718.6 km with 38 liters of fuel. Not bad, eh? You have to be economical, given the extreme high cost of traveling these days.
Relaxing moments on a rainy spring.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe is just another face, representative of Africa's current terrible relations with the Europe.
Worrying pictures of armed locals. International press says that police doesn't act.
Last monday (10 April 2000), I was invited to host a brief and introductory presentation, on the subject of software agents. It all happened @ ESGS and it was kind of a disaster...
Everything was OK, until the moment I was to show my artificial life Gil. It was quite a shock to realize that I had forgotten the Creatures 2 CDROM at home... and without the original CDROM inserted, the game refused to work. Gil rested asleep in the computer's HD.
Oh well, if you can't have it, live without it. So I did, and things weren't that bad :)
The presentation lasted 135 minutes, which was nearly twice the recommended duration, but there was no way I could have done it much shorter.
My presentation followed the order:
#1) introduction to software agents, using this document [45 KB PDF] to sync myself with the stuff I was supposed to talk about. This document is strongly inspired in Luis Custódio's classes @ IST.
#2) software agents and entertainment, using this other document [1192 KB ZIP of a PDF]. Notice that the second part was entirely based on the pages I had written for a conference on the same subject, one year before @ INESC.
#3) artificial life... and at this point, I was to present case: Gil. You already know what happened....
#4) case: forward inference engine [127 KB PDF documentation of my software].
All these documents and computer projects, plus some others, are freely available from the Computer Projects and Computer Documents pages.
North vs South / Robert Gabriel Mugabe (part 1)
April begins with strong racist questions all over the world. The North - South division suddenly jumps to the front page, with the never stopping famine @ Africa, the never stopping natural floods @ Latin America, and the ever going question of "under what conditions should North help South"?
First, it was Angola "against" Portugal, because of Mario Soares and passport problems with citizens from both countries... weeks later, it is Zimbabwe and the UK...
Robert Gabriel Mugabe is Zimbabwe's president. This man, a former teacher @ Ghana, has an history of very strong political relations with marxist and african nationalist parties.
He was arrested for 10 years (!), because of its fights against the white power @ Rhodesia (today's Zimbabwe) and he was a top responsible for the 1980 elections, that would elect ZANU-PF.
Mugabe would become president in 1987 and since then, he has been a very influent person on Africa's future.
For years, he was accused of doing nothing in order to solve the uneven share of lands (a few white british farmers hold 20% of them, while the smashing majority of the black population has nothing), but this April, Mugabe wakes (for the elections?) and orders the occupation of the white people's farms, going against the country's law. There are already reported cases of violence, during the takeover...
Where will it end?
Review code CDs are very much like any other CDROM...
Detail of Michelin's Race of Champions CDROM. A superb game!
Mugabe is fighting for a re-election, but that only highlights how fragile are most of Africa's regimes, unfortunately guided by personal interests, blind to long term projects.
These are some of the men behind the first case of reported violence against the white farmers. A couple of british were attacked by these people.