Assume you need to build a traditional three-tier C/S application with a substantial legacy Java codebase in the mix, you want to use web services, and you need to store/replicate/transmit hundreds of terabytes per year. What to do? First, read the prior art.

Joel Spolsky inspires both admiration and hatred, pretty much exactly like everybody else who writes anything worth reading. This time he's writing about platforms and applications. I can't actually apply this to anything I'm doing these days, but it's good reading anyhow.

It's only a flesh wound!

Have your own web page? Love pointless graphical gewgaws? Try The Weather Pixie!

After taking the real Polygeek quiz and scoring a surprising 27%, I went back and dorked around trying to get 100%. I didn't make it, but did find answers to get me to 77%. Then, I found this, which sucked all the fun out of gaming the quiz. If you're just going to publish all the pictures, then poop on your head.

Hey! Now that I know where Corey Greenberg escaped to, I can go find my audio product reviews! Hooray! Thanks honey! In today's episode, Corey reviews headphones for your portable music player. Now if only I had $330 lying about looking for something to do.

My beloved wife found this: BestStuff. I assume it's affiliated with NBC since it has their logo on it, but they do have reviews of |<3wl stuff. I wonder if they update daily ...

It's easy enough to wave off the stories of women being forced to drink their own breast milk, or grannies having their tweezers confiscated, or pretty blond women being groped. How do you set aside the rash of air marshal resignations? If there really is a flood of resignations, doesn't that suggest that something is wrong with the system/organization/process?

I'm sure this is legitimate, but I can't help responding "well, duh." You need a grant for this?

Afterm nattering at us, shouldn't the Swedes let the man go while wringing their hands and asking "why does he hate us"? How come they're held to a different standard than us?

Alex del Castillo reprints an email received from a friend in the service. He admits he can't vouch for its authenticity, but it makes a claim he (and I) agree with anyway. If you only want to read a bit of it, scroll down to the bold print: More Faith in the Commoners. Remind me to go buy a handgun for my wife.

American Realpolitik excerpts and links to the Fordham Foundation's recommendations for 9/11 lesson plans, an effort vastly superior to the excreble tripe from the NEA on the same topic. If I had my daughters were warehouse-schooled, then I'd be at least insisting these recommendations were followed in preference to the NEA ones.

Mang! What a smackdown Mr.Misha has delivered. "What he said," I added.

Dean Esmay lays out his case for ramping down the anti-Saudi rhetoric for a while. His argument seems plausible to me, for what it's worth.

BWA-hahahahahaha! Damien Penny forwards a plea for help. Won't you do something to help them out?

I've never really made a secret of my distaste for most religiousity, but even for me, this is too damned much. Whatever happened to "mind your own business" as a guiding principle? Leave the faithful to themselves until they start harassing you, hypocrite. I don't care what they do in church any more than I care what they do in the bedroom, and that goes double for Jane's readers.

Steven Den Beste is one of the writers I (and a whole bunch of other people) make an effort to read daily. Today, he presents an essay that posits that multiculturalism is morally bankrupt. Excellent reading. Go and do.

Here, in one fell swoop, is a quick round-up of some information about the RIAA hacking bill and some of its loathesome sponsors. Damn, this pisses me right the *@&$ off.

I heard about L.A. County's ban on soft drinks in schools on No Personality Radio and said to myself "Self! Is this really the most pressing thing they've got on their plates?" Once again, my obviously superior outlook on life is reinforced by finding kindred spirits elsewhere.

Arrrgh!!! A real live, honest-to-<diety/> protest in favor of free trade, and it didn't happen here. It happened outside the World Summit for Sustainable Development in South Africa. We really are losing our status as leader of the free world when we can't even send an official representative to stand with the farmers and point out that idiocy of raising poverty to a virtue.

RIAA's Hold on the House covers (again!) the evil that is being perpetrated upon us all by our elected officials. Read this and call your representative, damn it!

By the way, read about the phone call between Rep. Berman's office and In Arguendo.

BWA-hahahahahaha! In the wake of the earlier news that Donahue's new show on MSNBC scored a staggering 0.1, which is coincidentally enough the smallest rating possible, we have here an interview with Donahue's viewer.

Oooooh! "People are our most valuable asset," a spokesperson didn't claim without a trace of irony in her voice.

Bush v. Churchill? I don't find that unimaginable ... there are several historical parallels; we can disagree about whether or not they're the most important characteristics. Churchill was prone to keeping his own council and not playing well with other European leaders. As I recall Churchill was also pushed out of office once the need for his militancy and unilateralism were perceived as undesirable. Churchill was strongly in favor of tax cuts and hated socialism.

Churchill's view was that the government should follow policies which lowered taxes and increased the number of rich people so they could pay more in taxes, the same policies which resulted in unprecedented prosperity in the United States during the last twenty years of the twentieth century. (from Winston Churchill dot-org)

Unlike our own GWB, however, Churchill tried the multi-national thing and went home unsatisfied:

No one would take heed of his reiterated warnings of the folly of attempting to appease HITLER and of the necessity to bring together a "Grand Alliance" against the aggressor powers before it was too late. Baldwin and Chamberlain were too solidly entrenched in power to shift. Churchill tried to rally the right-wing Conservatives against Baldwin's liberal Indian policy, and he backed Edward VIII against Baldwin at the time of the king's abdication in 1936. (from Grolier's Encyclopedia)

Churchill also (finally) gave that up:

COLONIALISM was not the only aspect of Churchill’s Victorian image. His apparent support for preferential trade within the British Empire appeared to Americans as just the sort of restrictive policy that caused wars, and his willingness to make territorial agreements without regard for the wishes of the inhabitants of the places concerned — the Baltic States is one example — reinforced American beliefs that he was another European power politician. After all, American leaders remained firm in their conviction that World War II was primarily the result of a failure in leadership on the part of the liberal nations in Europe. Even Cordell Hull and Roosevelt, both of whom assailed American isolationists in bitter terms, placed the blame for Hitler and Mussolini on the Europeans, who had rejected Wilsonian principles and opted for narrow, selfish policies which made it possible for the United States to reject the Versailles Treaty. Churchill likewise condemned the weak European leadership between the wars, which fit his image in America as the best of wartime partners. But the Prime Minister did not share their critique of the peace settlement, and the Americans worried openly that Churchill was not suited for peacemaking. (from a winstonchurchill.org article)

So finally, we cover in one fell swoop the steel protectionism, unilateral action, regime change, contempt for European diplomats, and peacemaking as an end in itself.

It's only now that we think that Churchill was a great man; he was a joke to the intelligentsia of the time. All that said, if GWB doesn't start shooting Iraqis soon then I'm going to lose patience.

Are you feeling incomplete without a daily dose of something to spike your blood pressue? Try ConsumerFreedom.com. Found via a truly loverly write-up from American RealPolitik)

Yes, Alex ... I'll take fear-mongering and exaggeration for $1000. Mang, that Internet is a scary place! Thank <diety useLocale="true"/> that none of that stuff ever happens here in the real world. (Found via Ed Felten)

David Brin has given this speech, or one like it, to a great many groups. He has finally written it up, cleaned it up, and published it. In it he posits that security v. freedom is a false dichotomy, and damn we've come a long way from feudalism, and more; all topics he covers in more detail in his book The Transparent Society. I must admit that I was a bit taken aback when I first read the book, because I had bought into most of the unspoken assumptions. I'm delighted, though, because I want to think that my daughters will have a better life than I have, in mostly the same way that my life is better than my parents', and theirs was better than my grandparents', etc ad infinitum.

All forms of accounting fraud are equally bad right? Wrong, apparently. Some kinds of accounting misdeeds are just indiscretions and hijnks, rather than actual criminal conduct, if you judge by the behavior of the mass media.

Well, it's about damn time. I don't mind being told by gummint officials that things are complicated, and there's more going on than meets the eye, but it seems obvious from the ground that the House of Saud isn't our friend. The buddy-buddy treatment from GWB was completely uncalled for, and I'm delighted to find that it wasn't that at all.

Ack. Gasp. Sputter. I'll execute them myself, and I'll even supply the gun and the bullets. Just get out of the effing way. (Found via Lucianne.com)

Look! Don't you feel more secure already? Isn't the TSA just doing a wonderful job?

I'm making my vacation plans now for next year's Tomatina festival in Bunol, Spain. Who's with me?

Apparently, the tennis world is all a-flutter over Serena Williams' non-traditional tennis attire. "Yum," is pretty much all I've got to say about it.

And people laughed at the prospect of professional computer games players? What to make of this, then?

See, Mom? We can't get rid of the cats after all! They're good for the girls!

Man! If I had the money, I'd go too!

I give up. This is a large complex problem, and will involve large complex solutions. The status quo is obviously too expensive to maintain, I opine. At some point somebody has to stop feeding the revenge machine. I believe that either the Israelis need to either stop killing Palestinians at all, or maybe they should start seriously killing lots of them. This "third way" seems to do nothing but prolong the conflict.

Wait a second ... there are laws saying it's okay to throw people off their own land and give it away? I'm astounded that the judges had the nerve to release this ruling; you'd think they'd be afraid for their lives. Kudos to them.

One bit that caught my eye:

The government has previously ignored several court rulings against it, with President Mugabe saying that he would abide only by rulings he considered just.

I'm not sure we have a word (or phrase) for that in American English, but I'm positive that "rule of law" doesn't cover that.

Missed out on the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" meme-fest? Failed to buy a Furby before the craze died off? Don't make that mistake again. Putz.

Can't afford real usability testing? "How to simulate usability testing with confidence" is pretty much how I read it.

One example of open-source development that doesn't work. Open source is wonderful where it's appropriate, but that doesn't make it a panacea. Some things do better with a self-organizing collective, and some things do better with an actual designer with a vision.

Betty Horton lives in Cleveland. She is a law-abiding citizen with no criminal charges against her. Ever. Unfortunately for her, there is another woman named Bettie Horton who is wanted for several warrants. So, Betty, the legal one, gets arrested three times in eight months. What's worse is the police don't seem to be that upset about it, and the article implies that there's nothing Betty can do about it. We're living in a nation of laws (and lawyers) ... doesn't she have some sort of standing to sue the police for continually arresting her for nothin?

See? I could never be a music critic, because my mind doesn't work this way. Here is an essay ostensibly about The Air Guitar World Championship, but it veers off into why U.K. pop music doesn't suX0r like U.S. pop music does, and that Springsteen's new album is a complete yawn. I wish I could do that. Instead, I'm reduced to whacking things into people's heads with anger and a ball-peen hammer.

Thomson Multimedia / the Frauenhofer Institute own several patents related to MP3 encoding of stuff. They had previously said they weren't going to charge money for licenses for free implementations. They've decided to stop allowing that, and now everybody has to pony up cash for MP3 players. Xiph, the makers of an alternative encoder which is not patent-encumbered, have published An Open Thank-You Letter.

Ray Ozzie, the architect of both Lotus Notes and Groove, writes about nondiscretionary controls. "But Mitchell," you complain, "why do I give a rat's ass?" Because this is what some of your Congressvermin are trying to foist off on you in order to protect the current business models of some media companies. (Found via Ed Felten).

Mark Steyn is just amazing. His latest essay, "Stability is the last thing Iraq needs" is right up my alley. I don't really have anything to add, and my most effective effort would probably be just to quote bits of the thing.

BWA-hahahahahahaha! Was it W.C. Fields who said never to work with animals or children?

Hear hear! Let's bring them some clean water and put our name on the fountain. What a fabulous idea!

Wow. A court has found that people have no expectation of privacy when they type in their passwords. Doesn't that seem ... umm ... contrary to reasonable people's expectations? Exactly where did these judges get their notions of computer security? Is there anything people more expect to be private than their passwords?

I know I keep harping on this, but exactly where do these people come from? "Poor People Are Better Than Rich People" says the editor of the Earth Island Institute's online journal. This same message appears far too often on television, even (or especially) on children's programming. My wife periodically reminds me that I'm ruining everything for her by pointing out that Ootsie and Bootsie Snooty (on Disney's PB&J Otter) are by definition evil and unhappy since they're rich. F*ck that noise ... if you want to be healthier, be rich. If you want better health care, be rich. If you want to live longer, be rich. Being poor generally sucks, and no amount of blithering about the nobility of poverty will ever change that.

Here is a multi-page story about a guy who stole a pile of money via fictitious eBay auctions and skipped town. What gets me is that the article is trying to claim (somehow) that it's eBay's fault because they didn't do more to stop the guy. The short story is he spent four years (!!!!) trading on eBay just like he was supposed to, accumulating an overwhelmingly positive feedback rating (read: "reputation"). Then, he fired up a whole pile of auction items, collected the cash from the winners, and skipped town. Obviously, then, it's eBay's fault for not using their crack team of psychic predictors floating in their nutrient pools to determine that the guy was going to embezzle all the money and split. Bad company, no biscuit.

Well, the Beetle made such a miraculous comeback, why not the microbus? Surely a mobile sin bin is just what the youth (and boomers) of America really want and need; now you'll be able to spill out of the back amidst of cloud of doob-smoke just like in "Fast Times at Ridgmont High," and we both know that's what you're really about.

How dare the proles not consent to our rigid preconception of what belief systems they're allowed to profess? I'm shocked, shocked to find that average citizens are thumbing their noses at the majesty of government-sponsored busybodiness. Pffffft.

Hooray for Transparency! I don't actually hate the police, but I recognize (uncomfortably) the potential for abuse in their organization. At least some of the police officers I know are decent fellows, but some of them are just unreconstructed assholes. In that regard, they're just like the rest of us: some of us are decent, and some of us suck. This decision, however, helps to insure that the worst opportunities for organizational abuse are limited, and that's a damned good thing.

Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!

I have discovered that I have to write more commentary on a link here on this webpage than I used to when I just emailed them around to my victims. Unfortunately, here, I have nothing to add. Blech.

"The War on (Some) Drugs Heats Up", says Mike at ColdFury.com. It seems that no legislative body ever fails to pass the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development is meeting now in a concerted effort to blame everything on the U.S. Actually, they want us to admit culpability and send them some money. They claim that the earth is being ravaged by we eeeeeevil capitalists, and mass extinction is just around the corner unless we implement Kyoto and other GDP-reducing programs. The problem is, or a least one of the problems is, that the earth isn't being destroyed (according to Bjorn Lomborg). Dr. Lomborg has written a book about this very topic, by the bye.

BWA-hahahahahahaha! I was trying to link to the story here titled "FCC Probes Pattern of News Show Hype," but the permanent link doesn't work. In any case, all three stories here are worth reading.

So THAT'S what they mean by diversity ... a whole continuum of beliefs not including anything right of Al Gore. Bah. I had the great good fortune to receive my degree in Mechanical Engineering and so was spared the socio-political indoctrination that seems to go so well with fuzzy studies.

Why aren't we wringing our hands and asking "why does he hate us so much?" Instead, we seem to be arresting his punk ass and holding him over for trial. Was that really so difficult? I really can't imagine what his motivations would have to be before I'd be willing to just say "Oh, ok ... that's all right then" and look the other way. Blow up shit, go to jail. It seems really simple to me.

Let me see if I have this straight: (1) she's a girl, (2) she went to university, (3) she designed clothing with "The Most Holy", "The Wise" and "The Creator" on it? Clearly she's eeeeeeeevil and must apologize, and maybe ought to be killed outright ... all reasonable people would agree, I'm sure.

As a sign of my apparently irremediable juvenile nature, I feel compelled to present Buzkashi! by Seanbaby who is quite possibly the funniest thirtysomething child writing today.

And yes, I do think this is funny. I also loved Old Man Murray, before they folded up their tent.

Some days the stories just fall into your lap: "I'm the New Zealand Air Guitar Champion," says Toby Peneha.

What? Cold and wet not good enough for you? Fie on thee, shameless ne'er-do-wells!

I'm sorry ... I could have sworn you said you were the official government wizard. Surely my hearing is faulty.

Words fail me. Not a joke, by the way. I understand manufacturing for a niche market, but jeebus ... if you had to, could you describe a more niche-y market?

BWA-hahahahahaha! Bush Vows To Remove Toxic Petroleum From National Parks sez The Onion.

Really, it's just like shooting fish in a barrel. The Saudis fund their own lobby of apologists here in the U.S. Well, duh. My continuing astonishment lies entirely in the free pass they get from those who claim to be our media of record.

It could only happen in Georgia, I'm afraid. I have long toyed with the idea of a "Silly Religion of the Week": I would send subscribers various bits and pieces so they could put a shrine on their desk. Obviously this would irritate the Christian fundies no end. I would also make sure to include traditional Christian artifacts somewhere along the way, which would really get them hopping. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough people that wanted to tweak the noses of their cow-orkers that much, so I set aside my burgeoning business empire. Obviously, there is some pent-up demand that I didn't forsee, because here is another guy with nearly the same idea. Woo-hoo! Fire up the printer!

A series of photoessays about the West Bank, found via Douglas Turnbull. The strange thing, as Mr.(Dr.?) Turnbull points out is how disjoint the Palestinian and Israeli bits are, even though they are occupying the same three-dimensional space. It's just ... bizarre.

BWA-hahahahahaha! Steven den Beste opens fire on an anonymous British target of opportunity with a truly breathtaking amount of smackdown. To quote his closer, "Now go away, or I shall taunt you again."

Neo-Sovereignty is a rather long essay about a concept diametrically opposed to Transnational Progressivism. Essentially, this essay makes the claim that multi-national cooperation will always founder when the time arrives to limit membership to the "Weapons of Mass Destruction Owning Nations" club. Consequently, the nation (or nations) in the club most able to do so must take actions to ensure the nation (or nations) outside the club don't get to join.

BWA-hahahahaha! Ford Testifies to Stop Ride Sharing, inspired by Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenti, no doubt.

Strike a blow for freedom! Vandalize a speed trap today!. These stupid things are afloat in the U.S. as well, so we have an opportunity to show true multinational cooperation by smashing ours as well.