Posts

My current project involves building a commercial Java Web application. For years I’ve built Web applications (using Java and a number of other platforms) to deploy on our own servers. Building something that’s suitable for distribution is a horse of a different color. I thought I’d write up my experiences for other people who are taking on similar tasks. Distribution format – Usually Java applications are distributed as WAR or EAR files, but many people also package their Java Web applications with a servlet container to run them to make things easier. Open source licenses – My application uses a number of open source libraries, and I had to go through and make sure that all of the libraries were distributable without much fuss. Configuration – What’s the best way to set up database connections and other configuration parameters? Deployment platform – In theory, Java Web applications should work with any servlet container, but the devil is always in the details. Many Java applications seem to be distributed with a servlet container as well. What’s the best approach? Look for separate posts dealing with each of those issues. ...

Lately I’ve taken to playing Words With Friends, a Scrabble game for the iPhone. One of the first things I learned from playing against good players is that Scrabble is not about showing off your good vocabulary, it’s about turning the tiles you draw into points. A two letter word that nets you 31 points because you dropped a Q onto a triple letter score to make the used-only-in-Scrabble word “QI” is better than busting out a 6 letter word nobody’s ever heard of that nets 18 points. ...

Emmylou Harris on the Louvin Brothers: I’d always loved the Everly Brothers, but there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers. From the New York Times obituary for Charlie Louvin. I strongly recommend Louvin’s self-titled album released in 2007. His tribute to his brother Ira, who died in 1965, is particularly moving.

Ezra Klein sums up the current state of the union as briefly and accurately as you could hope for: When they were asked about shifting their focus to the future when the economy was so bad in the present, they explained that they got pretty much everything they thought they could get – and, in fact, more than they thought they could get – in the tax-cut deal, and it was time to let that work. Left unsaid is that they can’t get anything more out of a Republican House, and so there’s little point in begging. ...

I recently built a business Web site for a friend using WordPress and was shocked at how easy it was to create something really good, really quickly. I used a commercial theme and a few popular plugins and wound up with something really nice that looked professional and didn’t look at all like a blog. I didn’t consider using free themes at all, and it looks like that was the right idea. ...

My friend David Brooks, now assigned special “most hated” status for tricking me into linking to his New Yorker article by writing one interesting paragraph, makes an appearance at #25 on the Buffalo Beast’s list of The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010: The Bernie Madoff of American letters, every tortured construct and inaccurate assumption ever set to print by this annoyingly self-described “Bourgeoisie Bohemian” is a fraudulent attempt to justify why his house is more expensive than yours. Brooks couldn’t even wait for the bodies to cool after the Haiti earthquake before writing about how useless it is to send money because those voodoo-lovin’ savages simply can’t be helped. ...

Lane Wallace, who’s writing a book on passion, finds that it starts with a vision: And the origins of passion, I’ve concluded, are directly linked to this idea of ‘vision.’ For passion to take hold, we first have to have a vision of an alternate future that ignites a fire within us: a vision of a wrong righted, a community developed, a great new product made and sold, a goal achieved, or just a new relationship full of happiness and bliss. Not every vision leads to a passionate pursuit of it, of course. But in all cases where people do pursue something with passion, it’s because there was a vision, first, that sparked an unquenchable flame and desire to make that vision real. ...

Google has announced they’re going to more aggressively take on content farmers: As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ...

Tim Bray on making Facebook work: My hypothesis is that Facebook works great when you’re only friends with people who, when they post pictures of their kids, you actually want to look at them. Or, as someone said over dinner tonight, with people who you’d walk across a bar to talk to if you saw them.

Former Cato staffer and software developer Timothy B. Lee argues in The Return of Bottom-up Liberalism that generally speaking, libertarian philosophies have done very well in the policy arena over the past few decades: Rather, what’s happened is that liberalism in general has internalized key libertarian critiques of earlier iterations of liberal thought, with the result that a guy with a largely Friedmanite policy agenda can plausibly call himself a liberal. And actually, this shouldn’t surprise us at all, because Friedman called himself a liberal too. ...