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 I want for it to be fun for myself and for the guests. I’m going to carefully choose who to invite in order to create the best mix of personalities and conversations that I can. I’m probably not going to invite people that I know to hate each other. I’m certainly not going to invite anyone that I don’t like.

Foo Camp is O’Reilly’s party. The problem seems to be that this party has lots of well known attendees who document the parties they go to on their weblogs, which opens them up to criticism from people who don’t like the kind of party they’re throwing. BarCamp is a much more productive response than complaining about somebody else’s party.

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 we’re going to increasingly see for the rest of the year. We have the best military in the world and an astonishingly large defense budget, and we can’t even take over Iraq. The “more war” crowd expects us to believe that terrorists have the means to take over the world?

The proper response to the assertions we’re seeing is ridicule, not argument.

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 pigmentation. As adults, we look as different from everyone else as we ever will. I have often wondered if there’s some biological explanation for why that is.

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 admits to a regret or mistake. It’s a shame that a terrorist leader is setting the example here.

I was also glad to read that the Fox News journalists were freed in Gaza. It’s hard out there for a journalist in the Middle East these days, but the job they do is vitally important.

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 it’s setup with trunk (where the main development takes place), branches where you work on versions of the code separate from the trunk, and tags, where you mark development milestones. One common development model for Web applications is to work on new features in the trunk and create a branch for the version of the application that’s actually deployed. You create that branch like this:

svn copy http://sourcecode/svn/myapp/trunk http://sourcecode/svn/myapp/branches/production

Eventually you’ll make changes in the trunk that need to be applied to the branch as well. This is where Subversion falls short. It knows where the branch originated, but it doesn’t provide any way of keeping track of which changes in the trunk have been merged into the branch (or vice versa). Keeping track of this sort of thing by hand is incredibly painful, and it’s exactly the sort of thing computers are good at.

A couple of days ago I discovered svnmerge, which handles this problem rather nicely. It’s a Python script, so it works on just about any platform (as long as you have Python installed), and it uses Subversion properties for data storage. Subversion properties are stored in the repository, so you can share your merge information among multiple users.

When you create a new branch, you just run the svnmerge init command. As the trunk changes, you can use the svnmerge avail command to see which revisions have not yet been merged into that branch. To perform and log the merges, you use svnmerge merge. (svnmerge will merge only the revisions you specify or all of the outstanding revisions.)

If you’re a Subversion user, I strongly recommend checking out svnmerge. The one question I haven’t figured out the answer to is whether svnmerge also keeps track of revisions to the branch that need to be merged back into the trunk, but I’ll get to it.

Note: SVK is another tool which provides this functionality (and a lot of other things). I haven’t had the chance to use it myself, but I hear good things.

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 found its coverage unbalanced. It tries too hard to present the Arab news, rather than just the news.

I have no idea how balanced or unbalanced al Jazeera is, because I don’t speak Arabic. (I suspect that David Ignatius doesn’t, either.) But I wonder how he gets the nerve to make this complaint about al Jazeera when he’s a member of the media. Take a look at news outlets, and just because it’s too cheap a comparison, leave out Fox News. Wouldn’t any neutral observer say that his criticism holds true for just about every media outlet? The Washington Post prints the Washington DC news, not the “balanced” news. The Raleigh newspaper prints news of interest to people of Raleigh and generally favors issues that are good for Raleigh and has a critical tone when it comes to things that are bad for Raleigh.

The cable news stations are even worse. Of course they show the American news, and even more than that, they are unabashedly pro-American. Some people would say that CNN is the most “neutral” news network, and they show Lou Dobbs on a daily basis, blasting immigration, attacking China, and generally acting as though the welfare of Americans is the only thing in the world that really matters. (Not that I think he even understands what’s best for Americans.) Flip over to CNN Headline News and you can get a daily helping of Glenn Beck, who’s not only shockingly stupid but dangerously psychotic. He goes on TV every day to tell us that Western civilization is in danger of collapse and that we’re in the middle of World War III.

To somehow pretend that al Jazeera’s news coverage is out of the ordinary or inferior to what we get here in America is pathetic and hypocritical. I suspect that the only reason that paragraph even made it into the column was to deflect anticipated criticism from the howling mob that was certain to emerge if it seemed like he was going too easy on the Arabs. Sad, really.

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 Saint-Exupery

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.” — G. K. Chesterton

“Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” — George Jean Nathan

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

The rules of the game: go to this page and find five quotations that reflect what you believe or who you are. Reload if necessary.

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 Channel quickly turned the footage into a special that aired last night.

The show is, of course, incredibly sad. Bourdain had just eaten a meal with his Lebanese guide, who had been enthusing about how the city was on the rise and Lebanon was finally back on the seat when suddenly the cameraman captures Hezbollah supporters driving around, honking their horns and celebrating as though Lebanon just won the World Cup. The guide looks ashen and Tony is just confused. The amount of loathing I felt for those people celebrating the opening shots in a pointless war is nearly impossible to describe. From there one of the locals the show had hired to help them out evacuates to Damascus, another’s home in South Beirut is leveled in an air strike. The crew winds up sheltering in a hotel in North Beirut for about a week waiting for the American government to get them out of the country, with a pool side view of the unfolding devastation. Eventually they’re evacuated by way of a Marine landing craft.

One thing that stood out to me is that Bourdain seems like a shattered man. He looks older and sadder, and was clearly holding back tears throughout most of the interview segments. It’s a perspective on the war that probably ought not be missed.

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 about when you should buy tickets, but Farecast uses quantitative analysis to make predictions about how to best time your purchases.

I’m anxious to apply it to my future ticket purchases. (The search interface is really nice as well, comparable to the one provided by Kayak.)

On the other hand, given the idiotic flight security rules, I’m not exactly eager to fly at all.

One thing I’ll be interested to observe is whether Farecast will end up being a force for change in how airlines price their tickets. Airlines profit through obscurity, but Farecast could wind up making the pricing strategies of the airlines more transparent.