Jose Antonio Sol�s tried to do a Rupert clone by using advanced bio-engineering techniques but failed. Here is the result of the experiment:

Mono

New type lookup system in the compiler has been deployed, fixing many existing problems. Martin Baulig has also joined Ximian and has been killing many pending bugs in the compiler, and the compiler is more robust than ever.

There is also a faira amount of Mono coverage this week, as I am doing a presentation at O'Reilly with the latest and greatest about Mono.

Cover story on eWeek, InfoWorld and the Ximian press release Enterprise Systems picked me in their top 100 power-picks I got #18.

Today it was the second day of the Gnome Summit. Peter took various yesterday, which are now available here .

I arrived at MIT around 2pm, and went to the hacking room. But found nobody there, which I found quite surprising. It would take me 90 minutes to figure what had happened: everybody was at the Rob Pike presentation. At this point, I ran to the presentation, but people were coming back, and found Rob with a group of people coming towards the hacking room.

The good news is that the discussion about Rob's work continued on the hacking room, and I got to catch up on his presentation on the plumber. As part of his plumber presentation, there were various Plan-9 features discussed, which are always nice to see.

The big news today is that Paolo fixed the last remaining problems in the runtime and the compiler and we are now completely self hosting on Linux. Which is good.

I am still working on the new type lookup system that should close various bugs in the compiler.

Martin Baulig will be an intern over at Ximian for a couple of weeks during the summer. These are great news, because he is the man behind the debugging support in Mono. Great news. Just great.

Duncan has been busy writing sample applications for Gtk#, so we can stress test the bindings, and we can have something nice to show for the O'Reilly conference.

I have signed my lease to my new apartment. Very cool, and in a nice location. Will be moving out by the end of August.

Evolution

Switched to the development branch of Evolution (RupertZilla) for my day to day work. I use a peculiar view of the calendar and have a lot of information, which made Evolution 1.0.x quite slow. The new version is about three times faster.

Also, incorporating e-mail into evolution is dramatically faster for indexed mailboxes, thanks to Michael Zucchi for the new indexing engine which can cope much better with large volumes of e-mail.

Finally, the new user interface touches are really nice in RupertZilla, something that I was missing. I decided to switch because all of the bug reports that I had filed before in Bugzilla have been taken care of now.

Also, the new composer is gorgeous, and allows for multiple-language spelling. Since I write in Spanish and English this is very helpful.

Jos� Barber�n, which was my boss while working for the PRD during the 1994 elections died this morning. He studied the results of the 1988 and 1994 elections, and found plenty of evidence of the tampering of the electoral results.

His findings were documented in "Radiorgraf�a del Fraude". What nobody realized is that it was possible to plot the results from the elections. You would expect a regular population distribution, but instead the results for the election showed the PRI winning with abnormalities in the population graphics, they called this phenomenon the "crocodile's tail" because of the shape of the graph.

A typical graph would look like this (plotting the percentage with which a given party won per locality):

This is how the PRI won in several states:

What that means is that there were many places where the PRI won the election completely (100% votes of the votes) which is an anomality, particularly in Chiapas.

Sorry for the poor graphs ;-)

A quote I found online for the book:

"The statisticians found two telltale signs of massive tampering. In place of the single bell-shaped curve that would be expected to describe the distribution of votes obtained by each party, the PRI was found to have two such curves: one centered around a mean of 36 percent (its true national average), and the other peaking around an implausible 100 percent."

"A second diagnostic test revealed the provenance of these 'unanimous' results. Whereas totals for each of the opposition parties had last digits that occurred with roughly equal frequency, the last digit of PRI totals was 60 percent more likely to be a zero, indicating that the PRI had inflated its totals by simply adding zeros to its actual vote count."

Last year he begun leading the effort to make the Mexico City government move to Linux.

Many people in the Linux community in Mexico had been working with his teams bringing Linux to the administration.

We will miss him.

The University of Mariland's Fishcal user interface for calendars seems like a good place to borrow ideas for things that we can do with Mono, Gtk# and Evolution.

Janis Ian:

Costing me money? I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet?and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing

...

Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money.

The article goes on to explain what things the RIAA should do if they really cared about artists (they dont) instead of caring only for their own profits.

The issue here is profits: The artist needs are not going to enter the picture, unless they will help profits. In the above article, a nice case is made.

Courtney Love said the same thing two years ago in Courtney Love does the Math in Salon.

Peru report

In Peru, the free software law is getting very good coverage.

The coverage is in depth, with interviews to the congressmen behind the law, and what it means to people.

In spanish.

Refusenik

Another real hero speaks: Why I wont serve Sharon:

No more. No more excuses. We members of Courage to Refuse, reserve soldiers who have vowed not to serve in the occupied territories, will not set foot beyond the 1967 line unless it is in civilian clothes and as invited guests.

Recently I was having a discussion about the Palestine situation with my friend Jody. And there are a couple of things that I have been thinking about since that discussion:

First, we should all strive to preserve Human Rights. That is the only foundation in which we can have a meaningful debate.

Take a look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And ask yourself whether Ariel Sharon is violating or not human rights.

Second, Spain has dealt in a pretty interesting way with terrorism in the Basque country. For instance, they have not resorted to establishing curfews on the entire population because there are terrorist groups in the region.

They have not resorted to blaming the entire Basque countrie for the crimes of a few.

A million people in Palestine are under curfew, that is also a human rights violation.

Bush's plan on Palestine

What an Israel Officer has to say about Bush's policy on the Middle East.

Peace

An article on peace activism in Israel: here

More Killing

Ha'arez reports on `How Abd a-Samed became the 116 child killed in Gaza'. 26% of those killed in Gaza are children.

Libert�, Egalit�, Fraternit�.

Rodolfo said something very interesting in Uruguay. In modern culture, most people realize the importance of the french revolution's "Libert� and Egalit�" (although, as some people say, those with money are more equal than others). But we do not generally acknowledge the importance of the Fraternit� piece.

Gnome has been for some time been seen as a hippy project, because we originally used some nice flowers on our web site. I think that many of the people involved with gnome and free software were of the fraternit� kind.

Anyways, something worth keeping in mind.

Palladium

Interesting list of questions and answers on the Palladium.

This raises the question of whether governments are serving the people that elect them, or are serving other interests. The war on drugs, the Ucita, the Dmca, the war on communism, and the war on terror.