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February 28, 2003

Rally Turkey

The Rally of Turkey started today, and, as expected, it's been a rough event with several notable retirements. But first, the good news. Harri Rovenpera is leading the rally by a whisker over Francois Duval and Tommi Makinen. Other pleasant surprises include Giles Panizzi holding fourth place in his privateer Peugeot, and Armin Schwarz in seventh (he was as high as second).

Now the bad news. Petter Solberg retired during SS4 when he spun in a corner and mashed his suspension. Sebastien Loeb also retired, but in a more bizarre way--he got lost between stages and ran out of fuel. Most of the time, the cars are required to drive on their own between stages on open roads, and Seb's co-driver obviously had some issues with his map. Marcus Gronholm had power steering issues on SS3, dropping him over 3 minutes off the lead. Gronholm isn't pleased and he sounds like a poor loser (he doesn't want to race anymore :-( ). Richard Burns also had early issues, but is beginning to find his form and is moving up the leaderboard.

The remaining Citroens of Colin McCrae and Carlos Sainz have been doing well, especially they've been running first on the stages, effectively sweeping the roads for the other drivers. If the cars can handle the beatings, they should be in the fight for a podium spot.

February 27, 2003

Mr Rogers

In case you haven't heard, Fred Rogers passed away early this morning.

February 26, 2003

Double Standard (or, How do you say NIMBY in French?)

I heard this interesting segment on NPR this afternoon, and I couldn't wait til the morning to mention it. They are doing a series on Muslims in Europe, and today's segment talked about Muslims in France. Interesting stuff. In a nutshell, the French citizens generally look like xenophobic bigots, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Muslims. In fact, the treatment of Muslims in parts of France closely resembles the American South of the 1950s and 60s.

I find it a bit interesting that a country which is so against a war in Iraq because of what it might do to the population there wants absolutely nothing to do with a similiar group within their own country.

February 25, 2003

A Fair Shake

If you don't follow the sports world closely, you probably haven't heard that Colonial tournament. This has been met with all sorts of opinions (as expected). Many of the pros on the PGA tour don't really like the idea, though this is to hide the fact that they don't want to be beaten by a woman. Sorenstam isn't just any old golfer. She's the most successful female golfer in history, and based on results alone, she is more successful than even Tiger Woods. But because she's a woman, most people don't know this. No "I am Annika Sorenstam" commercials for her.

The general opinion from the talking heads in the sports media is that Sorenstam will more than likely make the cut at the Colonial and will do fairly well. It's a short course, which won't give the men and their huge shots a big advantage, though Sorenstam will have to the hit the ball further on her approaches to the greens. And most folks in the media like the idea of Sorenstam competing with the boys, even if it's just to see her fail miserable.

I came across this interesting article on ESPN's site this morning. It seems Brian Kontak wants to play on the women's tour in the interest of "parity." You haven't heard of Brian Kontak? Me neither. He doesn't hold a PGA tour card (meaning he can't play with the big boys), though he has had success in the Canadian tour and some of the minor tour events. He claims that this isn't a publicity stunt--he just wants his chance to win on the LPGA tour. Ummm....riiiiiight. I give Bob Haring, the columnist, a lot of credit for calling Kontak out as a publicity hound. If he's so interested in making a name for himself as a golfer, he should do it on golf's premier stage, the PGA tour (which is what Sorenstam is trying to do herself). If Kontak plays (which isn't a given, since LPGA rules state that competitors must be female, unlike the PGA, which has no gender rules) and fails to win, or worse yet, fails to make the cut, what does he gain? Nothing. He hasn't done anything positive for his sport. If Sorenstam fails to make the cut, she'll still be seen as a bit of hero for at least trying to play and win with the big dogs.

February 21, 2003

Ugh

Why does every bike shop in our fine city have an absolutely hideous web site? How bad can they be, you say? Well, most of them don't have any good information on them, and the designs are so ugly that you expect blinking text. Sheesh.

February 20, 2003

Black Helicopters and the Golden Arches

I found these articles yesterday in Reason about the government's ongoing war with fat. Interesting stuff, but many of them are nothing more than libertarian knee-jerk reactions that do nothing more than take a stance against the government just because it's the government. For example:

The belief that things like fat and sugar and salt aren't really bad for us. On the surface, I agree, but only if you eat them in moderation. Eating a Big Mac a day isn't really moderation. The stance Reason takes? Let the fast food folks do what they want, and let the people be responsible for what they eat. If we have a nation of fat people, so be it. It's their own damn fault. Several of the articles also site scientific studies that show that fat is really bad for people, and the government has decided to fight an enemy that doesn't exist. In fact, the war on fat is compared to the war on tobacco.

Here's where I can't stand the positions the magazine takes, namely that the market doesn't count when they say people have to take responsbility for their actions. That is their guiding principle for both issues....fat people wouldn't be fat if they didn't eat so much, and people dying of lung cancer should have realised that smoking was bad for them. I don't have a problem with that. People should take responsibility for their actions. But where is the call for responsibility for the manufacturers? No where is anyone saying the manufacturers are responsible as well. I'm as much of a capitalist as the next guy, but why isn't the market subject to the same criticisms of the consumer? I am not a supporter of the tobacco settlement, and I'm not a fan of the government getting too heavily involved in the markets, but the stance Reason takes is unacceptable--the market and its players are just as responsible as the consumers.

anklebiter

In case you're all wondering what to do get us (or, more specifically, the anklebiter), look no further than right here.

February 19, 2003

Hoops

Just got finished configuring Tomcat and Apache for the upcoming PNC project. I've never configured Tomcat (a servlet/JSP engine) from scratch before. It's a bit of chore, and I don't quite have Apache handling the requests to Tomcat correctly (I have to type http://localhost:8080/test instead of just http://localhost/test), but that's a minor inconvenience.

Various Updates

First, for anyone keeping track, I didn't take the job offer. We were just too far about on compensation. No hard feelings on either side though: they understand my situation, and I understood theirs. Perhaps in six months after they get funding, they'll call me again. In the meantime, I'll be starting a project for PNC next week. Simple stuff....converting some existing Perl web scripts to Java/JSP. By the time that work is finished, I should have a handful of other projects that could take me into the summer or beyond.

I still haven't added any sort of archive list to this page yet. Sorry (like anyone wants to read my stuff again anyway). Maybe today.....the included templates have a table-based calendar system for the archives, but I'd like to stay away from that format if at all possible. I'm also considering turning on the comments system some time soon....not that I really care what you think ;-)

February 17, 2003

War? Self-defense?

An interesting article on Reason points out the apparent contradictions in the Bush administration's claims of self-defense as a reason for war with Iraq. If you're a libertarian anti-warrior, it's a good read, and provides nice ammunition for arguments with *conservatives.*

Let It Snow

We got a lot of snow over the past day or so. Hopefully it'll be the last of it for the year. I'm a huge fan of the white stuff--it just seems to make the dreary winters around here much more bearable--but we've had over three feet of it before yesterday's storm. I want to actually clean my car, and sweep out the garage, but it hasn't been dry for weeks.

A few observations having just driven to Oakland to take Jen to work:


  • Most of the people driving today seemed to be fairly competent driving on the snow. I noticed the same thing yesterday afternoon. No one was really crawling along, and if they slide at all, they just re-adjusted and went on their way.

  • I have a new pet-peeve: pedestrians that walk on the streets when a sidewalk hasn't been cleared. I realize that it sucks to get snow all over your pants, but I'd rather have wet pants than get flattened by a car. The roads are narrower thanks to the snow banks, and if there's traffic coming the other way, you have to come to a complete stop and wait for the traffic to clear to avoid hitting a person.

Robert Cringley wrote an interesting little column about the setting of Sun Microsystems. The word on the street today is that Sun is trouble because while it's been fighting the Evil Empire on one front, a second war is beginning to start with IBM and, in some part, the Linux community. Conventional wisdom says that big corporations won't be willing to pay tons of money for Sun hardware running Solaris, when they can get Intel-based hardware running Linux from IBM. Some say that the Sun architecture, while once the king of computing, has slowly been slipping as Intel and AMD have caught up. I say that there could be some truth to that. IBM does have the potential to take a chunk of Sun's market share, but it won't be anytime soon.

It's easy to be swayed by these arguments. IBM is making a more affordable product and bundling it with a free (as in beer) operating system. Sounds great. But how many of us have worked on projects or with companies that require the kind of horsepower that a real Sun server provides? I'm talking a machine with a minimum of, say, 50 processors. And maybe 128 gig of RAM. I've been fortunate enough to work with cllients that require this sort of firepower, and they aren't ready to ditch Sun for anyone else, despite the high costs of licensing Solaris. Why? Well, the hardware is extremely reliable. And even if it isn't, things like hot-swappable CPUs provide 99.99999% uptime. And then there's the support. Something happens to your hardware? Call Sun and a tech will be there that day. Problem with Solaris? Call Sun. Sure, with Linux you have a wealth of information on the web, but unless you have Linus Torvalds or Eric Raymond as your system administrator, you'll probably need professional help at some point.

So do I think Sun isn't in trouble? Well, they have their problems. They're bleeding money (roughly $2 billion a year), and other manufacturers are catching up. Sun has also started a Linux initiative, and the OS has been ported to the SPARC architecture, but the adoption rate will be slow when Sun's version is released.

Then there's Java. Once lauded as the be-all-end-all of programming languages, it is falling out of favor with the talking heads of the industry. Some people claim that Microsoft's .Net initiative is taking a chunk of the market away from Java, but I don't think that's the case. And here's what Cringley has to say about Java:

Even Java is becoming superfluous. Java is the Dan Marino of software. Just as the former Dolphins quarterback, Java affected the world so much that history cannot be written without its mention. But nonetheless, neither Java nor Dan ever won the big one.

What exactly is he talking about? Sure, people are beginning to realize that Java isn't the solution for simple websites, or that you don't create stand alone apps with the Swing libraries, but he wants us to believe that Java is on it's way out, but he never says what is going to take it's place.

Let's look for second at the true barometer of the strength of a language: the number of jobs available. I'll use our local technology council's job board. You'll either have to take my word it or do the searches yourself, since they use POST operations for the queries and I can't cut and paste a URL.


  • Java: 97 positions listed.

  • C++: 83 positions listed.

  • C#: 5 positions.

  • Visual Basic: 46 positions.

  • Perl: 14 positions.

Suddenly Java doesn't seem so superfluous in Pittsburgh. You'll note the absence of a search on ASP/VBScript. A search on ASP returns multiple results that simple contain the 'asp' substring somewhere in the listing. I don't doubt that the number of positions available fall somewhere between VB and Java numbers.

All that said, Java still has its issues. For one, the core libraries are officially enormous. Suddenly everything and the kitchen sink is included in the SDK. We don't need this. If the downloads are all free anyway, include the core-core libraries in the SDK, and provide the other non-core (java.sql, java.xml, java.net, etc) as downloads. Then of course, there's the issues with the JDK's compatibility with Solaris and the SPARC architecture. Doh! How can Sun produce hardware and an operating system, build a programming language that it touts as truly write-once-run-anywhere, and then have issues with THEIR OWN OPERATING SYSTEM AND JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE? That's a problem.

February 14, 2003

A New Start

Well...here's my first first Movable Type post. Yah. I'm still working the kinks out of the layout for this page, and the comments pages, so it'll be awhile until it's completely done. I'm also going to try to import some of my latest log entries from the other page, mostly just to take up some space.

By the way...I know that the links on the site still point to the old log. I'm working on it!

February 13, 2003

Foiled

Well, last night I was supposed to give a lightning talk at the Perl Mongers meeting, but alas, I got stuck in traffic in Oakland thanks to the Pitt game. At least they crushed West Virginia. You can check out my slides here if you're curious about some obscure Perl module.

I believe I'm going to be moving the web log back to Movable Type, as I've quit fighting for SSH access to the web server, and I'm tired of FTPing my entries every day. I've had SSH access in the past, but either my SSH client or their SSH server daemon doesn't clean up after itself when the connection is dropped, leaving whatever process I was running to monopolize the CPU. Meh.

A rare pro-war view on Reason. While I can't say I'm pro war in Iraq at the moment, this is the most candid reason to go to war there that I've read.

February 12, 2003

Why I'm not a Conservative

I never, ever want to be associated with people like this. A few choice quoutes from Mr. O'Reilly:


"I don't care what you think...so keep your mouth shut"

Ummm...didn't you invite the man on your show to hear what he thinks? Oh wait, you're Bill O'Reilly. You don't really care what other people think. You just invite them on your show to scream to them.

This is an interesting concept. I'm very close to calling myself a libertarian, but there are few things I just can't get past. First, my jury is still out on gun control. In my opinion, the original purpose of the second amendment was two-fold:


  1. The citizens of the U.S., lacking a standing army at the time of the writing of the Constitution, still had to protect themselves, and the country still had to ask a citizen militia for help in times of a war. Without the right to bear arms, the country would have been defenseless.

  2. It was a symbol of the power of the people (the basis of a republic). If the citizens can bear arms, ultimately the government could not strip their power away through force.

Now, these days point #1 is a bit moot, since we've got the largest army in the world. Point #2 is still a little sticky though. Of course, based on point #1, how much good would your pistol or shotgun be against the world's biggest army?

My other point of contention with the libertarians is their often racist attitudes. Though this is gradually changing as more open-minded intellectuals join the party, the party faithful still tend to be rednecks. Freedom means freedom for everyone, stupid.

Hope you don't mind the switch to proper capitalization. I just thought I'd try it out.