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As of about half an hour ago, 83.87 percent of the votes have been counted and it seems more and more certain that Alan García will make it to the second round. He currently has a 0.9 percent lead over Lourdes. Unfortunately the official ONPE site is always a few hours behind. Though it doesn’t matter much because they are currently counting at a rate of 3% a day (or so it seems). Update: The Peru Election weblog reports that ONPE (the official electoral office) has just started counting the votes aborad. About three percent of the Peruviants vote from abroad, so this could actually alter the result in favour of Lourdes. The foreigners are estimated to vote more in favor of Lourdes while the rural areas (which is the main part of the votes that have not been counted yet) generally vote for Alan and Humala. The suspense will probably only terminate when 100 percent of the votes have been counted. ...

After more than six months in Peru, after learning Spanish for a month, after working at the Diego Thomson for more than six months, after getting to know different parts of the country, after getting robbed a few times (three times to be exact), after getting to know many great people, the Peruvian culture and my girlfriend, after accepting a new job in Switzerland, after learning about the Peruvian history and politics and the Spanish language, I’m now finally going back to Switzerland. Yes, you heard that right. In less than a week, I’ll finally be able to eat my favourite Kebabs at the Limon restaurant again. I’m leaving Peru on April 13 and will arrive in Switzerland April 14. (Disclaimer: I have no control over any plane crashes, terror attacks, weather situations, the airline, etc. Actually I have no control over anything.) Flight: IB3474 Coming from: Madrid Arrival date: Friday, April 14, 2006 Arrival time: 18:35 Zurich local time And as the theme song for the occasion I recommend Perfect Summer by Waiting For Steve. Though it seems I’m returning for something like winter, according to some photos. ...

Readers of my weblog know, that in Peru was election weekend. The results for the presidential race are surprising. Ollanta Humala wins, which for some time has been predicted. But for second place it’s still unclear whether Lourdes Flores or Alan García will take it. This is important, because the top two contenders will go on to the second round. According to the latest numbers of today, Monday, 5pm Peruvian time with 75.64 percent of the votes counted, Humala gets 29.65%, García 24.95% and Lourdes 24.69% (source). Lourdes and Alan have switched the second/third place a few times. In my opinion a second round with Humala and Alan would be the worst result possible. Alan has proven that he is a bad president and Humala doesn’t exactly sound promising either. But many Peruvians don’t trust Lourdes because she has strong links to big business. The evangelicals are glad, that Humberto Lay, an evangelical pastor, did better than many expected. His party gets about three seats in congress. It’s the only new party without a serious presidential candiate which gets new seats. There will be six parties with representation in the congress. Of this, three have presidential hopefuls (APRA of Alan, Unión por el Perú for Humala and Unidad Nacional for Lourdes), and two parties represent former presidents (Alianza por el futuro which wants Alberto Fujimori back and Frente de centro for Valentín Paniagua). Not much can be said about congress representation, though, because just about 14 percent of the votes have been counted. My sources for following the elections are: ...

It has started. From now until Sunday it’s not allowed to sell alcohol here in Peru. Also parties seem to be generally forbidden until Sunday. So it’s even more drastic than I thought before. Update: I learned a few more things about this. The law is called “ley seca” (the “dry law”) and under this law selling and consuming alcohol is forbidden from Friday until Monday lunchtime on the election weekend. The reason is that drunkards actually go voting. Also large congregations are forbidden, with a few exceptions such as church services which are allowed on Saturday but not un Sunday. ...

This Washington Post coverage of the Peruvian Election provides a very good summary of what’s going on. One excerpt: Can Peruvian polls be trusted? No. Peruvian polls are notoriously unreliable. The most solid prediction is that there will be a second round and Humala will be in it. The volatility of the polls rests on the fact that many Peruvians do not make up their minds until a few days before the election and that polls rarely reach the 20 percent of voters in the poorest, most remote areas of the country. (Because isolated, low income voters are most likely to vote for Humala, this may mean he is even further ahead than polls suggest). Also it seems, that Flores is currently in the lead again according to the polls. I have read some very critical articles against Humala in the newspapers (though I only read the first pages at the kiosk). So the following interpretation seems plausible: "Humala's support has fallen because of a barrage of attacks against him these last few days. ... That has generated a fear of voting for the unknown," said CPI's director, Manuel Saavedra. But again: polls are unreliable.

Marriages are rarely news-worthy for me. But this one is special for several reasons. First, Fujimori is a former president of Peru and would like to become president again. Second, he is currently imprisoned in Chile where the courts are evaluating if they can extradite him to Peru. Third, his party is campaigning and would like to get some Fujimori people elected into congress. They also have a candiate for the presidency but she has not much hope to get elected. So out from his prison, Fujimori now married a Japanese woman (Fujimori is Japanese as well). Many Peruvians see this as a move to get his party some more sympathy votes. Personally I think so myself, because the timing is just “too perfect” and Fujimori too political. The elections are on Sunday. ...

You know what I hate about cell phones? I have quite a few megabytes on my mobile phone for pictures (mostly unused). But still the phone is hard coded to allow only 200 short messages stored on the phone. In all folders combined. Please tell me that there is at least a reason for that. Sorry, just a random rant. Going back to the usual program now.

The Guardian has a piece about the upcoming presidential election in Peru of this Sunday, April 9. If you are interested in the first-round favourite Ollanta Humala you should read it, because the document presents some information about him. Then there is this piece of knowledge: But surveys suggest professional politicians are almost universally despised as self-serving. This context helps explain the apparent popularity of Mr Humala, who has not previously run for office, according to John Crabtree of the Centre for Latin American Studies at Oxford University. You don't need to survey for that, though. Whenever I talk with my Peruvian friends and taxi drivers it's very clear that politicians are liars, corrupt, self-serving and anything but responsible. Women and non-politians are trusted more. Also I'm told that it helped Fujimori that he was Asian and that also Humberto Lay, an evangelical pastor with Chinese parents who runs for president, profits from the notion that Asians have a better moral base. Also most Peruvians I talked with feel that Peru has a lot of unused natural resources that the past governments should have used to enrich the people. They usually talk about the sea resources. I'll comment more about the elections here, as I'm very interested in the outcome. Though I'll be more interested in what the new government actually will achieve. Hopes are generally very low. (Via Findory)

One of the jobs I have identified as valuable at the Diego Thomson is getting a better software for the library. That should be easy enough. I’m only looking for some good cataloging, being able to lend out a book to a student, and some small extras like printing reports. Oh and Spanish translation of course. Should be easy to find? Maybe. I have so far looked at OpenBiblio and PhpMyLibrary. Neither does convince me. So I guess I’ll have to have a look at other packages which seem to be a lot more work to install. Does anyone know any software they use? And no, my media manager is not an option, we’re talking about a different league here. ...

Software developers can be judged best by their work. A CV or even an interview can never really be trusted. While I try to very honest in my CV I have seen some CVs that will make me double-check every claim an applicant makes in his CV. Some of my classmates of my apprenticeship would write they had a “good” understanding of C++ while they just barely knew that it was some object oriented programming language. And I have gotten requests by friends where they asked me to define some terminology. It later turned out, that they needed that to put into the CV. “Ouch” is all I can say about that. But how can your potential employer ensure that you actually know your stuff? Recommendations are important. Can they call your former coworkers and ask about your performance? This can also be dangerous though if you left the job with sour feelings. The company may give you bad ratings because you criticised the company strategy a bit too loudly. I haven’t had that experience myself but have friends who did. What nobody can influence though is the quality of the projects you publish. An extensive software project shows your creativity, problem solving skills, communication skills, code quality (if you publish the source code). And it shows that you are actually able to deliver and know the programming language you are using. All things that your employer will want from you. There are several ways you can do that. The most obvious is to implement some idea that’s floating around your mind and publish it as free software. Or you can put out some Web project. Be aware that this requires quite a time commitment, though. Something not everybody is able or willing to do. The second option is to participate in an existing open source project. Found a bug? Fix it. Have feature request? Build it. All of that is visible as well and gets an URL. Document the work on your Web site (as you now have one, don’t you?). And the third option is to make the work of your current job public. Are you working on something that could be bundled as a product? Publish it as free software. Of course, that’s not your decision but has to be approved by your boss. If you need a case study, point your boss to Ruby on Rails. Published by David of 37signals, that company is now extremely well known and produces a lot of buzz on the Web. Rails was originally created as part of Basecamp and then extracted and made public. No matter which way you choose, make sure that the code you publish is of good quality. Take pride in your code and see it as a piece of art. Actually you should always do that no matter whether the code is public or not. To some extend I have taken all three routes. I have published a lot of projects (blog directory, Swiss weblog statistics, Media Manager, Bookmark Manager, though I’d like to remove that code from the Web because it’s horrible). Also I have contributed patches to some open-source applications. And I was able to publish a research document I did at namics (Web application security). ...