Category: Etc

A few days ago I noticed some comment spam and wondered how it managed to get on my website without my e-mail notification system letting me know. Sure enough, it turns out that sometime last December my perl Mail::Sendmail hack stopped working. So I have missed a bunch of comments. I apologize to those folks who were kind enough to comment. I've gone through the comments and put in responses. I'll have to keep checking things manually until my ISP lets me know what the problem is.

Is there a massive world wide terror network called Al-Qaida or just a lose uncoordinated collection of intellectually affiliated groups? How many people would a dirty bomb kill exactly? These aren't questions I've ever seen asked before, even in the press I read which tends toward the more alternative side. There is apparently a documentary on BBC Two that is asking exactly these questions but I'm guessing I won't be seeing it here in America. It almost makes me want to get satellite. The Guardian has a good summary of some key points the documentary makes. I have no idea how accurate the documentary is but I think it is asking important questions. It's too easy to turn the rats in the shadows into monsters. It's too easy to be scared and demand 'something' be done. It's hard to look fear in the eye and make honest assessments about the real dangers we are facing.

Hamdi may go free but Padilla doesn't get his day in court because the Supreme Court ruled that his lawyers had filed their paperwork in the wrong court district. The Supreme Court also ruled that the 'enemy combatants' held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba can make legal appeals to U.S. courts.

Continue reading Hamdi MAY go Free

I have redesigned the website using Blosxom so it will be a lot easier to maintain. I also added in comment functionality. Please, use those comments to let me know what you think!

Three publications I was involved with have come out in the last couple of months and I realized I hadn't really mentioned them. I wrote an article on what's happening in the Integration Standards space that I published in Weblogic Developer's Journal, you can get a copy on BEA's website. I was co-author on an article with Jim Whitehead describing the design behind WebDAV's property mechanisms. You can get an older copy on my website, to get the actual published copy you have to pay money. Finally, BEA and IBM just published a joint whitepaper that I had the privledge of making a lot of technical contributions to on a new technology called BPELJ. It is actually pretty cool, I'm very excited about getting it into real world systems.

If you look slightly up you may notice something new about my website, Google AdSense. The way AdSense works is that you sign up on their website, they review your website and if it meets their guidelines then you can put a link on your website's pages to Google's server that will serve up ads. You get a cut of the ad revenue your site brings in.

I do wonder if sticking ads on my personal website is garish. My general opinion is that the answer is no. I think the ad format is tasteful and not intrusive. If the ads help generate some income to pay for the cost of the website, that's great. If they actually make me a profit, even better!

Oh well, what can I do, I'm a capitalist pig and proud of it. Although I must admit that I'm a lazy capitalist pig. I've only put the ads on my more popular pages because I'm too lazy to go to each page and update it.

As I discussed previously, Jose Padilla is an American citizen arrested on American soil and held without charge, without right to see a council, without right to a court hearing or any other rights that are supposedly guaranteed by the American constitution for almost two years now on the exclusive order of President Bush. In President Bush's America if the president declares you an enemy combatant then you can be arrested and held without charge, lawyer or due process for as long as the "war on terror" continues, in other words, forever.

A Federal appeals court ruled on 12/18/2003 that President Bush did not have the right to hold Padilla prisoner without charge and ordered Padilla released from Army custody within 30 days. However the Bush administration asked for and in January received a stay of the release order while the ruling is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On 2/11/2004 the Pentagon did agree to let Mr. Padilla see a lawyer, the first non-government employee Padilla will have seen in almost two years, but the Pentagon was quick to point out that it did this only because it wanted to and was under no obligation to do so. The issue is now on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, you can track the case's progress here.

According to The Register, the employees at Belkin decided that their wireless router will, every once in a while, redirect a random HTTP request to their website to serve up an ad. But, hey, at least you can opt-out by having the Belkin website send a magic flag that gets set in your router. Think about that last one for a second. I won't ever be buying another Belkin product again. I really don't care if they 'fix' this issue, I don't want to provide financial support to a company that could do something so fundamentally wrong and insecure.

On the good news side I just spent a few hours on a conference call where four of us used Net Meeting to share Word and Powerpoint. It was outstanding! We were all running on Cable or DSL connections via VPN into our corporate network where one of the guys set up his computer to accept calls and off we went. Not only was the performance top notch but the over all experience was very natural and multi-user control (at one point two of us were editing the same Word document) was trivial. Furthermore Net Meeting works with any Windows app so, for example, I shared out my Mozilla browser without problem. The Microsoft Net Meeting team really deserves major congratulations for having created an outstanding product. The best part of all is that it is built into every W2K and WXP box.

Apache is trying to maintain a list of all known web services specs. If you can look at that list and not get ISO flashbacks then you may be missing the point.

I just wanted to leave myself a note that I'm willing to bet that at some point in the relatively near future a huge scandal will erupt when people finally figure out why healthcare costs have been increasing at a double digit rate for the last few years. I can find no compelling reason that could justify such huge increases other than some form of massive fraud. I have already seen the absurd billing rates that the industry supports and our current 'first dollar' insurance system is clearly nuts, especially the filter that is introduced when people get their healthcare through their employer instead of on their own but none of these causes are sufficiently compelling to explain the healthcare cost explosion. When I did some research on the subject I found a laundry list of explanations provided: the population is aging, there are less healthcare providers, people are fatter and so suffer from more diseases, new medicines are expensive, people are demanding more healthcare, etc. but in the material I find on the subject no one ever quantifies these cost factors or provides a model that shows how they result in double digit cost growth. My guess is that there is a series of crimes in here some place, it's just a matter of time until they come to light. Anything whose cost increases at a rate greater than the increase in income isn't sustainable so eventually something will give.

have been meaning to put this table up for a while. It was originally in The Economist July 12th 2003 issue in a table entitled "Perry Mason, this ain't". It compares the rights defendants have had in various trial venues against the rights that the Bush administration would give defendants who are considered 'enemy combatants' in his special 'military commissions'. See my 9/12/2002 entry for an example of an American citizen arrested on American soil being declared an 'enemy combatant'. In other words, this could be you.

Rights To:	US criminal Court	Terrorism Trials in North Ireland	South African apartheid	US court Martial	Bush's Military commission for Trying Suspected Terrorists
Civil Judge	yes	yes	yes	no	no
Choose own lawyer	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Remain Silent	yes	yes	no	yes	yes
Open Trial	yes	yes	yes	no	no
Jury Trial	yes	no	no	no	no
Lawyer-Client confidentiality	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Know all evidence against you	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Appeal to independent judge	yes	yes	yes	yes	no

While there may be arguments for changes in some court procedures due to the special threat of terrorists, the Bush administration does not appear to have made any serious attempt to find that compromise. Instead they have created kangaroo courts.
For those who are curious, the U.S. courts ordered the government to let Padilla meet with his lawyers. The government refused the order and the judge, rather than ordering the government to obey his order, decided to certify an appeal. Arguments have been filed in the appeal and the oral hearings should happen in 10/2003. This means that an American citizen, arrested on American soil has been put under arrest, denied right to an attorney, not been charged with anything, not allowed to meet with anyone for over 15 months. Welcome to Bush's America.
As for Zacarias Moussaoui, the basic facts I stated in my 07/15/2003 entry still hold true. The government has now refused two orders by the judge to let Moussaoui call the named witnesses. The government now wants the judge to dismiss all charges against Moussaoui. This would allow the government to either expedite its appeal of the judge's order to let Moussaoui interview the witnesses or allow the government to re-arrest Moussaoui as an 'enemy combatant' and charge him in a 'Military commission'. Here was the most enlightening discussion I could find of why the Judge has rejected the government's requests and what the government could have done to both protect national security and defend the constitution. The Judge's decision should come down next week.
Every vote against Bush is a vote for freedom and don't forget to pay your freedom insurance.