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A reader of my OnJava article on discovering a Java application’s security requirements wondered what parsecodebase would look like in Java. Here it is. parsecodebase, a Perl script in the original article, takes the output of the profiling security manager and formats it, grouping on codebase.

A hearty thank you to my friend and author Jason Brittain for mentioning my Java security article in his Tomcat 2nd Edition work. I received a signed copy today from Jason, over burgers, which will sit beside my dog-eared copy of his first edition work on my tech bookshelf.

Jason, nice job on the book. No Tomcat professional should be without it.

The question is why?

From John Battelle, Windows Live gains search marketshare in March, while Google loses a bit.

So I stopped on over to the Live site to execute a search whose results I need for a day trip. I wanted a map of 10th and Fulton in San Francisco. So I go to the FireFox toolbar and type “fulton and 10th avenue, sf”.

The Google results include a second click Google Maps result, which is exactly what I wanted. The Live second click was a link to the SF Chronicle that, as it turns out, did contain a map of the 10th and Fulton area. But I’m not going to follow that link, because a SF Chronicle link could contain virtually anything. Not only that, when I clicked on “Maps” in Live, the search string had not been sufficiently disambiguated for Live to present me with the map I wanted, namely the intersection of 10th Avenue and Fulton in San Francisco, CA. It wanted me to narrow the input, starting with a map of the continental United States. None of the suggested locations matched a location in San Francisco. What?

If Live wants to be taken seriously by a world trained to use Google, it needs to adapt to us, not the other way around. Of course, I’m logged into GMail almost continously for a couple years now, so Google probably knows what links I want based on my history. But until Live can get up to speed and surmount that history-less barrier it has with me, I find it unusable. The results returned are inferior to Google’s, not that Google’s are by any measure always spot-on. But at least I know how Google thinks, and vice versa, so I know how to manipulate it for effect. Besides, with the full faith and credit of Microsoft Research behind it, how many different things is “10th and fulton, sf” likely to mean? Live is linking to literal content rather than meaning behind the search input.

If Live eventually offers a consistently higher quality search experience than Google, I’d probably switch. Every six months or so, I go have a look at Live with some typical search input. And every time I come away with the same conclusion: they’re just nowhere close. And a question: who are these users who are getting value out of Live?

When I was kid, my friend Randy and I would occasionally ride our bikes down to La Benite Park to watch the Missouri River go by. The park is in Sugar Creek, MO, where we grew up. Recently, my interest in the Lewis and Clark Expedition was renewed, and I thought to take a look at their journal entries for the summer of 1804, when they passed through the Kansas City, MO area.

From the Moulton online version of their journal entries on June 25, 1804, we find Clark’s entry describing the camp at Bennett’s Creek. Note Footnote 4, where Bennett’s Creek is considered to be the same as La Benite, the name of the modern park itself, but then referring to a creek on the left hand side (south) side of the river.

Never did I go down to the park and peer out at the river, a thousand muddy feet wide and sweeping everything in its roiling path downstream, that I did not imagine the Expedition moving by, right to left (east to west), wondering what they looked like, what they did, what they talked about, what early 19th century spoken English in the West sounded like, what it would have meant to be with them. Watching and admiring Lewis, personal secretary to Thomas Jefferson himself.

Somewhere at a nearby curio shop I saw a set of after-dinner game cards printed with questions intended to stimulate conversation. One of these questions was: Would you rather spend a week living at some point in the past, or some point in the future? My answer, no contest: in the past, with the Expedition the day they paddled by my hometown.