Since Kristian’s excellent GTK State of the Union talk was today his slot is now available for a Patchsquad BOF. So that’s tomorrow at 11am. Thanks Behdad for allowing us to grab this. A little background on the idea of a Patchsquad: Primarily the idea is to reduce the workload of maintainers by commenting, not reviewing, patches that are waiting in Bugzilla. This may include testing, checking for obvious issues and gentle pestering of maintainers. Lucas held a BOF last year to introduce the idea that was well attended and a lot said but interest seems to have twindled. Myself and Diego want to try reinvigorate the idea! Update: Whoops! Looks like we haven’t got that slot afterall. If you’re interested in the Patchsquad pleas some along and speak to either Diego or myself.

...is just not enough time to see the place properly. I took Friday and Monday off, and Thursday night a week ago, Sarah and I flew down to San Diego for a bit of a "Yay, we've achieved normality" escape. We'd intended to go to SeaWorld on Friday, vege out for two days, go to San Diego Zoo on Monday, then fly home on Monday night. Well we did SeaWorld and the zoo as planned, but lazing around the pool never happened, we ended up running ourselves ragged exploring San Diego all day Saturday and Sunday instead. We stayed at The Dana on Mission Bay, which we picked because it was the closest to SeaWorld. The accommodation was more like a motel than a hotel. There were numerous two-storey buildings across a fairly sprawling area. It had frontage onto what I presume was Mission Bay, and also had a Marina attached to it, so the outlook was quite nice. It also had free WiFi, so we could upload photos throughout the stay. The food offerings were pretty good, and reasonably priced as well. SeaWorld was really good. It's been a long time since I've been to the Australian equivalent, but I don't remember it as being as interactive. San Diego's SeaWorld had a Bay Ray feeding area, where you could purchase food (small whole fish), and hand-feed the Bat Rays. That was pretty cool. It took a bit of a courage to leave your hand in the water, palm up, with something the size of sardine dangling between your fingers and let these huge rays literally swim right over your hand so they could suck the fish from between your fingers. There was also a dolphin feeding area, where you could purchase some small fish again, and give the dolphins a pat on the head and then throw them a fish. I really love dolphins, and one day I'd like to be able to swim with them. The main attraction of SeaWorld is the various shows that they do. I think we caught all of the different ones. The killer whales are just amazing. There were a few different programs where for an additional fee, you could swim with various animals. Dolphins and Beluga whales seemed to be the ones we noticed in particular. There were a few oddities, though: The park is owned by a beer company, so there was a part where you could go and get free samples. Two per person per day (I think on the honour system). At least at the food outlet where we bought lunch (they don't allow you to bring in any food or drink from the outside "for the safety of the animals", so they have a nice monopoly on catering) every kid's meal came in a commemorative Shamu blue plastic lunch pail - whether you wanted it or not. There were two empty ones left on the table that Sarah and I sat down at. The lady cleaning up the tables asked us if we wanted them, and we said no, and she promptly chucked them out with the trash. This just struck me as a terrible waste. They obviously cost money and energy to produce, and they're just going to end up in landfill. They could have been washed and reused instead. I felt this was very hypocritical for a park that was trying to send people away with a message about conservation. Other than this nitpick, I thought SeaWorld was really great. It was a good size, and it was doable in one day, in their normal opening hours. I guess it'd be a bit slower with kids. Photos from the day are here. The next two days we spent exploring San Diego. The hotel was conveniently located on an MTS loop, which ran surprising frequently for a weekend (at least compared to public transit in the Bay Area), so we bought day passes on Saturday and Sunday and used it to get to the Old Town transit centre. On Saturday we explored Old Town, which was a historic preservation of how San Diego looked "back in the day". In the afternoon, we also bought 48-hour tickets for the red double-decker "hop on, hop off" tour bus, and did one of the two loops that it offered. The next day, we caught the loop in the opposite direction, and checked out Mission Beach, which was probably the best beach I've seen in California so far (although the water was still far too cold), saw some pretty cool alternative accommodation (possibly for next time), and did part of the other loop on the tour bus, getting off at the USS Midway. This massive retired aircraft carrier is permanently moored at San Diego, and for a fee, you can crawl all over most of it. It was very interesting, and gave a good insight into the life of a sailor. We blew a good 4 hours or so here, and ran out of time to see the entire thing (we didn't make it onto the "island" part of the ship, which we were a bit bummed about). We then caught the trolley back to Old Town, and grabbed a beer at a pub that sold it by the yard glass and half yard glass. We opted for the half yard glass, since the full yard glass seemed a bit unwieldly, and we thought it looked like a hell of a lot of beer, but the half yard glass, whilst also looking like a lot of beer, was only about one and a half pints. We then grabbed some dinner at one of the very authentic looking Mexican restaurants (they had women out the front, almost on the sidewalk making fresh tortillas on the spot) and headed back home. Photos from our exploration are here. On the last day, we went to the San Diego Zoo (which every time I read the URL for, I read it as "Sandie go Zoo!"). This zoo is purportedly the best zoo in the country, but it really didn't blow my socks off. We seemed to have a really hard time navigating the place, and spent a lot of the day walking around in circles trying to find various exhibits. It's also in a bit of a valley, so the circles tended to be up and down hills, which was tiring. I really don't think we were very efficient at all in our coverage of the place. The other thing that I personally found annoying was the cages. The wire was very close together, which made it really hard to take photos, because the camera would keep focusing on the wire, instead of what was behind it. I guess this is why God invented manual focus, but that made it very hard to photograph big cats stalking their cages. The photos we did manage to get are here. Overall, we had a great time in San Diego, and it seems we didn't really scratch the surface. I'd like to go back again and see Balboa Park, the Gaslamp district, and I thought there were more naval vessels that you could look at, but I might be mistaken. Definitely a very nice city.

I've never been much of a podcast listener, largely because I haven't gotten my act together and downloaded any on a regular basis, and partly because the iPod is tied to Sarah's iTunes on her laptop, so it's not convenient to go fiddling with the iPod. If I ever manage to get back into the swing of things and get to the gym regularly, I think I'd prefer to listen to a podcast rather than straight music, so I can hopefully expand my brain while I'm slogging my guts out on the treadmill. Kynan and Shona have both talked about LugRadio events from when they lived in the UK, and I've been vaguely aware of it as a podcast (it's probably the first podcast I'd name if you asked me to name one). I vaguely knew that Kynan had been trying to organise something LugRadio related in the Valley for a while now. Well, it turns out he's succeeded, and it's good to see he's gotten some credit for it as well. Onya Kynan! So I got all excited when I went and looked at the schedule and discovered it was going to be something vaguely like a mini-linux.conf.au, I scurried off and bought a couple of tickets. Then Sarah pointed out that it's the weekend that we're going to San Diego for a four-day weekend. Oh well, at least the tickets were pretty cheap. So, if, unlike me, you'll actually be in the Bay Area on April 12th and 13th, check it out, it sounds like it'll be fun.

LISA’07 is over, and just concluded with a great talk about “Cooking at the Keyboard”, which of course I liked a lot, being this one of my favorite hobbies! This was my first LISA conference, and I had an all-round experience, giving an invited talk, hosting a BoF and speaking during the Hit The Ground Running track. Of those three the most fun has been the HTGR talk, in which I quickly summarized the Ganeti platform in 10′ and was able to answer a few questions in the last 5′. I definitely liked giving the invited talk, and I think the idea my teammates had to not just talk but actually give a live demo of our platform was very successful, even if it took some time and effort to prepare. The BoF was nice because it gave people chance to give more feedback and to talk about their ideas, it’s probably the session I learned more from. The slides for the talk are on the conference page, and the ones for HTGR will be soon! Globally it’s been a very intense week of talks, sessions, hallway chats, work and fun, and I definitely hope to be at LISA’08, next November in San Diego (it’s a bit like going back home, isnt it?)! I’m really glad to have come and want really to thank all the people who made this possible and all the people I met here, who made this event so good!

Tasks 0.5 is now released. This release has features a port to OpenMoko and several bug fixes.

• Add an OpenMoko frontend (Rob Bradford)
• New icons from Andreas Nilsson to match the Pimlico style
• Use a SexyIconEntry for the URL entries if available (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #241)
• Fix layout of widgets in the task editor (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #236)
• Chain up focus events in the new task label fixing warnings and IM
• Add some padding around the editor dialog (#323)
• Improve messages for translation
• Translate the menu bar
• Fix license to refer to Tasks not Sound Juicer
• Remove Application from the desktop file

More information, screeenshots, and tarballs can be downloaded from the Pimlico site. There are no packages yet, but I hope to have those online shortly.

In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!. The event name we've choose was invol crate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work. We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list. I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute. However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal. The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;). Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning. I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings invol crate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next invol crate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.XTech 2007, of which I'm chair, is progressing well. We've had a large number of submissions and the review process is proceeding apace. Speakers will be notified on February 2nd, and we hope to publish the schedule very soon after. Now's the time to think about joining us in Paris, May 15-18th.
The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, aka ETech 2007, for which I'm a member of the program committee, is now open for registration. Be in San Diego this March to connect with the brightest cultivators of tomorrow's tech.Also from O'Reilly, the 2007 Open Source Convention is now open for proposals. OSCON needs no introduction from me, I'm sure. I've been on the program committee for some years now, brooding over Linux, XML and other topics. Deadline for proposal submission is February 5th.

I'm pretty happy about the way the 'Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use' episode of the LinuxCast came out so well. I'm not very used to talking for recording, and like everyone I don't particularly enjoy hearing my own voice recorded (do I really sound like that?), but it was fun to do, and I think it's a nice adjunct to the Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use article itself. tags: api podcast linuxcast linuxworld

Tijuana We're on a trip in Southern California this week, so we decided yesterday to go to Tijuana for the day. Maj, Amita June and I got out of the condo we're staying at in Encinitas early in the morning -- well, early for a vacation day -- and headed down to downtown San Diego. It's a trip of about 25 miles, with one tricky turnoff at highway 805 that seems to get me every time I visit this part of the world. Going into Mexico with a car can be a bit of a hassle. Many American insurers don't cover cars going into Mexico, and you'll often get asked about insurance when you cross over. There are some quick-and-dirty insurers on the border that can give you one-day insurance or other short-term coverage, but we have a rental car right now, and most (all?) rental car companies forbid with bitter, mouth-foaming forbiddance driving the car across the border. Fortunately for us, San Diego has a great way around this problem. Their trolley system goes from downtown San Diego right up to the border in San Ysidro. So, we picked it up in the Civic Center downtown, after a brief stop at the Downtown San Diego Vistors Center (to get tourist material), a shopping foray at a stall outside of the downtown Macy's (to get Amita June a pair of purple Crocs), and a side trip into the Westin for a bathroom break. Man, the Westin in San Diego has nice bathrooms! I'd heard about these trolleys in the past, and I guess I'd expected a kind of fancy tourist train, but it's really just the Blue Line for typical light-rail trains for San Diego and its suburbs. The seats were comfortable, but the train right-of-way went through some of the least scenic parts of Southern California I've ever seen. There's something about this corner of the United States of America that's depressing and end-of-the-world; I get the same feeling about other borderlands, like around Plattsburgh and Laredo. The end of the line for the trolley is completely opaque as to how get into Mexico. We wandered around past some ugly strip malls until Maj spotted a tiny oblique walkway that said "US PROPERTY SUBJECT TO SEARCH AND FINE" and in much smaller letters "a Mexico - to Mexico". We went through a wiggly walkway and across the no-man's land between the scary metal fence at the US border and the actual Mexican customs area. Nobody was there, but we got the feeling we were being watched. At the end of this weird walk was a very nice tourist info center, where we got some maps and brochures and such. Another 10 minutes walk through the streets up against the fence, we got to Avenida Revolucion, the central way through the Tijuana/Zona Centro. It had been a while since we'd been to a city with aggressive touts, so getting yelled at by people in shop doorways or in the street was a bit of a jolt. I hate the invasion of my anonymity, and I'm pretty reflexive about saying "NO NO NO NO NO" to everyone, but Maj is a little more practical. "If everything is run by aggressive sideshow barkers, you're going to miss out on everything," she points out. "Sometimes, you have to say 'yes', even if you don't like the way the question was asked." By the time we hit av. Revolution, we were pretty tired, so we stumbled into the first restaurant we found -- El Torito, a big nightclub with go-go cages, a mechanical bull, and a tattoo parlour on premises. I was attracted by the racy Absinth Mexico posters. "Family restaurant, family place," said the touts, seeing the baby in the stroller. Sure. The food wasn't bad -- I made the mistake of ordering the fish Vera Cruz, but the waiter made a smelly-face and suggested I get the shrimp instead -- and the cocktails at 1PM were generous and inexpensive. Probably the nicest part was a guy with a guitar who came over and asked to sing. "We've got enough music," said Maj, pointing at the ceiling where loud disco tunes were booming. But he was insistent, so we let him play, and he sang a loud Besa Me Mucho that drowned out the Ricky Martin and had us, the waiter, and nearby diners singing along by the end. Amita June was fascinated by the sounds, and clapped along when he was done. After lunch we walked down av. Revolucion, which had a dense layer of souvenir shops and discount pharmacies offering Viagra and Cipro without a prescription. One weird repeated theme was donkeys painted as zebras, hooked up to carts where you could sit and get your picture taken for $2. Some of the donkeys looked pretty good in their zebra stripes, but most looked pretty bummed out. I'm not sure why tourists would expect to get their picture taken with a zebra while in northern Mexico. It got a lot nicer as we got down to the end of the block, and we kicked ourselves for being so lazy when we passed Chiki Jai, a charming little restaurant with tiled walls and rough wood furniture. Much more to our tastes than El Torito. We stopped at the monumental Jai Alai courts, with a beautiful facade and a nice statue out front. Ducking into the Tia Juana's next door, we did a diaper-change break and had some chips and salsa and pineapple juice (and Dos Equis Dark on tap for Papa). Then we started walking back to the border. On our way back, we got off of Revolucion and walked over to the city's Cathedral. It was a much more realistic part of the town -- shopping and bars and restaurants, true, but less ridiculous touristy crap. When we got to the cathedral, there was a holiday street fair going outside, with games and food stalls and people laughing and walking around with kids. It felt a little more human than the pressure-tactics-dense world of Revolucion. On our way back to the border crossing, we dipped briefly into the red light district at the head of av. Constitucion (who knew?), then made the long slog back to the USA. We didn't get much in the way of souvenirs, but Maj bought a nice set of luchador dolls for her brother, complete with a tiny wrestling ring. The line at the border was huge, and we had to wait at the trolley station for another 30 minutes before one left for SD again. By the time we got back downtown, around 5:30, we really weren't up for a dinner in the San Diego/Gaslamp Quarter like we'd originally planned. So we piled into the car, paid the $20 parking to get out, and headed right into rush-hour traffic that led to the over-populated and under-networked North County (San Diego County). Would I take the trolley to Tijuana again? Maybe. Next time, I'd probably go to one of the stops between San Diego and San Ysidro, where there are free parking lots and a little less hassle. tags: tijuana san diego travel san ysidro

Hazards of vacation homes I was just rifling through the fridge here at the condo in Encinitas and found what I thought was a delicious Abita beer, the fine drink you have when you can't handle another hurricane in New Orleans. But it turned out to be an Abita Purple Haze, a gross raspberry-wheat beverage. Unfair! It has probably been stuck in the back of the fridge of this condo for years. Fortunately there was still another Stone Pale Ale, from the North County local microbrewery, to satisfy my lunchtime beer needs. tags: stone brewing abita beer

It's pretty cool to see that Technorati is going to be acting as an OpenID identity provider. That is, you can use a Technorati account as an identity on other sites (like Wikitravel). Technorati OpenID URLs look like http://technorati.com/profile/evanprodromou (say). Nice job, Technorati. tags: technorati identity openid

Encinitas Maj and I finished up our business in Los Angeles this morning, so we picked up stakes from her parents' house in Long Beach and drove down to my parents' condo in Encinitas. There was a time that a big chunk of my family lived in and around San Diego. My dad worked for a company called Peregrine Semiconductor, and my brother went to San Diego State University at the same time. Nate lived in Mission Beach, but my folks bought a condo in Encinitas, near Dad's work. Mom split her time between the house in Los Altos Hills and down here. Times have changed and everybody's drifted back up to the Bay Area (California), but my parents still own a condo on the cliffs over looking the Pacific Ocean. We all use the place for vacation time, although it's a lot easier for my brothers and parents in Northern California than it is for Maj, Amita June, and I in Montreal. Encinitas is a nice town with a really pleasant little main street on Pacific Coast Highway, great beaches, clean air and the sound of waves as you're falling asleep. We spent 4 days down here last winter, and really enjoyed it -- probably the most relaxing time of the year. We're going to spend a few more days here this week. Last year, in the late afternoon, Maj took Amita June into the pool in the condo complex. It's about 20 feet from the edge of a cliff over the Pacific, and as they were swimming around the pool, the sunset was making a red-gold luminous carpet out of the ocean below. We were close enough that we could see dolphins jumping in and out of the water. My baby and wife laughing over a dolphin-dotted sunset; jeez. Mom and Dad are selling the condo -- we're going to have to dodge realtors while we stay here -- so it's unlikely we'll get another chance to spend time in this particular condo again. Good to appreciate the time while we can. tags: encinitas san diego sunsets dolphins

Wikitravel on CNN The AP article about online travel guides made it onto CNN. The last time we had an article about Wikitravel syndicated ( Web Denizens Contribute to Do-It-Yourself 'Wikimania'), originally by Ellen Lee of the Contra Costa Times and published December 2005, it kept popping up for months. I figure this one will be out there for a while, too. tags: cnn wikitravel

Lessig Steps Aside I'm sad to see that Lawrence Lessig will be stepping down from his position as chairman for Creative Commons. As he announced in his latest "Lessig Letter", CC Changes, Joi Ito will be taking over the position. I don't think there's a better person to do the job. I hope that both of them continue to work for free culture in their own ways and through CC. tags: cc lessig joi ito

MyBlogLog TechCrunch is effusive about how great MyBlogLog is. I tried it out a bit, and I have a MyBlogLog account, but I found the user tracking script a little creepy and invasive. So I took it off. I'm not sure the value of the service outweighs the automated click-tracking. tags: mybloglog privacy cookies

I'm reporting to you live from Stockhom, where the Northwestern European Programming Contest has started. Our teams (some even have their own website) have yet refrained from beating every other team but are trying hard. As expected, team Messed Up from Twente is taking the lead, even though their key contestant just flew in this morning from San Diego... There's a live scoreboard available for those at home, and maybe just as interesting, a live video stream. The guys here at KTH are doing a good job in organising, even though it was mostly a copy of last year, up to exactly the same lunch and same dinner. We (Jan, Jaap and I) have been participating in the organisation so we'll be prepared for some of the caveats when the contest is coming to Utrecht next year.

Today, as it was widely anticipated, the Superior Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) declared Felipe Calder n, of the currently right-wing governing PAN party, elected as president for the 2006-2012 period.
My regular readers will know that my political views are against his party's, and that I completely oppose him - Of course, being consequent, in June I started, together with some friends, FeCal.org.mx, a site destined to show the incongruencies and incoherences in the official version - and that evolved to a site I am quite fond of, having good and deep analysis of the political situation. Of course, it is time now to redesign and think forward for this site, now that FeCal is no longer a candidate - but lets leave it aside for now.
Today, we are mourning. We are not mourning an electoral loss - Wherever there is democracy, there are losers, and it might be right that we lost this time. Furthermore, in political systems such as ours, it is practically guaranteed that the majority of the citizens will lose (this means, it is terribly hard for any candidate to get over 50% of the votes - If Calder n wins with almost 35% of the votes, or if L pez Obrador wins by a similar amount, we will anyway have 65% of losers). But what we are mourning goes far beyond that: We lost faith in our electoral institutions, which we were so proud of a couple of years ago. They proved not to be serious, not to be adequate for a hard decision. Why am I saying this? Lets analyze a bit.
First of all, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)'s main function is to organize the federal elections, and to make sure they are run with neutrality. Since the early months of the formal competition (as the campaigns themselves started way too early and we Mexicans are sick of the eternal electoral climate), the IFE has not acted in time to stop a dirty campaign, made not only by the PAN party but by the nation's President himself and by groups that, being privately owned, are said to be outside the reach of the IFE's regulatory spectrum. The IFE's general council should have been built with representants of all of the main political forces, but only PRI and PAN (which means, center-right and right wing) were represented.
Secondly, over the last six years, President Fox seems to have made constant efforts not only to prove us all he is a complete fool and inept as a statesman (examples abound, there is no rush to prove Vicente Fox just cannot be trusted to run a country), but that his fight for democracy was nothing but a race for personal power. He took every oportunity he could to promote his party - while the Mexican law requires him to remain neutral during the electoral period. There are many proven examples of irregularities and corruption inside his cabinet (most notably those carried out by Josefina V zquez Mota, who was in charge of all of the federal programs to fight poverty, and was the coordinator of Calderon's campaign) leading to inject resources into the campaign. Yes, this should have been stopped by IFE as soon as they were detected - But it was not. And, thank you Mr. Fox, by doing this you severely undermined the respect there should be for the Presidential figure.
Now, IFE's role ends shortly after the elections. After that, it is TEPJF's role to qualify the elections - To ratify they complied to the required equity, legality and certainty. Many of us had more trust in TEPJF than in IFE, mainly because of the series of personal and group connections that came up between IFE and the power groups. Most of us were quite vocal on the voto por voto, casilla por casilla front - Demanding from TEPJF to request to recount all of the votes. Having only 0.58% distance between the top candidates, with lots of statistical anomalities, with tons of reports of illegal tampering of the ballots, having a wide recount would surely make many among us believe and accept the results - Of course, the PAN repeated ad nauseam that the ballots had been counted and we should not go again over the same excercise, quoting all kinds of arguments that came from a too narrow interpretation of the law. And, in the end, too narrow was the response of TEPJF - Only 9% of the booths were reinspected, and not all of them were recounted. In fact, one week ago, they decided to discard over 300 appeals (this means, 300 requests for trial on a specific booth or on a whole district), without yet disclosing which appeals were they, on what basis were they discarded, what geographical areas did they impact, or anything. They nullified about 235,000 votes - And this number is quite scary, as it practically matches the official difference between the two lead candidates (244,000 votes before this partial recount, 233,000 after it). We can now state for certain that the difference between the candidates is smaller than the error margin.
Today, with a very important portion of the country in doubt on whether their decision was legal and correct, TEPJF ratified Felipe Calder n as the elected president. This would be good news. I would like to accept Felipe as my president - Sadly, I cannot, just because all of the TEPJF's principles were violated:

• Equity: The process didn't progress with equity. Illegal publicity was repeated over and over. Just as one example, the Presidency has had the equivalent of 24h a day of ads in the national electronic media for over six months - And IFE acknowledged it was used in a way that promoted the vote for their candidate. The final message was very subtly changed, many people were left unsatisfied, and... That was it.
  Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador was often protrayed as a puppet of Fidel Castro and Hugo Ch vez, and there are still people who believe he was setting to create a communist regime in Mexico. Of course, this was also a direct result of what is now known as the hatred campaign that the ruling party and an important group of industrials pushed. So, no, we had no equity.
• Legality: Most of this posting has dealt with the ilegalities of the process, they are really not in short supply. The sad and alarming thing is that it was the TEPJF itself which commited the last and most important illegal acts.
• Certainty: In a strongly contested electoral scenario, I perceive this to be the sole most important principle. How many votes were cast for each of the top candidates? We have repeatedly stated that the difference between them is below the statistical error margin for a process where a million people counted the votes. And after last week's results where nearly 240,000 votes were discarded, the difference is objectively and undoubtely smaller than the error margin. Even if no fraud was made, people make mistakes, and it is too na ve to assume not even one out of each 200 votes was incorrectly accounted. And even if no fraud was done, not allowing the society to ensure the results of the process really match the reality is by itself a fraud. We will now probably never know if Felipe Calder n cheated, the same as we still don't know who won in 1988 and by how much. Then, official records say that Carlos Salinas had over 50% of the votes, Cuauht moc C rdenas almost 30% and Manuel Clouthier close to 20% - But both C rdenas and Clouthier were sure they had won. And while C rdenas (founder of the PRD, which now supports L pez Obrador) called off the civic resistence to start creating a strong political movement for future, PAN's Clouthier did exactly what his party criticizes L pez Obrador for. In fact, our president Vicente Fox was the Agriculture Secretary in Clouthier's parallel government. Only that Clouthier had a misterious accident some months later and died - giving way to the dark period of PRI-PAN concertacesiones led by Diego Fern ndez de Ceballos.

So... In short, what comes now? We are exhausted by this long process. As too many people, I just cannot accept the imposition of yet another fraudulent president. I had the hopes that Mexico had changed in the last 18 years - But it has not. We are still in a strong presidentialist regime, and we still don't have hopes of getting a democratic government. If we do have a democraticly elected president, perfect, I will accept it. Of course, criticizing and keeping a close eye on his government, as I don't think the social and economic principles they push, but accepting. But there are too many signs of a fraud, there are too many stinky bits in the decision. The stinkiest of them all, the refusal of their opportunity to shut us up. Is it better to have millions of angry citizens closing important streets and giving Mexico a bad name by writing about our trip back to the stone age than to allow for a legal recount? Is it too much asking giving some certainty to our elections? Is there any doubt we will keep fighting this imposition?

My stay in Madrid has come to an end and I'm currently sitting at Ralf Treinen's place in Paris. I had a pretty good time in Madrid. Basically, I just did the usual stuff (i.e., too much Debian, too little work for my research) but there are a number of nice guys in the group I was working in and we had lots of fun. Earlier this week, we went to Teo's place who has this massive swimming pool. He recently organized a BBQ, which was good as well, with lots of Sangria... A few weeks ago, Diego (at whose place I stayed), Alvaro and his cute girlfried Yaiza went bowling. It was really good fun and it turned out that Diego is a real master, scoring several strikes after each other! Now that summer is coming, a number of people are leaving for other places. Israel went to Canada for three months a few weeks ago, Gregorio left for the UK a few days ago and my stay is over too. Overall I had a pretty good time, even though I'm not particularly happen that I didn't manage to go to the beach once even though I was in Spain for three months... The last time I was here at Ralf's place in Paris was just before DebConf1 in Bordeaux in 2001, which feels like eons ago. Anyway, I'm heading out to take a look at Notre Dame.

I'm in San Diego at the moment. As of today I shall be contracting for Linspire building packages for their Debian derived Linux distribution and doing some KDE development.

I'm in Madrid now. On Friday afternoon, I returned to Cambridge from Vienna. Unfortunately, I couldn't start packing straight away because I had to work on a paper which was due Friday night. At about midnight my co-author noticed that the deadline had been extended until Wednesday so I went to sleep. The next day I finished packing and then started moving everything into my office at the university. Unfortunately, that took much longer than expected and I missed my bus to the airport. Turbo boost (aka taxi) to rescue and I was at the airport in time. I'm really slowly getting fed up with moving and need to settle down. It's just so much work, and that even though I don't own terribly much. I wonder how other people cope... in the last five years, I've lived in London, Innsbruck, Vienna, Melbourne, Cambridge and now Madrid. Hmm. Anyway, Madrid is fun. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy my time here. The people in the group I work with at the university are incredibly smart and friendly. Last night, Gregorio (my main contact at the university), Diego (the guy I'm staying with) and I went out for dinner... nice food and Sangria! What more do you want? The place I'm staying at is nice... Diego is friendly, we have wireless, a fairly big apartment and there's a balcony where I can see myself sitting with my laptop working on stuff and sipping Sangria... I don't know yet how I'll cope with the commute given that I've always lived very close to work (5 minutes per foot in Cambridge was about all I needed for everything) but I'm sure I'll find something to do. It will also be a really interesting experience to life in a country where you don't speak the language.