New song from Eminem is out. lyrics, plus video in Real and Windows Media are available.

Loved the video.

Commentary and lyrics at common dreams

Florida Elections

Greg Palast on Harper magazine this month on the new touch-screen computers in Florida's election or how Florida is learning one or two tricks from Mexico's IFE.

Nat on Inspiration and Software

A great read from Nat's blog: Getting nothing wrong is for the uninspired

Walking to Work

Today my laptop was left on while I walked to work, and this is what happens when you walk by MIT:

The anonymous method support has been checked into CVS in the HEAD branch.

Another cool Mono App: Panoramic Photos

Autopano-sift is an application to assist in the creation of panoramic images from a series of pictures.

Sam Ruby Slides

From DevCon are available.

Last week we had a Mono Summit in Cambridge, notes from the various discussions and developments are available here: http://www.go-mono.com/summit-notes.html

John Pilger documents the Story of Diego Garcia and the cleaning of the native population in the 60's.

The story has a happy ending, those expelled from Diego Garcia received 3,000 pounds (each).

There is more information on Pilger's site.

Duncan's NodeStore/NodeView

Duncan has done some work to bring the NodeStore/NodeView to life, simplifying the life of those using the TreeView, here is a screenshot from his blog entry:

Interesting article: 100 facts, 1 opinion.

Btw, you can not use `Fox News' as your fact check source ;-)

Cleaning up the Record

Yahoo picked up on the removal of transcripts of the from the White House web site. The removals include some priceless gems.

For those running to the wayback machine to look for the originals the Whitehouse web site has been updated with a robots.txt file to avoid it.

Gnome Notifier

Thanks for all the e-mail on the Gnome Notifier. Am not interested in turning this prototype into a working product, there are better efforts underway. The point I was trying to make on my last post was that early on I realized that we needed the notification system to do more than just show a message: it is important to be able to have a list of actions associated with it that I can click on.

My toy Gnome Notifier was written a few years ago as a sample program that I wanted the Gnome people to productize. It was not meant to be a real or completed program.

Linux and Windows

Nicholas Petreley has a Security Report on Windows vs Linux.

Jamin, you might want to read the news articles posted from Enjoy the Draft's FAQ. I was particularly interested in question (5).

Rico Mariani has a blog on .NET performance. An interesting read is his Performance TidBits post.

A good companion is: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability.

Notifications

Calum writes his feelings about notifications: they should not have options. And here lies a problems with the view on notifications: am personally not interested in the equivalent to `tail -f some_log'. I want my notifications to be interactive, and hence those options seems awesome.

I am personally interested in a notification framework to the desktop to avoid things like GAIM popping up a dialog box in the middle of writing an email that asks me if I want to accept a buddy or not. In this particular case having a default button makes things worse, because I do not know which people I have accepted or not accidentally. I literally have this problem every day.

In fact, I want to have a log not only of notifications but of actions to follow up to. So some notifications should not go away, they should stick around, and when I have the time I can go and click the appropriate buttons `accept', `accept', `reject', `reject'.

Some other notifications can just go away: if I have not responded to the CD insertion action, it can likely go away from my screen.

Longhorn keeps track of notifications that the user has not seen.

My old gnome-notifier does exactly this, and supports a special kind of url `run:' that you could use to run programs in response to actions.

Elijah Gaim is one of the applications that have this behavior. But even if you do not steal focus, I do not want a window popping up in the middle of the screen for GAIM. I want these kind of notifications to go elsewhere (Windows uses a baloon and the proposals so far are along the same lines: notifications are out of your current work area).

Enjoy the Draft

An educational website: Enjoy the Draft Dot Com.

The FAQ is a must-read.

A lighter, more positive side of the draft.

I am the last one to notice monoForge a site that allows you to test your Web-based Mono application on Linux. During the beta period the service is free.

Gnome Notify

An implementation of the Desktop Notification. Fredrik is working to get a notification that looks like Tuomas mockups.

Another version is MonkeyPop which uses Mozilla. MonkeyPop uses a set of tools for developing desktop applications called the Chicken Framework. One nice thing about the Chicken Framework is that its distributed with documentation.

It would be nice for the authors to work together.

Tomorrow the 21st I will be participating on the Evolution E-Plugin hackfest. The hackfest will take place in the #evolution IRC channel on irc.gnome.org.

We will be learning the E-Plugin interface that Michael Zucchi designed for Evolution. Now Evolution 2.x can be extended with user code to implement your favorite missing feature or your favorite aberration.

Plugins are typically built with C but there is a Mono interface so any Mono supported language can be used to extend evolution.

This blog entry has some demos of the E-Plugin from August, it will give you a few ideas of what can be done.

Mark Crichton's Mozilla# for Windows

Mark has Gecko-sharp running on Windows (this is the Gecko binding for Gtk# running on Windows).

Gecko# on Windows.

Echoing Nat's post on the fifth anniversary of the incorporation of Helix Code.

Seven Cool Mono Applications

Edd has written an article on Seven Cool Mono Apps built for Linux using Gtk#.

More Gnome Toys

After the above article from Edd, Eugenia posted a list of another twelve applications written in Mono/Gtk# here and today I also noticed MonkeyPop and Word of the Day Applet

A lot of cool innovation on top of Mono/Gtk#.

An interesting article studying Microsoft as a citizen, based on the ideas from the movie "The Corporation".

The author wrote a very interesting follow-up to it.

Update: Nat has posted his thought on Microsoft. A must read.

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is my hero. His appearance on CNN this Friday was unbelievable. He showed the world the state of journalism in the country.

You can read the script, but I recommend watching it (BitTorrent).

Mono-esque and Gnome-esque happenings

Garret has updated the F-Spot Product Design Wiki with many screenshots as a foundation for ideas to F-Spot

This week all the Novell Mono developers came to town for our semi-annual meeting.

Vasu has posted a description of the events on the Mono Day at Novell Bangalore. It describes some pretty cool demos that they did.

Dodos

If you were looking for information about the now extinct Dodo, look no further than here. The first match in Google is not about the Dodo, its about some Internet provided in Australia.

Mono's XML stack

We learned from Dare that XML 2 was going to get some features cut, which is a good thing for us, as there is less to implement. Kind of a shame, since Atsushi has a good foundation for XQuery already on the Mono tree. Until XQuery is added back to the Framework, we will likely distribute a Mono.XML assembly that contains our implementation of XQuery for those interested in using it before the next major revision of the .NET Framework.

Atsushi had been working on our XQuery implementation for Mono, and has some insight on its current design and limitations.

Sean has lost his mind

From Todd's blog I see that Sean has decided to shoot Gaim in the foot: look at this this monstrosity.

To add humor to this, Nat found the the ChangeLog entry for it:

Modified Files:
 	gtkprefs.c 
 Log Message:

Simplified the prefs dialog by replacing the tree with tabs.
 
You may think this is a bad idea, but it"s not.
 
	

John Luke blogged about Lazlo. Lazlo is very similar in spirit to Macromedia's Flex: it is a server-side XML markup for creating applications with JavaScript as the programming language for it.

Like Flex it produces Flash files dynamically, and it is implemented using Java. An adorable project, worth helping those guys out.

A demo of Lazlo can be seen here.

Spanish Mono Article

Jordi Mas (from our Windows.Forms team) has written an article in Spanish about Mono: Beyond .NET.

Happy Anniversary Jackson

Jackson has been with the Mono team at Novell now for a year.

Most Missleading Foreign Policy Statements from the VP debate

Someone had the patience to do it: here. This one is particuarly packed with jewels.

And for healthcare, there is this one.

Since am linking, a new Mark Fiore episode: The Few, The Contractors.

Farenheit 9/11

Got my Farenheit 9/11 DVD yesterday and I watched the beginning of the movie again. As awesome as it was when I first watched it, and comes with some extra footage and complimentary material.

Watching it for the second time, I felt that there was so much more that could be added to the movie and spice it more with what we know since the movie was released. It is still a very powerful movie.

Peter Sestoft and Henrik Hansen have published their new book `C# Precisely', a pretty concise book from MIT Press and it covers the C# 2.0 language including generics, iterators and anonymous methods.

Peter is one of the developers of the of the C5 class library: a library of generic classes for C# (We package this for Mono as the Mono.C5 assembly).

I mentioned a few days ago Joshua's GovtTrack.us web site. This web site is data intensive and was ported from Perl to Mono, according to Joshua the porting experience was a joy.

Joshua is one of the XSLT magicians in the Mono project, the man who turned 3,000 lines of C# code for pretty-printing our documentation into 300 lines of XSLT macros.

But Joshua did not use ASP.NET to write the new site, Joshua rolled out his own processing model using Mono and the low-level hooks of System.Web, he discusses the porting process on a recent article:

Websites have some of the same design issues as programs. One common issue is how to avoid duplication, but while software developers have solved this issue with functions, website developers are still struggling for a solution. GovTrack.us, my new website, solves this problem using XSL transformations and the Mono framework.

The article is interesting for anyone interested in extending and hooking up to the HTTP processing pipeline in Mono and also discusses how to extend Mono's XSLT with C#-coded functions.

Joshua has a blog.

Linex (Debian) packages for Mono

Users of Linex can download packages for Mono from here. The rumor on the street is that Alo himself packaged Mono. Maybe he has finally reached enlightenment.

While watching the debate, president Bush made a statement about how spreading freedom was the right thing to do. And how eventually freedom will help fix things in the world. The CNN blog had a funny remark:

I love the way Bush talks about "spreading" liberty and "spreading" freedom. Like they're this peanut butter and jelly that can just be piled on top of slices of other countries.

A point that I think people have been missing is that the major source of the problems around the globe have to do with quality of life, freedom comes in a distant second place.

The focus on the war on terror I believe is completely missguided. Dropping bombs or shooting people will only exacerbate the dislike for an invasion. On the other hand, if social programs to reactivate the economy, to improve health-care, to improve schools, to create jobs, you will increase the number of happy people and minimize the discontent.

There is a whole debate about what "freedom" means, and it probably means different things to different people. Every once in a while I ran into people who miss the days of living under a dictatorship: from the Franquistas in Spain who think the country was better off with dictator Franco, to chileans that believe that dictador Pinochet was the best thing to happen to Chile since sliced bread. These people were enjoying their lives and hence had no problem with the imperfect states of government they had.

My point is that some people did not care about their freedom rights as long as they themselves were doing fine. Another example are some americans today. They seem to be just happy to reduce their own rights and freedoms for the sake of security (Patriot Act) or the sake of capitalism (The DMCA).

A better strategy to fight terror around the globe would be to revisit US foreign economic policy, to help organizations like the FAO, give economic relief and revisit the free trade agreements to level the standard of living around the globe.

The subject is explored from an economist point of view: here and here.

And of course, at the core of the problem I believe strongly is ultra-capitalism: companies and practices which are only concerned in increasing shareholder value with no social compromise (The movie "The Corporation" digs into this issue more).

Other post-debate links

On Korea's nuclear proliferation.

Last night I watched , very interesting documentary on the relentless effort to bring Clinton down. The ironic bit of the movie: while Clinton was preparing to do a speech at the UN on terrorism as the biggest threat to the world, the republicans were airing and promoting his deposition on the Lewinsky case.

The most interesting tidbit comes in the DVD: at the premiere of the movie, Clinton got to speak to the audience, and had great bits of insight. What makes the man most admirable is that he respects those that disagree with him, and proposes to engage in a discussion to understand the different points of view.

Enjoyed pretty much the debate, I was surprised at Kerry's articulate intervention. Bush did try the whole show to point out Kerry as changing opinions, I wish Kerry had pointed to Record Shows Bush Shifting on Iraq War.

Alex (of Tomboy fame told me today on IM:

Alex: ya, he was damn good Alex: if he had been able to speak that way throughout the campaign he'd be winning Alex: the problem is that bush's progeny is much better at spin Alex: so by this time tomorrow the people will be convinced that bush won the debate