Bounty
Another Saturday, another trip to the beach with the dogs (3 today, we're watching K.), and another trip to the Farmer's Market. Cauliflower, raspberries, tangerines, English shelling peas, avocados, grapefruits, and a big bouquet of Alstromerias. Cherries, tomatoes, and peaches are now in season with basil to come in June. You can get 3 pints of raspberries for $10 from the guys at Vasquez Farms; they're so sweet that you'd think they'd been lightly dipped in honey. This time, I didn't even wait to get to the car to break into the shelling peas; I just started right in as soon as I'd paid for them.

Society
"Thucydides wrote years ago that hegemony kills itself. A power that has hegemony always becomes arrogant. Always becomes overweening. And always unites the rest of the world against it. A countervailing power always reacts. A hegemonous system is very self-destructive. It becomes defensive, arrogant, and a defender of yesterday. It destroys itself. Therefore no monopoly in history lives for very long"

Peter Drucker, Managing in the Next Society

Drucker was actually talking about the Microsoft antitrust trial here. But what else do you think this could apply to?

Software
Lest my previous post, together with my comments about my current job and my article on software development, seem too depressed and/or bitter, let me say this.

I still love programming. I've never gotten tired of it, and my skills, far from stagnating or becoming obsolete, continually deepen and grow. I can't imagine doing anything else and I wouldn't want to. All I need to do is find the right place to practice my craft. Surely there's a stable, well-run company in need of a kick-ass database architect/engineer out there somewhere?

Work
CJ and SH are out today, so it feels lonelier than ever around here. I wander around like a lost ghost, unable to concentrate on the work I'm supposed to be doing. I've been through meltdowns before, so why is this one provoking such a strong emotional reaction?

Policy
Just when I think William Safire is a complete wanker, he goes and writes something like this: "The concentration of power — political, corporate, media, cultural — should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy."

If those were the beliefs that so-called conservatives actually acted upon, I'd call myself a conservative too.

All this comes in the context of discussing FCC Chairman Michael Powell's relentless drive to remove the last barriers to total consolidation of the media by a few congolomerates. Dan Gillmor, Larry Lessig, and Glenn Reynolds point to various facets of this issue here, here, here, and here.

War and Peace - two or three tangentially related stories
Robert Byrd, speaking on the Senate floor yesterday. Look at the previous two posts. Put them together with this and this. Draw your own conclusions.

Politics
Salon is reporting that the US Intelligence community is reviewing the quality of pre-war intelligence vis-a-vis Iraq. Full story in the NY Times.

Politics and Society
TalkLeft on the Justice Department's Report on Use of the Patriot Act. Most revealing sentence: "the INS did not charge any aliens with the expanded terrorism grounds of inadmissibility or deportability provided under section 411 of the PATRIOT Act". But it's been used plenty of times in non-terrorism cases. Courtesy of Instapundit.

Life
Fog off the ocean, cool and delicious as a crisp apple, this morning in SC; looks like summer's here. Driving to work, it clears to reveal a pure blue sky as I start up the hill on Highway 17. The drive over the summit and down is perfect and beautiful. Then, just past Lexington Reservoir, I see a dirty gray shroud of smog over the Valley.

Can you blame me for thinking of life in the Valley as a lesser existence?

Money
So Warren Buffet is against the dividend tax cut. Who does he think he is - George Soros?

Life
On the way to work, I gave $5 to a homeless guy on the corner who was wearing an "Open Source Is Not A Crime" t-shirt. I'd forgotten about it all day until just now.

Software
OK, so I'm working on adding an enhancement to some low-level code that creates objects in the database. Bad enough that the DB schema is defined using UML (a subject I'll write about some time in the future) and implemented using XML. Worse is the actual code itself. The primary class I have to modify is 7000+ lines of code. The primary method in this class is 3000+ lines long. The critical code is contained in a for loop that's 1200+ lines long. The code revolves around picking out fragments from an XML schema definition and processing them. Calling this code opaque would be a wholly undeserved compliment.

No one who writes code like this should call themselves a professional programmer. I've seen lots of bad code in my 15+ years as a (real) professional programmer, but this is the absolute nadir. I understand the person who wrote this is now at Oracle. Perhaps this explains the laughable XML bullshit that has been emerging from Larry's boys the past couple of years.

I'm in the middle of refactoring it into something understandable, otherwise I'll never be able to modify it. Apparently, everyone else is too scared of this code to have done it before. Not that I blame them.

Roedy Green has a much funnier take on How to Write Unmaintainable Code. It's less amusing when you actually have to work on it.

War and Peace
Everyone interested in what's happening right now in Iraq should read Salam Pax's blog. The pictures take forever to come up, but they're fascinating. There's one shocking passage - with pictures - about how every Iraqi (44 in total) who approached a US Army checkpoint during a sandstorm got killed on a particular day after there had been some suicide attacks. What makes it so appalling is how matter-of-fact and laconic Salam's description is - "[They made] the mistake of getting near the Shamia checkpoint on a day when the US army was having a bit of a mood."

This isn't a condemnation of the US Army on my part - I was once a soldier too - because I can understand their feelings and motives. But this is why we shouldn't kid ourselves about what really goes on in wartime.

Life/Software
Had lunch with D. in beautiful downtown Santa Cruz. Cafe Campesino was closed, so we had omelets at Walnut Street Cafe. While I was waiting to meet him, I walked into the atrium of the Cooper building and listened to the saxophonist who was playing on the street - perfect acoustics!

D. talked about how he had adopted the idea of test-driven development (TDD) from the XP guys and how it had changed his coding style. We talked about Chrysalis also, and I decided to try to use TDD to help finish the current module I'm working on. He also recommended using Eclipse, which sounds like it's got a lot more features than NetBeans.

Life
Took the dogs to the beach this morning and took pictures [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. The quality of the pictures using the zoom is pretty crappy; I'll know better next time. I've never seen the tide so low - an effect of the waning (ex-)full moon?

Software
OK, so now I can publish the first draft of Why Don't Software Executives Understand Software Development?. It still needs a lot of work. But I'm going to write the second article I'd planning on doing - Outsourcing vs. Open Source - Which One is the Real Revolution? and then come back to it.

Plagiarism
Yes, I stole that metaphor from John Irving's The World According to Garp. But it fits.

Mo' Music
Her songs may be about death and botany, but listening to Gillian Welch sing (and David Rawlings play guitar) is as peaceful as lying in bed at night listening to rain falling on a deep lake.

Music
Afro-Cuban All Stars on 5/5, Gillian Welch tonight. It's an every-other-Monday thing.

Tech Culture
How could I have left Dan Gillmor off of my bloglist? Check out what he has to say about a new form of net journalism.

I also added RageBoy, and I'm about to add Esther Dyson and Halley Suitt

Software
I've finally finished the first draft of an article entitled Why Don't Software Executives Understand Software Development? I'm not quite satisfied with it. The ideas are good - my thesis is that it's not a lack of understanding of process, it's that sociological barriers (culture and class) prevent senior management from understanding what the process needs to be. Not the conclusion I expected to come to when I started writing the piece. But it needs a lot more work. Worse, I can't publish it on the web until my new site is up, and that won't be until Tuesday.

War and Peace
Where's Saddam? Vigilant eyes are everywhere. He's pumping gas near Tikrit. No, he's mowing lawns and pruning trees in Aptos.

Life
Took the dogs to Arana Gulch this morning. Because of the late spring rains, it's green and overgrown and full of flowering thistles and plants in grass as high as your head. C. didn't go running through the grass and rolling in the milkweed like he usually does. I thought about climbing my favorite oak tree but decided to leave it for another day. I took the trail that leads down by the creek and saw the tide pushing the water up the creek. Odd; at that point, we must be a half-mile from the entrace to the harbor marina that the creek flows into.

Foreign Policy
Certain neo-con elements are now advocating regime change in Iran, according to Forward. Meanwhile, civil disorder still seems to run rampant in both Afghanistan and Iraq. All stories courtesy of the Agonist.

Life
Went to a karaoke party. Not really my kind of thing, but S. got into it and belted out a couple of tunes. After we left, it occurred to me that these folks sing karaoke for the same reason I write a blog - to have a (public) voice.