As Jeff and myself walked back from a dose of fried quesadillas from Anna's taqueria on MIT I was telling him "There is always an interesting event announced on these walls".

And in the middle of one of the corridors I found that both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of the "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" will be talking at the Stata Center at MIT on Wednesday.

The book has been excellent so far. It expands on a paper that was widely discussed last year but goes into a lot more depth.

Another excellent book that I just finished reading recently is Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East.

Update: Robert pointed out that I forgot the link to the event.

Over the summer Ben Motmans rewrote the database support in MonoDevelop. Working with Ben was a pleasure.

Part of the challenge was that I personally had no idea what it is that people do with these database UIs. My contact with databases is so bad that about once a year I google up the instructions to setup Postgres again, and figure out my login, password and connection string followed up by extensive cut-and-pasting of "CREATE" statements until I have something that roughly can store a few values.

His work has now been integrated in the First MonoDevelop Beta release.

Query Result and Database Explorer

Alter Table

Creating a SQLite connection.

This Database Add-in replaces the old Mono.Query add-in, and will hopefully continue to improve to have a central location for all of your database needs.

Dave Winer on Media you can't trust. Reflections on Ahmadinejad and its coverage.

Dave also recommends "All the Shah's Men" a book that I recommended earlier this year.

Tonight, Jon Stewart had Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia on his show and interviewed him.

I learned in the interview that Evo Morales made two promises during his campaign: to nationalize the energy sector and to do "Reforma Agraria" (sorry, forgot the translation).

He achieved both within eight months in office.

In the energy sector, he said that the Bolivian government used to receive 300 million dollars for its energy and today it receives 2,000 million dollars.

In addition to my participation on the keynote at Remix07 with Brad Abrams, I will be hosting a session on Silverlight on Linux which will be heavily oriented towards questions and answers.

Now, I have been living in Boston for seven years, and I have no idea that there was a Hyatt Regency in town.

Hope to see you there!

For the sake of minimizing our valgrind time, dividing and conquering the task of spotting leaks, and to reduce the surface that must be audited for security for Silverlight, Rolf has commited support that removes the Mono dependency from Moonlight.

Moonlight 1.0 will not require Mono anymore (Moonlight 1.1, that tracks Silverlight 1.1 will).

In the meantime the team has been busy performance tuning video playback for Moonlight. As it turns out there is no one-size-fits all optimization for video on Linux as different video cards are accelerated differently.

When we were describing one of our hacks to improve performance to Kevin Gallo he quoted a friend of his on graphics performance, and it went more or less like this "Graphics performance work is basically a collection of hacks".

It inspired confidence in some of the tricks that we have been doing to reduce the work that Moonlight does.

My friend Chris Toshok is looking for a college to attend to learn a few new tricks. He has a few constraints, but if you can help him find a place in Boston, we might be able to bring him back to the Norteast.

Last week I was interviewed by the LugRadio crew. The interview is now available.

The last question I think was the most interesting, but I did not have time to actually finish answering it.

The crew has a nice gallery of pictures for their Rock-band look. But a picture at Starbucks?

From Scott Adam's Sorry I confused You post where explains his satiric post from the day before:

Still, the bulk of my sympathies are with whatever group suffers the most, regardless of how much of the problem is their own damned fault. To feel otherwise would be inhuman. Sometimes it feels as if the Palestinians are only one Gandhi away from fixing their problems. But he’d need to be bulletproof.

Mark, the hacker behind Mono's CoreCLR Security implementation has committed to SVN the support for generic code sharing.

Generic code sharing allows the same native code generated by the JIT to be reused for more than one generic instantiation. This can be done when the JIT can ensure that the code generated for the given method would be exactly the same.

This optimization currently needs to be enabled with -O=gshared

Update: Mark blogged some details and clarifications

Am pondering which movie we could go see tonight, here are some of the reviews of what lies ahead:

"This monster film makes even the remake of Godzilla look good."

"The only winners in Dragon Wars are the computer-imaging geeks who must have logged tons of overtime. The rest of the world is left scratching its head at a monster epic so dismal that it doesn’t even register as a guilty pleasure."

"...wants to position itself as a first-date movie, but it's a first-date movie for those who don't believe in second ones."

"How hard could it be to make a clever parody of Snow White? Very hard, apparently." and "Sydney White has a concept and a title, but beyond that it draws a blank."

"There's more genuine humor to be gleaned from saying 'Woodcock' over and over again than from watching Mr. Woodcock."

"Less a brave movie than a foolhardy one. Trapped in a no man's land between seriousness and pulp trash, it plays like a combination of Death Wish and The Hours. If that sounds like an awkward fit, it is."

"It wants to be a moody, dark exploration of pain and revenge (the same feelings I experienced during and after the movie)."

Sounds like its another weekend of skipping the movies.

Am stuck in Megatron 3 (or Meganoid? Its some kind of Mega) on the Wii, there is some dude that I cant kill. I think its time to hire a professional through Craig's List, get them to come home, kill the dude and move on with the game.