Blogging the days...

I don't know if anyone else is having this strange feeling lately that Linux is getting, you know, good! I mean, I use Linux since RedHat 5.0 and at that time you had to, you know, suffer! Sure we had the enthusiasm but things were not easy and people were just happy to be able to say "there's this thing called rpm that helps install programs" or "this apt thing", or just some good ol' cli goodness that made your hart warm and cozy (Yes that is what happens to youth that doesn't mingle a lot with the peers). These days it's "Ubuntu cool, Debian stable, Mepis like Debian but more cool, Fedora getting better, Knoppix it'll boot your lighter, Slack is with The Man behind it". Even I have my mantra that starts with emerge -my world and ends with Gentoo. (was that a lame joke or what :) Anyhow, distro rivalry existed since the dawn of the ages but this is different, it's like people are starting to, you know, love the Penguin :)

There's a talk in town that WinFS might be backported to Windows XP. I think this is great and also a business-wise idea. First of all, there's a ton of old hardware that'll probably never be powerful enough to run Windows Vista, but that could run Windows XP for a while to come. But wait, take 2 and 2 together and let's just consider leaving all these machines to the competition namely MacOS and Linux. You can't just stop offering all the goodies! It'd just leave a lot of users angry for not having the latest and greatest eye candy and might just decide to "switch". Tiger already has some interesting indexing features and Linux has it's own ideas on the subject. Of course, WinFS will definitely just rock. So don't slack and bring it on. Having written that I just realized how much of a software engineer programmer geek I really am and I'm sinking deep into the grounds. :) Big hugs to Bibi as she's having a vacation at home with her f...

Talking about movie rumors... Even thought a project about the Silver Surfer is something I remember reading on the net during the 90'ies it seems that this time around with all Marvel's heroes coming to the big screen it just might be his lucky chance. I read just a few comics with the Silver Surfer but I loved every single one. I guess that these years have been hard on man kind and I wonder how people will react with the views that the Silver Surfer has. Of course I don't know how will his pacifistic views convince the studios as it might prove hard to push it out the doors these days as I'm getting the impression that the US is getting more and more conservative, more and more paranoid and maybe just a bit too fanatic with religion. I've grown with US movies and my views of the world are very influenced by that and seeing how the whole country changes it's mentality is just plain scary. Anyhow the news is from 2003 but said that it comes after the Fantastic ...

I'm a SciFi books fan and one of my favorite books is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. I heard a podcast today having a interview with OSC and it gave me a pleasant surprise. It seems that Warner Brothers are preparing to make a movie version. If it's as half as good as the book, it'll be one hell-of-a movie. Update: I found OSC's official site .

Check it out, you can log in to google so it learns what you search for and should become even better with time. Wow, and I thought Google reads my mind already :) It's pretty interesting how the search business is getting all warmed up (warm? hot!), yahoo now has it's own minimalist search page and so does MS . So... basically what will happen is that in the end search engines will have to deal not only with html (google already does pdf, doc and probably other formats too) but with mp3's, podcasts, images and probably in a ideal future it'll even be expandable with new formats as they come along. Such a unification to search would be especially be cool with indexing features and future storage file systems and is hopefully going to bring back the control into user's hand. My question would however be, even if you can gather and index all this metadata, who will have the time to compile it? I mean it's nice that you can say that a picture was shot in San Franc...

I don't know any hard statistics but I suppose planes rarely drop, probably less often then let's say 1 in 37 flights. I mean you don't get 0 that often when you play roulette even though you do get it now and then. Yet still, just in the last few days every time I watch the news there's a plane crash. Now what are the odds that can happen? Anyhow I remember this joke about a paranoid person that feared going on a plane because he thought there might be a bomb on board. He had to go somewhere so he called a traveling agency. The agent had a passion about statistics and told the man what were the odds that he might get on a plane with a bomb that were very small but still it wasn't very appealing to the man. So he asks what would the odds be that two bombs might be on the plane, the agent calculates the odds and finally the man satisfied by the small chance gets the ticket. The only problem is that he gets arrested on boarding as they find a bomb on him. What does t...

I tried Google Talk (I think I'll be calling it Talker) yesterday. It's really cute, slim and responsive. The voice part was a little bit deluding. The quality was ok but the first time I noticed some glitches now and then. For now Skype sounds better.

If you're in Bologna and have a desire to eat something Indian consider the Taj Mahal. It's in via San Felice 92/D , I've eaten there a couple of days ago and I must say I'm sorry I haven't tried it sooner. For 38€ me and my girlfriend had some exquisite chicken with curry, rice and a sauce that was a joy for the palate. Also we took a thin bread with something yogurtish like in the middle that was great too. At first you get served three sauces and some ultra thin and crispy breads, very tasty. Warning, the third sauce is ultra spicy. In the end we took a nice icecream and some Kheer, that's a sweet based on rice and milk with some pistachio. In Macedonia we have almost the same thing except we leave the grain as a whole and here it was fractured to smaller grains. It's easy to do, you just need some milk, sugar and rice. In the end they offer you something to drink. Really nice service, highly recommended and I hope to try some other delicacy soon. Plus I ...

I like a lot the google toolbar. It's the first toolbar I had and frankly I don't know if I'd like to have more than one activated as the screen relestate is a precious commodity these days. And guess what, Yahoo, MS, Netcraft and who knows who is preparing the next one. And each one has some cute features. Instead of going on an all out war, duplicating development effort and just looking plain dumb, why not standardize a open project and work on it together? Netcraft with it's anti phishing tips, MS with it's desktop search, A9 for Amazon shopping, eBay for auctions, google with it mind reading search, word highlighting and word search buttons, email checker for yahoo-hotmail-gmail, and why stop there? Plus there is the issue that it has to have versions for both explorer and firefox. The relestate is limited guys, learn to deal with it. Of course the other alternative would be OSX-like widgets or Konfabulator (but hey, that's yahoo now... hmmm... wicked!)

When I posted on Tablet PC while back I've had a response so I'll bash this thing too. The project we're developing is going to use some PocketPC's. One of the requirements is to be able to take signatures. As we think you can't put a signature directly on a web form we're considering the user putting the data over the web form and then generating runtime a rtf so that the user could load it in Pocket Word and add the signature. Later in the office the report (in pocket word format) would be synchronized using the cradle. As we're still evaluating the devices on the market (here I haven't seen any Mobile 5.0 devices) I had installed the Mobile 5.0 SDK and the scenario works fine with a 2003 SE emulator device. However the Mobile 5.0 Word doesn't have the drawing capability. Are we stuck with the 2003 editions, do I have to enable the drawing capability in a certain way or is the emulator that doesn't have it (I can't even paste if from the No...

Me and my girlfriend were out tonight to see a spectacle that takes the visitors to the underground passages of the water stream of Aposa. What was once one of the two streams that brought water to the city and allowed a barricade from the enemies. Starting from the Hebraic ghetto, Dante and his bolognian muse took us underneath, explaining some of it history, how it got closed to form the sewage system, the WWII bombardments, it's reconstruction. All in all a really nice trip, it goes by the name of Tra-ghetto and it's a part of Bologna's cultural summer. You can find more information here .

I'd like to say some things. First of all I like C# more than Java and I believe C# 2.0 is better than Java5. For this last year or so, my life has been immersed with developing J2EE Web Apps so I'd like to share this with all whom it may concern even though I haven't programmed one single line of Asp.net despite I wanted to do so. My first objection was the Web Server issue. Sun did some really neat politics, it makes a set of specifications and lets third party developers implement them. This alone gave me the possibility to choose from a variety of different Servlet and Application Servers. On the MS front? IIS 5.0, 6.0 (runs only on Win2k3 Server) or Cassini. As I wanted to run IIS 6.0 and I didn't like to install Win2k3 it'll be a while until I'll be developing on the Asp.net platform. Asp.net looks great I must admit, simple yet straightforward API, unified thanks to the fact there is just one innovator, just one implementer. Componentized developing that ...