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I have no idea how it happened, but somehow The Daily Show managed to get former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to appear for an interview with Jon Stewart.

Confession: I love Jon Stewart’s interviews. He’s no Terry Gross, no, but given the constraints he works with (just a few minutes on the show, the fact that the show is first and foremost a comedy), he can pull off some really interesting interviews.

The Albright interview was good, albeit hampered by Stewart’s need/desire to cover a whole lot more than is possible in the short time frame their format allows:

• Albright’s recent study that shows how profoundly the world hates and fears the US (and, she made sure to point out, that the US isn’t too fond of the rest of the world, either). This should be no surprise to anyone who’s barely conscious. An interesting note is how much the situation has worsened in the past two years (again, little surprise). Stewart asked
• Albright discussed her experiences in North Korea, and although she did not outright criticize the Bush administration, I got a real sense of how badly things were bungled things by not picking up where she’d left off. As she explained, North Korean leaders were under the impression they were dealing with the United States, so when the newly elected Bush administration didn’t really do anything, it was confusing and damaging. Scary.

Granted, Madeleine Albright can hardly be speaking from an unbiased perspective, but I credit her for being reasonable and intelligent. Except that she chose to appear on a fake news show, of course. :)

This rant is a bit late in coming, but I finally got sick of hearing people complain about the iTunes 4.01 update. Oh boo hoo, Apple disabled the ability to stream music across subnets with iTunes. Those dirty, rotten, greedy, freedom-hating bastards.

I’m sorry, I have no patience for that attitude. Yes, being able to listen to music streamed from home while sitting in a coffeehouse or at work is pretty damn cool. Certainly falls within the realm of personal use, and I’m all for it. But obviously it was causing more of a legal hassle than it’s worth. What did you expect? All Apple did was remove the far-too-easy point-and-click means to do it. Guess what? You can still set up Apache to serve up those files. Drop a few bucks and you can use Andromeda to stream your music. And obviously, you can still use iTunes to stream within your own network. So what’s the problem?

I have to say, though, that the hullaballoo has given rise to some amusing conversation amongst the Windows users at work. They never quite seem to have their facts straight.

Update: Whew, could I sound more bitter?

Interesting. Among other things I’d rather not discuss for fear of frothing at the mouth in anger and disgust, the 2003 Minnesota Legislature passed legislation requiring all state employees to be paid 100% by direct deposit. Period.

Well, it doesn’t piss me off, but it is an interesting step.

Here’s the book I’ve really been waiting for: Practical mod_perl was just released. If the sample chapter, “Coding with mod_perl in Mind,” is any indication of the quality of the rest of the book, I will be in heaven.

Customers who shopped for How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle – How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers also shopped for … Girls of Topless Volleyball.

Heh.

Checky 2.0 has been released.

And hey, it’s been ported to IE: CheckIE.

Errant Architectures, in which Martin Fowler explores some of the problems with distributed architectures: namely, there’s a huge overhead to distributed objects. One solution he discusses is the Remote Façade, in which course-grained objects are used at the distribution boundaries to provide an interface to finer-grained objects. The benefit is that you can reduce network traffic overhead by making as few remote method invocations as possible. His preferred solution, though, is not to distribute objects in the first place.

By happenstance, I read this article a couple days before coming across the Remote Façade (aka Session Façade) in Rod Johnson’s wonderful Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. He derides the idea as not so much a design pattern as a workaround to problems introduced by distributed architecture. I really like the tone and practical stance taken in this book. I’m learning much even though I don’t do anything with J2EE. Yet.

In a sidebar to his article, Fowler writes:

In this discussion, I’ve assumed a synchronous, RPC-based interface. However, although that’s what I’ve described, I actually don’t think it’s always the best way of handling a distributed system. Increasingly, my preference is for a message-based approach that’s inherently asynchronous. In particular, I think they’re the best use of Web services, even though most of the examples published so far are synchronous.

He then points us to Enterprise Integration Patterns. Good stuff. Lots to take in. In particular, I’m suddenly very intrigued by asynchronous messaging. Quite different from how I usually think about things, although at first glance it seems that I may have already given it some thought through my dealings with Jabber.

So much to learn. So much fun to be had.

You may recall that the Open Source Application Foundation recently received a $98,000 grant to help extend Chandler (their first product, a personal information manager) to meet the needs of higher education. They’ve now released a report that outlines their plans: Chandler in Higher Education – “Westwood”. Westwood will build on the first full, stable release of Chandler.

After working closely with representatives from a number of universities we concluded there were four key recommendations for incremental functionality in Westwood:

1. Nomadic usage and central Repositories
2. Standards based Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) Client
3. Full interoperability with standards based infrastructure
4. Robust security framework

The full report is actually fairly interesting.

Microsoft stuff that’s caught my attention and that’s cluttering my bookmarks:

• Free e-book about securing IIS. In case that link goes away, here’s a direct link to the book (zipped archive of text files).
• Rewrite.NET — A URL Rewriting Engine for .NET.
• Is Internet Explorer Dead? There’s discussion/speculation elsewhere, but this is the most interesting bit.

One more for my reading list this summer: Perl 6 Essentials.