So in case you're wondering why I suddenly seemed to have flipped out and have started attacking Republicans every chance I get, it really has to go back to Madrid. I just sorta realized this myself. I don't think I realized how much of an effect the bombs last week had on me until I noticed myself getting *really* uptight about the year...

In my email: From: chris <starcraftkid@stny.rr.com> To: russ@russellbeattie.com Subject: wow wow for someone as faggoty lookin as you i'm surprised you even have the balls to go up against republicans over the internet. Lets face it faggot only real men are republicans. The majority of democratic males (that would be u cock smoker) are...

In Spain there weren't many English language periodicals that you could get your hands on regularly - mostly international versions of Time or Newsweek and The Economist. The latter always has in-depth articles, but like most British press, it can be petty and bitchy as well. In fact there was a time when I was quite annoyed at being forced...

At this point I'm thinking that the evolution of JSP isn't much of an evolution at all, but just complete chaos. Think about it, right now if you want to create a JSP page, you have all these things you can put on your pages: Scriptlets, directives, custom tags, bean tags, JSTL tags, .tag files, Expression Language syntax (EL), EL...

So I was using some JSTL SQL queries to produce XML pages. Doing it in JSTL is quick an easy and I figured wouldn't be that much slower than doing it in a servlet or JSP with scriptlet. Wow, was I wrong. First, though, let me say that I was thinking about it in the bathroom (where I do most of my thinking) and I thought "I bet you deep...

Now that I've gotten that last post off my chest it's time to think about what else to write about (to the 50% of you who are left reading this blog). It's a nice day out today, though a little chilly. I need a haircut. I've got a to-do list that's running off the page. Anyone have any experience (not guessing, I can do...

It's very simple: Iraq was not involved in 9/11 Iraq did not have WMDs The United States is now LESS safe than a year ago, *because* of the war No matter what political party you belong to, Bush must go. -Russ

For my Spanish readership. Here's a company that obviously does not want to sell its product to any Spanish speaking country in the world. But it is "elegant and whisper quiet... with a range of mounting options." LOL. Oh, my. They've got a bigger model too... it's called the "Puta Madre". Hehehe. Just kidding...

Last week I reversed the listing order of my downloads directory. For years I've been downloading new files into the same c:\download\general\ folder and then having to scroll to the end of the list to find the file and use it. Suddenly it just dawned on me to 1) Turn off the details view in my downloads, and right-click in the folder and...

The sucky thing about being in California (and there's not much sucky about being here) is that all the Europeans (and East coasters who wake up around 5 a.m.) get the scoop on new Nokia phones first. Damn! Like with all new Nokia phones, everyone in #mobitopia was examing the specs and reading the tea-leaves of the new launch. The phone is a...

I ran across Joel-on-software's comments on Python (boils down to "I don't know jack about the language, but the indentation thing is cool!") and I thought about Java doing the same exact thing. Change nothing else but make indentation count. Suddenly Java looks really clean! Here's a Java Servlet with indentation: import...

Know It All Girl just pointed out this *fantastic* link to The Center for American Progress where Donald Rumsfeld gets caught in another Republican lie: RUMSFELD DISHONESTY CAUGHT ON FILM: The most vivid display of the Administration's widening credibility gap came when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked Rumsfeld "If Iraq did not have WMD,...

The name servers are in play. If you see *THIS* message you are reading the site on my old server. It'll be about 24 hours before all the domains propogate to the new server. (I've shut off comments on this blog to prevent the dull witted out there accusing me of deleting comments). -Russ

Okay, some continuing thoughts about Web Services as Unix-like Software Tools. Les just left a message about STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR which made me realize I forgot about STDERR. That's important to remember because Unix tools can take in a chunk of data and send it out the other side, and also give you messages about what's happening all at...

I was struck by a thought while I was reading the first section of the Linux Cookbook that Web Services, if they agreed on some sort of input/output standard, could operate much like the Unix toolset with stdin and stdout. I'm not the first person to think of this, but because I'm working with both XML and Web Services lately and now am...