Sunday, April 6, 2003

Wow: The Salon interview with Bill Moyers This is great journalism: an interview with a great journalist and political writer. Although the whacko political far-right takes shots at Bill Moyers, anyone who enjoys well presented and thoughtful commentary appreciates Bill Moyers. No matter what your political inclination is, I think that you will enjoy his thoughtful comments in this interview. 9:47:21 PM

More on Java Enterprise Beans I must admit to wasting some time today following Google links for discusions of EJBs. I do a lot of Java server side development, but I probably use EJBs less than 10% of the time. This seems to jive fairly well with what other server side Java developers have written. Ironically, one of my small jobs that I am doing right now is to help a long term customer set up a side business of hosting EJBs. Figuring out ways to share a JBoss/Tomcat instance between many users has prodded me into digging into EJB containers, etc. I guess that my problem with EJBs is that they are just a little bit too much work for what they provide (persistence, transaction support, etc.) for many server side applications. That said, the entire "J2EE stack" (EJB containers, JNDI, etc., etc.) is very cool and fun stuff - I just think that it is an overkill for most applications. 9:00:51 PM

Israeli human rights group B'tselem said the expulsion of the Palestinians was a violation of the Geneva Convention This Christian Science Monitor article has all the details. It is about time the US stops sending 70% of all its foreign aid to Israel until Israel cleans up its act. We have been a very, very good friend to Israel, but in my opinion, Israel's actions, getting worse the last few years, hurt the US. The current government of Israel is, in my opinion, no friend of the US. I also condemn the Palestinian suicide bombers and the leadership of Yasser Arafat. I believe that most people in the world are sick of both sides in this conflict continually "getting even" with each other. This is really bullshit behavior. I am a religious person (a Christian) and I would call on all people of the world who believe in any religion to stand up and speak out against the evil perpetrated by both sides of the conflict in the Middle East. I think that it it not the fault of the Israeli and Palestinian people - their leaders are evil, not the people themselves who are good people (again, just my personal opinion). Like people everywhere, they simply want jobs and a safe environment for their families. It is time to for the US to stop supporting all governments who violate human rights. In the past, we have supported many dictatorships and other marginal governments because these actions were perceived to be in our national interests. I hope that whoever the democrats run for president next election makes an issue of our world wide political strategy. 4:04:02 PM

Dick Cheney has it right - read this quote! Here is what Dick Cheney said in 1992 as Secretary of Defense: "If we'd gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein - assuming we could have found him - we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. Then, you've got to put a new government in his place and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shi'ite government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up?" The source is this article which was linked from Google news. BTW, the entire article is worth reading. 3:42:39 PM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 9/16/03; 7:35:48 AM.