Friday, April 11, 2003

A good Java blog I just ran across an interesting Java related blog. A good read! 12:29:32 PM

Right wing slander and lies: dissing on the Human Rights Watch The always interesting Joe Conason frequently does an excellent job pointing out how the far right lies (assuming most people will bother to check up on what they say). This interesting article is a good example of just how far the far right will go to justify their weird political agendas. Note: if you are not a Salon member, you will have to view an advertisement to read this article. Just my opinion: the average American is ill-served by the far right (or the far left for that matter). Note: I don't really intend to diss on all conservatives: I have spoken with very conservative republicans who share my view of America (defend our Constitutional rights, fight against freedom killing legislation like the "Patriot Act", etc.) I do intend to diss on conservatives who "conveniently" forget about other people's rights to free speech because they disagree with them or for political agendas. Nuff' said. 12:19:51 PM

XML has really changed the way I work I have been using computers since my father (a member of the National Academy of Science) made a BASIC timesharing system available to me when I was a little kid in the early 1960s. I am a computer guy - love the technology. I was thinking the other day of awesome new technologies that seemed to change the computer world: punched cards (no more teletypes with punched tape :-), structured programming, the book "The Egoless Programmer" (a personal favorite), discovering Lisp (a big deal for me!), object oriented programming, and XML. Much of my technical interest is in the field of artificial intelligence. In Lisp, "data is program and program is data" (I forget who said this, but I am quoting someone). It was always a very big deal to me to be able to store processed data in files of Lisp s-expressions and to feel confident that this information could be used again as needed. XML is like Lisp s-expressions. For most "interesting" systems, both data and program code work together. With XML, I can do a lot of work preparing data and feel confident that I will be able to use data in the future no matter what programming language or operating system platform I am working on. 12:00:18 PM

Israelis kill yet another peace activist - this time a British citizen Anyone who bothers to read non-US news has seen the escalated violence reported on the West Bank. This time, it was a British citizen who was killed while trying to help some young children caught in a cross fire. Time to bring in the UN observers (blocked so far by the US government, under pressure from very effective US pro-Israeli groups). I think that it is time for the US government to stop acting in the best interests of Israel and put America's interests first. Our support for Israel, no matter what they do, is hurting our foreign relations with many countries around the world. We really need to do what is best for us, not foreign countries. Israel, like the U.K. and a few other countries, is a very good ally. However, when an ally acts in ways that are not in our national interests, we can agree to still be very good friends on the things that we agree on, but not offer universal support for their actions. 11:40:26 AM

Ari Fleischer: "there is no real humanitarian crisis in Iraq" I just heard him say this on TV. Outragious! As someone who voted for George Bush, I have one request: get rid of this guy! In my opinion, he reflects very badly on our country. 9:37:50 AM

Failure of U.S. and Other Country's News Media To be fair, I am put off by extreme biased news coverage in other countries as well as in the U.S. What can we, as consumers do about sub-standard, unprofessional selection of topics that are covered and conversely, not covered? I am glad you asked! When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by English language news broadcasts from around the world. Now, we have something even better (way better!!): reading international news on the Internet. One good resource is Google News which gives links to news (sort of) randomly sampled from around the world. As consumers, I think that we should give the huge corporations (General Electric, etc.) who own the major news networks a kick in the economic pants by boycotting the major so-called "news" networks in favor of opening our minds a little and reading news from around the world. I believe that truth is good for freedom and good for business. News media in the U.S. and the rest of the world that severely censors what local audiences see can not be a good thing for the long term safety and prosperity of everyone on our planet. Anyway, I am appalled by the censorship of what we see in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world. In the U.S., I recommend the Jim Leher News Hour on PBS - compared to other news shows, they are relatively open to topics not shown on the major (huge corporation owned) news media. For print news, I like the New York Times - I sometimes see issues covered (hidden away, but covered) that I usually only see in the foreign press. Warning: obviously, be sceptical about anything you read, especially on the Internet :-) (Oh - hopefully this is not a recursive self-referencial comment :-) I tend to go by statistics - widely covered (averaging the world press) news is more believable. 8:05:39 AM

Awesome: Mount Wilson hike I had not taken a whole day off work since the weekend before last, so.... A friend and I hiked up Mount Wilson yesterday. 12 Miles, 2400 foot elevation change. We took a little over 9 hours to do this: lots of time to enjoy 360 degree views around Sedona Arizona :-) I hike a lot, but Mount Wilson is the best hike in Northern Arizona (my opinion). 7:34:33 AM

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