Blogging the days...

It's incredible what people with a lot of free time on their hands do. Like Yossi Vardi (former ICQ chairman) that made two bold statements "Never underestimate a pigeon carrying a memory card, hovering above your head, ready to download" and "Never underestimate the data transfer rate of a snail on wheels!" and decided to prove it. My comment would be that this is an interesting insight into Moore's law. In fact what today we use for data storage (DVD) tomorrow will be a Blu ray disc and the same snail will be upgraded for free thus leveraging 2 billion years of R&D. Or to paraphrase the mottoes of the day if it works don't replace (fix) it. ;)

I found this great blog that talks about (and let's hope it'll continue to go into details) the future of NTFS. It seems that MS will be adding transaction Api to handle NTFS in Longhorn. Now let see how long will it take for first C# examples to come out.

This guy was famous in his own days, must have been an actor or something :) 

Here you can see the cathedral, the bell tower and a part of the Baptistery (on the left) 

This is the bell tower that was designed by Giotto. 

Been to Florence the last week, this is the dome of the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore and was designed by Brunelleschi. 

I actually remember the days when I learned HTML 3.0 from a book. I also remember coding it by hand and tracking the links so that nothing breaks. Of course the day I discovered that there are tools that let you run your site as a project gave my life a whole new sense and I could just dedicate myself to graphic design. The last couple of years as I started to program seriously the concept of "project" was implicit but it was mostly static and the IDE's did not help a lot with team development. So what I hope will happen that projects will start to interoperate. Ant, Snv, Bugtraq, trac, xUnit, profilers etc. have to be integrated and allow for a better project management for the entire group and we need OpenSource solutions, yesterday. Rational has had them for a long time but they had great cost. Microsoft is now lowering the bar (in price) with Team System but it's still not free. I have greatest hopes from eclipse as I see most development effort and easiest extens

Did you catch those cute 80x15 buttons people stick to their web sites lately? Well you can use this free service to build your own button.

Adobe will acquire Macromedia. Wow. I would really like to know what will come out of this merger. The best companies in the graphic business merge... I hope this won't slow down adoption of SVG as Adobe might be tempted to push Flash. I really have great hopes for Flex. But what will happen to interleaving products like Fireworx/Photoshop or Freehand/Illustrator?

MSN Messenger 7.0 has come out, you can get it on the MSN site. It seems it has added support for the MSN blog service Spaces , and also Video Conversation, Audio Conversation, Winks & Nudges, Photo Swap, PC-to-Mobile Phone Chats , Personal Music Message and they are promising more. It sounds great and looks good too but as I have many accounts on different networks I decided to use just one, the Miranda universal client that has a great community and is very expandable via plugins. Plus it's free unlike Trillian .

Rainy's Rainlendar is by far the best calendar that sits on your desktop and let's you annotate events and to-do's. Recommended.

Eurogamer.net - Half-Life 2: Aftermath , It seems that Valve is preparing the sequel to the Half-life serial. Time will tell how long will it take and will it be more reasonably priced.

There are some really good sites on where to get the latest MS development stuff. The pillar is of course MSDN and it's future improved edition MSDN2 but once it leaves beta this link might be obsolete. Then if you have a broadband connection I'd definitely recommend the Channel 9 site which hosts a bunch of videos with MS developers showing their jobs and the latest technologies. They have a new forum service, so we'll see what level of acceptance it will have. MS has definitely been ahead with this blog-mania and a lot of developers blog regulary, my favorites are Eric Gunnerson , Adam Kinney , Don Box , Mark Fussell , Stan Lippman , Chris Sells and the mythical Scobleiser .

Planet Gentoo is a new blog outlet by the gentoo developers. Some really interesting news related to gentoo and changes that are going on with it so subscribe to planet gentoo! Other useful links are: Break my gentoo , Gentoo Wiki , Gentoo portage , Gentoouser , and often there are gentoo user groups in your language. Ex. Gentoo.it and Gentoo Italia for Italian users. Of course don't forget the forum and irc.

Have you ever had a computer disaster? The one that makes you feel like the end of the world is here and that you've lost 1,2+ years of work in oblivion. I had some too and I'd like to share some of the worst. 1. I'm installing RedHat 7.x beta, I don't remember what I did but I noticed he's formatting the disk with windows. Ctrl+Alt+Del after format. Ok,let's think a bit. I'm doomed. But wait, it didn't take too long this format, maybe was only a quick-format? So I install windows on a spare disk (I like having a lot of disks), install Windows, install Norton and tried restoring the FAT. Bingo! It really made my day. 2. The second was that one of the most basic Windows XP files was damaged (I don't know what damaged it) and my disk didn't want to boot anymore. Better still, my disk at the time needed extra drivers so Windows Rescue didn't work on it. So what happened was that I installed XP on a second disk, patched the needed file and copie