Posts

You knew it was coming: Microsoft’s content management system. Pigdog: Things to Say When You’re Losing a Technical Argument. I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing, the number of these I’ve used or the number of these I’ve had used against me. OK, I’ve created a new poll question, about X windows. The question is whether or not you use virtual-size desktops. The reason I ask is that when you install Linux, it always enables these modes, and I find them incredibly annoying. I’m finding the concept hard to explain, but Linux users will know exactly what I’m talking about. ...

Simson Garfinkel’s rant against Java looks like it was written about three years ago. Everybody knows that Java is slow and that “write once, run anywhere” is largely a myth. He also spends a lot of time on Java applets , which are rarely discussed these days. I’ve got a little message from the present for Simson – all the Java action these days is on the server. He briefly mentions servlets (referring to them as “applets inside Web servers”), but hardly gives them the attention they merit, being that Web applications written in Java are at the epicenter of the Java world these days. I’m not enough of a computer scientist to make a reasonable comparison of Java to anything other than Perl, but it seems to me that many, many companies are successfully building applications in Java these days, hateful though it may be. ...

I’ve been watching with interest the ongoing power generation problems in California. It looks like the California PUC is going to approve a rate hike that will raise the average family electric bill by about 10%. The problems have come as a result of an ill-conceived deregulation plan which, ironically enough, was supposed to lead to lower prices through competition. Unfortunately, the prices charged to consumer and power plant construction are still heavily regulated, so the anticipated competition was completely stifled, and the guys in the middle (the power companies) got completely pinched after they sold off all their existing power plants. I find it all fascinating. ...

O’Reilly Network: Designing JSP Custom Tag Libraries. Anyone need another reason to oppose the death penalty? Yesterday, Salon published a devastating article about how the death penalty effects jury selection, skewing juries toward the prosecution’s side. The way it works is simple – prosecutors can legally dismiss any potential juror who is not in favor of the death penalty if the death is a potential sentence in the case. So they ask for the death penalty in as many cases as they can, and they filter out everyone who’s not a wholehearted death penalty supporter. Unfortunately for the defendants, that also enables the prosecution to get rid of lots of people who believe in things like reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence. What a travesty. ...

Here’s an interesting email message I got from Egghead.com over the holidays. Jonathan Shapiro posted some great thoughts on copyright to the FSB mailing list relating to the big copy protected hard drive story broken by The Register last week. LinuxPlanet has a preview of Emacs 21.0, the much-needed modernization of Emacs. It looks very promising, I wonder when a beta will be released? If the Windows version lags far behind the Unix version, I’ll probably have to move to Linux as my desktop operating system at work. ...

Clay Shirky on micropayments. More consumer-hostile plans in the PC industry: plans are being made to copy-protect hard drives. I will never purchase such a drive.

Palm OS 3.5 is finally available for Palm handhelds other than the ones that it comes on by default. Unfortunately, the upgrade costs $19.95. I’ll probably go ahead and spring for it for my Palm IIIx just because I like to have the latest software. The Economist is critical of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. They have the same worries that I do – which is that these two define “U.S. interests” far too narrowly. I’m not a fan of Madeleine “Cruise Missile” Albright, either. I’d like to see people who consider social justice for people around the world to be in America’s interest in those spots, but there’s no chance of that with a Republican administration. ...

Hey, guess who got a mention in Salon today? If you’re visiting via the Salon link, I hope you’ll stick around. I can’t remember if I linked to Mark Levine’s Q&A; about the Supreme Court decision in Gore v. Bush, but I had problems with the earlier versions due to some errors of fact that I noticed. Apparently thousands of other people did, too, and let the author know about it. Anyway, here’s the updated version. Absent any consideration of the ultimate result of the Supreme Court’s decision, I think that the reasoning they used to render it was tortured and out of keeping with the law. I think that Levine’s essay raises some valid points, but I also think it’s a bit too severe – I don’t believe that the Supreme Court Justices are as nefarious as he portrays them to be. ...

I just wanted to make sure to credit Dan Hartung with making the first mention I saw of the hanging chad problem in association with the current election. Way back on 11/9, he discussed Votamatic punch card voting machines and the hanging chad problem associated with them. Nice work, Dan. If you use Perl under Windows, you really need to know about PPM. It’s a tool that enables you to install Perl modules on your computer without make or a C compiler. This makes it possible to easily install some of the more complex modules like DBI and LWP. ...

MIT and Cal Tech have obtained an initial grant of $250,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to come up with new voting machines. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. What will be more interesting to see is how much the voting mechanisms change before the elections in 2002 and 2004. People are pretty worked up about our obsolete voting machines now, but I can see that petering out pretty fast. ...