Holy effing crap. Dick Gephardt announces his complete preparedness to overthrow the Constitution to suit himself. Everyone please remember this when election time rolls around again.

No cannisters of VX yet, but we may be closer to a conclusion, as much as it may pain weak-minded in-duh-viduals such as Lee to find that it wasn't all made up.

I love a good rant. "No," you say, "not you! Why, you're a paragon of friendly friendshipdom and shizznit."

Behold The Bile Blog from a guy who obviously knows his way around the Java community and is able to inspire great reaction in his readers. I'm also putting him in the blogroll so I won't forget to check his page daily. Hooray for hatred and loathing!

Oh, my aching sides. You kids!!!

Oh dear sweet Jebus ... this sounds like great hooting fun.

News Flash! Globalization is Good!!! With a capital "G"!!!! (Found via Tim Blair)

Finally! A responsible explanation of why writing projects (like the Full of Hate Brothers) might someday have real meaning.

In yet another fine example of other people thinking of things in a completely new way, Erik Benson runs a service called All Consuming, which displays a running list of the most talked-about books in a (large-ish) subset of the blogosphere. He also wrote an article for O'Reilly explaining how he built the whole thing using SOAP, XML, and RSS. It's quite an interesting story, I opine.

BWA-hahahahahah! Rand Simberg lets Bill O'Reilly have it with both barrels. Woo hoo!

Finally, the online world catches up with the real world. New icons for MSN Messenger.

I keep finding these things just a few montsh too late to save me. In an effort to make my pain have meant something, I present the way I should havegenerated those damned Excel spreadsheet from a weba pplication instead of the way I wound up doing it.

Oooooh ... Samurai Jack action figures!!! Yet more crap to clutter my workspace! Yay!

I love to issue proclamations, but I don't really expect anybody to do what I tell them to. I would like to ask, however, that you please go sign this petition. The steady erosion of our public domain due to lobbyists for Disney et al is a real problem, even if it doesn't look like it yet. There are many many pragmatic solutions to the issue that don't involve depriving Mickey of any of his residual income.

If you're considering trying to find a VC, there's obviously a lot of stuff to think about. Thanks to Joel Spolsky, I found two interesting bits:

• Presenting Your Company: David Hornik and Andrew Anker, two VCs with August Capital, throw out a few bullet points of ways to completely screw yourself up in the presentation
• Joi Ito describes her company's investment process, which is kind of icky in its own special way.

Come and get it! Finally, a browser that is usable and that doesn't suck as bad as IE6. I had hoped against hope that eventually the time spent rewriting Mozilla from the ground up would accomplish something (besides giving the entire browser market to Microsoft), and it appears that it might finally bear fruit. Presenting: the Firebird Browser Project Page.

Hooray! Now you can configure Outlook (if you're using it) to quit hiding your attachments from you. Sure, some attachment suffixes are dangerous, but so is a pocketknife, fire, and bleach. Just because you may hurt yourself with a thing isn't necessarily enough reason to expunge it completely from your world. Sometimes, you really want somebody to email you an Access database, damn it.

Ooh! Owww! <thwack/> <thwack/> <thwack/> Arnold Kling unleashes a short torrent of economic attitude on Clinton, Bush, Greenspan, and other worthy recipients. More like this, please, sir.

Kathy and I took our daughters to see Finding Nemo yesterday, and I have to say that Pixar has done it again. The film was great fun and the voice characterization was spectacular. The story was sufficiently engrossing that, for most of the film, I wasn't even marvelling at the animation but was just pulled into the quest for Nemo. And for me that's really saying something.

As always, there's a scary bit. McKenna cried pretty seriously at that part, but she stuck it out and cheered for the big finish. All in all it was well worth the price of admission. Go see it.

If you google up "mr tones.com", we're #4. Curiously enough, a real website with a url anything like "mrtones.com" doesn't show up anywhere. I suppose that's why nearly half of our visitors here with referrer tags are from some variant of that search. Sorry 'bout that kids ... they have their own page at "http://www.mrtones.com/". (Duh)

I wonder if they know how much of their traffic we're siphoning off, and if it's worth any cash to them?

Damn, but that miniputt is some hard sh*t.

Since the Jayson Blair-a-thon hasn't yet run its course, I'd like to point to this 404 page, found via Joanne Jacobs.

Holy effing crap! That is a staggeringly impressive layout you've got there. I'll be cutting and pasting some CSS tonight, for sure.

BWA-hahahahaha! Finally, an academic quite to my liking. He's a funny funny man.

In case you ever want to use the stock JavaMail distribution to fetch via POP3 or IMAP over SSL, you'll be glad to have these tips on JavaMail and JSSE.

More SCO happiness:

Novell announces that they own all the patents to what used to be AT&T Unix System V, so SCO doesn't have any intellectual property to be trying to protect. Neener neener.

SCO replies that, um, they weren't alleging patent or copyright infringement (so what was all that back there then?), but breach of contract instead. Way to go! Move them goalposts!

BWA-hahahaha! A quick quiz: Art or Crap (as found on Gawker)

Whoa! Flashback alert! Jess, the Expert System Shell for the Java Platform, brings back all kinds of weird memories of my narrow escape from the crushing black hole that was AI research.

Blah blah blah until you get down to the sidebar at the bottom that describes how SAML solves the cross-domain SSO problem. Sure it's kludgey, but it'll be workable. You have a better idea?

LinuxTag, a non-profit organization in Germany chartered to support and evangelize the use of Linux, has filed suit in German court. Under German law, it appears, company "A" may demand that company "B" stop making anti-competitive speech unless they can demonstrate a factual basis for company "B"s claim. In short, SCO now has to either (1) divulge their evidence of intellectual property misdoings, or (2) shut up.

Choice #1 lets them continue making their "Linux is infringing on our patents" claims while giving IBM an early look at their evidence which may very well help IBM in the US trials coming eventually. Choice #2 suggests, rather strongly I'd say, that SCO in fact have the proverbial sack-o-nothingness.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving pile of schlubs. Hooray for LinuxTag!

There's always a HOWTO, isn't there? Sand Castle Tips and Tricks by sandy feet.

BUSH ATTACKED BY CRAZED TRIBBLES!!!!!

BWA-hahahahaha! I gotta get me one of these t-shirts!!!

I missed two, for an embarassing 89% score.

Oh crap. Here's yet another thing for me to worry about, and my oldest daughter is only 5.

Bob Cringley weighs in on the SCO v. IBM suit. My opinion, and thanks for asking, is that SCO has a big ol' sack full of nothing, and they're hoping to make some money fall out of the sky. I suspect they'll be in Chapter 13 in no time at all.

Whoops! Sorry 'bout that, chief. It apparently isn't true that all emails containing the letter 'P' are evil; it's just that some people apparently imagine they are.

I just found this, and only about two years after it was written: Ted Husted wrote a quick few notes about performance penalties for reflection and creation v. caching in Java. I was under the impression that reflection was an order of magnitude slower than direct invocation, and here people are only seeing 5-10% slower. Damn, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Hooray for The Gipper! And hooray for Scott for writing this moving essay about the great change in the world that is the end of the Cold War.

Well, crap. More stuff I have to buy. I'm going to have to get a second (or third) mortgage to pay for all the stuff plus someplace to store it.

Hey France! So, like, we're have a party? and lots of people are gonna be there? and you're totally not invited. Okay?

Frank J. explains how to deal with the plethora of Homeland Security Alert Levels. In detail.

Death to these bastards. I'll even supply the bullets and fire 'em myself.

BWA-hahahahaha! "Throw me a frickin' bone" indeed!! This sounds like great fun.

Sick of dealing with actors and their fragile egos and demands for better lighting/blocking/trailers? Dump 'em all in the very near future.

Holy crap. Lee, it appears that you got out just in time, because your erstwhile countrymen have gone completely around the bend.

(Blogger archive links are hosed. Again. What a crock).

More reason why Tim Blair is must-reading for all sentient beings:

According to Clean Up Australia, Australians use in excess of 6 billion plastic bags per year. If tied together these bags would form a chain that is long enough to go around the world 37 times.

Well, maybe that's exactly what we're trying to do, art haters.

I seem to be on a web services kick. As in most things, once you get immersed in something you get sensitized to it, and start finding it everywhere. (This happens especially when you buy a car). Anyway, if you do anything that remotely involves books, you can now access the entirety of the Amazon powerhouse via their published web services.

For the three people left in the world who write their own WSDL files, let me point out this free graphical WSDL editor. "Use vi and be careful" is no substitute for a good format-specific editor. ("Use emacs and be careful" is, of course, malfeasance)

Once again, the Japanese lead the world in coming up with bizarre crap to buy. Here we have hats. For cats. To wear on their little feline heads. Plus collars, in some cases. I'm completely boggled. (Thanks to Kimberly Swygert for finding this rare gem)

BWA-hahahahaha! How to look like a no-life-having online dork without trying.

Just like Urban Dictionary but with a higher S/N ratio: pseudodictionary - the dictionary for words that wouldn't make it into dictionaries :: v2.0

Well, well, well ... who knew the Beeb was in the training business?

Bwa hahahahaha! Kathy and I watched all the episodes of "Red vs Blue" released so far, and laughed at quite a bit of it. These guys are a riot.

For those who don't recognize the visuals, this is all done with Halo for the XBox. Quite an impressive accomplishment, given the nature of the tool (first-person shooter for a console).

Also, rememberize this IBM series on BPEL in order to ensure full bozzword compliance.

Note to self: make sure I've internalized this list of IBM's best practices for web services; it's sure to impress somebody eventually.

I kept waiting for Lee to notice this theory, and even told him about it, but he never blogged it. I suppose it doesn't really tie into his "it's all America's fault" mania.

The clouds broke just long enough for me, my wife, and our oldest daughter to see the vanishing moon. It was wonderful. I know it meant a great deal more to me and Kathy than it did to McKenna, but hopefully she'll remember it later. The clouds moved back in before the totality finished, but the coolness was fully established by then.

Hooray! A Sam & Max sequel is coming!!!!

And now ... a diet for Lee to endorse.

Hey Lee! You keep claiming that free speech is being suppressed here in America, right? Perhaps you've forgotten what suppression of dissent really looks like. Keep this counter-example in mind the next time you want to chat about the Dixie Chicks and their poor pitiful dissent-suppressed selves.

"Switch" to a better entertainment form!

I am completely dying here. I'm hoping with all my being that this is a joke. The crappy MIDI music gives it away, if it is.

If it isn't a joke, then I weep for the future.

Michelle has a fun contest!!!1! Enter now!

Moxie explains the difference between women and men, in a disturbingly clear graphic.

FInally, a real help to all those people looking for a complete timeline for the development of the Internet.

Well, well, well ... who knew?

This was from yesterday, but I only now got around to reading it: Orin Kerr quotes Terry Fisher as saying that record companies only make $0.19 per $20.00 CD sold, to which I thought "well, that's crap." My reply was this (sent via e-mail, since they don't have comments on their blog):

I apologize for the lateness of my response, but I only today read your posting on The Volokh Conspiracy about CD prices. I'm not in the music industry, so perhaps I'm missing some important facts from elsewhere. Allow me to question one aspect of your posting: the $1.50 per CD for manufacturing. I can go to Best Buy, Media Play, or Circuit City and buy 100 CD-Rs for $10 nearly anytime. With only a slight bit of preparation (buying the Sunday paper for a week or two), I can find a coupon/rebate combo that results in CD-Rs being free after all the paperwork is filed.

CD-Rs: between $0.00 and $0.10 per
CDs: $1.50

Hmmm ... my "Hollywood accounting" detector is ringing madly. I suspect that most of the cost (beyond what the retail store gets) is inflated tremendously. As I said before, I'm no industry maven, but I can certainly question the accounting practices that cause Toni Braxton to file bankruptcy simultaneous with having a multi-platinum selling CD, the Dixie Chicks telling Dan Rather that their 17-million-selling CD didn't make them millionaires in spite of that representing $200M in revenue, and Courtney Love does the math for us.

All in all, I think somebody's leg is (or legs are) being pulled quite mightily.

Professor Hatch already responded; he said to read the paper because he's just repeating the numbers. I read the paper, and it did absolutely nothing to dispell my unease. I also suspect that these numbers might very well be correct at exactly the same time that Courtney Love's numbers are correct. It's all about where you decide to put the numbers in which column, and where you are when you put them there. I still believe that the record companies are playing fast-n-loose here, although I can't prove it.

And another thing ... if these CDs are created as works-for-hire (which the music industry claims is the case), how come the artist has to bear the cost of the creation? Am I to understand that "40 Grit" gets to pay to create the music, gets to pay for the producer, gets to pay for the studio time, gets to pay for the marketing, gets to pay for damned near everything related to the generation of the content, but the record company owns the result? The record company gets the profits? How exactly do you explain that away without terms like "indentured servitude"?

Holy effing crap. I may have to buy a Honda, just to reward the people that make adverts like this. And amazingly enough, it all really happened exactly that way in real-time ... no Photoshoppery involved, although it did run to 606 takes to get it all right start to finish.

Peter Oborne asks "Is Blair just an empty, vainglorious, narcissistic creep?" Come on, Peter! Tell us how you really feel about it all!

A quick excerpt:

The government now faces two distinct challenges. The first, of course, is the reconstruction of Iraq, while the second remains the reconstruction of Britain. Labour swept to power six years ago with a series of promises to rebuild public services. They have all been broken. As far as Tony Blair is concerned, the central paradox of six years in office is stark: the levers of power respond with alacrity in defence and foreign affairs, and yet government is all but powerless in the domestic arena.

It is worth pondering this contradiction, made sharper by the military victory in Iraq. It raises two fascinating questions. Why do British armed forces, with their meagre £25 billion budget, always deliver? But why do the NHS and the education system, though in receipt of unlimited amounts of public money, continue to fail? To put the problem in another way: how come the simple British squaddie — though underpaid, overworked and forced to carry out his or her duties in conditions of appalling danger — always rises to any challenge? But how come so many British schoolteachers, rather better paid, with far shorter hours and long holidays, endlessly whinge and — as the teachers’ union conference demonstrated yet again — block even quite sensible reforms?

Once again, Bill Whittle has penned a truly wonderful essay, "Victory", which everyone should go read right away. As always, it's moving, forceful, and really just about the best use that those electrons could have been put to.

I keep putting "BIll Whittle" into Amazon's search page. Sooner or later a book's going to show up, and I'll be having one thank you very much.

A quick essay on why the Jakarta Commons Logging API instead of plain ol' Log4J is a bad idea. I'm not sure I buy this completely, but it is the way I've been trending over the past half-dozen web-apps I've delivered.

Ummm ... can you say "conflict of interest" boys and girls? I sure can.

In my long-running quest to completely exhaust my meager savings and earnings by acquiring scads of nearly-worthless electronic junk .... I present the home laser cutting/etching tools. They even come in colors! CNC machining tools in my own goddamned basement!

Yet more consumer crap that I must now buy. I'm going to have to get a better-paying job if I plan to continue affording all this electronic junk, aren't I?

An easy one-page guide to properly using apostrophes in your writing.

Holy crap!!! I may have to revise my mental picture of what arbitrary and capricious means. Not only is the law (apparently) written far too broadly here, but it also suggests that a digital camera has an unforseen advantage over film: it doesn't allow the local busybodies-masquerading-as-retailers a chance to poke their noses into your business. Christ on a stick, I've got pictures of both of my daughters naked (in the bath, getting a diaper, running down the hall, etc) ... does that mean that I'd be considered a child pornographer in Texas?

My wife also says "we never talk", when in fact our household is filled with talking from the instant the girls wake up until they go to bed. Rather a lot like this, in fact.

I must admit to having been vaguely irritated at seeing our various Presidents returning salutes since they weren't in uniform, although unlike the NYT I didn't demean the men holding the office by calling them "puerile"; I just didn't like it. Now, thanks to Bill Quick, I find out the history of the returned salute, and find that it doesn't offend me quite as much anymore. Yes, that's probably because I thought Reagan was a spectacular President.

It's all about the ooooooiiiiillll, innit? Don't bother denying it, you sorry sonsabitches.

Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi expatriate, a respected author of several books on Iraq, and is reporting for The New Republic. In general, not really a good candidate for inclusion in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy(tm). So how come he's pointing out that Baathist officials had the most reason to loot the National Museum and none of The Big Media is picking up on it?

I won't call her a buffoon either. I will, however, call her a liar unless she upholds her end of the bet.

Oh my oh my oh my. That's quite an error you've got there. I'm not a lawyer (duh), but doesn't most software come with a license that says that the company doesn't warrant anything at all? This might be a most interesting test of how well a software company can claim they're not responsible for how their software product performs.

Having accidentally missed a Paul Graham essay (the topic of the previous post), I figured I'd be happier if I went and made sure I hadn't missed many. I hadn't, although I note he's written yet another essay about language design.

For those of you who don't know, which is damned near everybody, Paul Graham is a Lisp resource of the first magnitude. He wrote the textbook on ANSI Standard Lisp, and his book "On Lisp" covers in more depth how to think in Lisp/write idiomatically in Lisp/be a Lisp native than anything else I've ever written. He really is The Man.

Unfortunately, he hasn't yet learned the central lesson of RMS ... the set of people who want to learn/know/use Lisp is vanishingly small. No amount of proselytizing will convert the vast majority of software developers into Lisp guys. It just doesn't work that way. Eric Raymond (go read everything he's ever written, by the way) noted this same thing about RMS a while back, although I haven't been able to track it down via Google yet.

Mr.Graham also looks down his nose at Java, and C (and C++) to a lesser extent. In fact, in his essay Beating the Averages, he states that there is a continuum of language power/expressivity such that some languages occupy higher places on the lattice than do others. Lisp, of course, sits at the pinnacle. Java comes in for a real beating in nearly every essay he writes.

And yet ... Java is everywhere. How did that happen? I'll posit my opinion, and it's a remarkably simple one:

Java forces you to play well with others

That's it. There isn't any magic ... just the fact that all the bits and pieces are required to fit together without serious blood loss. Sure, you can get libraries written in C with well-documented headers, but they're woefully OS-and-version dependent. C++? The language standard specifies that symbol mangling is implementation-dependent because the committee knew that trying to force one single object model/memory layout on everybody at this late date was going to be organizational suicide ... so you not only have to have the right OS at the right version, but also the right compiler also at the right version. Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ruby are all doing pretty well in places, but none of them have serious corporate buy-in, for reasons which I completely do not know.

Lisp? There's a bit of lip-service paid in the standard to what they call "FFI", but the reality is that Lisp expects everything in the entire world to be loaded (in source form) into the current image. Sure, the libraries you can find/buy will work, but that's because the vendor has to give you the source. Not many vendors really want to do that.

And so we come to Java. Run-time linking works because it's specified in the standard exactly how it has to work, and Sun is quite serious about prosecuting people who call their product "Java" that doesn't hew quite closely to the standard. Hey, look! We can write servlets, and web apps, and SOAP services, and sell the damn things to people using any old J2EE container and we don't give a good goddamn whose container they're using because run-time linking works.

I can sell/give away a JAR file full of Java classes and interfaces with embedded documentation, and my clients can just drop it into their copy of JBuilder, IntelliJ, VAJ, or even EMACS. Compilation works, context-sensitive help works ... it's just shocking.

Don't misunderstand me here ... I don't particularly like the language. It gets in the way far too often for a language that does so little to help you out. The real truth, though, is you don't have enough time to write all the infrastructure and support you can have via download if you just put up with the warts.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr.Graham's Lisp-based e-commerce solution is clean, sparse, elegant, tasty, and more absorbant than anything I'll ever write. I, however, can get to the finish line faster than he can because I can download stuff written by IBM (representing untold man-years of effort) and nail it to stuff written by the Apache group (representing more untold man-years of effort) and then nail that to stuff written by Object-Refinery. My finished work product isn't nearly as pretty as Mr.Graham's but it only took me a week. What was your time to market again?

Hey! I missed a Paul Graham essay from earlier this year.

I've read it twice now, and I continue to be strongly conflicted over this paper. On the one hand, it creates a tremendous resonance in me; I hated my school years from sixth grade on, although it was much better from tenth grade because my high school placed a huuuuge premium on aggregate performance on national standardized tests, such as the SAT and the AP exams.

I hated school so badly that I was (and still am) determined not to let my daughters suffer through the same things. I am completely in favor of homeschooling them both right up until they turn 18 and decide they want to go to college and drink too much. My wife, however, feels that she can't teach them effectively, so wants to put them in good private schools. Given that I'm the primary earner in the family (and consequently not home to bear the obligation of mentoring full-time), my eldest (5 years old) is in a private pre-K, and will probably be in a private kindergarten this fall. Believe me when I say this does not make me happy, but she seems to really enjoy being around her classmates, so I can only hope she'll wind up sitting at the "A" table when the time comes.

On the other hand, this essay also carries with it a whiff of sour grapes, as well as the subtle flavor of a well-coddled self-esteem. Poor Paul Graham (and me) ... those horrible heathens didn't recognize how truly superior we were, refused to acknowledge that we were already travelling down the road they were only dimly aware they had to follow, why we were true leaders! We deserved their respect and admiration, and they were the doody-heads for not giving it to us! Wah! We demand our just due! Wah!

Ahem.

On the third hand (yes, I'm an alien), he's exactly on the money (I opine) with his analogy of school personnel to prison wardens. Public schooling is nothing if not relentless in its demand that students sit down, shut up, and do as they're told. It's horrible, but unlike Paul, I don't see a mechanism for improving that except taking the kids out of the situation. He seems to hold some hope that the system isn't irredeemable, but he didn't say how he thought it gets fixed. In the meanwhile, my daughter goes to school four days a week and I hope each day that she doesn't ever have to put up with the cruelty and spitefulness that I did.

And here's a review in English for the little tanks. Oooh .... I've got to get a couple or four of them right quick.

How's your Japanese reading these days? Good enough for this toy? I'm having trouble finding all the characters in my J->E dictionary, but what I've translated so far looks super-dee-duper.

How come it took this long for the M.S.S./Monty Python to be made so clearly?

Today I received a spam (as yet unopened) with the subject "Iraq: God's Plan?" Now I must admit I'm a big fan of General Franks and the CENTCOM general staff, but isn't that a bit over the top? I mean, they're still just professional military personnel, plain ol' homo sapiens sapiens just like the rest of us.

Holy crap! Cats and dogs are expected to begin cohabitating immediately, now that Microsoft is leaping on to the open source bandwagon.

It appears that I'm the last guy in the world to link to this make your own freeway sign applet. Requires Java 1.4 (as far as I can tell) to work.

I keep saying I need to take a look at Maven, since it appears there's quite a lot of movement towards it as a build tool. Here's IBM's take on it.

As an aside, I always thought project management was about managing the project goals, requirements, stakeholders, and schedule. How surprised I am to find out that project management really only means "smarter build tool". Who knew?

Holy f*cking crap, that's insanely hard.

Only about six months ago (see! I'm getting less irrelevant by the minute!), Chuck Cavaness wrote an article about Struts best practices. Excellent stuff, that.

I still occasionally go look at the Sitemeter stats to see who's coming to the page, and what they were looking for. Most of the stuff is more-or-less normally bizarre, but this just blew me away.

According to Google.co.kr, we're the sixth best hit for "f*cking my brother's wife".

Holy crap. Since I don't have a brother, they must be looking for you, Lee. Better watch your back.

I lurv Homestar Runner. I do I do I do.

Also, am I the only person who doesn't understand why Cartoon Network isn't offering them a production deal? WTF?

ScrappleFace: Looting Suddenly Stops in Baghdad. Oh, my aching sides.

Hooray for Brigadier General John Kelly, United States Army. Thanks to Tim Blair for finding this loverly article.

The Tech Report has a review of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. I really need to start saving up, don't I?

I'm only a year out of date, it appears. I just found an article about web application development comparing XMLC and JSP. I now officially have my curiousity bit latched high, and I must now go poke around a bit.

Our weapons technology is so amazing, we now actually need (and have) bombs that don't explode.