childish countries
chakie, I suppose I meant that the typical connotation of 'terrorist' (as least in the US) is not someone who might reasonably be accused of war crimes, but someone who uses a particular brand of violence to attack the established local order, to attack an 'us' that explicitly excludes most people. Thus it's not 'terrorism' when the state employs the same tactics against a group or organization outside one's sphere of concern. That's some of where the resistance to the ICC is coming from, since it would enforce the same rules on both sides.
Now I certainly agree this is an immature perspective, and anti-intellectual as well. But the hypocracy you point to is more a symptom of a deeper cause than an inconsistency with which to challenge those in power.
London
Our stuff arrived from Vancouver last week after 133 days in transit. (well, mostly in a warehouse waiting for a container to fill.) It's great to have utensils and books, cds and dvds, bedding and more clothes. And of course a desktop computer and printer again. snow is back online. Everything seems to have survived just fine; no damage at all aside from some of the jets on my old inkjet cartridge being blocked/dried out.
I guess that makes our household complete in a sense. We were holding off on buying some things like bedding and kitchenware because we'd shipped some (dimly remembered in detail) so now we either have it or can go get it. And I'm very comforted to have some books around to refer to, even though I have most of my important references as PDFs.
build tools
I thought I'd add to the build tool thread that's been happening here off and on. I don't have any real design ideas, but I would like to relate my biggest complaint about the GNU autotools. tromey has alluded to this in his requirements gathering, and maybe it's obvious to those thinking about this, but it's not something I commonly hear articulated.
Most people complain about the arcane syntax and learning curve (bad 'code shui'?) but that's never really bothered me so much. The tools do work, after all, even if you can't always use the naively obvious solution.
The part I'd really like to see done differently is better language support for decision-making. When I'm writing configure scripts, I often feel I'm trying to write an expert system in sh and it's not a good fit. :)
As a really simple example, jbig2dec has optional support for png output iff libpng is available. But libpng depends on zlib, which we don't otherwise use. Now the easy thing is to call AC_CHECK_LIB() for zlib and then for libpng, and let the user sort out dependency issues. However, I'd like to do better. I don't want to add zlib to the link line if we don't have libpng or vice versa. Worse, because many distributions package headers separately, it would be nice to print a warning if the headers aren't available (and the libs are) but still disable png support, just to help with that common bit of user confusion. The actual actions to take are very simple: if the dependencies are available, define HAVE_LIBPNG, add -lpng -lz to LIBS, and add a file to the LIBOBJs. But to invoke those three steps when I want to I have to do a bunch of conditionals and temporary variables. And that's just a 'trivial' chained dependency.
So, it would be really nice if that were automated and one could just specify (optional) goals and dependencies and have the tool work out the best possible config just like make finds the minimum set of build steps to update a target. Simple, direct, no hacks. fwiw