Today the Boston Film Festival showed Das Experiment. The movie was very intense and disturbing. Intense as very few movies I have seen in my life, indeed, it is hard to tell when was the last time I got so scared.

Anyways, we learned while leaving the movie (from a German girl that had seen the movie before) that they had removed from the end the subtitles that said `The events of this movie aren based on the Stanford Prison Experiment.'

It is even more scary that this actually took place.

I feel uneasy reading the experiment description from the professor, because to him it was only an experiment. The only place where he redeems himself a bit is where he ponders a number of questions at the end about the prison system.

From this site, I ran into the Peace Psychology papers, I have not checked them all yet, but there are some interesting bits.

Anyways, the movie stresses one interesting part based on the research from the Stanford Experiment: people in a position of power are bound to break the rules, and seem to enjoyed it.

This makes the need for strong rules where human rights can be violated not only extremely important, but they have to be carefully monitored.

Just found a reviewat FilmCritic.

New Camera

Today I met a very nice photographer called Rick Friedman who was carrying a Canon D60. I was shocked to see someone carrying that camera, as it is just about impossible to get your hands on that, I have tried, and I have looked every web site on the Internet, and that camera is just unavailable.

Well, Rick was nice enough to actually call a friend of his in the area that actually carries the camera and was able to give us one. So today after work, Peter and I went to check out Zeff Photo this store, which was about 20 minutes away from the office.

I got back with the camera and all sorts of extra toys for it, now its time to take some pictures and see if I can match those from Juantomas with his mighty Canon Ixus.

Now the next step is to get either a compact flash with 512 megs of ram and 24x access speed, or to get the IBM 1gig Microdrive, decisions, decisions.

DSL

I just got DSL at home, but it seems to be slower than the public Newbury Open Wireless network that I was using before. Although with the DSL I can actually use irc and https POST (I have no idea why https POST did not work with the open network)

Mono

Quick status report: Martin is working on a C + CIL Debugger that we should be able to use very soon; Paolo and Dietmar are fixing our existing bugs in the runtime, and working on new optimizations for the JIT engine; Dick and Duncan are fixing bugs on the underlying class libraries and finally Gonzalo is working on the ASP.NET code.

Israel has kept three million people under curfew for 79 days now. The article goes on to describe how Israel is seizing illegaly more Palestinian land.

That means roughly since late June.

How did the summer treat you? Some nice vacations on the beach? Did you get to travel around the world? Maybe have a challenging summer internship?

I know I got a lot of fun, and traveled a lot this summer. In the meantime, a nation was ketp under house arrest, some of them shot, some of them do not have food, and no access to medical facilities.

The war against terror in Israel and Palestine is nothing but a smart spin on ethnic cleansing.

How is this any less evil than the worst attrocities in humanity?

A few days ago, I made a list of Human Rights that are being violated by Israel, here is the list:

• Article 2:
  Not every person has the same right, there is active discrimination based on race/religion
  . Palestinians are subject to military law, while Israelis are subject to civil law.
• Article 3:
  Israel actively puts the life of civilians in danger
  Israel curfews limit 3 million of palestinians liberty
  Israel uses summary executions without a trial and kills people
  
• Article 4:
  Conditions for Palestinians working on Israel is one of servitude.
• Article 5:
  Israel interrogation mechanisms are reportedly using torture
  Curfews put population under inhuman treatment
  Curfews prohibit people from getting supplies and medicine they need
  
• Article 7:
  Palestinians are held to military law in various zones in Palestine, while Jews are subject to regular Israeli law
  
• Article 9:
  Israel uses its fight against terror to engage in ethnical cleansing
  
• Article 10:
  Suspects are not tried before a tribunal, but summarily executed
  
• Article 11:
  Ditto.
• Article 13:
  Curfews since April violate this right
  Palestinians are not allowed to re-enter the land that belongs to them
  
• Article 17:
  Looting by Israel Defense Forces to demoralize the population violates this principle
  The stealing of Palestinian land is ilegal
  

Today I went to see a movie to the Copley Place movie theater, which I try to avoid, as the seats are far from great, but seems like every bad movie is playing on the comfortable theaters, and all the good ones are playing either here or Kendall.

I noticed that the Boston Film Festival was going on, and got a ticket for Interview with the Assassin. Not only good, but the director introduced the movie and there was an questions and answers session at the end.

Great performance from Raymond Barry as the asssassin.

Darts in the chest: just following orders.

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter's published an interesting piece in the Washington Post: The Troubling Face of America.

September 11

A new piece from Howard Zinn talks about the ignored issues after September 11.

This reminds me I also found something interesting from the Freedom of Information Act a few days ago. This includes the Church Report that describes the covert operations of the US in Chile, and the financing of anti-Allende activities including the organization of the 1973 State Coup.

The State Coup was carried out on on September 11 1973. Estimates range from six thousand people killed to ten thousand during the first few weeks of the dictatorship.

New Interview with Chomsky on Iraq

of his weapons of mass destruction... -- From the Independent.

War Blogs

Today as I was reading Trevor's log I found a link to Warblogger watch. This is a site dedicated to keeping an eye on all the nutcases advocating war.

Gyro

Microsoft Research released their prototype CLR and C# compiler with support for generics

30 of 49 Palestinians killed by Israel in August were civilians and other stories of Israel state terrorism.

Hardly a controversial view, here is Noam Chomsky addressing the same question

Ana

Girlfriend Ana has setup a new web page

I have avoided updating my activity log, because I wanted to run it using a Mono-based logging software. I have various of the pieces in place already (rss, macros for my site, and a replacement for the text processor I have). But I wanted to have a better mechanism to maintain the log, and get a new design, because the one you see right now is terrible.

Anyways, instead of doing this, I have been working on mPhoto: a scalable image viewer (an image widget currently) so Nat can stop using his MacOS X to browse his 10k+ picture collection and use Mono/Linux.

Curfew

Israel maintains the Palestinian population under curfew. This madeness began in April. How would you like to have spent the last five months of your life under curfew, without food to give to your children, without a chance to see a doctor, or get the medical supplies you need.

Ariel Sharon, who was held responsible for the massacre of Shabra and Shatila

Nobody should be above the law, nobody should be able to violate international law, and nobody should be allowed to violate human right, and much less in the scale that the state of Israel is doing.

35 years of military occupation, 35 years of living under military law, 35 years of racial discrimination in the territories that lawfully belonged to your population.

By actions like the summary executions, bombing of a family complex where an alleged Hamas leader lived (killing 11 children) without due process, only puts Israel on the same moral ground as the terrorists.

The Israel government is not interested in eliminating terror, it is interested in ethnically cleaning the Palestinian population.

Iraq

Former UN Weapons inspector has testified that Iraq does not pose a threat to their neighbors; that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction (as opposed to the US weapons of mass love); that Iraq does not pose a risk to the United States.

He pointed out in an interview with Jon Stewart that since Saddam Hussein has been demonized, a whole range of diplomatic options have been removed from the table. Again, we, as civilized humans have the duty to attempt every possible diplomatic option before resorting to meassures that would lead to loss of human life.

He also advocated on that very interview that sanctions to Iraq should be dropped. He did testify about this in Congress as well. Of course, Iraq is already being bombed routinely. Sounds like a violation of international law.

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.