Miguel de Icaza

23 May 2005: Dissent like its 2005

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Mon, 23 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Check ChomskyTorrents for your dissenting needs in torrent form.

Update: Fixed the previous link.

Nina Simone

Maria Laura just introduced me to Nina Simone, wonderful.

Galloway's Transcriptn

An transcript of the amazing declarations of George Galloway in the US Senate: here.

Update: Even better, there is a video.

Ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter talks about the background of the hearing.

17 May 2005: Cross Language Integration

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Tue, 17 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Lluis Sánchez from the Mono team on his blog produced two screencasts: (first and second) which demostrate how Mono allows code written in C#, Boo and Java to work transparently with each other.

The demo shows:

The latest MonoDevelop IDE in action: creating a project made up of components and libraries written in multiple languages.
Three different languages consuming the Gtk# API.
The Mono Debugger in action. The debugger is a library and there are two front-ends that consume this library: a GUI front-end as seen on this screencast and a command-line front-end.
MonoDevelop's new templates for Boo and Java.
Three different languages instantiating and inheriting code from another language.

The Java magic is achieved through IKVM and the GNU Classpath.

Read Lluis' blog for more information on the futures for MonoDevelop.

The screencasts: first and second.

Enlightenment#

Hisham has been working on Mono bindings for the Enlightenment (EFL#). You can find the bindings on the module "efl-sharp" on our repository.

Better Late than Never

Found about the existance of ccMixter: the Creative Commons site for sampling, mashing and sharing music.

Old iPod

I found a use for my old ipod. It will become a Linux-powered voice recorder.

Zoltan Takes on the The Last Frontier

Zoltan, hacker extraordinaire, has embarked on the last frontier.

13 May 2005

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Fri, 13 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Stuttgart, Pilsen, Prague, Paris

I will be doing two keynotes at Guadec in Stuttgart and at the .NET Technologies in Pilsen.

I have strategically placed a few cities on this Eurotrip to visit some friends and meet with some developers in the way. If you want to join me for lunch, dinner to discuss Mono, .NET, Gnome, free software or Linux write me an email to my gmail account miguel.de.icaza@gmai.com.

The dates are as follows:

Germany: Stuttgart: May 27th to May 31st for the European GNOME conference.
Czech Republic, Pilsen: May 31st and June 1st at the .NET Technologies conference.
Czech Republic, Prague: June 1st and June 2nd.
Paris, France: June 3rd and June 4th.

Update: Sorry about the dates. A bug in my brain prevented me from incrementing the month to June. The dates above have been fixed.

Spec#

A few new ideas for C# are being tried out on Spec#. It is taking steps into building tools to prove the correctness of the code. This is done by integrating into the language things like pre-conditions, post-conditions, object invariants, non-null types and checked exceptions. A separate tool is later used to do a lint-like process on the program.

File Systems in C#

You can now write your own user-level file system in C# bindings are here

Paco, r0ml, Stephen in Boston

Tonight Ben and myself had dinner with Paco, r0ml and Stephen which all happen to be in town this week. Sadly I did not take any pictures, but Paco might have some images to share later on.

It was one of the most fun dinners I had in a while everyone had tons of stories to share. We went to Casa Romero one of my favorite restaurants in Boston. Ben ordered "shrimp with something". Only later he learned that "something" was a sauce of corn parasites. He seemed to like it.

Only today I found that r0ml's not only had a blog, but he was raised in Brazil as a kid. His portuguese is vastly superior to mine, even after having being married to a brazilian for almost two years.

11 May 2005: Open Source Java, part 2

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Wed, 11 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

After my post on Apache's Harmony project I have been watching the fireworks on the blogs and the mailing lists. One thing is clear: nobody quite knows what Harmony is supposed to be.

There are pros and cons. The main pro is that I discovered the BileBlog, a modern-age blog that reads like a good Jamie Zawinski opinion. In particular the flame about project Harmony is gem.

Unlike Mono, open source Java faces a big problem: there are a number of free commercial Java runtimes available for every operating system that matters. The group of people who would have contributed to a free java to scratch an itch are gone. From those who remain another large chunk will switch in a heartbeat to a commercial implementation the moment they run into missing features, scalability issues, the lack of a moving GC or a hard to debug problem.

So you must rely purely on free software advocates or people employed to clone Sun's Java for a strategic purpose.

To illustrate my point: Mark reports that for the two months leading to May 7th GNU Classpath had 299 commits and today is made up of roughly 900,000 lines of source code. Mono in the same time frame had 985 commits to its core class libraries and has roughly of 1,600,000 lines of code. The previous count is only for the core class libraries and does not include Mono-specific or Gnome-specific class libraries. The Mono effort is also three years younger than Classpath and five years younger than Kaffe.

For an open source Java effort to succeed, it not only needs to match the functionality of Sun's Java first, but it must offer functionality that is not available anywhere if it wants to attract developers to its core. Today there are probably two openings in this area. IKVM which makes Java and .NET run side-by-side and GCJ which turns Java code into native code.

Java and C#, CLI and JVM

Havoc last post bounces across every possible point.

I was not going to enter the language discussion on PlanetGnome, because it touches on too many topics. For one, I think that:

Some key libraries must remain written in C. And we (The Mono Group) have a very good framework for binding GObject-based APIs into Mono APIs.
We have a tendency to dump things into a library and hoping that every application will use the library to gain consistency.
For example, recently a user mailed me to point out that although he can browse his files on a SMB share, he can not actually use any of his local tools to manipulate these files. It turns out that instead of doing the obvious thing, which was to ask the kernel to mount the file system the path we went down on was to use the Gnome-VFS to provide an SMB transport. And this works beautifully with the Gnome tools, but it does not work with any other tools.
Mono right now shines as a platform for developing desktop applications, and we want to make sure that the developer experience there is great. Once we have conquered that space, we can organically reach into other spaces, but lets first get the first generation of Mono-based GNOME applications rock solid and shipping.
I would very much like Mono-based applications to be part of the standard Gnome desktop release and get the stamp of approval of the Gnome Foundation. There is no mandate that all distributions must ship all the packages, so Red Hat can just not ship this.

I think my comments echo Mikael's post, which both Jeffrey and Havoc seem to have missed.

I wanted to follow up on a few things that Havoc mentioned:

Graydon's contrast of Java and C# GUI code is a passable rendering of Java source code into C#, but is hardly an analysis of the technical issues.
For an actual technical technical contrast there is Dare's C# for Java programmers document and the eight-part interviews with Anders Hejlsberg.
Last year I was invited to present to the Red Hat Java summit in Boston. My presentation at the time focused on teaching to a Java-savvy audience the differences between the languages Java and C# and the JVM and the CLI, I have uploaded the slides here.
The same universe of open source libraries being furiously developed for Java are being developed for .NET. Either direct ports, or re-implementations of the same concepts.
Mind you, a lot of these open source technologies under development for Java and .NET give me a Freshmeat.net-deja vu. I still fail to see the correlation between all this server code and the Gnome desktop.
I can only smile when I see that Havoc tells people to try Java 5 as an alternative to Mono. Specially considering that any use of Java 5 features will likely lock people into using Sun's proprietary Java.

10 May 2005: Innovation

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Tue, 10 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Jamie correctly points out that the idea of having the search functionality present at all times without popping up an annoying dialog box predates Firefox, it has been availble on Emacs and XEmacs forever:

Emacs search functionality is also a bit more evolved at this point than Firefox (in an Emacs kind of way). Anyways, I can not wait for more desktop applications to use this model for searches.

Mono's Performance

Gonzalo has posted some details on the evolution of Mono's performance for WebForms and WebServices here.

Summary: Loading a test that shows a directory listing without any caching enabled has gone from 30 requests per second a year ago to 155 requests per second as of Mono 1.1.7. Check the details on the incremental improvements that got that performance.

09 May 2005: National ID card in the US

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Mon, 09 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Some folks are opposing the national ID card in the US, for more details see the UnrealID.com web site. A FAQ is available from News.com. BoingBoing has a call for action.

To get the law approved, legislators used a clever hack: the actual RealID thing is not being discussed or debated, instead it was just hidden inside another piece of legislation which will likely get approved (some military budget).

Bruce Schneier, security and cryptography expert also has some negative things to say about the plan, but focuses more on the lack of security that this will bring and comments on the legislative hack:

If you haven't heard much about REAL ID in the newspapers, that's not an accident. The politics of REAL ID is almost surreal. It was voted down last fall, but has been reintroduced and attached to legislation that funds military actions in Iraq. This is a "must-pass" piece of legislation, which means that there has been no debate on REAL ID. No hearings, no debates in committees, no debates on the floor. Nothing.

ID cards have successfully been used in totalitarian regimes to impose the will of those in control. Am not saying this will be the case in the US, but I figured I might share some perspective:

In Lebanon they were effectively used to identify the opposition and carry massacres effectively (both major groups: christians and muslims).
If you saw "Hotel Rwanda" you probably saw the checking of the national ID document to sort out your ethnic affiliation and how folks dealt adequately with people.
In Military-Dictatorship Latin America, National ID documents were imposed to keep track of those who opposed the dictatorship: Trouble makers, haters of the freedom to do what they are told (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Franco's Spain).

Of course the situation is not the same in the US. In Lebanon people are pretty much "born" into their political party, as their political party is very much tied to the religion.

Probably other developed nations of the world have National ID documents and they have been very happy with it, I have probably not paid attention to those.

My point is that its a resource easily abusable by those in control. If you care about these issues, you got less than 48 hours to call your representative.

08 May 2005: Fafblog and the Medium Lobster on Revisionism

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sun, 08 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Very amusing: the Medium Lobster sets the record straight on the invasion of Iraq.

Also from Fafblog: Great Moments in History: God Hides...

Fun with abused Web Standards

Some people fell in love with the idea of REST-based web services. But they mistakenly confused REST as `encode the operation anywhere you want, send and parse the document in any way you feel, hey we can do whatever we want as long as we use http'.

The problem was that they did not follow the directions in the small print, and the Google Accelerator was the first application to byte them in the ass:

Here is what they saw
Here is the hillarious I told you so post:
Well, you didn't listen to me, did you 37Signals? Did you? Now Google releases their Web Accelerator and your application is broken. Apparently you used GET to delete items from Backpack and when Googles Web Accelerator pre-fetches that URI in you web app, items get deleted. Let's make this clear, Google didn't break your application, your application was broken, Google was just the first person to point it out to you. Do you feel the pain? Do you feel it?

This is a good example of something that people predicted would break (Dare has a post here).

Not being a web developer, I just kind of watched the debate without much insight on what was going on until now.

07 May 2005: Fork in the Open Source Java world

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sat, 07 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

For quite some time there have been a number of open source Java virtual machines implementations, it could be easily understood that each project was trying out different ways of implementing the virtual machine or had different goals, milestones or requirements.

All of these JVM efforts at least shared the class libraries (which is a large component of a Java VM) in the form of the GNU Classpath, and this certainly helped these communities collaborate.

The Apache Foundation is now starting up a new effort (Harmony) to put together a virtual machine and its class libraries under the Apache License. The FAQ posted is a bit short on the motivations for this effort. I can only speculate that this was done to avoid the side effects of class libraries licensed under the GPL-with-exceptions or the LGPL which make people nervous.

Depending on how this process is managed, this could either become a big delay in bringing a full free software/open source Java implementation (as people take sides on the licensing debate) or if managed properly could make open source java more viable.

The challenge that the Harmony project faces now is significant. They need to convince enough of the existing open source Java developers that they should abandon the current GNU classpath effort and either relicense their code to be Apache-license compatible, or that they should rewrite their code to assist this new effort on the grounds that the Apache License is better. This last point does not seem to be very well articulated in the FAQ which merely dances around the issue. The FAQ at this point seems to mostly focus on spinning things positively while not explaining the rationale for this split, as can be seen by the first follow ups.

If they are not able to bring these existing contributors over they are going to have to grow this codebase from scratch and depend on member companies to contribute code to the effort. IBM might be interested in donating parts of their code (assuming they are allowed to) and might even be behind this split.

We have been working on the open source Mono for almost four years now and it has helped me put things a bit into perspective. I can not blame the Apache folks for going down this path. This should have been sorted out a long time ago in GNU Classpath land, but am fairly skeptic about the viability of Harmony's class libraries.

It is hard to tell what will happen, but without the endorsement of the majority of the GNU Classpath developers this is a major setback for open source/free software Java. It might be a necessary step, but am skeptical of its success possibilities.

In the meantime, gentlemen, you can start using Mono with its lax license today! Get it while its fresh!

Mhm, sorry about that. I just felt like plugging Mono again. Lets move on.

Class Library Licensing

Licensing wise, we went through a similar issue in the early days of Mono. Our class libraries used to be under the LGPL license. We switched the class libraries license from it to the MIT X11 license in response to comments from our potential users and contributors. Of course the MIT X11 license has pros and cons. On the pro side, it imposes very few restrictions on the users and its very easy to mix and match, and in general people feel comfortable with adopting it. On the downside, it is possible for companies to "appropriate" the code and never contribute anything back.

Certainly people have copied the Mono class libraries into their proprietary products and not given changes back (mostly people find Mono components easy to reuse on the Compact Framework that lacks plenty of functionality), but even the GPL and LGPL would not have changed things dramatically in this case (only the receiving end would have the right to the source, and for Compact Framework users, even more irrelevant than desktop users).

When it comes to large users of the Mono class libraries, Mainsoft is probably the largest consumer of it. Mainsoft has a product that turns CIL bytecodes into JVM bytecodes and allows users to port their C#/.NET code to a Java VM. Mainsoft could have chosen to make a proprietary copy of the class libraries, improve their copy and ship that to costumers. But instead Mainsoft has chosen to become an active contributor to the project, and is relicensing its own code under the same terms, the MIT X11.

There are a number of reasons: it is simpler to get new improvements from the community into your own code base, you can drive the direction of the project, and they have created a great aura around their company in the community: they are not only socially responsible contributors, but the world can see that their contributions are top-notch. In addition, their customers get access to the code and can benefit from the shared knowledge pool of the resulting code.

I mention this because a common reason to use the GPL and the LGPL, as opposed to a more lax license like the MIT X11, was that third-parties would tend to keep their improvements to themselves and that only a license with stronger terms could get them to contribute back. A few examples are usually mentioned: the X11's own failure in the 80's to get vendors to share their improvements and the success of GCC in forcing the C++ front-end to be released.

Maybe those examples did apply in a poorly connected world and much smaller ecosystem of the 80's, but none of the two previous scenarios necessarily apply today for horizontal software. The Mono class libraries have demonstrated that companies are willing to contribute to the class libraries and that collaboration will help them reduce the cost of development.

I am now less convinced that forcing people is the best way of achieving collaboration. The GPL has certainly played a role in educating people about free software, but for the most part people who contribute to nascent open source/free software projects have done so do for a plurality of reasons that have nothing to do with being forced by the license, including shared R&D costs, joy, need, curiosity, challenge, sense of community, social responsibility, or fame.

Brilliant Ideas

This must be obvious to every Firefox user now, but am still amazed at the simplicity and the beauty of Firefox's search design.

Ever since I can remember GUI applications, searching has been implemented as a popup box that pops in the middle of your document covering the text you want to search. Descriptions on how to float these dialog boxes and the discussion about how to create these non-modal dialog boxes is present in most GUI programming books that taught these principles to developers.

The beauty of placing the search at the bottom as opposed to using a sidebar is that the document is almost never reformatted.

I find myself missing this interface on my applications. Evolution for example still has the old-school search dialogs:

The new Adobe Acrobat pops up a small enough window with only the basics: the text to search for, backwards and forwards button, and configuration options are done from a button on the left:

An improvement, but not as good as Firefox.

That being said, the places where I miss search the most in my applications are:

GAIM: At some points during the day there are too many people logged on, and I would like to search for specific users online by typing on an incremental search box.
Update: I know that I can select the list and start typing on the treeview, but the search is only done on the visible strings, not on other elements. So for example, someone's nick name might be "Arturo", and extra information from the messenger service might be that his full name is "Arturo Espinosa", and I have aliased him to "Pupilo". I can only search on the "Pupilo" string, not on the "Arturo" or "Espinosa" strings. Hence the need for a search feature on GAIM.
Evolution: the filters dialog box and the folders list. Like in the case before, I do not want to only search on the text string shown to me, but in any other strings that might be part of the filter criteria:

It should be noted that this dialog probably needs some love anyways.

06 May 2005: The Genesis of a Free Software Hacker

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Fri, 06 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Alex Graveley's story. An interesting read

05 May 2005: Ajai Raj at University of Texas

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Thu, 05 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Ajai Raj attended a presentation from Ann Coulter in Austin, was arrested for swearing and being lewd. A very articulate article:

So yes, the Q&A session came around, and it was pathetic. Her slack-jawed fans got up and licked her face so she could pat them on the head--one schmuck offered to be her bodyguard, and she smiled, doubtlessly making a mental note that she wouldn't touch his nether regions if she were King Midas. Liberal protestors posed well-intentioned but woefully timid questions and got shot down in a hail of ignorant shitfire from the She-Dragon. Standing in line awaiting my turn, I watched her send a moderate Republican, who had questioned the sheer incendiary magnitude of her rhetoric, walk away in tears when she tore him apart for daring to question her.
So yes, I saw my "opportunity to say something lewd and offensive." And I took it.

But the whole blog entry is worth reading.

GanonScandal

The Ganon scandal is getting more spicy. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a couple of members of congress obtained the records that show entry time and departure of Jeff Ganon, the fake reporter into the White House.

Most of the records are normal, but there are a number of inconsistencies: multiple-entries with no exits recorded; Multiple exits without an entry recorded; Extended stays and double visits after press conferences.

Speculate away.

Iraq War: Fixing Facts

The famous memo is here:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002

Greg Palast says Impeachment Time and Tom Paine publishes Ray McGoverns' explanation

Iraq Taxi Rides

From Tom Tomorrow a transcript from Meet The Press about how things are getting better:

MR. FILKINS: Yeah. There's actually a company in Baghdad that does nothing except offer rides to the airport and back. They've got an armored cars and some guards. And they charge $35,000 for...
MR. RUSSERT: Thirty-five thousand dollars?
MR. FILKINS: ...for a ride to the airport. And I think you know, if you miss your plane and you have to come back, it's another $35,000. But...
MR. RUSSERT: How long--is it six miles?
MR. FILKINS: I think it's about six miles, yeah. It's not a happy six miles. So, you know, they earn their money.

What's striking about this is that if you read the entire transcript, both of these reporters actually seemed to think that things are generally improving in Iraq--proving once again that everything is relative...

04 May 2005: Switching to Mono

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Wed, 04 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

A Java developer talks about his migration to Mono: he needed a cross-platform GUI framework and good database support. He goes on to describe his experience at length on his `Mono for Fun' article.

02 May 2005: Making Gnome Fun

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Mon, 02 May 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Like everyone else, I have been thinking about Edd's blog entry as well as the follow up from Mikael.

My feeling is that the Gnome Desktop itself is fairly complete at this point and that is why we have seen people invest less into the actual infrastructure on the desktop and a lot more on getting things right. Am personally very happy with the incremental goodies in Gnome 2.10, it continues to be a pleasant upgrade every time and it is a good direction to polish and improve while some of the fundamental components of the desktop are sorted out.

In my opinion infrastructural hacking can be fun and its important, but the easy stuff is done, and the more complex issues can take years to get to the point of being fully baked and wildly deployed.

This is why casul developers or those who do not happen to be working for companies that can do multi-year commitments of work on a single direction have turned their attention to create independent applications in Mono or Python. The activity in GnomeFiles is a proof of this. As it happened in the past, a lot of the new Gnome-based and related developments and activities are happening outside realms of Gnome. It would not hurt to create bridges to these projects.

There are important pieces of the desktop that will bring considerable upgrades to our developer offering: Cairo, the new vector-based Gtk+ toolkit, GStreamer, The GL-based X server, Luminocity and D-Bus to name a few.

But these technologies will take a few years to be completely baked. Cairo has been under development for almost three years and D-Bus under development for two and none of them are available yet in 1.0 form. And once they are ready, it will take sometime before these technologies are wildly available.

In the meantime, there are a number of easy things that we can do to improve Gnome:

Desktop Improvements: both Windows and OSX have raised the bar in terms of what users expect from a desktop.
Photo management, video editing and audio production are no longer vertical applications, this is a standard feature that every OS needs.
System Configuration: the Gnome System Tools have finally made it into a real distribution (Ubuntu), and its architecture is useful for both large-scale management as well as creating multiple front-ends (GUI, Console and Web).
We should do a push to expand the scope of these tools and bring or port existing configuration tools from other systems.
Keep up: OSX just came out and it has a bunch of new and interesting ideas. We do not need to start with the huge pieces of OSX, we can start with the small increments, very much like we have done in the past to bring the best in them.
We have also quite a few bugs open in Bugzilla that could use some help.
Evince: Probably one of the most important efforts in Gnome right now. What they have achieved so far is great, but it needs to keep up with Apple and Adobe's offerings to be a full replacement.
Web applets: Like every other user out there, I want to get the OSX dashboard widgets into my desktop. It should not be hard to modify Mozilla to provide the same functionality and even be source compatible. The core is there already.
Probably the most important element of Apple's Dashboard is the fact that it basically runs full-screen: so there is no need to write small controls or make them tiny or try to get creative about showing them or hiding them. Its basically a full new screen where you can use the space effectively.

We continue to maintain Evolution but we have also branched and started a few new desktop projects, this time built with Mono and Gtk#: a new GUI designer for Gtk+ (Stetic), a personal photo management application (F-Spot), disconnected file sharing (iFolder), desktop search (Beagle) all pieces that we consider important for the desktop.

I believe these components (and more) should be part of a standard desktop offering. Whether they become part of the standard Gnome offering remains a political issue, but at least Novell, Mandriva, Debian and Ubuntu are making these available in one form or another (wink, wink).

In my opinion, Mono is in a strong position since it provides the same libraries that have been developed for C# developers to be consumed by other languages (of particular interest are Boo and the renewed IronPython) and because it has opened the doors to the Windows developers which are now starting to get their feet wet on Linux, Open Source, Gtk and Gnome.

29 Apr 2005: Jeremy Allison

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Jeremy Allison has now joined Novell as well. He will be in a number of conferences in Germany this week.

28 Apr 2005: John Pilger Documentary

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Am a big fan of John Pilger's articles and books. And while doing my daily delicious popular browsing I found a torrent for Pilger's Palestine is Still the Issue documentary.

The documentary aired in the UK, and I had read the blurb on his web site a few years ago.

26 Apr 2005: .NET to Java

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Mono offers a mechanism to run your .NET code on non-Unix systems by providing a CLI execution environment. Mainsoft has taken a different approach. Mainsoft wrote a translator that integrates with Visual Studio that converts existing .NET applications into Java applications by translating the CIL bytecode into JVM bytecodes.

Mainsoft has historically focused on server-side deployments with their product (Integrating ASP.NET with J2EE and bringing Visual Studio debugging to J2EE). But Erik Sink from SourceGear needed to bring the Vault software to Eclipse users.

Erik wrote an article on how he got his .NET code to run inside Eclipse using Mainsoft's products, it is available on Microsoft's web site.

Boo

The programming language Boo is gaining popularity among developers. Boo is an open source Python-like language that has been designed to integrate into an ECMA CLI virtual machine, so it integrates things like properties and attributes directly into the language.

Boo is a statically typed language very much like C#. This means that Boo will produce optimal strongly typed CIL code, but if you need the flexibility of dynamica types it makes this available through type inferencing or dynamic typing.

You can learn about the differences from Python here and its main features here

Peter Johanson has implemented a Boo Add-in for MonoDevelop, he has various screenshots on his blog:

Intellisense Support for Boo in MD.

Configuration Page for Boo Add-in.

Boo Shell Inside MD.

ASP.NET 2.0 updates

Lluis updates us on Mono's ASP.NET 2.x status.

Thomas Friedman Follow-Up

Cullen pointed me out to McSweeney's take on Writing your own Thomas Friedman OpEd.

VMware 5 Screenshots on Linux

Christian Hammond has posted some screenshots of the new VMWare 5 with its snapshotting GUI here.

Ajax for .NET

There is a blog dedicated to Ajax for .NET here (from AjaxMatters).

24 Apr 2005: More Books on Lebanon

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

The book on Asad that I was recommended is awesome, it gives a different perspective on the Lebanon war from the Syrian point of view.

As I was reading the book, Amazon introduced a new feature that allows customers to see a list of books referenced by a given book. I used this to get myself a couple of other books: "Israel's Lebanon War" and Abu Nidal: A Gun For Hire.

In "Israel's Lebanon War" has an excellent introductory chapter on the Lebanese civil war as witnessed from Israel. The book relies on interviews and de-classified documents from the Israel government to recreate the Israeli involvement in Lebanon.

I have not finished this book, but it is a good complement for Robert Fisk's "Pity the Nation" narrating the gradual involvement of Israel with the Phalange party. The book begins in the early years of the Lebanese Civil war (1977) and describes the rise of Bashir Gemayel from the low ranks of the Phalange Militia to its control of the other Christian militias through the assassination of his opponents to the presidency.

On the other side Menachem Begin starts to empathize with Bashir's struggle and conceives a plan to make Bashir Lebanon's president. He relies on Ariel Sharon, his secretary of defense, to put together a plan to destroy the PLO, reach Beirut and install this new government.

Such a plan would have been rejected by the Israeli Cabinet, so they have to prepare and operate in secret and only give as little information as possible to the Israeli Cabinet. To make their case they have to withhold negative information and intelligence assessments from the Cabinet and paint a rosy picture of the invasion.

To get the cabinet to approve the plans, they present them with a limited plan: a military invasion of southern Lebanon of about forty kilometers. The real plan is to reach Beirut, but this will not be disclosed to the rest of the Cabinet until the invasion starts.

The invasion plans faced a problem. There was a cease-fire in place between Israel and the PLO on the border and as long as the palestinians did not attack there would be little reason for an invasion. Arafat had managed to curb its guerrillas from responding to provocation (which included bombing and shelling of their cities and positions).

Patrick Seale's "Abu Nidal: A Gun For Hire" is addictive and non-stop reading. A book tracing the inner working and operations of Abu Nidal's terrorist organization. Abu Nidal started a resistance group which splintered from the mainstream palestinian opinion in the 70's. Abu Nidal's would transform his group from an extreme palestinian group into a work-for-hire organization that would carry out terrorist attacks against the enemies of his sponsor of the day. Most importantly Abu Nidal broke early on with the PLO and did everything he could to destroy the moderate palestinian voices.

The book recreates Abu Nidal's operations, its mode of operation and some missions it carried out by interviewing collaborators, defectors and opponents. The book starts by tracing the steps of a new recruit in the group, and then exploring the claim from a senior PLO officer: that either Abu Nidal's Organization was infiltrated by the Mossad or Abu Nidal himself was working for the Mossad. The exploration of this claim takes the rest of the book as Patrick Seale reconstructs the various terrorist strikes carried out by Abu Nidal. In this book, Lebanon appears only as a backdrop to the mainline story.

In any case, Abu Nidal's strikes consistently undermined the efforts of the PLO and the palestinian cause which he claimed to be assisting. Attacks would set back any attempts from the PLO to become a political force to represent the interests of the Palestinians in the exile and on the occupied territories.

Abu Nidal's group carried out an attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London in 1982. This was taken as a violation of the cease-fire and the invasion of Lebanon begun.

A light side of Lebanon today

A lebanese makes fun at the current state of affairs in Lebanon.

Another one: How-To for a Lebanese Cabinet.

Speaking of Books

A few months ago, I was also recommended `From Beirut to Jerusalem' from Thomas Friedman. I never quite liked his articles on globalization in the past and I was skeptical about his book, but I gave it a shot.

I could barely read one third of the book, as it felt mostly like a shrine that Thomas Friedman had written about himself, it felt very much like a `me, me, me book'.

I mention this now because I found two interesting articles: Write Your Own Thomas Friedman Article which captures more elegantly what I disliked about the book.

And a very funny review of his new book.

20 Apr 2005: Code Access Security in Mono

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Sebastien has two nice articles: Graphs to visualize security demands and the fourth part on the series of the Mono Security Manager.

Sebastien is using the Cecil introspection library by JB to extract the CIL bytecodes and trace the use of the security manager.

Mexican Coup, part 2

Carlos Alberto points to an article with quotes from around the world on the recently staged coup. And has details on Mexican Ambassador to the US campaign to stick his foot in his mouth. He is mailing newspapers trying to justify the coup staged against Mexico City's major by the federal government.

He is arguing that technically they are allowed to use a technicality to block Lopez Obrador from running for the presidency.

Sign the petition online against the Fox coup: here

17 Apr 2005: Boo Integration with MonoDevelop

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

The Boo language integrated into MonoDevelop: description and screenshot.

13 Apr 2005

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

10 Apr 2005: Dirty Tricks in Mexico

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sun, 10 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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, Andrés Manuel López 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 López 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 López 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 Andrés 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.

09 Apr 2005: GUI for hand-held devices

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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.

07 Apr 2005: A Day in the Life of a Journalist

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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

06 Apr 2005: Scripting OpenOffice with Mono

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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

05 Apr 2005: On Release Dates

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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 ofÂ 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 andÂ 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.

03 Apr 2005: West Bank

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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.

02 Apr 2005: SharpMusique

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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.

22 Mar 2005: Mono updates

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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

21 Mar 2005: Sad News

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:55:00 GMT

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.

19 Mar 2005: MonoDevelop

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Lluis has a nice summary of the progress in MonoDevelop.

18 Mar 2005: Beirut

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@novell.com) — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Coming to Beirut was a revelation, because it is completely different from what you imagine. I consider myself informed on the Middle East and on its political situation, but I was still a little bit scared of visiting Lebanon.

In the Corniche.

Edd and Yuyu both e-mailed me and told me that it was worth visiting and they eased my fears. Then I talked for a few weeks with Alaa and Hisham from the Lebanon Linux Users Group and they answered all of my pressing questions on Beirut.

Laura in the Corniche

Turns out that Beirut today is a very safe city just like any other american or european city. What makes the trip interesting is the new language and arabic scripts.

I went to Beirut after reading Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation. The book is similar to reading The Thousand Nights and a Night, it is packed with stories that span roughly fifteen years in the life of Lebanon and the civil war.

Downtown Beirut.

I got a haircut in Beirut. My barber asked me what I was doing there. `I am here because I read Pity the Nation' was my standard answer during my trip. He then said, ``I used to cut Mr. Robert Fisk's hair in the 80's during the civil war, he and the others staying at the Commodore Hotel''. He gave me his business card.

While in Beirut, we had the pleasure of meeting with Robert Fisk for lunch:

Laura and Robert at Lunch.

I had attended one of his lectures at MIT a few years ago, being a fan of his writing. But meeting him and Victoria for lunch was a pleasure, not only we had a great conversation, but the conversation had so much information that when I got back to our hotel I took pages of notes on what I had learned.

I told Robert the story about the guy who cut my hair, and showed him the business card. He said `Oh, yes, I remember him; I have now a new barber'.

Posing for the camera.

Our friends in Lebanon told us repeatedly that visiting the Sabra and Chatila camps was dangerous. We asked Robert about it, and he said `Nonsense, I go there every week' [1], `you should go; do you have plans this afternoon?'.

Robert arranged for his driver to take us there, for Mohammed to show us the camp, and for drinks later that evening at his appartment. He only warned us that we would not be able to sleep after the visit. He was right.

At the Entrance.

Victoria left us at the entrance of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in the hands of Mohammed. Mohammed and his sister are the sole survivors in his family from the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre.

At the entrance

At the Sabra and Chatila Refugee Camps.

Palestinians refugees living in Lebanon can only work in the refugee camps. The camps are bounded, they can not expand their surface, so families grow their housing by adding a new floor every once in a while as a gift to newly-weds:

Vertical Growth in Sabra and Chatila.

In addition to the work restriction, new legislation in Lebanon forces palestinian families to sell any property they own to a Lebanese if the owner passes away, they can not keep the property.

At the Entrance.

We accepted two tea invitations after much insistence, and we had dinner at Mohammed's place.

Palestinian Kids.

There is some limited internet connectivity in the camps, we saw one room where people were playing games and using the web, but no more than six computers.

At the Palestinian Youth Center.

[1] Or something like that, dont remember the exact frequency.

Mono Updates

We are back in town from our trip to Lebanon.

Sunset at Byblos.

Marek and Martin have completed two new features for C# 2.0: Nullable Types and Fixed Buffers. They will both be available as part of our upcoming Mono 1.1.5 release.

Dan has posted an update on Stetic. His update has a flash video that you can see.

Massi has posted a long explanation on how to improve Mono's SSAPRE implementation.