Bolivia's Constituent Assembly, charged with rewriting the country's constitution by December 14th, has suspended its work indefinitely.  Campesinos and other indigenous groups plan to march through the streets of Sucre peacefully to advocate national unity.  But what's does national unity mean when the MAS party, the party of the president, changes the assembly rules, so that they can unilaterally vote on changes and amendments. 

The always insightful MABB Blog, has been keeping an eye on the rising tensions in Sucre, and documents the actions of the MAS in the Constituent Assembly.

It seems as though, MAS, in addition to having angered the Sucre citizens by arbitrarily removing the motion to debate the move of the seat of government, are getting ready to go ahead an approve their proposed constitution using their majority votes. An action which is widely repudiated, not only by the opposition, but also by the citizens of Sucre.

And, to add what comes across to me as a little paranoia, the President threatens to take action against "foreign diplomats who become involved in Bolivian politics," accusing the USA of funding the opposition. Its not foreign meddling when Castro or Chavez do it? It's naive to call out the US, but par for the course. I think its mostly rhetoric for his supporters, something like a wedge issue to keep the us-vs-them mentality and deepen divisions in the country.

He added that while his government would be patient with foreign governments, "at any time we will make radical decisions against those ambassadors who are always provoking us."

The tension is so bad that a brawl broke out:

http://www.youtube.com/v/kShFxAJ3LVo

Is there a solution? Will the country look to a military coup to impose order, or is there still hope for coming to a consensus everyone can live with?

Adobe's PDF Reader and Acrobat software are up there pretty high on my list of bloated windows software that I'll never put on a Windows maching I get. Its slow, bloated, and takes forever to launch, which is particularly annoying when you want to read something right now!  Viw Download Squad, comes news of Sumatra PDF viewer which is free, fast, tiny, and Open Source.\

Sumatra is a single 802KB executable file for Windows. No installation required. That means you can run Sumatra off of a flash drive. You can also set it as your default PDF viewer.

I linked to a negative review of Adobe Acrobat 6 four years ago!

Jamesr on Column Two sets the bar pretty high when he observes that it costs \$5 million to write a CMS. On the face of it, I can't argue with it. The temptation with writing one from scratch is that it so easy, and tempting, to have something functional with a pretty minimal investment (say less than \$100k, heck, one marathon coding weekend of a halfway talented/dangerous programmer.  If the \$5 million is to write an a CMS that "just works right" CMS, I wonder what the price tage for a CMS that handles the majority of the features actually needed by most web sites. I expect the Pareto principle to be in full effect, in that 20% of the features will account for 80% of the cost. Given that rough estimate, you can write a usable CMS for \$1 million invested, or can you? I haven't convinced myself but now since its written on the Interwebs, it must be true.

This is real money (cash) that needs to be found and spent by vendors, to produce an acceptably good mid-market solution. This isn't a all-singing-all-dancing product we're talking about here, but rather a CMS that just "works right", and meets the expectations of most purchasers.

What are the difficult 20% features? Workflow, Full Internationalization/Localization of content.  ContentHere has a full list of the hard stuff.\