C# allows an arbitrary number of parameters (similar to varargs in C) in indexer properties. This looks like this:

   class Vector {
	 public object this [params object [] items]
	 {
	 	get { ... }
        	set { ... }
         }
    }

    // ...

    Vector v = new Vector ();

    v [1, 2, 3] = 10;
	

This is one of the parts of the spec that I did not find on the first pass of writing the compiler, so the internal design of the compiler did not allow for this particular usage. Not many applications depended on it, but there have been a few.

The problem was that the compiler had a flag describing whether a method's last parameter was a "params" (setters and getters are treated as methods). This works for the getter method, but the problem is that the setter method has a params in the middle, the above would turn into:

	object set_Item (object [] items, object value) 
	

Today Marek Safar submitted a fix to this long standing bug. Although the bug was filed by a third party a year ago, it was on my personal compiler TODO list for at least three years.

This fix will be on Mono 1.2.3 or it's available on SVN on r69571.

Excellent article on the Guardian:

So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse and worse.

...

Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr President; you have made one hell of a disaster.

The same folks that were calling for "Iraqi Liberation" from Saddam are now pitching the need for a strong man. They never made any sense, but they are now venturing into new delusional grounds when they suggest that Augusto Pinochet is a good model to follow.

Of course, this particular columnist has always shown the intellectual prodigy of a clam, the wit and finese of a dumb rock.

His claim: Pinochet's abuses "helped create a civil society". Well, you can not get any dumber than that. All he knows about Chile he probably learned this week.

My books on the Israeli/Palestine conflict now amount for a considerable part of my bookshelf real estate.

A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine around the pros and cons of the "one state" vs "two state" solutions to the conflict.

For those not familiar with the options, they are:

One State Solution: Israel and the West Bank become one country, with the same rights and laws applying to all the inhabitants. No distinction made based on ethnicity or religion.

Two States Solution: Israel continues as it exists today; the West Bank and Gaza become a sovereign state and the inhabitants of the West Bank are governed by its inhabitants. The Israeli military evacuates the occupied territories, and Israeli citizens living in the West Bank become Palestinian citizens or have an option to emigrate back.

My friend had good points against both solutions, the one state solution and the two state solutions. And I agree that both have problems, but the status quo of "one state and a colony" is way worse.

The One State and a Colony is the current configuration: Israel is an independent country and the West Bank is a colony under a military occupation.

This is a good Q&A with Chomsky on the prospects of a solution. This article lead to Noah Cohen's reply: Apologetics for Injustice in Palestine?. He advocates the one-state solution. Chomsky replied in Advocacy and Realism A reply to Noah Cohen.

The problems of the two state solution today are explored by Haim Bresheeth.

Just ordered three new books:

• Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
• Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
• Ali Abunimah's One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

Patrick Cockburn's Occupation is a very interesting read on the occuptation of Iraq and what went on. The story is told from the perspective of the Indepedent's journalist point of view. Patrick's book is packed with interesting stories, but Robert Fisk is still a better story teller.

Mexico Updates

Meanwhile, Mexico is going back to the 70's style repression. With hundreds of "disappeared", tortured and a handful of killed protesters at the hands of the state and federal police and an incompetent new president whose only significant act so far has been to propose education budget cuts (he back-pedaled yesterday on his plan) and raise the salaries of the military.

Democracy Now has a complete report on the situation in Oaxaca.

Brad Will's (a journalist with Indymedia) was covering one of the confrontations between the police and Oaxaca protestors, when government gun men shot him. His reporting and in particular his own video where he is killed is available with subtitles in English on YouTube.

One of the advantages of going to the movies in Boston is that the experience is enhanced by comments from expert graduates and undergraduates from the many famous universities in town.

We recently went to see the new James Bond movie, "Casino Royale" at one of Boston's largest movie theaters. We arrived with plenty of time to spare, and we managed to get some great seats: middle, center-front.

There were four or five Harvard students sitting behind us. Properly dressed, well groomed, and with impeccable haircuts. On our left, an MIT student with his date. He reminded me of the comic guy from the Simpsons.

MIT guy provided some valuable data throughout the movie.

When the first bullet was fired and the character dies, he solemnly informed his date "That is unrealistic" and he gave some details to back up his assertion "a bullet fired in that direction and speed would not push the body in that angle, let alone throw a guy from a chair".

This was a premonition of the things to come. He had found a mission, a goal worth standing up for. During the rest of the movie he kept us informed about which parts were realistic and which ones were not. For the next two hours and a half, we were treated to a string of assessments "realistic" and "not realistic".

Every once in a while he would also comment on the technological developments in this new Bond movie, "that technology actually exists.". He complements it with, "they are actually different". I was hoping he would say to his date at some point "That myth has been busted", but I waited in vain.

I probably could have learned more from this MIT fellow about poker and the probabilities in the game, but the movie was distracting me from his fascinating lecture on the math and strategy behind poker.

The Harvard guys were definitely more social, more outgoing. And they also shared with the rest of us their movie evaluations.

Although they mostly focused on the various Bond girls. Unlike the MIT guy that went into longer discussions and technical explorations, they limited their comments to short sentences, they had developed an advanced taste for succinct statements: "Yeah Baby" was a favorite, a few "I want some of that" and sometimes they just used a few guttural sounds.

They also shared with us their jet-setting background as they addressed the local culture "That is totally Venice".

If I had to guess, I would guess they were not English Majors.

What I found interesting is that the well-groomed Harvard folks giggled every time a girl was on screen. If the scene contained some erotic material, love declarations or kissing, the giggling usually turned into chatter. I learned a lot from them. Four out of five would "totally do her" and one of them would "Also quit the job for her", perhaps he was a secret agent wearing a Harvard sweat shirt yearning for a better undercover assignment.

An updated version of the Mono Migration Analysis has been released, you can download this from here.

This new release from Jonathan Pobst has some important updates:

• It tracks the API of Mono 1.2.2 (just released today).
• It will automatically update to new API releases as we make them, so you can keep an eye on the progress we make as we publish new versions of Mono without having to update your Moma installation.
• It optionally allows you to send us feedback and information about the software you are analyzing: you can tell us more about your product, your target and the time frame that you are thinking of to port to Linux.

In the last week since the release of Moma, we have received 524 application submissions, from 299 different IP addresses (196 of them were single submissions, 48 were two submissions, 28 were three and a few folks sent more than that).

Groklaw is running a sensationalistic headline today:

Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org

Well, if there are any Novell supporters left, here's something else to put in your pipe and smoke it. Novell is forking OpenOffice.org.

There will be a Novell edition of OpenOffice.org and it will support Microsoft OpenXML. (The default will be ODF, they claim, but note that the subheading mentions OpenXML instead.) I am guessing this will be the only OpenOffice.org covered by the "patent agreement" with Microsoft. You think?

Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that they explore new levels of ignorance.

Let me explain.

We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to OpenOffice, and we are the largest external contributor to actual code to OpenOffice than anyone else.

We have for years maintained go-ooo.org (as well as its previous incarnations) a site where we encouraged new developers to join the OpenOffice effort, and worked to lower the barrier for contributors by creating tutorials, pre-compiled images and provide tools for contributors to work on it (some of this content is now being migrated to OpenOffice's new Wiki system).

For years we have been shipping a patched version of OpenOffice because the release schedule of OpenOffice did not match our release schedule. In the very same way that Linux distributions have to ship patches against vanilla packages because the release schedule of those packages does not necessarily match the release schedule of a distribution.

The work at go-ooo.org started in the Ximian days, when we were an independent startup, and we did quite a lot of work to make OpenOffice better integrate with the Linux desktop, upgrading its aging pieces and did quite some work on improving its performance.

Our patches have been published in here (see for example) for the longest time. And plenty of them have already been merged upstream.

But technically, Ximian never shipped a vanilla OpenOffice, we always shipped an improved version of it (with bug fixes, with backports or new features). This is nothing new.

Today we ship modified versions of OpenOffice to integrate GStreamer, 64-bit fixes, integrate with the GNOME and KDE file choosers, add SVG importing support, add OpenDMA support, add VBA support, integrate Mono, integrate fontconfig, fix bugs, improve performance and a myriad of others. The above url contains some of the patches that are pending, but like every other open source project, we have published all of those patches as part of the src.rpm files that we shipped, and those patches have eventually ended up in every distribution under the sun.

But the problem of course is not improving OpenOffice, the problem is improving OpenOffice in ways that PJ disapproves of. Improving OpenOffice to support an XML format created by Microsoft is tantamount to treason.

And of course, the code that we write to interop with Office XML is covered by the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (Update: this is a public patent agreement, this has nothing to do with the Microsoft/Novell agreement, and is available to anyone; If you still want to email me, read the previous link, and read it twice before hitting the send button).

I would reply to each individual point from PJ, but she either has not grasped how open source is actually delivered to people or she is using this as a rallying cry to advance her own ideological position on ODF vs OfficeXML.

Debating the technical merits of one of those might be interesting, but they are both standards that are here to stay, so from an adoption and support standpoint they are a no-brainer to me. The ideological argument on the other hand is a discussion as interesting as watching water boil. Am myself surprised at the spasms and epileptic seizures that folks are having over this.

Btw, I believe the translator that people are discussing is built with C# and XSLT and is available here. I wonder some of the posters on the Groklaw thread are going to have a stroke over the fact that the software is hosted at source forge.

Mexico is in a turmoil over the questionable elections this year.

Fighting erupted among the representatives over the new appointed president. The new president was sworn-in in a rush, the international guests barely could sit before they had to whisk him out. Link

The upside is that what is typically an incredibly boring TV broadcast that goes for a few hours was reduced to less than five minutes.

I will be talking at the GULEV conference in Cancun next weekend. The GULEV conference has been running for a few years and it has always been incredibly fun. It is usually hosted in the port city of Veracruz.

The last time I attended, my friend Arturo had just broken the screen of his powerbook. He traveled to Veracruz with an external monitor, underwear and a toothbrush.