Sean Bell Shooting Crime SceneSean Bell was murdered in Queens, NY early one morning in late November. He died in a hail of 50 bullets fired by New York City police officers. See A Fatal Police Shooting in Queens (New York Times), an interactive graphic of the crime scene (Flash). As usual in these situations, the officers involved have been remanded to administrative positions (taken off the street). Regardless of the circumstances, police officers get the full “innocent until proven guilty” treatment, not only being able to stay at large... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Develop your web application using Firefox. Validate your (X)HTML, validate your CSS, test your JavaScript. Tweak graphics, tweak layout. Get the client to sign off. Now that everything’s looking and working just right, it’s time to get it running in IE. Fire up IE and load the application.

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Lingering... [More]

As of today, there are new rules in effect governing storage of electronic data for companies doing business in the United States. Though the title of this article is a bit misleading, New rules compel firms to track e-mails (Yahoo), it’s more or less true. More accurately, companies will have to keep track of every scrap of digital detritus that may be needed in possible future lawsuits.

“The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal... [More]”

The BMI, or Body-Mass–Index, has been in the news a lot lately. Whether because of runway models, whose BMIs are dangerously low, or because of kids in first-world countries, whose BMIs are dangerously high. The BMI myth by Peta Bee (The Guardian) takes a look at the utility of this measurement in determining health. As usual, now that the public (as well as insurance companies and government agencies) has glommed on to this statistic as the final say in health, scientists have taken a look at it and found it wanting.

Calculating... [More]

“Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.”

Humility should be taught in school, along with tact, ethics and critical thinking. And not just in graduate school, but early and officially. Naturally, out-of-class experiences at most schools impart valuable lessons in humility and tact, though these are, in general less structured—and more painful—than they ought to be. Instead of actually learning tools that will make us better people, we learn the coarse rules that make us better workers. Even though we spend at least 13 solid years... [More]

Here’s how America’s media and intellectual elite help Americans keep track of what’s important. Two recent articles about former presidents serve as illustrations below.

A Jihad on Jimmy

The first example comes from one of America’s leading lights of scholarship: The World According to Jimmy Carter by Alan Dershowitz (Huffington Post). In this, the eminent israel apologist and all-around war hawk takes Carter to task for his latest book about the Middle East, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid (Amazon).[1] After taking a moment for the... [More]

The recent Mark Foley scandal in the US dragged the issue of pedophilia back into the limelight. It’s an issue that has increasingly gripped public fears, resulting in medieval public registration programs and increasingly inflexible laws. By simply reading the mainstream media, one would think that child predators lurk around every corner and it’s only a matter of time before every child is preyed upon.

Hurting the Innocent

As irrational fears go, it ranks up there with the fear of... [More]

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.”

“You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. (Bertrand Meyer)”

Lookup for earthliThese days, it’s incredibly hard to find a domain name that hasn’t already been taken. This odious process usually involves going to a domain name provider and typing in a desired name, hitting submit and hitting back when the ensuing page shows that the desired name is taken. PC Names has found a perfect use for Ajax, testing the domain name you’ve typed as you type it and showing the results for .com, .net, .org, info, .biz and .us below.

There are other tools as well, for searching all... [More]

Take a look at this extremly short article, US carried out madrasah bombing (Times Online). It gives us the following information:

“The bombing of a Pakistani madrasah last month, in which 82 students were killed, was carried out by the United States.”

Initial reaction? Horror, of course. Or the numbed ghost of an emotion that passes for horror, when hearing of the murder of dozens of people you don’t know, from another culture, at extreme remove. An intellectual horror, if you will, if not necessarily a... [More]

In the article, Arabs’ Questions Throw Elder Bush on Defensive by Jim Krane (AlterNet), the elder Bush spoke before a more-or-less openly hostile crowd. One student used the forum to ask him what he had to say to the theory “that U.S. wars are aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America’s benefit”. Bush Sr., 82, responded:

“‘I think that’s weird and it’s nuts,‘ Bush said. ‘To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I... [More]”

The article, Choices = Headaches by Joel Spolsky, starts with the following screenshot of Microsoft Windows Vista:

Vista 'Off' Choices

From there, he launches into a diatribe on a surfeit of choice. It’s pretty well-written, as usual from Mr. Spolsky, but somewhat poorly aimed, also as usual from Mr. Spolsky. The basic premise is a good one: don’t provide more choice than your customers know how to deal with. Provide just enough and no more. Extra functionality should be available to those who need it and no one else.

His... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

As of version 1.5, Java has blessed its developers with generics, which increase expressiveness through improved static typing. With generics, Java programmers should be able to get away from the “casting orgy” to which Java programming heretofore typically devolved. The implementation in 1.5 does not affect the JVm at all and is restricted to a syntactic sugar wherein the compiler simply performs the... [More]

The ZuneDo you hear that sound? That’s what Apple shaking in its boots sounds like. With the Zune, Microsoft enters the personal music player fray, diversifying further into the hardward market. It’s like an iPod, but it’s not from Apple; it’s from a company you can trust.

It was accidentally released a tad earlier than expected, but that alone can’t explain the way it’s stumbled from the starting blocks, tripped over its own shoelaces and face-planted into the tarmac. The trouble started with the... [More]

The United States takes a lot of money from taxpayers and invests it back in the country. In contrast to many other countries in the club of the “First World”, we pump an unbelievable amount into our military. The Mother of All Defense Supplementals by Charles Peña (Anitwar) supplies some numbers for those with a strong stomach. The full military budget comprises several pieces:

• The official budget, which totals $439 billion for this fiscal year
• Budgets for the various secret services, like the CIA and the NSA, which... [More]

“The only two things you can truly depend upon are gravity and greed.”

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Given a recursive object structure in memory, what’s the best—and most efficient—way to render it with Tapestry? First, let’s define a tiny Java class that we’ll use for our example:

public class DataObject {
  private String name;
  private List<DataObject> subObjects = new ArrayList<DataObject>();

  public String getName() {
    return name;
  }

  public List<DataObject> getSubObjects() {
   ... [More]

The elections of yesterday were a sign that America may not be dead from the neck up. At the very least, there seem to be limits to both our apathy and patience. Despite the warm fuzzies emanating from many pundits today, the Democrats haven’t magically changed into a different party overnight. At best, we will be treated to a three-ring circus as they attempt to impeach Bush; at worst, we have the opportunity to be disgusted, appalled, disappointed and manhandled by a different sack full of... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

See Finding Conforming Methods for part one of this two-part article.

The problem we’re working on is as follows:

1. Given an object, a method name and a list of parameters, execute the matching method on the given object.
2. Determine from the object’s class whether the given method can be executed from the given context (web, command-line, etc.)

We will use annotations to mark up methods as callable or... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

This is a two part post illustrating some tricks for working with the Java reflection API. Part two is available here.

Java reflection provides a wealth of information about your code. One interesting use of this information is to layer scriptability on top of an application, calling code dynamically. Suppose we wanted to do the following:

1. Given an object, a method name and a list of parameters, execute... [More]

For the longest time, pop psychology has taught us that “rape is about power, not sex.” That rape was purely an expression of power was received truth, though it didn’t sit well with anyone who’d experienced the powerful effects of libido. It was hard to imagine that rape would have nothing to do with that; it seemed more logical that different personalities responded differently to this drive. Because of the nature of most pornography—and it’s distinctly male-dominant/women-subservient... [More]

Stephen Colbert, who plays a rabidly right-wing talk show host of the same name on Comedy Central, walks a tight rope on every show. He satirizes that large segment of America’s media that hews to the White House party line no matter how much it zigs and zags. He does this by pretending to be one of them, but more so. Though an exaggerated version of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh is hard to contemplate, Stephen has to try to stay one step ahead of their theatrics every week. Needless to say,... [More]

Texas Justice

Jeffrey SkillingThe first is from Texas, where, as reported in Skilling Sentenced to 24 Years in Prison (Washington Post), Enron’s former CEO, Jeff Skilling, has been found guilty of corporate fraud. Specifically, “for the accounting tricks and shady business deals that led to the loss of thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in Enron stock and more than $2 billion in employee pension plans”. He has been sentenced to 24 years, 4 months in prison. He will be expected to pay the outstanding sums in the class... [More]

The comic strip Doonesbury has weighed in heavily on the second Gulf War, stationing one of its main characters, BD, there and having him sent home after his leg was blown off in an attack. His friend, Ray, is still there. Recently, The Sandbox has appeared on the Doonesbury web site, which, in its own words:

“…[is focused] not on policy and partisanship … but on the unclassified details of deployment – the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox... [More]”

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

See Finding Conforming Methods for part one of this two-part article.

The problem we’re working on is as follows:

1. Given an object, a method name and a list of parameters, execute the matching method on the given object.
2. Determine from the object’s class whether the given method can be executed from the given context (web, command-line, etc.)

We will use annotations to mark up methods as callable or... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

This is a two part post illustrating some tricks for working with the Java reflection API. Part two is available here.

Java reflection provides a wealth of information about your code. One interesting use of this information is to layer scriptability on top of an application, calling code dynamically. Suppose we wanted to do the following:

1. Given an object, a method name and a list of parameters, execute... [More]

The innocuously-named Military Commissions Act of 2006 was recently signed into law by an all-too-eager George Bush. Within it, the Congress had agreed that the executive—specifically, the POTUS—effectively has the final word on the definition of torture, applicability of protections from the Constitution, as well as which information is considered too vital to the nation’s security to be communicated to either its own citizens or other members of the government. The executive has the right... [More]

Borat In KazakhstanBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (IMDB) is—as the title makes relatively clear—a fake documentary by Sacha Cohen. The preview shows Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev, wandering from one excruciatingly socially awkward situation to the next, all the while with an ingratiating grin on his face that begs forgiveness for not understanding our great culture while, at the same time, apologizing for the backwardness of his own. In a word, he’s disarming—enough... [More]