Top level order at CNN to downplay civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

I found the link at http://www.jihaddict.com/

Hunger starts to strike in Afghanistan

As stated by those informed (Chomsky also brought this up in his MIT talk) hunger in Afghanistan among refugees is starting to make its toll with many civilian deaths.

"She hadn't eaten anything for 10 days," Baran said. "We have no tent, either. She froze to death last night."

Baran brought his family to this camp outside the city of Herat 10 days ago from Badghis. Like hundreds of other families at Maslakh, which means "slaughterhouse," they have no shelter and are not yet eligible for food distributions.

These people do not have to worry anymore about the evil Taliban inflicting pain on them. They have been liberated and released from these evil-doers. These people thank the bombing for releasing their souls from the evil oppression.

Ximian Mexico

Went today to the Ximian Mexico offices and met with Israel, Javier, Tambet (who is visiting town), Chema, Arturo. Federico was missing as he spilled coffee on his keyboard.

Chema and I went to La Buena Tierra for an early dinner, and then across the street for some coffe. Very good location picked for the Ximian offices in Mexico.

Mancha

Went out with Mancha, Arturo, and Cynthia to Los Bigotes de Villa.

Implemented the base operator in Mono. While writing the test suite I ran into another piece of the compiler that I have neglected and have to start working on (mostly visibility issues).

radio

Today I was a guest at the Zona Libre a radio show that talks about Linux in Mexico City and broadcast from the University.

We had a lot of fun: Mancha, Arturo, Natorro and I were there, together with a bunch of guys that run this volunteer radio organization.

They have Pictures of the show, and you can also get the Audio (in spanish) and the IRC log

Flew to Mexico City, Arturo picked me up at the airport.

Later that night we had dinner at El Cambalache (Mancha's favorite meat restaurant).

Mono-C# compiler

Finally finished all the switch statement. The only bit missing now is `goto default'.

Working on airplanes is excellent. I love working without a network connection to distract me.

Back from New York at 1pm. The train from New York to Boston is pretty nice. You get to go to the coffee wagon, chill, get a spacious seat and they have AC power plugs for laptops.

I hug out all day with Mauricio. We mostly went restaurant and coffee hoping all day until it was time for the Jaguares Concert.

We ran into a few other friends at the concert, it was pretty good, but I had the feeling that the singer was in some kind of rush to finish singing a song. I might go see them again in Boston on December 15th.

On my way to New York to meet Mauricio and to go see the Jaguares concert tomorrow.

Switch statement in progress; Helped Ravi with the code to initialize arrays with non-static data.

Went to the movies with Tuomas, Radek, Duncan and Chema to see Spy Game.

Staples happened to sell the Envision 17" LCD monitor. It is cheap, gorgeous and easy to carry around.

My new computer has arrived. A nice and shiny HP desktop for home use. It came with a copy of Windows XP Home edition, pre-installed and with no CD to reinstall it.

As I tried to purchase a computer screen, I found out that MicroCenter had some pretty juicy screens, but they were expensive. And CompuUSA Cambridge is no more. They shut down.

Howard Zinn's article on "A Just Cause, Not a Just War" appeared re-printed in Mexico's Jornada newspaper today. You can read more at ZMag

MIT Social Justice Cooperative produced two fliers One and two.

An interview with Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani Scholar-activist that died on May 11, 1999 on the Taliban, Afganistan.

Yossou N'Dur: ``The next song is for all kids that suffer; Kids are the first victims of repression, Seven Seconds''

Operation Enduring Freedom, bringing Infinite Justice to people all over the world (click on images for details not on TV)

News

This page has good links on alternative News Sites

In other news, Oliver Stone's movie JFK had an interesting side effect. Worth keeping in mind when you read Richard Stallman's opinion on today events.

There is only one thing I have been afraid all of my life as a programmer (besides revere engineering device drivers) and it is to implement pointer dereference.

I have never been able to figure out why I am afraid of it, it seems pretty simple in theory, specially with the CIL bytecodes. But there is still something unknown in there that makes me afraid of it. It is definitely material for my shrink to study.

Anyways, in case you were wondering, I am still stuck in mutator unary operators while Dietmar hacked ValueType support and Paolo is quickly fixing System.Reflection.Emit bugs and Dick is busy finishing the threading/locking semantics of Mono to mimic the ones in Win32

webpage

I have been sprinkling my web page with a few pictures that I have taken. I also discovered that the HTML table tag is not as hard to use as I thought. One item less for the shrink.

Still fixing the unary mutator operators.

House

I woke up late this morning.

Exhibit A

Nat was still yelling at his computer this morning. I made a mental note to investigate the matter in more detail later. It is hard to believe that such a peaceful person like Nat (see Exhibit A) could be yelling at a computer for 12 hours straight.

Required-reading I finished last week reading Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence. A required reading for every american (or anyone trying to understand americans). I am slowly going through my queue of pending books, the next victim is Tragicomedia Mexicana (this one is to understand how some people in Mexico got so rich, and how others got so poor).

Ordered a desktop computer online. I just remembered that I forgot to get an ethernet card for it and a monitor. Details, details.

Mono

Ravi got enumerations going in the compiler, very good news. I am stuck handling a few non trivial cases for some unary operators.

Movies

Saw Amelie with Daniel. Best movie I have seen in the last two years. Wonderful movie. Not only is the movie excellent, but it manages to capture the spirit of Paris. Juantom�s had suggested in Spain that I watch it. I was in the mood to discuss the movie, but Daniel was in the mood to get a sweater. When I got home, Nat was yelling at his computer so I decided to purchase movies on amazon.fr as a replacement to discussing Amelie.

Went to the movies with Duncan and super hacker Radek (which just arrived this weekend to Boston) and we watched the Heist. The Fandango internet-ticket thing did not quite work as advertised so there was a long line of people waiting, and we missed the first few minutes of the movie.

Radek

I got a chance to talk to Radek about Mono and .NET. He currently works on GtkHTML together with Larry Ewing for the Evolution project, but he is looking for a spare time hacking activity.

Mono is of course the right spare time activity for every hacker ;-)

Went to sleep at 7am, woke up at 12:30, just in time for lunch at Juantom�s'.

Paella

Juantom�s made a RFC for a Paella on Saturday. He cooked it today.

Pictures available somewhere in the web site, I have to track them down.

Hector came back from Valencia, and was quite sleepy.

Arroz caldoso with everyone.

Jetlagged and woke up at 2am, ran into Nat on irc.

Went to the conference center and found that the GNOME booth was completely crowded! The guys in charge of the GNOME booth had been doing some excellent demos. A bunch of pictures (no thumbnails) from the Frankfurt trip are also available.

Went to a panel on Open Source, met Roberto Zicari on the panel (after so many years of emailing each other).

Did my Mono presentation

Flew to Madrid very tired.

Madrid

Ismael, Juantom�s and Amaya picked me up at the airport.

Mandatory dinner in town, we went to the Galician restaurant close to Ismael's house (which is now close to Juantom�s' new office).

Stayed at Ismael's