The other day I ran into Jitsu, a new toolkit for creating Ajax-y applications.

Jitsu takes an interesting approach in the Ajaxy space.

Am going back to Mexico to vote on this Sunday's election.

Am voting for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO/PRD).

The smear campaign against AMLO has been quite intense, a few mexicans in Barcelona told me the most amazing stories. The rumors being spread include "If AMLO wins, four families will be forced to live in an appartment", "AMLO is being financed by Fidel Castro", "If AMLO wins, you will only be able to buy food with food coupons from the state".

It sounds like a list of recycled cold-war era propaganda.

That's the kind of thing you have to make up, when your candidate gets caught up in a corruption scandal using a creative setup and mis-using federal information.

More videos: here.

I had a conflict of schedule (my plane leaving Barcelona two hours before my talk at GUADEC) and the organizers were kind enough to reschedule the Mono and Gtk# Q&A session at GUADEC to be on Monday instead of Thursday.

The session will be held in the "Sala de Actas" (Room #2) at 7pm on Monday 26th.

Jim Pubrick has written an interesting blog entry detailing how they are using Mono on Second Life. Second Life is going to use Mono to run the user-provided scripts with native code (which am told can be up to 150 times faster than the current engine).

SecondLife is using Mono in a non-conventional way, which I like to think is one of the benefits of having an open source engine, they have added a micro-threading implementation.

Microthreading was necessary because some of their simulations are made up of thousand of threads/routines, and using the default threads in Mono (which are mapped to operating system threads) would have been too heavy.

Their micro-threading implementation is different than Tomi's recent continuation work in that Second Life has added support to "migrate" running code across machines.

A presentation from the Second Life folks at Google Tech Talks.

If anyone has an invite to Zombo.Com please email it to me.

For your progressive needs, this week has a couple of interesting events in Boston:

• Noam Chomsky will present his new book "Failed States" tomorrow at 6pm in First Parish Church.
• Friday and Sunday at the Boston International Film Festival "Occupation 101", the movie I have been waiting to see for years. See the schedule for times.
  I will probably go to the Friday show.
• Update: Chris Toshok, FBI most-wanted 2004 man and developer extraordinaire, provides the transcript of Stephen Colbert's 2005 Commencement Address.

Tonight Laura, Duncan and myself went to watch "An Inconvenient Truth", featuring Al Gore as he presents his case for action to stop global warming.

The movie, which follows Al Gore through as he delivers the same speech over and over around the globe had everyone in the movie theather glued to their seats.

As the before and after images start rolling and the graphs and numbers of warming in the planet and the pictures of large chunks of ice the size of entire states start thawing the sense of urgency grows.

By the end of the movie not only everyone was applauding, but stayed seated as the credits and some extra messages kept rolling and applauded again. Few movies have that effect on people.

I highly recommend it.

Here is the YouTube Trailer.

Now, when I got home I Googled for the movie, to find the web site, and one of the sponsored link ads pointed to "Friends of Science" (not linking to them), which has a section on "Myths and Facts" about Global Warming. The section on Myths and Facts probably were strong enough a few months ago. They probably managed to make some people doubt the negative effects of Global Warming, but compared to the arguments put forth by Al Gore in the movie they just represent a radiography of the kind of shady discourse that passes as science and debate nowadays.

Some extra googling landed me at a site that has actually done a littble bit of research about who exactly these "Friends of Science" are, basically astroturfers.

In addition, last night we watched the PBS documentary on the AIDS epidemic (now you can watch it online). Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore appear on the documentary. After listening to both of them, Clinton very articulate and passionte, and Gore making the case in front of the Security Council on a health issue Laura turned and asked me "And this is the guy they tried to impeach?".

Addendum:

• "How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic"

Duncan pointed me today to this blog entry from Google Research: "Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken".

Fascinating read.

Stetic Lluis completed the work in Stetic, the Gtk# GUI designer, to support menu and toolbar editing. His work is based around Gtk+ UIAction/Action/ActionGroup, which takes advantage of the new features in modern Gtk+'s.

MonoDevelop hosting the updated Stetic GUI designer.

Read his full blog entry for further screenshots and explanations. The code is available on trunk.

MonoDevelop and C# 2.0: on the same blog entry Lluis talks about the integration of SharpDevelop 2.0's NRefactor code. This means that MonoDevelop will now do proper completion and parsing of C# 2.0 projects (Generics, anonymous methods, partial clases and so on).

Zac Bowling: has two interesting posts this week: his progress on Mozilla embedding. His post describes his work to give us finer control over embedding Mozilla in our applications (in particular to implement Windows.Forms's WebControl).

He also has a very nice post about uses of Mono beyond running your application on Linux and tips for .NET developers.

Google announced Picasa running on Linux, I agree with Robert Love's opinion that using and improving Wine was the right thing to do for Google. Wine and Picasa stability and performance are very impressive.

Independently of the open source debate surrouding Java, I enjoyed very much this blog entry from Sun's CEO. In particular:

I'm still amazed when I hear folks wondering how Sun monetizes Java. So at the risk of repetition, I'd like to share a few thoughts.

...

Then there was the civil war era in the US, when locomotive companies all had their own railroad widths and shapes - designed only to work with their rail cars and steam engines. How'd they fare? They failed, standards emerged that unified railways and rail lines, and that era created massive wealth, connecting economies within economies. Standards grew markets and value.