Thomas Friedman on Syria, the US and War

If you’ve not heard of Thomas Friedman you should know who he is. He’s a journalist that has published a number of must reads: The World is Flat and Longitudes and Attitudes as well as a really interesting television story on global warming and electric cars: Addicted to Oil (its on again on August 14th)

But anyways… check out the Fresh Air interview from August 1 with Terry Gross. Most notable and disturbing was this quote from Thomas Friedman, “(Hezbollah) hates Israel more than they love their own kids… that is such a travesty.”

There’s more interesting things he has to say about the tragedy of the Accidental War as the Economist calls it.

Quote from Captain James Cook

"I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored."

Captain James Cook, 27 January 1775

I put this quote here as food for thought. At the time Cook wrote this he had good enough reason to make such a strong statement. For well over 2000 years, or perhaps even all of recorded human history to that time, boots were only made of wood. Note, that at this time, there were no steam powered vessels, nor were there the steel and iron ships which would come to be about 100 years later.

When we try to solve problems in our lives we often put too little thought into questioning the base assumptions that we make decisions on.

This also leads into that often quoted addage about those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.

NANT files and XML namespaces

NANT files and XML namespaces

Being a reader (worshiper?) of Scott's blog I happened upon
Intellisense and NAnt .build files in VS.NET back a while ago. Recently I also starting using nant include tasks to centralize common functions/scripts/targets in a single location. When you combine the two, beware: all included files in which you reference targets need to also include the same namespace for instance:

xmlns="http://nant.sf.net/schemas/nant-0.84.win32.net-1.0.xsd"

The only error you see is:

BUILD FAILED

Target 'foobar' does not exist in this project. It is used from target 'wombat'.

Enjoy!