This summer I will be participating in a series of lectures at Bertrand Meyer's LASER Summer School on Software Engineering in the Elba Island.

I will be talking about open source development.

In CSPAN1 last night you could watch the White House Correspondents Dinner where Stephen Colbert had a thirty minute intervention.

From Boing Boing a transcript, and a torrent for the whole thing.

Crooks and Liars has a copy here.

Bush's face is priceless. And there were many tense moments, you can tell the audience was way uncomfortable.

Update: Colbert will be profiled today in 60 minutes.

"Living with War", Neil Young's new album, is currently being streamed from his web site.

Alternative streaming site.

It is also available from Real's Rhapsody.

Neil interviewed in CNN, available on YouTube.

An early review of the album by a friend of Neil Young.

Another pre-release review.

Yesterday I found MonoCalendar, a Windows.Forms-based calendar application, very similar in spirit to iCal.

MonoCalendar is a big exercise in abusing System.Drawing, when I ran it in the morning it was crashing. Just as I was preparing to file a proper bug (and after nagging Massimiliano to look at the crash) Sebastien, Bill Holmes and friends had fixed the GDI+ issues that were stopping MonoCalendar from running.

here is a screenshot:

Windows.Forms-based MonoCalendar.

To run it, you must be using the latest versions from SVN of Mono and GDI+. Hopefully we will have a new beta of Mono soon (1.1.16).

This summer Google is sponsoring a number of open source projects with their Summer of Code 2006.

Last year Mono had a great success: a lot of fresh code was contributed and many of the students that participated in the effort continue to be contributors to the effort (see my previous comments about it).

See our page with ideas for summer projects and feel free to email me if you have any questions (or reach me on irc.gnome.org, channel #mono).

In addition to Mono, the Beagle Project is also being sponsored for the Summer of Code. They also have a great list of tasks to implement in the joyful world of C#.

Tomi Valkeinen has implemented continuations for the Mono virtual machine.

His continuations work is here.

Most of his tests are used for a user-level thread implementation he calls Microthreads.

This looks like a very nice addition, and Paolo seems to like it too. In the past I abused C# iterators to get some of the benefits of continuations in Mono's ASP.NET (the HTTP processing pipeline).

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters that triggered the fall of Nixon, calls for senate hearings on the Cheney administration.

Most of what we have learned about the reality of this administration--and the disconcerting mind-set and decision-making process of President Bush himself--has come not from the White House or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or the Treasury Department, but from insider accounts by disaffected members of the administration after their departure, and from distinguished journalists, and, in the case of a skeletal but hugely significant body of information, from a special prosecutor. And also, of late, from an aide-de-camp to the British prime minister. Almost invariably, their accounts have revealed what the president and those serving him have deliberately concealed [...]

Alp just noticed this commit to Mono:

2006-04-19  Massimiliano Mantione  

        * mini.c: Disabled inline where it can alter the call stack in a
        way visible from managed code.

        * driver.c: enabled inline,consprop,copyprop,treeprop,deadce by
        default.

And was wondering why we did not make more noise about it.

The story is that the actual new optimizations shipped in 1.1.14, but inlining had some negative side effects that broke some applications (for instance, if we inlined a method that used System.Reflection.Assembly.GetCallingAssembly() you would get the wrong assembly.

The other problem that we found was related to the order in which classes were initialized when no static constructor was defined (for the full gory details, you can read this).

The first issue has been fixed (the inliner was too happy inlining). We have solved the known instances of static constructor initialization, but inlining might expose some of these problems, hopefully they should be resolved by the time we ship 1.1.16.

Simon shows his Nexxia application running on Linux with Mono in this video. Check it out here.

After a few months of no updates at Billmon.org he is back with each piece better than the previous one.

His analysis on Iran and related events, priceless.

New Billmon expression of the day: "neocons and their pet rocks". I love that expression in so many different levels.