December 2002 Archives

Just wanted to wish you all a great 2003.

Philadelphia has a crime program that's working.... cops visible and on the street.

Waiting until the last possible day, Gov. Schweiker signed legislation yesterday granting the suburbs more power than Philadelphia in running the Convention Center - and Mayor Street immediately responded by saying the city might no longer support financing half of the center's much-coveted expansion.

Read the rest in in today's Inquirer.

I tell ya, I find it ironic that the party whose central theme is the principal of local governance has been taking so much power away from it. The Convention Center and The Parking Authority. I'm making a bet your town has stories as well. City rights being transfered to the state. State rights being trumped by the federal government. All three threatened by corporate rights. Hamilton over Jefferson?

Just ironic.

Some sites for your browsing pleasure...

CNN: Year in Review - No one can compete with CNN. See reports on previous years as well.

CSMonitor: Monitor Milestones: 2002 Year in Review - Culling their coverage of the big stories this year. The only year end review that mentions the horror and progress simultaneously occuring in Africa.

Popular Science: The Best of What's New - Gadgets and other consumer goodies.

NewScientist.com: The year in technology. A little less high tech and closer to home is CNET's Best of the Buzz.

Wired: The Year In Privacy - Citizens lose.

Google: Year-End Zeitgeist - Check out what people searched for at Google. Looks like a mixed bag.

Lycos: Top 50 - Some human analysis on what people searched for - Example: Boy bands out, talent in.

Yahoo!: Year in Review - Lots here but why don't they have music?

Time: Persons of the Year - They made the right choices.

Space.com: Top 10 Space Science Images of 2002.

NewsWeek: The Year of Living Dangerously.

WashPost: Dave Barry: Poking cautiously through the wreckage of 2002.

Alternet: The Good, The Bad, The Worst and Townhall.com's Diana West: Questions for reflection - From the Left and Right respectively.

NYTimes: James Traub: Osama, Dead or Alive.

Inquirer: Joseph N. DiStefano: The Year of Corporate Scandal.

Inquirer: Tom Moon: Music: Cynicism was out, replaced by sincerity. Meaningless pop is dead - or at least wounded. Britney and Christina bombed this year. Pink didn't. Think about it. "Ironic/Angst Ridden/My Life Sucks and I'm just gonna cry in my room or hit your face" meaningless crap - gone. No more Limp Bizkit. It was a prime time for some lyrical music. Shame Metallica wasn't back in their best mid-80s form. Woulda kicked some ass.

NYTimes: Chuck Klosterman: The Ratt Trap: Dee Dee Ramone, B. 1952; Robbin Crosby, B. 1959 - the demise of Ramone completely overshadowed the demise of Crosby - why? - what does it say about you?

Inquirer: Clea Benson: Small steps take hold for a Philadelphia on the rise - Most Philadelphians don't realize how well it's been dealing with the recession in comparison to the rest of the country. We had crime drop here. Change has been slow, but it's happening. Things set in motion years ago are making a positive effect in the here and now.

CSMonitor: Faced with foreign competition and an ever-faster pace, many engineers are dropping out of a once-safe field.

In 2000, near the end of the high-tech boom, industry CEOs convinced Congress to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, allowing up to 195,000 skilled workers from India and elsewhere into the US. Some engineers contend that those CEOs kept many of those H-1B workers while cutting higher-paid US citizens.

"About 80,0000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you'd have jobs for all of them," the IEEE-USA's Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B issued.

Check out this MeFi thread. According to the thread, the FDA is now going to allow unverified health claims on food labels. If true, it's another blow against your interests for corporate ones.

The Philadelphia Inquirer: New woe as jobless aid ends.

The NYTimes: Dividend Tax Cut: Winners and Losers. via Garret.

CommonDreams.org: Corporate Personhood Is Doomed (boy that title is a little too optimistic...). via Garret. via a great MetaFilter thread.

Democracy Unlimited: First Local Government in the United States Refuses to Recognize Corporate Claims to Civil Rights. via Garret.

The Founding Brothers struggled with where to draw the line between Federal and State governance. They probably couldn't foresee the rise of Corporations competing with the Federal government and States for rights. It's an evolution that's been slow and subtle over the last 100 years or so. Probably due from our transformation from a farming to an industrial economy. Simple generalizations slamming Republicans won't do. But if the Dems want a platform - I'm with Garret - this is it. They won't go for it however. No one bites the hand that feeds them.

And hey - if you didn't catch the drift - go check out Garret's site. He's knocking on a door I'd like to see opened up by other webloggers. Common you Dem webloggers... this is what you should be talking about.

To understand the news of today, you gotta have an appreciation for the history of the past. Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis is a terrific book for just that. You get what feels like genuine insight into the politics and relationships of the revolutionary generation. By sharing the conflicts that occured between Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, Jefferson and Adams, Ellis sheds light on their characters and principals. It's not the fairy tale they teach in school. It's a drama with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The book simultaneously brings the founding fathers down to earth and at the same time grows your respect for them. No longer semi-deities they are people who knew their actions would and could have consequences far reaching beyond their time. An educational and fun read.

Wanted to wish you all a safe and happy holiday. I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned - this is my true thanksgiving holiday.

Garret shares the following wishes, that I gotta repeat...

no more lives torn apart,
that wars would never start,
and time would heal all hearts.
every one would have a friend,
and right would always win,
and love would never end.
this is my grown-up christmas list.

Go to Garret's for the rest of the lyrics. Says it all doesn't it?

I've been reading Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis and can't believe how timely it is. The book focuses on six moments in the early history of the nation and the main actors in them. You get a real sense of who the Founding Fathers were, what they cared about, their characters, their principals. It's a fun read. Really it is.

One thing they cared passionately about was the balance of power. Their views ranged widely. Paint them in the widesest strokes and you have those that believed in strong federal government with emphasis on economic and foreign policy and those that believed in strong local (state) government.

It's that tension that has more or less defined American politics for the past two hundred years.

Consider that dynamic when you read the next two stories:

At the NYTimes - Cities Urge Restraint in Fight Against Terror.

And in a bill that will probably be overturned (make your bets), a local government in the United States to eliminate corporate claims to civil and constitutional privileges. via dangerousmeta.

Naming "the whistle-blowers", Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins, as Persons of the Year, was the right thing to do.

As Rafe puts it, "The reason they don't recommend Java for Web development is that they don't understand it. "

And Niel explains, "the advantages of JSP strongly outweigh the problems with JSP."

Nice to know I'm not alone :)

In my comments Dave shares the one real problem JSP has, other then it's lack of availability - error statements are horrible. Just horrible.

JSP does NOT suck! Uttering those words is against the conventional wisdom of so many at javablogs.com and elsewhere. I feel the expectation from many Java developers - for JSP to provide easy seperation of HTML and logic - by default - is unreasonable. If that were it's main goal - then it's a failure. But if you look at JSP as a PHP/ASP/CGI competitor - feature for feature it's stands on it's own two feet. What's missing is the availability of it for your average web dev hacker.

Don't you think MovableType could be written in JSP? Of course it could. And it probably would be easier to maintain, more scalable, and easier to extend.

But not to deploy. The market for MovableType would shrink to such a size as to not make it worth the effort.

Seperation of logic and design in JSP does suck. But honestly - is it any better with CGI, PHP, or ASP?

Just as in apps developed with those languages, if the goal is for designers to manipulate HTML and avoid dangerous logic code, then you embed a templating language for them to interact with. Would you let a web designer touch your CGI scripts? Hell no! Then why would you in your JSP?

MovableType does this. Why couldn't a JSP app do the same? Fact is - they can.

There are a growing number of templating languages that suit this purpose and are available for Java developers today.

Saying JSP sucks is like saying Perl sucks.

And that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Has a company finally put *all* of the pieces together in an easy to use, cheap, package? Macromedia's Contribute sounds cool. Gotta give it a whirl.

This comes via part three of Jonathon Deacour's Conversation with Joe Clark. Whadda quote!: "The larger CMSs are a kind of protection racket: You buy our system for six figures, and then you keep paying us every year to maintain your license, and also you'll have to hire a person trained in our ways to keep your system up and running. Fail to do any of that and your entire site crashes. It's extortion, really, and high-end CMSs are dogs in so many ways?they can't produce valid code, their URLs are appalling, and they are difficult to use. In essence, big CMSs are mainframe systems, with the same need for constant nursing and non-stop tending by codependent system administrators as those old mainframes."

The first of three book excepts from "Java Enterprise Best Practices" gets you thinking about Servlet frameworks.

Check out Free Speech -- Virtually at the Washington Post. via Scripting News.

I'm getting many, many, many requests to my home PC on port 3396 today. My firewall software is keeping them from getting thru - I think - and my PC isn't sending anything out - but it's too weird not ask - any of you out there are seeing something like this today? I use Comcast digital cable, I'm used to a few script kiddies doing port scans daily, but the nonstop requests to 3396 is freaking me out.

Some interesting posts in this discussion on the lack of free Java web apps.

Some point to the lack of web hosts that provide Java services. I think Kattare, the host I am using, is great and I recommend them, but this is correct - there must be many more then there is today. Sun would do Java a world of good if it evangelized to web hosting providers and made it easy for them to provide basic services.

Some mention a difference in approach between the Perl/PHP/Python folks and the Java folks. Supposedly Java developers get overconcerned with archetecture and forget the real task is to get the job done. There's some truth to that. I've run into many developers like this. I've been accused on occasion :)

Eventually it's going to be projects like Roller and miniblog that will change people's attitudes.

It's universal - Al Gore rocked SNL.

Gervase Gallant muses on how the process of writing code could be as natural as the process of writing prose. I like this piece.

I highly suggest printing, reading, and re-reading this piece from Tim O'Reilly on piracy and distribution if you havn't already.

Read it and weep at the Washington Post.

Hey, at least this is a whole lot more honest. The typical tract is to leave loopholes only those who can afford it can find.

Go Eagles!

Posted so close together you'd figure these two are conspiring.

First read at the Washington Post what you already know, cultural critics deploy the same kinds of arguments again, and again, and again. A perfect how-to for you webloggers that want to get in the game!

And lo and behold the weblogosphere has started to link to this Benjamin J. Stein article on how our culture is slowly poisoning us.

It was good reading yesterday. Let me share some highlights...

First, the Inquirer covers how Street's biggest contributors do very well at City Hall. That's pretty much the way it's always been and Street simply hasn't faught the "way it is". Actually, he seems to embrace it according to the article. Of course this has a whole lot to do with campaign finance and Philly isn't following other cities' attempts at reform.

Related to what I said yesterday about Philly slowly losing the control to govern itself, Tom Ferrick details just how well the state (Republican) takeover of the parking authority has gone.

In Silencing the demons Ralph Vigoda shares the story of Larry Boettcher. Suffering from schizophrenia, not taking his medication, he set himself up to be shot by the police.

Pretty much every weblog out there has linked to Google's Year-End Zeitgeist, but let me direct you to the almost forgotten Lycos Top 50 for some similar fun. "Dragonball" was the most searched for term at Lycos.

Reading a related Slashdot thread discussing the results, ya gotta wonder, what do they say about us?

The NYTimes has started a series of articles that will explore private management's (Edison) impact on Philadelphia's public schools. Their first installment is depressing.

Over at PhillyBlog it's Katz vs. Street. Looks like I will be voting Republican in the next mayoral election. I don't want to, especially considering the underhanded politiking that's been ripping away Philadelphia's right to govern itself these past couple of years. Street needs to open his eyes right now or one of the biggest upsets in city political history will take place.

Rafe points out a growing chorus is critquing Struts.

Marc Fleury, creator of JBoss, posts a self serving, but very insightful Why I Love EJBs. It is a must read for server side Java developers.

Dave Winer hasn't smoked for six months! Congratulations!

Borland being bought by Microsoft is just.... ironic! Wonder if it will happen?

Mike posts about the desktop software market and wonders is it dying?. I'd have to answer no. What has died (settled down more like it) is the productivity software market. That market was the area of so much interest/competition/innovation during the 80s and early 90s.

During the mid to late 90s software development turned it's attention to the internet. A grand switch of attention occured on the server side. The desktop stagnated.

Now that attention is turning itself back to the desktop looking to utilize the lessons learned and the bridges built to exploit the benefits of connectivity, sharing, communication, integration, and convenience.

New ways of organizing the complexity out of the desktop/internet experience are are coming on the scene almost daily. Napster? Kazaa? Maybe an RSS Aggregator? Radio or AmphetaDesk perhaps? Google on the desktop will happen. Believe it. Weblogging as a metaphor for organizing your desktop? Yep. That too. Think of categorization and date/time instead of folder/office cabinet. Check out the Microsoft MyLifeBits Project. These are the kind of desktop innovations that could only occur after attention was spent on the Internet.

I'd argue that iPhoto heralds a new kind of app. It's more then a simple photo manager. It integrates a multimedia external device to your PC. It enables you easily share your efforts. That's a new class of software that won't settle down for a long time. Think iPod, cellphone and PDA. How will these ultimately impact your desktop is unforseen right now. But they will.

One long running behind the scenes market not dominated is developer tools. It's still wide open. But if MS buys Borland.... man oh man.... that would be interesting. I wonder if that will do for IDEs what it did when they purchased FoxPro and took over the desktop database market?

Speaking of bridges Shelley is building them at her weblog lately.

Let me lay down a few links for you.

CNN: Trent Lott won't step down. The Bush administration did a good job of distancing itself from him. Here's the bottom line... if Bush/Rove wanted Lott to go, he'd be on the first Chevy Suburban out of town. All that's come so far is brilliant political sidestepping. Keep that in mind the next time you blindly vote for a political party across the board - it's your/our fault he's in office in the first place.

dangerousmeta: Garret argues for zero tolerance and points to the latest unemployment rates. It's damning. That's what it is.

The Cardinal steps down. That's not enough when this is as systematic as it appears. I'm surprised at how quiet the other Christian bloggers have been. Yes, statistically, the occurence of these crimes against humanity are similar to the population at large - but that is no excuse for the coverup. No excuse. No excuse. No excuse! It makes me sick, gets me angry, and depresses me all at the same time when I think about it.

In the cases of Law and Lott you have organizations that should have taken responsibility and done the right thing. Instead you have protection of the organization superceeding protection of those that are served by it.

In other, related news....

NYTimes: Kissinger Pulls Out of 9/11 Commision.

Oliver Willis: Whitman expected to resign from her EPA post. She was set up to fail IMHO. You can argue what you may about her, but she does inspire passion. Hopefully we will see her in the public service realm arena again.

This O'Reilly article does the best job I've seen so far at getting you started with Eclipse.

Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.

Then imagine that this country's king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.

Read the rest of this editorial at Yahoo! via therablog.

Here is the story at KYW. Now why couldn't there be a similar 'do not e-mail' list that spammers would need to check or be fined?

This is harsh. ...

Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such assholes? Surely it's no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Dem-ocratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the Lincoln Navigator. Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, High and Mighty, the connection between the two isn't a coincidence. Unlike any other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be.

According to market research conducted by the country's leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch! Read the rest of Stephanie Mencimer's review of Keith Bradsher's "High and Mighty: SUVs".

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Since 9/11 my significant other has found more dissonance between his job and his career goals so he decided to quit his job. Unfortunately that dissonance remains and he seems stuck at determining what he wants to do with his life. What suggestions do you have for moving on? In other words the intent to change is high but his actions seem weak. He focuses more on his house repair than on exploring a new career.

Stephen Covey: The ideal career can say "yes" to the following three questions: Am I good at it? Do I really like it? Does the world need it to the point that I can get paid for it? This requires a lot of self-knowledge, and also the study of opportunities to discern the real needs and problems in those opportunities. Then proactively, you go to that opportunity as a prepared solution to their problem instead of being just another problem.

Comment from Stephen Covey: The main reason most people don't have the job they want is because they don't do this homework, and they're nothing but a problem rather than a solution to problems.

Comment from Stephen Covey: Arise to your responsibility and make it happen.

Read the rest in this missed Stephen Covey chat transcript at USAToday.

Stephen Covey is chatting now at USAToday on Job satisfaction.

Shelley posts on the irony of a summit on Social Software that has as attendies mostly "made up almost exclusively of white, educated, upper-middle or upper class, 30-50 year old males."

Dave Rogers posts in her comments a "truth" I believe in computing - "I think history shows that technology has never changed _what_ people do, it only changes the _how_. Technology usually compresses processes in time, or expands them in space, often both at the same time. Most of the time we confuse the "how" with the "what," and think something novel has happened."

That last phrase though is a little off. It *is* novel when the time is shorted to accomplish a task, or distances are compressed, or messages further distributed. The "How" is important :) But the essential truth he points to here I know to be very true.

Check it out over at Origivation. For you internet wonks, the interview can be interesting just to learn how TPT utilizes MP3.com to get international listeners.

There's a new weblog in town - PhillyBlog - that is carrying the torch. They are doing a wonderful job. Gotta e-mail them to say hi.

We have forced air heat. It sucks.

"Father, in the name of Jesus," Efrain Cotto prayed Wednesday, minutes before the first seating of a pre-Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless and hungry at the Salvation Army headquarters in North Philadelphia.

"We need your help. We can't do this alone."

Besides Jesus, Mr. Cotto, volunteer coordinator for the Salvation Army and a local pastor, could have used a couple of dozen more volunteers.

Read the rest in this Philadelphia Inquirer article.

The frog's vision is filtered to only see objects of a certain size moving at a specific speed. Only these circumstances will cause the cells within the frog's eyes to fire and generate a reaction -- tongue whipping out at the prey.

Unfortunately, any dot of the right size moving at the right speed will trigger this reaction, including a plane flying by overhead.

The human visual system is much more sophisticated, but people are just as capable of filtering; the only difference is that human filtering is deliberate rather than being based on genetics. So you all can go outside an look at planes without feeling the impulse to whip your tongue out. Well, most of you normal people.

Read the rest over at Burningbird. I know that the filters Shelley talks about develop at the earliest ages. Kindergarden even. They simply become more defined and strict as we get older. In high school, of course, we figure after the mess is thru, things will change. But do they? The wise amoungst us do somehow learn to master the reflex. And there are those that fight it.

Question for you... do you think weblogging is instinctually a filtering process? I do. And sometimes it reminds me of high school.

You may get the impression I had some kind of bad high school experience from the above, but that wouldn't be true. I had plenty of friends. One of which is still my closest. But, then, as I am now, I didn't like to be categorized. So I moved amoungst the filter defined cliques. I was neither fully "in", nor "geek", nor "loner". I was all three. I resisted the efforts each clique would make to put down the others. There were, however, uncomfortable moments when these things come to blows. I can't count how many "metal head" vs. "preppie" fights I was in. Kinda like weblogging. There are things to learn, and friends to make, in the most unlikely of places.

Cliques help us to feel safe by letting us know there are others who feel/act/look the same way we do so people defend these boundaries/filters/cliques with plenty of visciousness. If there's an argument occuring between cliques, watch closely and you will see evidence of argument techniques listed in this baloney kit under "Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric". Check it out.

I've always felt there is some "essential truth" to be found by listening to people across these boundries, real or artificial, no matter what. I'm an Idealist. As my About page says, an ENFJ or ENJP, counting upon my mood. These are Myers-Briggs personality types. You can discover yours by taking the Temperament Sorter II test, but beware, for detailed results it's going to cost you $15 bucks. Jonathon Delacour has been exploring the subject recently at his weblog in relationship to blogging. I normally don't buy-in to things like this. But the test is amazing accurate. Of course it's just another filter :)

"We're really [screwing] up on the client side," Gosling wrote to Richard Green, Sun's vice president of developer tools, in an e-mail dated May 13, 2002, "mostly through neglect."

Read the rest at CRN. Ouch, the truth hurts. via GMSV.

First snowfall of the winter. Going to have almost a foot by the time the day is thru. Very nice.

Anyone catch the Sixers game last night? Richelle growls, "I hate the Celtics". Me too. But a Sixers/Celtics game sure is fun to watch. Go Sixers!

Jeff Jarvis explains why Fox News, or Howard Stern, or certain blogs for that matter, are so popular.

According to Wired, the real threat to the music biz isn?t P2P ? it?s CD-Rs swapped on the street.

..."I have friends who pray that science will never discover or explain certain things. I don't understand that," he declares. "Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches it."

...Echoing Immanuel Kant, he insists that belief in God is independent of anything scientists discover. More than two centuries ago, Kant argued that science could never disprove the existence of God. But neither, he said, could it prove Him.

Read the rest at Wired.

Impressive, most impressive. Using Cold Fusion, Access and good experience it get's the job done extremely well. Check out the numerous different paths to navigate the database. A great site for Buffy fans and for developers to think of similar projects. You can surf around here for eons. Whadda great job! Highly recommended.

The Rittenhouse Review has been posting small comparisons of the best and worst in Philly. This week it's Longwood Gardens and the SEPTA subway system.

I'm having fun reading this free online book on the art of computer programming. As Mike says - this isn't your typical comp-sci book.

Todd Cranston-Cuebas, Senior Technical Recruiter for Ticketmaster, shares some tips in this interview. via this Slashdot thread.

It's for C development, but can mostly apply to Java as well. Good to see similarities to my own approach in there.

MeanDean has released Versescape 0.2. His commentary on his approach can be very helpful for those learning Perl or are designing a site scraper. An educational challange would be to port this to Java.