For the last six months or so, Doonesbury has been publishing blog entries from US soldiers on duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no way to tell just how edited or censored they are; there is no way even to tell if they actually come from soldiers. As with almost everything you see and here, it’s difficult to know what to believe. It’s also difficult not to use that fact to pick and choose what to believe, selecting only that which does not offend your delicate sensibilities—that which... [More]

People’s interactions with each other online and how the web affects what kind of content they create is the subject of this short film by an anthropology professor. It’s got a nice soundtrack and the animation and transitions are really well-done. It takes the viewer visually through HTML content creation and the transition to XML and newsfeed creation through creation of videos and social bookmarking sites for organization to mashups of any kind of data.

“Digital text is different … more... [More]”

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

In part one of this article, we discussed improvements to the user interface and basic applications like Windows Explorer. In this second part, we take a quick look at some usability issues associated with installation, networking and security.

Networking

Accessing known networks is snappy and pretty easy, taking advantage of an explorer that actually seems to use threads (shocking!) One down side is... [More]

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

Past experience has shown that, while the initial reaction to the initial release of a Microsoft product can be very good, that curve degrades with time. With early versions, replace the verb “degrades” with “plummets”. Early on, the superficial glitz has the most power to distract from the deficiencies. Vista is far from an early version, coming as it does at the end of a long line of predecessors of... [More]

That, in a nutshell, sums up the last 6 years in America under the Bush Agenda. Faith-based and fancy-free. The title of this article cites Bush’s response to Nancy Pelosi when she asked him why he thought that “this time it’s going to work” (meaning an infusion of troops), as documented in The Pentagon’s not-so-little secret by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon).

Accusations that Bush’s approach[1] to the world is simplistic and detached from reality are mean-spirited. It is anything but simplistic; the sheer artfulness and complexity... [More]

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

Most Tapestry programming involves writing event handlers and operations on page objects. In order to execute these operations, you need access to properties of the form and properties of the session and application in which the page resides. For convenience, developers can add references to all sorts of objects in the system using various forms of the @Inject* annotation (like @InjectPage, @InjectObject... [More]

The last US election in November was widely regarded as the dirtiest in US history. The Republicans, in particular, slung nearly ceaselessly from a never-ending supply of mud. With just over 21 months to go until Americans start making up excuses for not voting for President, the first salvo has already been fired at Barack Hussein Obama, United States Senator and proud leader of an exploratory committee to determine whether his winning smile will be able to dredge up enough cash for a run at... [More]

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We keep our source code in Perforce, an extremely powerful SCM (source control manager). It retains multiple revisions of files and manages integrations between “branches”, or diverging streams of similar code. Read/write permissions for paths within the depot can be restricted per user.

Recently, we needed to get the history of a particular file to see which changes had been applied to it over the course... [More]

“Cynical is a word used by the naive to describe the experienced.”

A perrenial hole in Office security has been plugged in the upcoming 2007 release: IE has been replaced by Word as the HTML renderer for mails. It’s not that Word doesn’t have security problems of its own, but that most email worms are written to take advantage of the holes in IE instead. It should be hours before spammers adjust their content to this new development. Because of this, as noted in Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back… (Ars Technica), “e-mails that use certain advanced HTML and CSS... [More]”

Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents by Michael Dirda (Washington Post) is a review of the book with the same name, by Robert Irwin. The review starts with a movie-trailer–worthy introduction of “Thirty years after Edward Said’s groundbreaking “Orientalism,” a British scholar responds.” This gives the reader the impression that Said’s book from the seventies had, to date, enjoyed an unchallenged status in the world of cultural history—a status the brave author of the book being reviewed finally had the temerity... [More]

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

Hibernate is a persistence framework for Java. Among the many perks it purports to bring to the table is automatic versioning for objects in the database. That is, when saving an object to the database, it increments a version number. Any process that attempts to store a different version of the same object is rejected. This is all extremely flexible and can be added to a POJO using an annotation:

 ... [More]

1. Song of Susannah (2004) − Stephen King (second half)
2. The Dark Tower (2004) − Stephen King
3. Things Fall Apart (1959) − Chinua Achebe
4. Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005) − Malcolm Gladwell
5. No Longer At Ease (1960) − Chinua Achebe
6. ‘Tis (1999) − Frank McCourt
7. Teacher Man (2005) − Frank McCourt
8. City of Light (1999) − Lauren Belfer
9. Night Watch (2002) − Terry Pratchett
10. Der große Boss: Das Alte Testament, Unverschämt fromm neu erzählt (1992) − Fred Denger
11. Going Postal (2004) − Terry... [More]

Factors in Our Colossal Mess by Gabriel Kolko (CounterPunch) offers a nigh-panicked critique of the out-of-control hyper-captitalism found in the rarified air of the international financial instruments markets. With a name like that, it’s already clear that the intent is to hoodwink and the system does not disappoint. With the introduction of ever faster computing, ever more memory and ever tighter integration of information and communication, traders, who used to be limited in their schemes to invent money out of thin air,... [More]

The opinion piece, Why I hate vegetarians, is a typical example of hating the cause because of its proponents. The author doesn’t counter any arguments of vegetarianism—she simply claims its ok to eat meat because some vegetarians are so damned “smug and superior”. A lovely bit of deductive reasoning akin to taking up smoking because there are non-smokers who are annoying.

“People should be allowed to make their own choices and not be bullied or frightened into giving up meat. In the US... [More]”

Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip and several books, including the interesting God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment (Amazon) and increasingly bitter Dilbert collections, like When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? (Amazon) has a blog as well and updates with ferocious regularity, almost always with a unique idea that usually freewheels into a thought experiment. Some work, some don’t.

A recent theme was free will.

The Little Robot That Could by Scott Adams

In this one he posits a robot, whose job it is to... [More]

“I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.”

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

If you are not already familier with HiveMind, read Setting up a Service in HiveMind for an introduction.[1]

In the article mentioned above, we learned how to set up a new HiveMind service. What if we want to replace the implementation for an existing service? Is it even possible? Why would you want to do that? This article answers these questions in the context of a real-life example from one of our... [More]

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

If you are not already familier with HiveMind, read Setting up a Service in HiveMind for an introduction.[1]

Almost every application is going to need to have information that is session-specific. This is accomplished by adding a member to Tapestry’s application objects list and assigning it the proper scope. With a scope of “session”, HiveMind makes sure that each session in the web application has its own... [More]

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

HiveMind is the IOC manager used together with Tapestry; it’s in charge of bootstrapping and connecting all of the myriad objects and services available to a Tapestry application. Applications based on Tapestry are encouraged to use it to configure their application- and session-level objects and services as well.

Once it works, it works well. Getting it configured in the first place—especially when new... [More]

So there’s this mime, David Armand, and he does a bit called Karaoke for the Deaf (Google Video) on HBO. His shtick[1] is acting out the song “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia.

It’s wicked good, so he gets invited to do it at some awards show, Torn by David Armand (YouTube), in the middle of which Natalie herself joins him on stage and starts miming the song with him.

A good time was had by all.

“If ignorance is bliss, then slap the smile off my face.”

You probably shouldn’t do this one at work because it takes a full six minutes of concentration and silence—during which bizarre sounds are emitted from your speakers. Either that, or you need some headphones. Test your musical skills in 6 minutes! is a Flash-based test for tone-deafness / musical ear. It plays 30 pairs of musical sequences that may or may not differ in tone: that’s for you to decide. For the really bored, there is also Can’t dance? Test to see if you’re rhythmdeaf!, which... [More]

The Daily Show this week had a number of very good clips, mostly centering on Iraq, Rumsfeld and Bush. In particular, they highlight the high-quality correspondents that the show still has, despite the loss of Carrel, Helms, Cordry and Colbert. Oliver, Bee, Riggle and Mandvi are filling in quite nicely, as you’ll see below.

Fareed Zakaria (Part I and Part II)

Though he’s always interesting, this interview with Zakaria is the best one yet; his analysis of Iraq and the Middle East is spot-on.... [More]

Instead of focusing on money spent on military budgets, World Wide Military Deployments takes a look at the number of soldiers deployed around the world by various countries. This is a relatively good measure of the degree to which a country exerts its forceful influence on other countries. The top 5 are:

United States ~ 400,000

140,000 in Iraq, 74,000 in Germany, 40,000 each in Japan, Korea and Kuwait and over 1000 troops in a dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East

Turkey ~ 36,000... [More]

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Wally is Dilbert’s coworker. He is, without a doubt, the absolute king of work-avoidance. His talents are numerous and his fame wide-spread. This latest Dilbert cartoon shows him at his absolute best—right down to the Dr. Evil-like gesture of sipping from his slightly-oversized coffee cup.

Wally's Way

There have been a flood of political cartoons covering the conference on the Holocaust taking place in Iran in the last couple of days. They almost all depict president Ahmadinejad of Iran as Hitler or a Nazi of some kind. To be fair to the normally right-leaning caricaturists of America, there have also been a hell of a lot of them depicting Bush as divorced from reality and incredibly political in all of his decisions. This reaction is somewhat expected, as Bush’s rating dips down toward the... [More]

Giant Carnivorous Centipedes tells you all can probably stand to know about “Scolopendra gigantea, a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs”, which reach “lengths of over thirty-five centimeters” (almost 14 inches). They’re carnivores, but beasts of this size (lovingly described as a bitter repast themselves in Papillon by Henri Charriere (Amazon)) must necessarily seek larger prey than mere beetles and spiders.

“In an environment completely devoid of light, the centipede scurries across the damp... [More]”