“Greetings to Mr. Beckstein”

Now, Bruce Schneier mentions an article by The Guardian that the British “Home office” released a statement saying that 10,000 passports have been issued in fake names in the last year.

10,000!

…and that’s what they admit to. The real number is probably higher. Just to make this clear: these aren’t fake passports, these passports are real passports, with RFID-chip, biometric security, holograms and every other gimmick these expensive booklets have, they are just issued in a fake name. So much for increasing our security against terrorism with technology.

I’ve said it before: “biometric security” in passports is nothing but a idiotic, boneheaded and incredibly expensive subsidy for the “Bundesdruckerei”. Simply because counterfeit passports are at most a small threat to our security. The british government itself gives out enough fake passports each year for an army of terrorists. How many have been issued in Germany?

This kind of crap happens when you confuse identity with intention, like every one of these self-anointed “terrorism-fighter-politicians” does (here’s where Mr. Beckstein comes into the picture). They should have invested all this money in the fire departments and other emergency services. That would have helped not only against terrorism, but against all kinds of threats, it’s just not something these people care about anymore.

Purity balls!

Little girls as young as nine promise their fathers that they’ll stay virgins and get jewelry for it! Awwww… what a cute idea. That said, I fear that these poor fathers are in for one heck of a disappointing experience. I really hope they still tell their girls about responsible protection and I also find there’s something to be said about the psychological trauma that makes these people think of this crap.

Back in the middle-ages and still in some parts of the world, a girl’s father owns her virginity and can sell it as he sees fit, what can you say… history repeats itself.

via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog

Update: This post addresses the differences between Django and Tapestry 4.1 and it’s a bit outdated. I wrote another, higher-level, post on that topic that you might want to read.

It seems that every web framework has the desperate need for displaying tabular data, but only few solve it as well as Tapestry does with contrib:Table. Even if you’re stuck with plain JSP there’s the excellent Displaytag library. Django has no such thing at the moment.

Not only that, the more I work with Django the more it reminds me of early Servlet-based development environments. urls.py resembles <url-pattern>s, Middleware can be compared to javax.servlet.Filters. Now, of course, Django is much more fun to develop with, because of its Admin-application, the newforms library, it’s pythonic and it supports rapid-turnaround development. So there’s no XML-juggling involved and you don’t repeat yourself and generally the design revolves around easy to guess interfaces. But really, I’m missing some of the features that are available in a Java software stack.

Currently, if I’m working with Java that means I have:

Of all these, Python has only a few equivalents. Rome, for example, is modeled after Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Universal feed parser and Django’s ORM solution works for most cases (I happen to think that EJB3 did a few things right), but there’s no equivalent to iText in terms of functionality and feature support and Acegi/Spring-security is simply the most-advanced authentication/authorization-library there is.

So if Sun would finally stop diluting the standard library and instead get their act together on fast and painless class-reloading, it would be a blast to work with (feature-wise, not language-wise, which might be fixable by using JVM-based scripting languages like Groovy or JRuby). But as long as I have to wait 30 seconds per round-trip for Tomcat to restart, I’d rather shoot myself than attempt to develop a CRUD web-application with Java again. If only someone wrote something like Django’s Admin application for Tapestry and JPA…

For now, it might at least be possible to integrate some of the libraries mentioned above with Python, by using gcj along the lines of PyLucene.

So I guess if I find time, which I don’t have, it’s pretty clear what has to be done. Someone needs to develop an Admin-application for Tapestry based on contrib:Table, BeanForm, JPA and annotations and then someone needs to develop a contrib:Table-lookalike and a fine-grained authentication and authorization middleware for Django based on decorators for views, but with the possibility of an external configuration file (dare I say it: possibly XML-based).

Unfortunately, the author’s gallery web application seems to be down. Found via Bruce Schneier.