Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

Picture

Name Marco von Ballmoos
Member since
Email [hidden]
Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
Description

The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3209 Articles
111 Comments

17 years Ago

Brinksmanship on Several Fronts

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

While America continues failing spectacularly in Iraq—despite pumping ungodly amounts of money into the venture—its eye wanders to Iraq’s neighbor, Iran. The lads in charge of the States have been grinding their war machine forward for months, nearly years, pumping themselves up, convincing themselves—which isn’t very hard—that this war will be much easier, that this war will go as planned, that this war will have a plan and that this war will be the beginning of the end of the Arabic... [More]

Most Americans

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

In the last several days, several polls have shown a remarkable turnaround in collective American opinion. Where previous polls have shown strong statistical divergence on important issues—both foreign and domestic—recent data suggests a much stronger alignment with the rest of world opinion on the following matters:

  1. The number of Americans believing in the Rapture—that Jesus himself will return to Earth and lift believers to heaven while condemning unbelievers to a thousand years of... [More]

You’re Free to Go

Published on in Technology

So that’s that; the big brouhaha over Steve Jobs’s stock options has finally, officially blown over. It seems the 6th generation iPod and 1st generation iPhone are both safe for now. Disney Board Clears Current Pixar Execs (Yahoo News) has more information, but it basically boils down to:

“Although the manipulation itself isn’t necessarily illegal, securities laws require that companies properly disclose the practice in their accounting and settle any resulting charges.”

That’s it? Just a little... [More]

Alberto’s Power Grab

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The executive branch of our government has long since crossed over from brazenly illegal to just batsh*t[1] crazy. In this atmosphere, you’ve got to shout to be heard above the din of casual corruption and corrosion of all that once defined the US as a democratic power. And Mr. Gonzales is no shrinking violet. The consolidation of power under the ever more powerfully defined executive proceeds—nay, accelerates—apace under the highest-ranking cop in the land, the Attorney General. Ever since... [More]

Boasting (Programming)

Published on in Quotes

“If you boast about how quickly you developed your product, people will complain about its performance. (Rails)

“If you boast about how well your product runs, people will complain about its development time. (Vista)

“If you don’t boast about either, people will assume you are developing in Java.”

Unknown

The Decline of Western Civilization

Published on in Miscellaneous

The term in the title stems from two movies released in the 80s, The Decline of Western Civilization (IMDb) and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (IMDb), which documented the world of punk rock and heavy metal, respectively. With metal and punk safely behind us, there are now much more insidious cancers eating away at the fabric of our society. One of the more prevalent, Local TV News, is discussed in Things That Still Exist But Shouldn’t by Amelie Gillete (AVClub). The article covers a few things, but leads... [More]

Idiot’s Guide to Economics

Published on in Miscellaneous

This guy breaks down Mankiew’s principles of economics into terms we can all understand (though the original list isn’t what you would call earth-shattering either).

“Let’s begin by separating them into the first seven principles, which are microeconomics, and the last three, which are macroeconomics. The difference, of course, being that microeconomists are economists that are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists, who are wrong about things in general.”

Principles of economics, translated by Yoram Bauman in 02/16/07 (YouTube)

Eerily Prescient

Published on in Miscellaneous

The Onion has staked a claim in the world of news reporting: to report that which never happened, and likely never could have, but in a manner that suggests that it did. For the most part, the intended humor is relatively transparent, making it easy to laugh along as the author gets increasingly outrageous. It’s funny because it’s sometimes hard to discern articles from the Onion from the human interest pieces in what are considered mainstream news sources.

The “Politics” section necessarily... [More]

Power

Published on in Quotes

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”
John Adams

War is Revenge

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

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]

Web Anthro

Published on in Miscellaneous

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]”

First Days with Microsoft Vista, Part II

Published on in Technology

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]

First Days with Microsoft Vista, Part I

Published on in Technology

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]

“Because I Told Them It Had To”

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

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]

When Tapestry’s @Inject* Silently Fails

Published on in Programming

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]

Lies, Damned Lies and The Media

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

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]

Hidden Files in Perforce

Published on in Tips & Tricks

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


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]

Cynics

Published on in Quotes

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

18 years Ago

Outlook 2007. Secured.

Published on in Technology

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]”

Modern Day Orientalist

Published on in Miscellaneous

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]

Versioned Objects with Hibernate

Published on in Programming

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]

Books read in 2006

Published on in Books

  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]

Wanna Bet?

Published on in Finance & Economy


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]

Vegetarian Propaganda?

Published on in Miscellaneous

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]”

Online Philosophy

Published on in Miscellaneous

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]

Misery

Published on in Quotes

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

Override an Implementation in HiveMind

Published on in Programming

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]

Session and Requests in HiveMind

Published on in Programming

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]

Setting up a Service in HiveMind

Published on in Programming

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]

Consequences

Published on in Quotes

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953