The excellent MABB tells us that Things are Getting Ugly in Bolivia. My native country is in the midst of rewriting the Consitution and it is turning into a divisive process.

The main message is that the Constitutional Assembly is in serious crisis. There are calls from the separatists in Santa Cruz (la nacion camba) to form a regional assembly. The people in the Andes, are so worried that they decided to go to Sucre to make sure the assembly continues its work. They have threatened the assembly members with community justice if they don't do what the "people" want. The assembly itself is having trouble meeting and doing its work.

Meanwhile, the government is violating civil liberties and dur process as it cracks down on opponents and high ranking figures from previous governments.

To date, the Morales team has announced plans to prosecute some 150 people who held high-level jobs in previous governments including five ex-presidents for crimes ranging from "genocide" to "espionage" and "destruction or deterioration of state assets."

Yet the government has provided scant evidence to back the accusations, relying instead on news conferences and public harangues. In the Nogales case, an ambiguous video of people removing stacks of money from a bank vault was leaked to TV networks in June and broadcast widely.

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Self described "economist by day and diner by night" Tyler Cowen writes an article in the Washington Post on ethnic dining in the Washington metropolitan area. People are often surprised when I tell them there are many Bolivian restaurants in the area, although less so than before. In his article, he interviews Victor Serrano, owner of Victor's Grill in Falls Church. By far, the best Bolivian restaurant in the area where you can eat the always-popular-with-the-gringos Salteñas as well as delicacies like Lengua, Fricase, and Bolivian Chicaron.

As Serrano points out, "Our competition is not right next door. We compete with . . . restaurants five or 10 miles away."

My eating odyssey has uncovered other surprises and undermined old assumptions. Who would have guessed, for example, that good Peruvian and Bolivian restaurants outnumber Mexican ones in a region that is home to more than 32,000 Latino-owned businesses and where one in 11 residents is Latino?

On an email list I lurk on, someone asked if there was any way to prevent PDFs on their website from being indexed by crawlers, such as Googlebot, MSNBot, and their cousins. A helpful reply pointed tehm to Jakob Nielsen sidebar on Preventing Search Engines from Spidering PDF Files. Nielsen suggesst using your robots.txt file or password protecting your documents. While the latter is a foolproof solution, the former is really insufficient.

Using robots.txt doesn't guarantee that your PDF files won't be spidered. There is nothing beyond convention and etiquette that enforces the rules defined in robots.txt. Well behaved spiders, of course, do obey it so this will keep your PDF's out of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. But there's nothing stopping me from writing my own crawler that ignores robots.txt and grabs your precious PDF files.\ \ One solution (although it can be defeated via User-Agent spoofing) is to pass downloads through a script and check the user agent string. If its an allowed agent, then the download continues normally, otherwise they're blocked. On Apache you could do this with all with rewrite rules that passes all pdf downloads to a PHP script that inspects the HTTP_USER_AGENT string. This transparently serves the /download_not_allowed.html page to user agents that do not contain the strings Gecko or MSIE, which are in most browsers.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}   !Gecko   [AND]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}   !MSIE   
RewriteRule .pdf$;  /download_not_allowed.html

An alternative, less user-friendly solution, is to allow downloads verified by a CAPTCHA, commonly used to block spam on blogs. That is, the download only happens if the user correctly identifies the words/picture in a distorted image.