As a Jeopardy! enthusiast, I found this AP story on one reporter's 'Jeopardy!' triumph quite entertaining.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 July 2005 at 1:37 PM

I don't want to delve too deeply into this, but on July 7 terrorists killed 55 people in London. This was a crisis of world-wide import and it continues to dominate the news more than a week later. Today, terrorists killed 59 people. The attack made headlines, but all the previous evidence about Iraq leads me to believe that it will be out of the news cycle by the end of weekend. It saddens me a bit when I consider that what has become the norm in Iraq would be epic if the events took place somewhere else.

It is entirely rational to more closely identify with those whose lives more closely resemble your own. Finding a mate would be a very different prospect if this weren't true. Yet it is unforgivable that so many of us value some lives more than others based on nothing more than stereotypes and biases.

I hope that I am proved wrong. I hope as much zeal goes into investigating the suicide bombers in Iraq as has gone into the investigation in London. I hope we continue to hear about this attack in Iraq for as long as the London attack stays on the news. But I expect none of this.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 16 July 2005 at 10:37 PM

Some brief comments on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince follow. No plot details are revealed, but those wanting to read the book with a clean slate should not go any further.

The new Harry Potter book was very good, but not the best we've seen in the series. It spent a bit too much time explaining things that had happened in previous books and setting the stage for the final volume. At least the angry, sullen Harry of book five didn't appear in this volume. But this book deals less with the minutia of life at Hogwarts than previous volumes, and I think that it lost some of it's charm because of that. Interesting new characters, a hallmark of the previous stories, were also missing. But perhaps the wizarding world is full up for now. In the end, the story was a good transition and it will be popular amongst the die-hard fans, but it doesn't stand as well as the other books on its own. Although, having said that, I can't wait to see what's coming in the last book, so it did its job admirably well.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 16 July 2005 at 10:09 PM

I've been thinking a lot about the war on terror and how the American public will react if American deaths from Sept. 12, 2001 through the present exceed the death toll of Sept. 11, 2001. I suspect the majority will continue on as if nothing as happened, just as they've done every day since this war started. One troop dies here, another there; it's all small numbers so most people ignore it.

But I wonder how people would react if they were asked to directly foot the costs of war? If people are asked to put their money where their mouth is, I suspect most people will take a disliking to a very costly war.

So here's my proposal:

1. For every death in the war on terror, tax each adult American one dollar.
2. For every other casualty tax each American adult ten cents.

These numbers are somewhat arbitrary, but a compelling case can be built around them.

Assuming this tax rate were retroactive back to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, how much would the car have cost each of us out of pocket? Here's the math based on the number of casualties on July 10, 2005:

Iraq Deaths:

1,756 = $1,756

Afghanistan Deaths:

 212 =  $212

Iraq Wounded:

13,190 = $1,319

Total:

$3,287

Speaking just for myself, my support for this war would have probably been maxed out around the $500 or $1,000 level, which we've long since passed.

Another benefit of this system is that it generates more than enough income to pay for both the war and decent benefits to the survivors. For example, if you assume there are 150,000,000 adults in the US, this system would have generated $493,050,000,000 for the war.

There are any numbers of variations on this. An intriguing one is to make the war opt-in. And if enough people don't opt in with their own dollars, the war won't happen for lack of funds.

Anyway, this is nothing more than a gedankenexperiment, but I think it provides an interesting perspective on the true cost of the "war on terror."

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 July 2005 at 1:07 PM

It isn't constructive and it's more than a bit over-the-top, but every time I read something like this I can't help but hope that every red-state hick who thinks cops should carry a twelve pack of syringes so they can administer lethal injections on the street and save the tax payers that effort of a trial ought to be incorrectly charged with a crime, convicted, and executed.

The death penalty is an amazingly bad idea, but I think we ought to give the people what they want. Let's make the death penalty optional. When the government sends out the census every ten years they should ask people whether they support the death penalty. If they do, they've just opted into the system and it will subsequently apply in capital cases that they're involved in. If they don't support it, the death penalty will be off the table. I suspect very few will opt in when it's their own neck on the line.

An don't get me started on Congress's desire to "streamline" the death penalty appeals process. It makes them look ghoulishly bloodthirsty.

Typing this up reminded me of my favorite quandary. Why is it that fundamentalist Christians, who literally worship at the feet of Jesus Christ and seem to inject him into most public debates, ignore most of his teachings? The Bible, Old Testament and New, is filled opposing teachings. In most cases this is because Christ was telling his followers that what was in their hearts mattered more than rote followings of obscure law.^* The example that best exemplifies this dichotomy to me is one having to do with the punishment for crimes. Oft-cited by the supporters of capital punishment is the Bible's request for proportional retribution. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and so on. Good ol' Leviticus (the source of so much that is wrong with fundamentalist Christians, in my opinion) even gives us "And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast" (Leviticus 24:18). The New Testament abandons the proportional response, for the caring one. Paul writes "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.' No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:19-21). A different approach, to say the least. I believe -- and this is probably the only time I'll ever say this as I am strongly agnostic and very much non-religious (see my thinking in paragraph one above) -- that America would be a better place if we could all embrace the actual teachings of Christ, but this is especially true for those who profess to do so already.

Alright, that's enough ranting to -- hopefully -- last me a year.

---

^* As an example of how Christ envisioned his religion, I offer you this anecdote. Christ was once asked which commandments should be kept. "And Jesus said, 'You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself'" (Matthew 19). For those keeping score at home, that's only six.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 11 July 2005 at 6:40 PM

It is, I think, fairly uncommon to find a reality TV show that manages to violate the Fair Housing Act of 1964 (a bill intended to ensure that people of all races are given equal access to housing), but ABC managed to pull it off with their recently scrapped "Welcome to the Neighborhood." In "Neighborhood," three (white, Republican, "close-minded," Texan) families get to decide which one of seven competing families will win a 3,300 square foot house and move into the neighborhood. The twist? None of the competing families are "traditional." The families consist of

a religious, African American family; a Wiccan family; a Latino family; an Asian family; a picture-perfect white family (except mom is a stripper); a young white family headed by staunch Republicans, only mom and dad are covered in tattoos; and a white gay couple with an adopted African American infant.

Fortunately, ABC realized how awful they would look if they aired this and yanked the show before its scheduled July 10th debut.

Via.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 July 2005 at 9:24 AM

If a CRT monitor begins to emit a high-pitched whine, is it likely to explode? I ask this for an entirely practical and important reason: this is what my secondary monitor has begun to do. It's six years old and I bought it as a refurbished item, so I'm guessing that it's at the end of its life and I should get rid of it, but I'm concerned that it might blow up and kill me before I get around to dumping it.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 July 2005 at 11:34 PM

JavaOne, Day One Sessions

The following is not an exhaustive discussion of the sessions I attended on the first day of JavaOne, nor is it even a complete listing of those sessions, but these were the ones that sparked my interest enough to type up a few words about them.

What's New in Eclipse? A Java IDE and a Whole Lot More
As it turns out, there isn't a whole lot of new information to impart regarding Eclipse. An interesting plugin to look out for is the Mylar plugin. Also of interest is the Higgins plugin, which creates a trust framework within Eclipse. (I assume the name is an allusion to the Higgins on "Magnum, P.I.," but I could be wrong.)

Enterprise Java Beans 3.0
The EJB 2.1 specification created a powerful but complex system. The EJB 3.0 spec attempts to deal with that complexity without compromising the functionality the developers have grown accustom to. Notable highlights include the removal of the EJBHome and EJBObject interfaces, the removal of the JNDI APIs, the elimination of deployment descriptor documents, and the re-introductions of a plain business interface for the beans. Further, checked RemoteExceptions are no longer thrown, so there is no longer an interface difference between local and remote EJBs. RemoteExceptions will always be wrapped in an EJBException when thrown. The EJB 3.0 specification relies heavily on the Java 1.5 concept of annotations. Using annotations you put descriptors of your beans directly in the source code rather than having an external xml file define them.

The EJB 3.0 specification also includes a new Persistence Model definition. In this new model, which resembles the open source Hibernate product in many ways, entities are simple Java classes. These classes are concrete and the can have getters and setters or persistent variables. Annotations again drive configuration.

For more information see the EJB 3.0 Simplified API document and the Persistence API document available on the Java website.

Designing and Coding Java-based Applications for High Performance Computing: Dissecting a Telco Application
Some performance recommendations gleaned from designing and implementing an application that processes millions of requests per hour:

• No String concatenation
  
• Use Object Pools [a later presentation called Object Pool use a performance myth: unless your objects have hundreds of elements, you don't actually save that much by using them]
  
• Parallelize as much as possible
  
• Order the tests done by if and switch clauses
  
• Replace some tests with exception handling. For example, if an input will be null only one time out of a thousand or a million, it might be more efficient to just catch the NullPointerException rather than testing each input for null.
  
• Profile, profile, profile.
  
• Avoid J2EE solutions, as they don't give enough flexibility to tweak for high performance.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 July 2005 at 3:34 PM

A tip for those of you buying mini-blinds. If the width of the blind is listed as, say, 34", the actual width will be 33.5". This is at odds from what the "How to Measure for Blinds" articles on the web tell you, which spend a lot of time discussing how to measure the inside of the frame versus the outside of the frame, but don't mention this size issue at all.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 July 2005 at 9:46 AM

Bush has been trying for years to have a missile hit an incoming missile as part of the Missile Defense Plan that occasionally makes the news because of its repeated failures, but has never been successful at it. Yet NASA seems to have no trouble hitting a comet with an auto-navigating probe from a distance of 83 million miles from Earth. Perhaps the defense contractors working on missile defense should reach out the the NASA scientists who pulled this off for some pointers.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 4 July 2005 at 11:07 PM

JavaOne is over. I flew into St. Louis this morning, stopped by the apartment to pick up a few things and discovered that the building had been sold to Apartment Exchange. This is probably a good thing as it will make the maintenance process a bit easier. And since I renewed the lease a few weeks ago with the old owner, I should be set for the next year or so. I cleaned up the kitchen a bit while downloading an audiobook from audible, then I drove to Evansville, where I'm spending the weekend. A pretty packed day when you consider that I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night (an early morning flight out of SFO had me getting up way too early after staying up way too late last night).

I'll do a full JavaOne write up tomorrow morning (I wrote a bunch of notes out long hand on Thursday when I still had things fresh in mind), but in the meantime here are a few things that caught my eye: EJB 3.0, Wicket, AJAX. My co-worker Pete is obsessed with all things JSF, so I need to remember to tell him about Shale, a web framework built on top of JSF.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 July 2005 at 9:24 PM