A new project at PBS, mediamatters, is covering some mover and shakers in the blogosphere. Oliver Willis describes why he blogs – and he’s an awful lot more honest then you’ll typically hear. Quote: “Everybody in America wants to be famous.” Check it out.

Providing service to the networks for years, the VNS imploded the last to major elections. What happened? Now the story can be told. A must read article for system architects and project managers.

Lessons to keep in mind:

1. Test early: Stress-test your system at least six months before launch
2. Test heavy: Put it through at least 10 times as much activity as you really expect
3. Trick yourself: Establish a deadline at least two months in advance of the “real” deadline and make all project managers and vendors comply
4. Name one chief: Regardless how many partners, consultants and vendors are involved, give one person ultimate decision-making power
5. Don’t reinvent the wheel: Make good use of existing personnel and technology, where possible

This five-step process works for any security measure, past, present, or future:

1. What problem does it solve?
2. How well does it solve the problem?
3. What new problems does it add?
4. What are the economic and social costs?
5. Given the above, is it worth the costs?

When you start using it, you’d be surprised how ineffectual most security is these days. For example, only two of the airline security measures put in place since September 11 have any real value: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers to fight back. Everything else falls somewhere between marginally improving security and a placebo.

Read the rest at in the Crypto-Gram newwsletter. via Cafe au Lait.

As Rafe puts it, “The reason they don’t recommend Java for Web development is that they don’t understand it. “

And Niel explains, “the advantages of JSP strongly outweigh the problems with JSP.”

Nice to know I’m not alone 🙂

In my comments Dave shares the one real problem JSP has, other then it’s lack of availability – error statements are horrible. Just horrible.

JSP does NOT suck! Uttering those words is against the conventional wisdom of so many at javablogs.com and elsewhere. I feel the expectation from many Java developers – for JSP to provide easy seperation of HTML and logic – by default – is unreasonable. If that were it’s main goal – then it’s a failure. But if you look at JSP as a PHP/ASP/CGI competitor – feature for feature it’s stands on it’s own two feet. What’s missing is the availability of it for your average web dev hacker.

Don’t you think MovableType could be written in JSP? Of course it could. And it probably would be easier to maintain, more scalable, and easier to extend.

But not to deploy. The market for MovableType would shrink to such a size as to not make it worth the effort.

Seperation of logic and design in JSP does suck. But honestly – is it any better with CGI, PHP, or ASP?

Just as in apps developed with those languages, if the goal is for designers to manipulate HTML and avoid dangerous logic code, then you embed a templating language for them to interact with. Would you let a web designer touch your CGI scripts? Hell no! Then why would you in your JSP?

MovableType does this. Why couldn’t a JSP app do the same? Fact is – they can.

There are a growing number of templating languages that suit this purpose and are available for Java developers today.

Saying JSP sucks is like saying Perl sucks.

And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Has a company finally put *all* of the pieces together in an easy to use, cheap, package? Macromedia’s Contribute sounds cool. Gotta give it a whirl.

This comes via part three of Jonathon Deacour’s Conversation with Joe Clark. Whadda quote!: “The larger CMSs are a kind of protection racket: You buy our system for six figures, and then you keep paying us every year to maintain your license, and also you’ll have to hire a person trained in our ways to keep your system up and running. Fail to do any of that and your entire site crashes. It’s extortion, really, and high-end CMSs are dogs in so many ways?they can’t produce valid code, their URLs are appalling, and they are difficult to use. In essence, big CMSs are mainframe systems, with the same need for constant nursing and non-stop tending by codependent system administrators as those old mainframes.”

The first of three book excepts from “Java Enterprise Best Practices” gets you thinking about Servlet frameworks.

I’m getting many, many, many requests to my home PC on port 3396 today. My firewall software is keeping them from getting thru – I think – and my PC isn’t sending anything out – but it’s too weird not ask – any of you out there are seeing something like this today? I use Comcast digital cable, I’m used to a few script kiddies doing port scans daily, but the nonstop requests to 3396 is freaking me out.

Some interesting posts in this discussion on the lack of free Java web apps.

Some point to the lack of web hosts that provide Java services. I think Kattare, the host I am using, is great and I recommend them, but this is correct – there must be many more then there is today. Sun would do Java a world of good if it evangelized to web hosting providers and made it easy for them to provide basic services.

Some mention a difference in approach between the Perl/PHP/Python folks and the Java folks. Supposedly Java developers get overconcerned with archetecture and forget the real task is to get the job done. There’s some truth to that. I’ve run into many developers like this. I’ve been accused on occasion 🙂

Eventually it’s going to be projects like Roller and miniblog that will change people’s attitudes.