You know, for years I’ve scoffed at the absurd warnings of impending terrorist attacks from John Ashcroft, and at the moronic announcements of the capture of people that we’ve actually had in custody for months (the deadly Somalian terrorist that we heard about yesterday was captured in November). Paul Krugman is the first person who has pointed out that Ashcroft always puts on a stage show when the Justice Department is punched in the gut by charges of incompetence, or worse. But don’t blame Ashcroft, blame President Bush. He knew what a clown Ashcroft was when he chose him as Attorney General in order to mollify the nutballs on the religious right, or he should have known anyway. Ashcroft is a scumbag, fire his boss and he goes too.

So today I was reading a story in the local newspaper about some Montagnards who are trying to return to Vietnam (the Montagnards are indigenous people of Vietnam who have been persecuted due to their religious beliefs, and, no doubt, their indigeousness). The article mentions that North Carolina is home to the largest Montagnard community outside their ancestral home in Vietnam. Naturally, I immediately wondered what sort of food Montagnards make and whether there are any Montagnard restaurants within driving distance.

This William Pfaff column on torture may be the last I link to. After reading it, I really don’t think anything else needs to be said. I find it unsurprising that Brits seem to get this so much better than Americans do. They’re from “old Europe” and have a political memory that goes back further and encompasses more than ours does, and I think that they understand the degree to which torture, secret detentions, and disrespect for the laws of the land degrade our county than we do ourselves.

I think that electronic voting machines should be audited as thoroughly as slot machines, don’t you? I find it a bit depressing that people value their gambling dollar over their votes, but it’s clear that they do. Maybe it’s that people trust politicians and their backers more than they trust casino owners. I don’t think we should.

I first posted about the development of Subversion back on June 21, 2000, but I didn’t start using it for real until it was released this year. For the past few months, I’ve applied it to a project that I’m getting paid actual money to work on, and thusfar, I’ve been extremely impressed. I’m the only person using the repository, and until this weekend I was just doing basic check in and check out stuff.

Subversion employs the Perforce model for these operations in that it batches all of the changes together and treats them as a single, numbered transaction (unlike CVS, which treats each individual file operation as its own transaction). The advantage of the Subversion/Perforce model is that if I check in three files together to fix one bug, I can easily roll back that change as a single operation. It also makes the revision log for the repository a lot saner.

Anyway, we had an interim release of the project, and the time came to make a tag for that release. I needed to do some serious refactoring and I also needed to preserve the ability to apply bug fixes to the released version of the code so it was time to either apply a tag or branch the code. In CVS that’s the choice I would have had to make, anyway. (In CVS, tags are just markers you can add to a specific revision of a file, while branches are distinct copies of a directory structure that maintain a relationship with the structure they were branched from so that you can merge changes between them.) Subversion makes things much easier — there’s one operation, svn copy. To make a tag or branch, you just copy your directory to another location and start working on the code there. Subversion keeps track of the relationship between the copy and the parent so you can merge changes between them.

I had actually screwed things up because I just checked in my projects from Eclipse at the top level of my repository instead of making the directories trunk, tags, and branches. This meant I didn’t have any good place to put the copy that represented my tag when I created it. So I created new top level directories in my repository with the names I just mentioned, and then copied the top level directories into trunk. At that point I copied trunk into a directory in tags called release-1.0. Then I checked everything back out of Subversion from the new trunk. Easy as pie.

The only thing I really wish for right now is a good way to shuffle between branches in Eclipse. Maybe there’s a solution for this that I don’t know about right now, but what I’m thinking I’m going to do is create separate workspaces for the trunk and for any other branch I’m working in. The only problem there is whether to version control my workspace metadata (in other words, my Eclipse settings) or just copy my workspace directory and delete all the projects before checking out from the new branch.

Overall, I recommend Subversion very highly. The only reason not to use it is if you rely on some tools that integrate with another version control system but haven’t been adapted to Subversion yet. For example, ViewCVS is a nice tool for providing Web access to CVS, and there’s not a version for Subversion yet, although it looks like one is in the works.

I think Christopher Hitchens has lost his compass to a certain degree, but he makes the straightforward case against torture in Slate today with no equivocation. He also provides a useful history lesson in drawing a comparison to England’s problems with Irish terrorists in the seventies. I’m reminded of Andrew Brown’s piece on fighting terrorism from all the way back on September 19, 2001. How’s this for prescience?

This may sound like hand-waving, but it has one immediate practical consequence: Don’t use torture. Torture is the crack cocaine of anti-terrorism because, for a while, it works. The terrorists will certainly use it. But everyone tries it. The Brits did it in Northern Ireland, the Israelis use it on the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority uses it on Palestinians too. The French, in their Algerian war against terrorism in the 1950s, turned it into an instrument of policy. But the price is higher than a democracy can pay. Either the people who have to do the torture are sickened, and spread their disillusion throughout society (this is what happened in France); or they are not sickened. They come to enjoy it; and then you have lost the values that you are fighting for. Either way, after a time, it stops working. The Russians in Chechnya can torture all they like. They still can’t win the war there.

I’m thinking it’s about time for some pop star to go on TV and tear up a picture of the Pope. Really, though, it’s President Bush who’s at fault in this specific case.

Tim Bray says Test Driven Development is the single most important software engineering advance of his career, and I’m inclined to agree. I honestly can’t imagine doing things any other way now that I’ve caught the TDD bug.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve really been siezed by the idea that email is just dying. The thought really hit me when I went to visit my parents and checked out their email. Last fall I set them up with Mozilla Thunderbird and told them how to use the Bayesian filter. They’ve been following my directions and still a bunch of spam is getting through, even after I layered SpamAssassin on top of it. More spam is making it through my filters as well. I get several bounced emails a day thanks to viruses that have infected other people and sent out mail with my return address. I’m still getting passworded zip files with viruses in them thanks to other email viruses. More than that, I just suck at keeping up with my email, period. I’m over 100 threads behind on the Apache Axis mailing list I’m subscribed to, and I owe a bunch of people personal email as well (sorry, people).

One thing that’s increasingly apparent to me is that the spammers are testing their email against email filters. In the most basic sense, spam and spam filters are really no different than ballistic missiles and missile defense. The offense has a huge advantage, because the defense never has the advantage of initiative. It’s unfortunate that there are no effective offensive strategies against spammers. I think that in this case, preemption is called for.

I’m a sucker for lists, and I’ve already mentioned Heartaches by the Number here, so I had to provide a pointer to Jack Sparks’ list of the top 100 country songs of all time, written in his usual irreverent style.