The picture you can see below is traveling the world. A woman wearing a bikini and knee-high boots disrupted the shooting of a group photo of EU and Latin American leaders at a summit in Vienna on Friday. The woman, who identified herself as Evangelina Carrozo, was protesting the construction of two wood pulp plants that are being built in Uruguay near a river border with Argentina. Read more about this.

While the form of protest may appear frivolous to the naked eye, the issue is quite serious. Uruguay has agreed to the contruction of two wood pulp plants that have failed to demonstrate that their day to day activities won’t have a major impact on the Uruguay river. It is such a serious issue that two nations that have been historically united (Uruguay and Argentina), are now facing their worst diplomatic conflict.

I do believe that the plants should not be built. It is an extreme position (the politically correct statement would be just to ask for serious studies showing the impact on the environment), but it is a well founded one. It is A FACT that such factories have a HUGE negative impact on the environment. Argentina knows about this, since we have our own share of paper mills destroying natural life.

I am shocked. I just read a study saying that in Argentina, during 2005, 14,526 people died and more than 120,000 were injured just by traffic accidents. That is: 39 deaths and 328 injured per day. This sickening high number puts Argentina as the country with by far the most number of traffic accidents. Between January and March of 2006, 1,777 people died as a result of a traffic accident.

Consider that Argentina has a population of 36,260,130. This means that 0.37 % of our population gets affected (either killed or injured) by a traffic accident, per year. After 10 years, 3.71 % of the population would be affected. Take that number, and apply it to a country like the US, with a population of 295,734,134 people, and you would get: 1,097,181 affected per year, and 10,971,811 affected after 10 years. Yes, the numbers are correct. Over one million people per year, and over ten million people every 10 years. Iraq’s war and the World Trade Center are starting to seem acceptable casualties, right?

I sincerely hope that argentinians realize that we can no longer continue like this. Because if we do, we just might not have anything to continue.

Try out the recently launched eSassy, a unique service including an Internet Explorer Toolbar that allows you to unify your shopping experience, and share / review products together with your friends.

Using a very easy to follow toolbar (see screenshot below) you can quickly add your favorite products (that you may’ve found on any shopping portal, such as amazon.com, ebay.com, etc.) to your unified shopping cart, and even tell your friends about it. You can also suggest products to your friends, or add them as surprise gifts so your network of friends can comment about it, without the lucky who’s going to receive the gift knows about it.

I find this to be a really useful tool since I am not the kind of user who shops at just one site. Quite the contrary, I buy stuff from different sources, so before eSassy it was hard for me to keep track. Now, not only I can keep track of my wish to have list of products, but I can also ask for my friends opinions.

This year I’ve been improving my skills on developing .NET applications using C#. Everyday, I get amazed on how strong the language is. In many ways, I sincerely believe that C# is the language that I wish Java could’ve been. I especially love the usage of templates (I do know they are available since Java 1.5, but they call it generics) and, above all, operator overloading. Thanks to that language feature, it is very interesting how event management is handled in C#. If you haven’t heard about it, I recommend you take a look.

While I’m still waiting for a local bookstore to deliver my copy of what promises to be a great read (Programming Windows with C# by Charles Petzold) I continued my practice by developing a desktop based application for some serious web clipping capabilities. I started the old school way (Textpad + command line C# compiler), but then I found SharpDevelop, a great IDE, which is not only open source but also developed in C#. Take a look at the following screenshot:

Amongst a great set of features, I have to say that the visual form designer is quite exciting (allowing you to drag & drop your own custom UI controls). It is surely making my C# developing experience more enjoyable.

Stay tuned for further news about cricava’s first desktop based C# application!

The excellent B2B IT service provider RentACoder.com has published an article of our own on their Coder’s Article section. Check it out at:

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/SoftwareCoders/articles/ImproveYourRACRanking.asp

We tried to share with other RAC coders our experience working on the site, giving the reader a set of tips trying to help them improve their own ranking. Hope it helps

Just a few days ago (February the 3rd) I came back from my 31 days vacation I took in Miramar, a city on the southern east part of Buenos Aires, a trully beautiful beach location.

I spend most of my days resting, just hanging out. However, I did find the time to get on a rowing boat a few times, doing a little exercise.

I’ve also spent my nights drinking good wine at some bar in the pedestrian street, which is considered the “downtown” part of Miramar.

I miss my vacations. I can’t wait to go back to Miramar. No place like it.

We are more than pleased to announce the launch of CRICAVA Technologies Open Source, a portal that will be the home of numerous programming related articles (targetting Java, C++, and PHP, among other languages), and a variety of open source projects that CRICAVA is donating to the open source community.

I’ve finished uploading my first article on the portal, entitled Simulating method / function overload in a PHP 4 class, that covers how to achieve method overloading on a PHP4 framework, where it is not natively available. Check it out.

Thanks to Claudia, who so generously took the picture, here’s a shot of my desk.

You can see my omnipresent mug (with coffee on it), the smooth mouse pad, and the LOTR wallpaper (that’s a picture of Sam & Gollum making Bunny soup)