I have been considering for a while to write about the creative coup being cooked in Mexico. It is a creative coup, because nobody had thought of this before. If there is one area where we mexicans excel is in coming up with some crooked schemes. This time is the turn of President Fox.

President Fox is using a technicality on a minor issue to block his strongest opponent from running on the upcoming elections.

I envision many countries will be able to follow Mexico's leadership on this new twist on bringing improved democracy to their people. The trick is simple: make sure to sue your opponent shortly before he presents his candidacy for the elections. You must ensure that your country has, or passes a law that will allow you to keep people under investigation to run for office.

Laura Carlsen's article gets to the facts quickly and with no verbiage.

A few selected quotes:

When Vicente Fox ended the 71-year reign of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party in the 2000 presidential elections, many observers heralded it as the beginning of a long-overdue transition to democracy. Now President Fox, in a concerted effort with members of the former ruling party, has closed the door on that transition.

By orchestrating a pseudo-legal offensive against Mexico City's popular mayor, Andr�s Manuel L�pez Obrador, Fox has not only dashed the hopes of Mexicans for a real democracy, but has also destroyed the political capital he gained back in 2000.

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Mexico City's central square to protest Congres's decision to strip L�pez Obrador of immunity to prosecution granted elected officials. The mayor will now stand trial for allegedly failing to follow a court order to halt work on an access road to a local hospital. According to the federal attorney general's office, the government will likely put L�pez Obrador behind bars, as a "preventive measure," before the trial even starts.

The president and his Secretary of State initially claimed that they were not involved in this activity, until the details about the secret meeting between them and a federal Judge came to light exposing the complot. Oops. They blamed the opposition for `politicizing' the issue.

The trial for Andr�s Manuel is over a minor problem (read the article for the details), and you have to wonder about priorities.

In the meantime, Fox has yet to answer to various charges of corruption in his administration involving his own campaign, Petroleos Mexicanos (the state owned oil company), his special properties, the use of federal resources for his personal use and the Cuban scandal.

The Cuban scandal is probably the best, it is like Watergate but ten times bigger: infiltration, complots, video-taping, bribery, federal agents concocting against the opposition parties. It has it all. The only difference is that nothing is happening to Fox.

On the economic side, the last week saw the largest capital transfer out of the country since the 1994 depression (the one that would bring the dollar price from 3 to 10 pesos).

So we are dealing with a special kind of weasel here: a dumb weasel.

The Independent story is here

Edd is back from Lebanon.

Edd, who was the first person to tell me that Lebanon was a great place to visit, just came back from his second trip to Lebanon. He posted parts of his travel log and some pictures on his blog.

Updated screenshots of GPE Palmtop Environment are available here.

GPE is royalty-free GUI framework for embedded devices and is based on the Linux, X and the Gtk+ toolkit.

I found this article on the fear of flying from Robert Fisk fascinating: After what I've been through, it's no wonder I have a fear of flying:

C# programming tutorial

A tutorial on C# in a Wiki: here

Progress on the OpenOffice/Mono front, here is a screenshot from the OOo/Mono team: Sample C# program running in OOo.

Loved the article of Joel on Picking a Ship Date. As usual, he has various entertaining stories to make his point.

Both Red Hat and SUSE have their Linux distributions shipping every six months (Fedora Core and SUSE Professional) which in my opinion burns too many developer cycles on testing, quality assurance and documentation. Except for a few fairly obscure developer features each distribution is hardly distinguishable from the previous version.

Maybe its a good thing that these features are released on a six-month based schedule, but in my opinion they are not as important as they used to be. In the early days of Linux the the a.out to ELF migration or the libc5 to glibc migration would have every Linux user running to download the latest distribution.

A few interesting quotes:

If you have a lot of validation and unit tests, and if you write your software carefully, you may get to the point where any daily build is almost high enough quality to ship.

On reasons why you might have to change your release date, I found this painfully funny:

Or maybe a new version of the Linux kernel is coming out soon with yet another all-new system to implement packe filtering;

On new software releases that are not worth upgrading to:

Corel PhotoPaint and Intuit Quickbooks are particularly egregious examples of this; they have a new "major" verson every year which is rarely worth buying

I have a similar feeling with my Linux distros; I tend to stay with my current distribution for very long periods of time. Literally, only when forced to upgrade through dependencies I consider an upgrade. Maybe am no longer a sophisticated user.

Joel has a series of new articles on the creation of his FogBugz, which am sure Joel readers have already clicked through: Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.

On teaching and hackers:

But mostly because I'm a pedantic windbag who can't resist the opportunity to teach a little lesson to the younguns who think that a compiler has to generate machine code.

[...]

Based on your age you will either call this an evil hack (if you're young) or an elegant hack (if you're old);

Random

Interesting read on blogs, IM, presence, wikis and our humanity on Adam's blog.

Microsoft and Open Source

Mitch Kapor comments on the recent Groove acquisition from Microsoft, Mitch said something interesting:

The challenge now is whether Ray and Groove, which represent forces of architectural innovation, can have a successful impact at Microsoft, which after all, is a large (58,000 person), middle-aged (30 year-old) company. It's hard to know whether the loss of nimbleness due to size and age is a greater challenge to Microsoft than is open source.

I have finally started looking at Microsoft's Indigo, and am disappointed at it for various reasons, maybe I will write something about it later. In the meantime, I started to learn about ZeroC's ICE which seems more useful as a basic RPC framework.

From the Electronic Intifada diaries: International peace observers report on the militas attacks on palestinians on the West Bank and poisoning of their flocks.

A more comprehensive article is available on Zmag.

Iraq and the case of the missing WMDs

The report is out. The culprit for the war was "Curveball" for feeding bad intelligence. Everyone else can now go and get a raise.

Jon has authored SharpMusique: a port of PyMusique to C# on Gtk#.

SharpMusique

SharpMusique is a very useful tool, but in addition Jon is shipping a C# binding ("VLC.cs") to the VideoLan library. VideoLan is a cross platform media framework, so this is quite convenient for folks developing cross-plaform media apps with Mono.

The only mistake of the afternoon was allowing Nat to test drive SharpMusique while I was logged in.

Interviews

An interview I did while in Turkey: here.

Scott Ritter on Iran

Scott Ritter, the weapons inspector that predicted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has written a new article Sleepwaling to Disaster in Iran.

Helen Thomas

I enjoy reading Helen Thomas as well, her latest piece is: Screened Audiences, Fake News Promote Bush Agenda.

Asad of Syria

The day after my return from Beirut, Duncan and myself took a cab back home late at night. The cab driver was a Lebanese which overheard our conversation and suggested the book Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East.

Someone had recommended this book before. So far, the book has been excellent, non-stop reading. I am giving it five stars in Amazon.

Amazon

Amazon keeps findinding ways of emptying my wallet. First the free-delivery service, and now they have added a list of books referenced by any given book. A feature that I have been properly abusing.

I answered a few questions for Howard Wen from O'Reilly on Mono, it covers some of the progress that we have done recently, the interview is: here

Francisco, one of Mono's key contributors lost his son in Iraq yesterday while he was on a patrol operation.

Our sorrows are with Paco and his family.

One of my pending email was a follow up to an email from Paco to his son a few days ago. Paquito was looking forward to come back and continue composing music and continue his graphics design work. He was composing and mixing music from the barracks on his spare time.

Update: Corrected the link above.

Lluis has a nice summary of the progress in MonoDevelop.