recursion

David Boaz, executive vice president, Cato Institute: Democrats and the Right to Choose - What?

When a Republican president is holding U.S. citizens without a court hearing, implementing a Total Information Awareness program to compile information on all citizens, and spending more taxpayers' money on every nook and cranny of the federal government, it's great to hear leadingDemocrats talk about freedom, trusting people to make their own decisions, and limiting the power of the state. It would be even better if they applied those noble principles to more than one, and only one, issue.

You helped him get there, jackass. Libertarians: your money, or your life? It's time to choose. Which party cares about your civil liberties more?

Or do you just not care, because you're not an Arab?

I hate the Cato Institute.

Earlier this month, I asked if anyone knew of a comparison between Torque and Hibernate. My former coworker and Ancept refuge McClain emailed me about Torque:

i read about hibernate on yer blog, and it does indeed seem quite similar to torque, though (the last time i saw it) torque relies on shell scripts and the like to generate the db tables.

mappings, relations and mutation are created in much the same way, via xml files.

Torque is actually the persistence layer for Turbine, though (last i checked) the turbine project was trying to componentize all of theirsubsystems so that they can be used independently.

So it sounds like Torque is pretty similar to Hibernate, though in Torque, the XML files are the driver which is used to create the database schema while in Hibernate the database schema is primary and you use XDoclet to generate the mapping files.

In other Hibernate news, the first beta of Hibernate 2 was released yesterday. It sounds like this is a ground-up rewrite with a lot of new features.

Hibernate2 Porting Guidelines

McClain also told me a little more about the Prevayler project he's working on:

my prevayler project is coming along pretty well (speaking of persistence). My prevalent system is mind-bogglingly simple: a map of catalog entries whose parent-child relationships are managed by a javax.swing.TreeModel (!).

Using the tree model has been a huge boon, as all of my relationships are managed consistently, and catalog entries are never duplicated, even with cross-linked nodes, multiple parents etc. All of this came free with the treemodel, which i vote should be moved into the collections package. If you ever have to do quick hierarchical crap, I highly recommend it.

I was concerned about migrating old data when you change your objects. Marcus Ahnve (who is actually using Prevayler in an XP development environment) has an interesting post on schema evolution. I'm intrigued by Prevayler, but using a relational database as your backend does still have a number of advantages.

Some guy came up with a Perl wrapper script for editing your Blosxom posts which sets the file's mtime back to what it was before you changed it. Rael links to it saying, "While I tend to be an 'let alterations rise' type..."

Sadly, I think Rael is missing the point of keeping the original date: Blosxom bases the URLs for your entries on the date. If you edit the post after it's been published, the edit "rises" on the page -- and so does the permanent URL! It's not very permanent if it changes every time you edit the damn post.

Thanks to blosxom, I've become a Shaolin master at the creaky semantics of touch(1).

Atrios finally turned on his RSS feed. Hurray! He moves into the regular column of links in the blogroll.

Now for the rest of you BlogSpot Pro users: TURN ON YOUR DAMN RSS FEEDS! It makes life so much simpler for your (technically-savvy) readers -- and it increases your readership because we read your site every time you update it. You paid for the right to use RSS. So use it.

Slactivist uses Darrel Huff's classic book How to Lie With Statisitcs to show why Bush's tax plan spin that the "average American" will save $1,000 on their taxes. A few days later, Spinsanity reiterated the same message, but without the great excerpt from How to Lie With Statistics (which is a a really excellent book, and quite cheap. You should pick up a copy.).

Why is Bush's "average" bogus? Because it uses the arithmetric mean, not the median.

Excerpt from Chapter 2 of How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff -- figures adjusted for inflation!

How to Lie with Statistics Like George W. Bush: "Darrell Huff warned us about people like this president."

Not your ordinary averages by Bryan Keefer.

I've been playing around with Java Blogs for the last couple of days. I'm subscribed to their RSS feed, so I get this huge amalgamation random posts, cross-posts, quotations and freewheeling discussions from all the blogs in the community -- all without any context whatsoever (you can't really tell who's saying what). It's pretty cool, if a little overwhelming. Their faq says they're going to play with collaborative filtering for the front page.

On a related note, I'm now subscribed to over 50 channels using AmphetaDesk. AD is really starting to creak under this amount of data. No, the code is doing great, but the UI just cannot handle this amount of text. It sucks, I need a way to delete posts I've already read. Morbus told me that feature would be in AmphetaDesk 1.1. Hopefully soon, this is getting ridiculous.

What's that you say? Switch to a client-side news aggregator? Never! How would I read my news from everywhere?