Primate Brow Flash

Always eager for any clue of what Tomcat thinks it is doing, I downloaded Lambda Probe It was built to monitor Tomcat performance and it is a beautiful and easy-to-use tool. It was last updated in 2006, a lifetime ago, but judging by the forum activity, it still enjoys wide use. It installs as a war and provides a nice web interface that shows, among other things, thread information, database connection usage, some limited visitor stats, charts for traffic volume, access to log files and log tails and much more.

It is very easy to install.
One thing that pleased me immediately: It shows insight into individual application settings such as session timeout and even the list of jar files that the classloader has loaded. This is so much nicer than opening up some properties file some place to check settings.

And Context attributes. and, good god… a drillable list of every session and the session attributes and values within. I’m in tears.

It doesn’t seem to have backend storage to allow you to look back over time at performance as this unanswered question from the forums hints at:

Is there a way to run a report so I would not need to rely on monitoring the system in real time?

Good question.

One of the effects of reading An Army At Dawn was that it erased any mystique I might have had for the generals involved. Rommel, Patton, Arnim, Kesselring, Eisenhower, Montgomery. The book described their mistakes and their raging egos. Their mistakes wiped out whole units of men.

The generals didn’t so much succeed with brilliant strokes as get swept along by random chance just like the lowliest private. When they did succeed it was just as much a result of weather, superiority in materials, idiocy of the opposing leadership, or timing. When they failed, which this book shows them all doing over and over, it was sometimes their own adhesion to perceived patterns in the randomness of the campaign, but also the weather, the idiocy of middle management or the bravery of the opposing troops. Hell, the allies even had the advantage of Ultra Intercepts and they still experienced ringing defeats.

It is interesting starting to read The Drunkard’s Walk immediately after this book. At the outset, the Drunkards walk tells us that we are not so good at separating real patterns and random behavior. At the outset, The Drunkard’s walk opines that those who succeed against foes with relatively equal skills in a unordered playing field like war, sports, finances may simply be those who never stop trying. Out of the book, I guess Patton would fit this description with his interventions and insistence on leading from the front lines instead of 25 miles back as his predecessor preferred to do. He didn’t exactly prove himself to be the instantly brilliant tactician in North Africa. He had his fits and starts. I’ve been led to believe, mostly by the movie Patton, that he took over and immediately began to kick ass.

Although Rommel had it the most right when he said, “The Quartermasters decide the outcome before the battle even begins”. If he thought this, it didn’t prevent him from taking the battle way past a reasonable stopping point.

Kate: How did Maureen hurt her leg?
Maggie: It was like she was in the olympics for rolling down stairs.

The best thing about painting is that it makes everything else fascinating.

In An Army At Dawn, we just landed in Morocco.

The town of St. Cloud in French Morocco was defended by the French Foreign Legion and the Service d’Ordre Legionaire, French Fascists who modeled themselves on the German SS.

Night slipped down on St. Cloud, transforming the farm town into a dark, sinister redoubt. Dead Americans lay like bloody rugs among the stubby vines. Gunfire rippled from nervous sentries, and it was worth a man’s life to move about before dawn.

A huge naval battle was underway around Casablanca:

Patched and vengeful, the American planes swarmed out of the sun from 8,000 feet. Each Wildcat carried six .50 caliber guns, and each barrel fired 800 rounds per minute- some armor-piercing, some incendiary, and some tracer rounds. Working from fantail to forecastle, pilots strafed Lafond’s flotilla so savagely that the French ships glittered from all the bullets richocheting off their superstructures. Flying bridges disintegrated, and the men on them were sliced to ribbons. A single strafing run against one destroyer killed every sailor on deck, except for the gunners crouched in the armored turrets.

The French commanders hemmed and hawed, concerned about their reputations and positions, while this was going on. If I were in charge of Operation Torch, I would have lined up the French commanders and shot them all and put the Free French in charge.

There are three media moments that I treasure.

One is when I was watching an argument about Social Security on the West Wing when a news brief about a detail of the Michael Jackson trial scrolled across the bottom of the screen. I was watching a fake show about a real issue that got interrupted by real news about a fake issue. Amazing.

Another is when the host of an MPR program introduced Patricia Ireland as Kathy Ireland.

The third happened today when I turned on the TV to see about Russia and Georgia and Poland and found myself watching a press conference about bigfoot.

Frank: “I can’t stop thinking about Halloween”

An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson

My review

Reading the early part of this book, I’m hooked. It describes the settings and battles so clearly. He must have gone to these battle sites and stood around imagining how each man experienced it. Must have taken a stupendous amount of work.



I had no idea that French soldiers were actually killing Americans during this campaign. In reading “No Ordinary Time” and this book, it strikes me how much WWII was about maintaining the French and British empires. The French took it so seriously that they capitulated to the Nazis in exchange for keeping their territories in Africa, to the point that they initially helped defend North Africa against the allies. To the point, too, that the French insisted that they be in charge of ALL allied troops in North Africa. Their arrogance was amazing.



The author seems given to flowery language at times that I find hard to take seriously. Also, I object to the genre of books that think that by explaining war in insane detail, we can somehow get some understanding of what war is like.


View all my reviews.

I was tagged by Bill into answering some questions in fives:

What was I doing 5 years ago? Well, we can look at my old weblog and see that i was camping at Frontenac State Park, working at the DNR, and seeing Nickled and Dimed at the Guthrie Lab,

Five Things on my to do list:

1. Mail Legos to my brother.
2. Mail $10.00 to my cousin - I owe him for last years fantasy football and I got a reminder from yahoo to sign up for this year.
3. Update Wordpress
4. fix my sticking brakes on my 29er
5. Meditate for the first time in 8 months

Five Snacks I enjoy.

1. French Toast
2. toast
3. raisin toast
4. english muffins
5. bagels

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire

1. Start a parallel government.
2. Hire a personal secretary
3. Pay for a “Nascar Sucks” media campaign
4. Fund an experimental school
5. Give most of it to Oxfam

What are five of your bad habits?
1. Playing Total Annhilation
2. pathological avoidance of anything mail related.
3. Staying up too late.
4. Its hard to come up with even four. um… leaving caps off of pens?

What are five places where you have lived?
1. Twin Cities, MN
2. Boston, MA
3. Longmeadow, MA
4. Berkely, CA
5. Blairstown, NJ

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. Dunkin Donuts Mystery Shopper
2. Car Mechanic
3. canvaser
4. planner (LOL, I know!)
5. Arcade token monkey

In turn, I tag Matt, Steve, Papa Twister, Kate, Josh

see more pwn and owned pictures

Interesting discussion on goodreads.com in the banned books group: Is Abridgment a form of censorship?

I’m aware that abridging a book and banning a book are two different things, but my mind puts them right next to each other.

To me it seems that abridging a book is another way to keep someone from reading a book, or at least parts of it. One could argue abridging hurts more than banning. If it’s banned, everybody reads it. If it’s abridged, everybody reads the abridged copy instead of the original.

Does anyone else feel like more abridged books are creeping onto shelves, replacing originals?

For example, I’ve been looking for an unabridged copy of the Count of Monte Cristo in libraries and bookstores I go to for a while, but I’ve succumbed and I’m reading the abridged copy right now.

I feel like abridgment (not sure if that’s a word) is hurting the literary world, and I was wondering if anyone agreed with me.

This got me interested in abridgment. The following comment in the same thread fooled me:

Now a book that truly is banned through abridgment is S. Morgenstern’s “the Princess Bride.” Sadly, one cannot find a copy of this book in the unabridged form. Truly, William Goldman has made it seem like it never actually existed at all aside from his mention on the cover and introduction. Goldman has monopolized the market, it seems, for satire on European royalty. Luckily, Morgenstern’s estate has kept the sequel, “Buttercup’s Baby” safe from his censorship.

See also: books going out of print.

I have a policy to read whatever comes into my hands by chance, just in case the universe is telling me to read it. The book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk was with us camping this weekend for some reason so I picked it up and immediately fell for it. “If you’re going to read this, don’t bother”, it starts out.

Choke is a funny book. The author is an infant writing to impress 19 year old boys, but he comes up with some funny stuff while frantically trying to out-nihlize the competition.

Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it’s every way you always wanted to get laid but didn’t know how. Of course, all this is to help you realize you’re a sex junkie. It’s delivered in a kind of “If you do any of the following things, you may be an alcholholic ” checklist. Their helpful hints include:

Do you cut the lining out of you bathing suit so your genitals show through?

Do you leave your fly or blouse open and retend to hold conversations in glass telephone booths, standing so your clothes gap open with no underwear inside?

Do you jog without a bra or athletic supporter in order to attract sexual partners?

My answer to all the above is, Well, I do now!

I do like his irreverent style, but I don’t like the way he feels like every invention of his is worth putting down on paper. Two guys drinking beer meant for slugs?

If I could understand this commercial, I think I would understand America.