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Book Review: Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists

If you’ve seen ‘Meet the Fockers,’ you probably remember the scene where Greg’s parents have constructed a shrine to him, full of 8th place medals and the odd 10th place ribbon. Greg apparently didn’t do too well in competition, but his parents loved him anyway. Not everyone is so forgiving, and most people had competition. To rephrase that, most people hate losing at competition–winning is just fine, thank you very much. In a free market system as well, most firms and people don’t like competition–it forces firms to respond to customers and people to work harder. However, the overall benefits to society are larger in a system where everything is competitive.

Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, by Rashuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, examines competition from an academic perspective, choosing to focus on financial markets. As you’d expect from two economics professors, they argue that markets are the most powerful economic invention of all time, and the solution to many problems facing us today is to make them more prevalent. However, the central thesis of their book is that markets depend on governments for vital infrastructure (rule of law, contracts, etc) and thus depend on politics. Because of the nature of politics the interests of a focused few can outweigh the interests of a diffuse many. This means that government regulation of markets can be easily hijacked by those with disliking competition to smother it.

The authors examine many cases where this hijacking occurred, from developed and developing countries and many different time periods. They focus on finance because free flow of capital has a magnifying effect on competition since upstart produces of goods often need capital. The focus is on incumbent firms, who are usually the party with the will and ability to influence the government to put the needs of the few over the needs of the many.

Other issues they tackle include the emergence of financial markets, whether finance benefits the rich disproportinately, and how the free markets of the early 20th century were rolled back in the 1930s and what replaced them.

Well written, if dense, this book would have been average had the last chapter, which proposes solutions to the political vulnerabilty of markets, been omitted. However, with their proposed solutions, which build on the foundation that they laid out in previous chapters, I feel that this book is a useful read for anyone interested in knowing how the world works and might work better. In addition, I think it’s wise and brave of them to trumpet that current markets aren’t really free but instead are usually hijacked by powerful incumbent firms. This is something that you don’t hear economists acknowledge often enough.

“Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists” at Amazon.

Books | moore |

Metafor: Using English to create program scaffolding

Continuing the evolution of easier-to-use computer programming (a lineage which includes tools ranging from assembly language to the spreadsheet), Metafor is a way to build “the scaffolding for a program.” This doesn’t mean that programmers will be out of work, but such software sketching might help to bridge the gap between programmers and non-programmers, in the same way that VBA helped bridge that gap. (I believe that naked objects attacks a similar problem from a different angle.) This obviously has implications for novices and folks who don’t understand formal problems as well. Via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, which also has links to some interesting PDFs regarding the language.

However, as most business programmers know, the complicated part of developing software is not in writing the code, but in defining the problem. Depending on how intelligent the Metafor parser is, such tools may help non-technical users prototype their problems by writing sets of stories outlining what they want to achieve. This would have two benefits. In one case, there may be users who have tasks that should be automated by software, but who cannot afford a developer. While definitely not available at the present time, perhaps such story based software could create simple, yet sufficient, applications. In addition, software sketching, especially if a crude program was the result, could help the focus of larger software, making it easier (and cheaper!) to prototype a complicated business problem. In this way, when a developer meets with the business user, they aren’t just discussing bullet points and static images, but an actual running program, however crude.

Programming Technology | moore |

The label tag

An HTML tip for you: the label tag is a boon to usability. If you it should take you to

Small touches like this make it much easier to build forms that are forgiving in terms of user input–you can make clicking a checkboxes easy for the mouse impaired.

Doing this kind of control extension used to take a bit of javascript, but now the label tag makes it easy. Looks like <tag> is supported in modern browsers (Moz 5, IE 5).

Programming | moore |

Quartz and java job scheduling

I’m working on a stand alone java application that needs some fairly sophisticated scheduling capabilities, more than java.util.Timer can provide. Normally, I’d reach for trusty old cron, but in this case, it’s a java program that needs to be run on both unix and windows with a minimum of fuss.

Quartz to the rescue. This open source java package lets you schedule a myriad of executable objects in many different ways. There are many different ways to use Quartz; there’s a nice tutorial here, and the Quartz javadoc is pretty up to date.

All I’m using it for is a cross-platform cron replacement, but it does seem to have large number of other features. The one that I’m not using that seems the most useful is the ability to differentiate between activities (a Job) to be scheduled, and the events, be they time or otherwise related, that should cause those activities to be executed (a Trigger). Nice orthogonality, but for my purposes, overkill. However, I can see the usefulness of this feature.

The coolest feature that I am using is JobExecutionContext.getScheduler() which allows any job running to access the scheduler in which they are running. They can delete themselves, verify that other jobs are working, and even shutdown the scheduler.

If you have to do scheduling in java, you should take a look at Quartz. (Here is a survey of job scheduling options in Java.)

Java | moore |

Two Expresso Good Practices

I’ve been working with Expresso 5.5 for the last couple of months. Two things I’ve learned, though they certainly don’t qualify as ‘best practices’:

1. Expresso provides a nice way to manipulate the model by setting certain criteria and then retrieving all the rows that match such a criteria. However, this can be abused.

For example, here we look up all the Indo-European languages:

MyLangDBObject lookup = new MyLangDBObject(); lookup.setField("FAMILY", "Indo-European");
for (Iterator i = lookup.searchAndRetrieveList().iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
   MyLangDBObject instance = (MyLangDBObject) i.next();
   // process instance
}

(For more, see Chapter 6 of the Expresso Developer’s Guide.)

This is all well and good, as long as there are not a significant number of objects that match your criteria. Because each object is retrieved from the database and plunked into an ArrayList, this method can use a tremendous amount of memory. A more memory efficient method of retrieving and processing a large number of rows is:

MyLangDBObject lookup = new MyLangDBObject();
lookup.setField("FAMILY", "Indo-European");
lookup.search();
Object[] keys = lookup.getFoundKeys();
MyLangDBObject instance = new MyLangDBObject();
for (int i = 0; i

The above code still creates a large List, but each entry in that list is much smaller. I'm not sure how to treat objects with multi valued keys. I just looked in the Expresso 5.5 DBObject class, and it looks like multiple keys are concatenated with '/' and returned as a single string; beware as that's not documented anywhere and I haven't tested it.

2. When you're doing complicated filtering, DBObjects let you add a number of 'and' clauses. For example, this code finds all the dead Indo-European languages from Asia:

MyLangDBObject lookup = new MyLangDBObject();
lookup.setField("FAMILY", "Indo-European");
lookup.setField("GEOGRAPHIC_AREA", "Asia");lookup.setField("TYPE", "dead");
for (Iterator i = lookup.searchAndRetrieveList().iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
   MyLangDBObject instance = (MyLangDBObject) i.next();
   // process instance
}

This approach works well for quite a number of cases. However, if you want to do anything more complicated, such as date ranges or 'or' rather than 'and' clauses, you have three options.

* You can call setCustomWhereClause(). This allows you to escape the abstraction and essentially drops you down to SQL. All well and good; this should probably be your primary means of doing more complicated filtering. (Unfortunately, in Expresso 5.5, JoinedDataObjects, an Expresso construct which joins multiple tables together and presents a unified view thereof, do not support the setCustomWhereClause method. Apparently Expresso 5.6 has added such support.) This code finds all the languages that are dead or are Indo-European:

MyLangDBObject lookup = new MyLangDBObject();
lookup.setCustomWhereClause(
   "FAMILY = \"Indo-European\" OR TYPE = \"dead\"");
for (Iterator i = lookup.searchAndRetrieveList().iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
   MyLangDBObject instance = (MyLangDBObject) i.next();
   // process instance
}

* You can pull back the data and filter on it in the middleware server. This is a bad idea, since you're not only using java where SQL would be better used, you're also pulling back unneeded data. However, it is an option that will always work, though it may be slow. For example, if the setCustomWhereClause did not work, you could replicate the above example via this code:

MyLangDBObject lookup = new MyLangDBObject();
for (Iterator i = lookup.searchAndRetrieveList().iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
   MyLangDBObject instance = (MyLangDBObject) i.next();
   if (! ("Indo-European".equals(instance.getField("FAMILY"))||
      "dead".equals(instance.getField("TYPE"))
      ) ) {
         continue;
   }
   // process instance
}

* You can create a view and point the database object at the view instead of at the underlying tables. This is probably the cleanest, fastest method for a complicated where clause with read only data, since no unneeded data is returned by the database. This works for JoinedDataObjects as well. If you are making updates, however, views may or may not work.

Java | moore |

Reliable HTTP Draft

Here’s an interesting ‘pre-draft’ of HTTPLR, an ‘application protocol for reliable transmission of messages using HTTP’ (via the author’s blog). It doesn’t require throwing away already built out infrastructure. There are, however, a few wrinkes:

This draft does require support of the PUT method, which is not available out of the box on Apache, as well as the DELETE method, which again requires webdav to work with Apache.

It uses the DELETE method (rather than the POST) to communicate client knowledge of message transfer (section 8.3, 9.3). I’m not sure how I feel about that, as it seems to be mis-using that method.

Other than that, I like the idea. It seems really well thought out, but it would be nice to see some sample code.

Programming | moore |

Setting the content encoding for HTML message parts with Javamail

I spent an hour chasing down the solution to this issue, so I figured I’d post it (or at least what worked for me). Basically, I have a multi-part message that can have different content encodings for each text part. I want to send this message via javamail. Now, there’s support for setting content as type ‘text/plain’ with a different character set, but if you want to add a part that is a different subtype of text to your message, there is no convenience method. However, this mail message had an example of how to specify html content and a character set:

MimeBodyPart htmltext = new MimeBodyPart();
htmltext.setContent(someDanishChars, "text/html; charset=\"ISO-8859-1\"");

(The author had some issues with this method in different app servers; it works fine for me in a stand alone java program.)

These additional parameters to the ‘Content-Type’ header are laid out, for text documents, in section 4.1 of RFC 2046. Here’s a collection of helpful email related RFCs. Additionally, section 5.1 of RFC 2045 outlines the way to add parameters and gives examples of the charset parameters.

Java Programming | moore |

Runtime log4j configuration

So, I’ve spent the last day or so trying to track down how to configure log4j at runtime (log4j 1.2.8). Now, there are some things that are easy: setting the level of the root logger is as easy as: LogManager.getRootLogger().setLevel((Level) Level.DEBUG). However, if you want to do more complicated things at runtime based on other inputs than the log4j.{properties,xml} file, things begin to get a bit kludgy. For example, I wanted to set up a set of appenders with sane defaults. Then, if values were present in a configuration file, I wanted to update those appenders with different configuration values and change the root logger’s behavior.

The easiest way I could find was to manipulate the properties file, as shown below:

package test;

import org.apache.log4j.*;
import org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender;
import org.apache.log4j.net.SyslogAppender;
import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;
import java.util.Properties;
import java.io.*;

public class Test {
   private Log log = LogFactory.getLog(Test.class);
   Test() {
      log.debug("test1");
      switchAppenders();
      log.debug("test2");
   }
   public static void main(String args[]) {
      Test t = new Test();
   }
   private void switchAppenders() {
      Properties props = new Properties();
      try {
           InputStream configStream = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/log4j.properties");
           props.load(configStream);
           configStream.close();
      } catch(IOException e) {
          System.out.println("Error: Cannot laod configuration file ");
      }
      props.setProperty("log4j.rootLogger","DEBUG, file");
      props.setProperty("log4j.appender.file.File","out.log");
      LogManager.resetConfiguration();
      PropertyConfigurator.configure(props);
     }
}

This code is executed via this command, making sure that log4j.properties is present in the classpath:
java -classpath .:log4j-1.2.8.jar:commons-logging.jar test.Test

This is quite a kludge, but I couldn’t find anything better out there. It has the obvious setback that the changes you make to the log4j aren’t persisted, nor can they easily happen in more than one place, and any changes to appender names break a log of things, but at least it works.

Java | moore |