Blogging the days...

One more year has passed. My life had some drammatic ups and downs than this year. I can't say I'm full out in the clear, but I've closed some things from the past and can look with hope to the future. I can't be happier for having so many good friends and I know things are going to get better. As it's wishing time, I'd like for java to have verbatim literals, that means you could omit the backslash in front of special characters (like the backslash itself) ex: "Backslash: \\" @"Backslash: \" I think this would allow us to much easier copy/paste regex code from existing regex expressions.

In a tragic accident between his VW Tuareg and a truck on the Zagreb - Lipovac highway (Croatia), the best Macedonian pop artist Tose Proevski was killed in an instant. He followed my generation with his beautiful voice and gave us truly splendid memories that we will share forever. A truly wonderful person, humanitarian and ambassador of goodwill that will be missed by all.

For about a year or so, I've been listening to the Bill Maher Real Time podcast which is a recording of the HBO show of the same name. It's amazing as in this day and age comedians are the ONLY people that can speak freely against the actions of their own governments (and when they were censored we can freely say they were REGIMES) even if the countries are actually democracies. Look at Italy where the best political comments came out of comedians like Sabina Guzzanti, Daniele Lutazzi or more recently Beppe Grillo with his V-Day campaign which is gathering some momentum that surprised the established politicians. Anyhow, this is not a post about Italian politics, I wanted to add two more great shows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report both on The Comedy Channel. These two are not available as a feed (a shame) but their sites offers quite a bit of excellent content. I heard about The Colbert Report when I saw a shootout between him and Bill O'Reilly (a...

As Pavarotti left us this week, I think I'll always remember him singing "Nessun dorma" by Puccini. His voice and talent were indeed unique and the world will honour him forever. Thank you maestro. Nessun dorma Nessun dorma, nessun dorma ... Tu pure, o Principessa, Nella tua fredda stanza, Guardi le stelle Che tremano d'amore E di speranza. Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, Il nome mio nessun saprà, no, no, Sulla tua bocca, io lo dirò Quando la luce splenderà. Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio Che ti fa mia. Il nome suo nessun saprà E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir, morir... Dilegua, notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò! Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

I recently read this article on How Propaganda Works and it's staggering how you can draw parallels on its (ab)use through history but also the present.

A couple of months ago I've discovered JQuery's Interface widgets and I must say it's a very nice set of extensions even though it does have issues with certain browsers (the homepage crashes IE7 for example). That said, I've quickly tried to do stuff I needed for my project. For instance, I had a div on one page that I dynamically refill with some data periodically. As it needed to be in a limited space what I did at the time is something like this: < div style = "overflow:auto;height:200px;" > This of course had the disadvantage to be completely fixed in height, but still provided the possibility to scroll around the data in the layer. So, I decided to use Interface in order to give the div the ability to resize. As the main Interface page offered only two examples of a resizable textbox and a selection over an image I've decided to publish this example where I show how to do the same thing but with a div (layer). You'll notice the expander w...