Another year, another bout of kvetching over the attendee list for O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. Before I get started, let me say that I have never been invited to Foo Camp, and even if I were invited I probably wouldn’t go because I never go to conferences of any kind.
Let’s say I’m throwing a party and [...]
Republican consultant Charles Black on why it makes sense to say we’re in a war against Islamic fascism:
It helps dramatize what we’re up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them.
This is the scary and idiotic rhetoric [...]
Why did human beings adapt such that we look most distinct from one another when we’re adults? Babies, regardless of their race or ethnicity, look a lot alike. Our appearance also converges with our fellow human beings as we get older. Most everybody’s hair turns gray or white and our skin loses some of its [...]
I was shocked to read the following from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah yesterday:
If I had known that the operation to capture the soldiers would lead to this result, we would not have carried it out.
I think I’m so disillusioned at this point that I’m surprised when anyone in a position of leadership actually [...]
Jim Henley on the politics of war:
War swallows up lesser distinctions. That, God help us, is what so many people like about it.
I am very happy with Subversion as far as version control systems go, but it has one glaring deficiency. When you create branches, it can be extremely difficult to keep track of which changes you’ve merged from one branch to another. This is probably best explained with an example.
Let’s say you have a repository, and [...]
This morning I was reading David Ignatius’ column in the Washington Post on al Jazeera, the Arabic news station based in Qatar. This made my jaw drop:
Al-Jazeera has been attacked by American officials as a propaganda tool for Osama bin Laden and other Muslim radicals. And as a journalist, I have often [...]
Picking up the meme:
“Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de [...]
If you get the chance, be sure to watch Bourdain in Beirut on the Travel Channel. As you may have read, he was filming an episode of No Reservations there when Hezbollah abducted the two Israeli soldiers, and was stuck in the city for another week or so while waiting to be evacuated. The Travel [...]
One of my long standing goals is to always pay as little as possible in airfare. The latest tool to achieve that end is Farecast which tracks airfares over time and lets you know if you should buy tickets for a trip now or wait for prices to drop. There’s a lot of received wisdom [...]