I didn’t know Java. (I was hired for my web expertise under the assumption that I’d pick up the language.) Now that I’ve been at it with Java full time for about 30 months, it’s time for me to go back to the book to pick up all of the things that I glossed over the first time around. I’m hoping to pick up more about threads, I/O, inner classes, and collections. I’m also hoping to pick up lots of other syntatical tricks that were utterly lost on me when I first learned Java. I just skim the parts that I already know really well, and it’s going pretty fast. Hopefully at the end I’ll be a much better Java developer than I am now. ...

A federal district judge has ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional in federal cases because it is certain that some number of innocent people will be executed and thus denied due process. The ruling does not apply anywhere outside the case for which the ruling was issued, but if Judge Rakoff’s argument is upheld in higher courts, then it could eliminate the federal death penalty altogether. Furthermore, there’s no reason why Rakoff’s logic is specific to federal cases, so were it to be upheld in the Supreme Court, we could see the state death penalty ended as well. ...

The news of the week was definitely Microsoft’s official announcement of Palladium in Steven Levy’s Newsweek article last week. Since the article went to print, the Internet has been abuzz with talk of the new platform, and the consensus seems to be that the untrusted person in this new computing paradigm is the person who actually uses the computer. If you’re not up to speed, here’s a list of resources that I’ve been able to scrape together: ...

Howard J Bashman agrees with my take on the Supreme Court decision that allows schools to impose piss tests on basically everyone. Here’s the quote from How Appealing: Justice Thomas's majority opinion, standing alone, suggests to me that soon high schools will be allowed to conduct suspicionless drug testing of all students, not just students participating in competitive extracurricular activities. ... What makes this ruling the day's most important for me is that, as a result of this decision, countless school children will be desensitized to what the Fourth Amendment (at least in my view and in the views of four Justices) actually requires, which in this setting would be reasonable particularized suspicion. I just like it when smart people agree with me.