Entries in Life

I was listening to the Indian Electronica podcast from a few months ago.  It was all very political, but one clip was from Arundhati Roy and was is spot on.  Commenting on the “anti-american” epithet that is thrown at anyone who disagrees with our government’s failed mission in Afghanistan (which still seems very widely supported) she says we are now told that we should support it to free Afghani women from their burqas.:

But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you’re opposed to freedom of speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons? Does it mean that you hate all Americans? This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy is an effective strategy. To be “anti-American” (or for that matter, anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you. If you’re not a Bushie, you’re a Taliban. If you’re not Good, you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists. Now that the initial aim of the war in Afghanistan – capturing Osama bin Laden (dead or alive) – seems to have run into bad weather, the goalposts have been moved. It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, that the U.S. Marines are actually on a feminist mission. Think of it this way: In India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables,” against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise?

(Googled up this Ms. Magazine article from the quote I remembered.  The article is slightly different from the quote I heard, but close enough.) In my mind, this same sort of thing is closely related to why Immigration has become an “issue” during this political season.  I’m really not sure what big threat immigrants pose to us, illegal or otherwise.  They’re here, as long as they don’t cause trouble and contribute to society, why are we worried?  All the arguments sound like a thin cover for Xenophobia to me.  Are we really worried about the amount of money we’re spending on illegals?  We could give each illegal immigrant a pony and we would spend less than we have spent killing Iraqis and deposing Saddam.

A while back I saw a blog post about keeping /etc under version control.  The particular article talked about using Mercurial for this and built on an article that used git to do the same thing. The nice thing about this approach was that it hooked directly into Debian’s apt and made sure that your repository was synced before and after each package installation … which means that if you forget to sync your changes to the machine’s configuration yourself, the system will take care of it for you. I set out to do something similar myself and, just as I finished, I discovered Joey Hess’s etckeeper which supports git and Mercurial, but not Bazaar, my DVCS of choice. So I added it. The biggest problem I found was that bzr doesn’t support pre-commit hooks the same way that git and Mercurial do, but since etckeeper has pre-commit hooks, I just put the action there. This means that some of the meta-data could get out of sync if you do a “bzr commit” by hand, but until the start-commit hook is added, I think that is just the way things will have to be.

While looking for a way to automate testing for the application I’m working on, I was amused to learn that, even for PHP applications, the standard for automated testing still seems to be Perl’s (and the Apache standard) Apache::Test module. I’m sure a lot of this is because of the browser-based mindset of PHP,  This combined with OO-heavy testing frameworks that show their Java roots make Apache::Test pretty attractive for lightweight automated testing. I’ve managed to combine it with Debian’s pbuilder for some great automated testing in a pristine environment.  Beautiful.

If it were up to me, my kids wouldn’t know much about football.  I’m not even sure that we’d watch the superbowl. But in our family knows football and the kids learn a lot watching with her.  So do I. Besides the actual excitement of the game, it was fun to watch her get excited about the plays and predict what the teams were going to do.  She watched a lot of football before we got married, and it shows. While I’m lost trying to follow the action, she notices the faked passes. I think she deserves to get an HDTV with a few HD sports channels.  Hmm… might make a nice Anniversary present.