…o meglio, ho l’ala, perché è una sola, ma per il parapendio va bene così!
Trattasi di una UP Makalu2, una vela DHV1-2 facilmente fruibile anche da principianti, ha dei bei colori sgargini simili a quelli della foto sopra, ed in più ha anche le mie iniziali stampate sopra 
Purtroppo oggi non ho potuto provarla, per via del vento troppo forte da nord che avrebbe impedito il decollo, mi sono limitato a vederla gonfiata dal vento e sono comunque soddisfatto di averla in casa 
È un puro caso, ma anche la mia prima vela da windsurf è stata una UP sails!
Forse nessuno di voi, pochi e affezionati lettori, non sa che oltre a far male quando viene la sinusite il seno mascellare può, nel caso l’osso in cui sono annegate le radici dei nostri denti sia troppo piccolo, essere messo in comunicazione diretta con la bocca semplicemente levando un dente. Neanche io lo sapevo fino a ieri pomeriggio quando il dentista, che a dire il vero per precauzione mi aveva anche fatto fare la TAC e si aspettava una complicazione del genere, mi ha levato il dente del giudizio superiore sinistro. Ora in pratica ho un minuscolo foro da cui quando degluttisco entra aria nella bocca. Non è una bellissima sensazione sentire l’aria entrare dal naso, passare nella guancia e quindi entrare in bocca. Il dentista, che come dicevo era preparato a una complicazione di questo tipo, e ha già provveduto a tagliare la gengiva per creare due lembi da cucire insieme. Martedì mi leverà questi punti e mi ricucirà ma per alcuni giorni non potrò soffiarmi il naso. Nel frattempo sospendo gli allenamenti di corsa fino al prossimo fine settimana.
Ora spacco le pietre sotto il sole cocente.Sono un fuorilegge. Il colore (e l'accostamento) dei colori del dispositivo elettronico noto come "Il cellulare di Luca" viola un brevetto. Sono un fuorilegge.
Ho combattuto la legge... e la legge ha vinto (x2)
Ho comprato un dispositivo elettronico cinese perché costava meno
Ho combattuto la legge... e la legge ha vinto (x2)
During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could be useful to share them with other people.
The one I’m talking about today is a simple command-line utility that adds an email address to your contacts based on the Jabber ID (or on the ID of other protocols). This is very useful to me as in Collabora we all have a roster automatically filled with the other Collaborans, this way I can automatically have their email addresses in my address book.
This cannot be done automatically for all the contact as, usually, it’s not true that a Jabber ID is also a valid email address (for instance it’s not true for jabber.org users), but it’s true at least for the GMail and Collabora servers.
If you want to try jid-to-email get the already compiled arm executable or the source code. Remember to take a backup before trying it, I don’t want to be blamed if something goes horribly wrong 
.
The program accepts two arguments: the vcard field for the IM protocol and a regular expression. For instance, if you cd to the directory where the program is and do “./jid-to-email X-JABBER @collabora.co.uk”, an email address will be added to all the contacts that have a Jabber ID containing “@collabora.co.uk”. Similarly “./jid-to-email X-JABBER ‘@g(oogle)?mail\.com’” will add an email address to all the contacts with a Jabber ID containing “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com”. You could also try using “X-MSN” to do the same thing for contacts that use their GMail address as MSN ID.
Please, let me know if you know any other server where the Jabber ID is always a valid email address.
By the way, this week-end I’m going to Brussels for FOSDEM: hope to meet a lot of GNOME people there!
Con l’aiuto di Andrea De Prisco sono recentemente tornato in possesso di tutti i miei articoli tecnici pubblicati nel periodo 1982-1989 sullo storico mensile MC-Microcomputer.
Il periodico ha rappresentato una delle prime riviste di informatica in Italia, dedicando ampi spazi alle prove dei nuovi hardware in commercio nonchè alle più innovative (per l’epoca) tecnologie software.
Ho pensato di condividere con i lettori del blog uno dei miei articoli: la prova tecnica del computer Sharp MZ-800 di giugno 1985.
I meno giovani ricorderanno certamente il clima pionieristico di sperimentazione di quegli anni. Questo computer, con la sola memoria di massa rappresentata dal registratore a nastro e dai due floppy disk da 5″ (opzionali) era venduto, 25 anni fa, al sorprendente prezzo di Lire 3.490.000 (oltre tre milioni!).
Potete scaricare l’articolo in PDF da questo link. Buona lettura.
Un micro-post per annunciare che, come avevo anticipato nel mio articolo precedente, Ondřej Palkovský, l’autore di GiPSy, ha mantenuto la parola data ed ha rilasciato il codice sorgente della sua applicazione, eccettuata una certa chiave di crittografia necessaria per generare i g-records, qualunque cosa siano…
Il codice è disponibile QUI, se siete in grado di farlo, correte a dare una mano! Soprattutto all’inizio qualche incoraggiamento è indispensabile!
I just rolled the tarball for the next development release of gedit. This release marks an important milestone, since we completed all the goals we had on our roadmap for 2.30.
In particular this release overhauls the internals of I/O handling in gedit by always using gio for file loading and saving (we only used gio for saving remote files) and by taking advantage of the new data conversion api added by Alex.
For the casual gedit user these changes should be pretty much transparent, since they do not introduce new features except for the ability of forcing different line endings (Window’s CRLF, old MacOS CR and the usual UNIX LF). However since they are affecting one of the most important parts of the gedit codebase we would like to ask anyone running the development version and in particular who uses files with encodings different from UTF-8, to heavily test file loading and saving and report any problem or regression.
Hi there! It’s been a long time since I last wrote something on this blog, which reminds me how many things have happened in my life in the last year and a half.
As some of you might know, I’ve been working part-time for Collabora (on Empathy), helping fixing misc bugs and implementing nice things like file transfer, the accounts dialog user interface and the transition to the Mission Control 5 framework.
In the meanwhile I kept myself busy with my university and finally, last week, I took the last exam of my course! This means I’ll hopefully graduate on April 
Since November, I already started digging into my thesis, which will be aTelepathy implementation of the XTLS protocol, an end to end solution to crypt communication over XMPP.
In order for Telepathy to support channel encryption, some new interfaces need to be written. I drafted some proposals for this on the telepathy mailing list in the last few months, and I’m happy that Eitan Isaacson picked them up and turned them into something more concrete. In order to discuss with him and the rest of Collabora about the proposal, I’ll visit the Cambridge office at the end of the month, right in time to attend FOSDEM and the XMPP summit together with the Collabora gang.
After that, the items on my TODO list include:
Hope to see you all in FOSDEM
Christopher Tozzi, l’abile redattore del portale WorksWithU, ha recentemente pubblicato un interessante articolo su Baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer), evidenziando attraverso i suoi commenti la semplicità d’uso e l’indiscussa utilità dello strumento grafico di analisi dello spazio su disco per sistemi Gnome.
Small post, just for the guys who don’t follow me on twitter.
For Ubuntu Lucid the desktop team started working on a patch which enables RGBA colormap by default, and adds client-side window decorations capabilities as well.
That means transparency to your applications and much more 
Murrine will try to follow this trend, maybe slowly because I’m busy with other things, but something will happen.
For the braves, here’s the link to the bug.
Of course, donations to Murrine are always welcome! 
Lately I’ve been finding myself amazed about the social turn that programming has taken in quite a while.
I started growing as a software developer thanks to the Internet, it and the people on mailing lists/forums/irc have shaped my skills, career and made me discover a lot of great things. I owe the Internet a lot. As Tim Bray says in his After Branding essay:
You are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it.
It is pointless to start talking about what good open source and version control tools have done to the social side of programming because it’s there to see for everybody. Websites like Sourceforge and Freshmat were everything we talked about in the old days.
Nowadays Distributed version control is taking over and the reasons why are clear: we need to be more and more social and what better way to exchange knowledge than to distribute code?
If I could I’d change name of those tools to “social version control”.
What I love about sites like GitHub and Bitbucket is that they are trying to build real social networks around source code, every developer’s currency. I love it. The what is not new but it’s the how (like how easy it is to contribute) that changes everything.
I look forward to social programming.
ps. on Twitter there is an amazing community of software developers exchanging small tips or links every day. You MUST be on Twitter, really. I am.
Pinder is my Python client for the 37 Signals’s Campfire online chat.
With the excuse of learning Git (by the way GitHub is awesome!) I rewrote it from scratch following the official Campfire API.
Needless to say that it took me very little time. Git is damn fast, Python development is already fast, JSON is basically a standard and the API is easy and clean. I bumped into a couple of problems but I am confident they’ll be fixed soon.
You can find Pinder on my GitHub page.
Next year I’ll try to present a case here at the company I work to switch from Subversion to either Git or Mercurial.
Some lovely guy sent me this email:
From: ****@gmx.de Subject: Freedom! Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it. -- Freedom Lover -- Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 - sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser
Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet Explorer…
Mettersi a litigare all’una e mezza di notte per decidere se la fila per i taxi deve andare da sinistra verso destra o da destra verso sinista.
Ho quasi le lacrime agli occhi…
Pur non avendo due monitor.
UPDATE: Leggendo il commento #81 sembra comunque che non sia ancora possibile selezionare immagini diverse. Aspettiamo ancora un po’…
Today was the GNOME Docs meeting day, a planning session for things to come in the doc world of GNOME.
We needed to plan a little bit of work for the coming months (one or two months, not much more), and we decided to focus ourselves on small applications help, something in the order of small games, the calculator, and so on. This will be a good exercise for writing help for an application, and a good learning moment to learn Mallard and topic based writing.
Speaking of games help, since Mario Blättermann ported the Tetravex documentation from Docbook to Mallard, we said: “Why don’t we start from that, and see how we can expand it and work on it?”. Tetravex is not that complex game, and should be pretty easy (and fun) to work on what Mario created.
We wrote down a basic structure for how a game help should (probably) be structured, and it goes in the form of:
It’s a really basic structure, probably it’s not complete and it will need to expand as we move forward and we reach new kind of games, but for a starter, we think that should work. I’m not going to explain each of them, I think they are pretty straightforward and self-explaining.
So, if you out there would like to start a new experience in the wonderful world of GNOME Doc writing with a light task, we might need your help in writing games help.
Get in touch with the GNOME Doc team at: http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject.
Being away from home, bored and yet too tired to do something productive, I skimmed through the gnome-shell proposal mail thread on d-d-l and spotted the inevitable debate on the choice of javascript as a scripting language for the shell.
Personally I am not a big fan of js, quite the contrary, but lately I had to use it extensively (though not in gnome related context) and at the end of the day it is a language as any other. I am not saying it would be the one I would have chosen, but once you use it a bit and get to know its idiosyncrasies, you get what you need done and move on with life. After all any programming language sucks, each one in its own special way and some more than others, but they all suck.
Reading in the aforementioned thread the reasons why js was picked I would have been totally satisfied with valid answers like:
Beside given that javascript
I do not have any major problems with it. After all we have clean and consistent code bases written using GObject C conventions, I do not see why we should not be able to tame js as well.
That said, some of the rationales provided for choosing it in the above mentioned d-d-l thread really really trouble me.
js has no platform libraries, so we can use our own
What kind of reason is that? First of all when you embed another scripting language you are not forced in any way to use its standard libarary as well. Second, having a good standard library (or a large set of third party libraries) is a good thing: I thought we were focusing on implementing good applications instead of reimplementing and maintaining a “gwhatever” library for every problem in the world.
using js will attract web developers
That is plainly naive. First of all I have never hacked on something because it was written in a language, at most I have learned a language because something I wanted to hack on was written in it. Second learning the syntax of a language is nothing compared to learning library API, tools, workflows etc and even if I have not used js in gnome yet, I am pretty sure they differ a lot from what web developers are used to. Last but not least, I’d prefer to attract a single good developer than a hundred people not willing to invest an afternoon in learning a language/api/tool.
It’s not secret that I started a new job and that I’m now working for a closed-source company (even if sometimes I have to work with my beloved Linux, but unfortunately that’s rare).
Before starting, I thought I would have found some great docs, describing the works of others, API documentation, internal guidelines, flow-charts, diagrams, whatever; I thought I would have found the basic “infrastructure” that makes a developer work.
I was wrong.
Actually there is documentation, but it’s only the end-user documentation, no real internal documentation. No documentation to help you speeding up with your work, to understand how things work. No (useful) comments in the code.
What would have taken you 5 days of work to accomplish, (exaggerating) will take you two weeks: you have to ask someone else in the company, but maybe they don’t remember or didn’t write that particular piece of code, or didn’t work on that implementation.
Documentation is important, from the end users to the developers, if you want your project to self sustain, if you want to ease the life of other people, and if you want your project to live a long and prosperous life. People were not in your head (and are not in your head) when you wrote that strange thing. 1-2 years from now you could be working for another company, what would be of other people who are trying to understand what you wrote? How would people easily understand how things work in a complex environment?
But luckily, things they are a-changin’. They are now realizing that they need documentation, that they need documentation in the code, and that they need to document things. A small victory.
Lesson learned: next time you do a job interview, if you don’t know the company, ask what are their internal standards, guidelines, and if there is documentation. You can understand a little bit of the level of professionalism of it.
è un mese che non faccio che pensare a questa strip di xkcd.
oggi abbiamo ricevuto il via libera (preliminare) al mutuo.
mi sento improvvisamente buttato in mezzo a eventi che non posso controllare — il tutto condito dal fatto che altri colleghi non sposati e più giovani del sottoscritto hanno già preso/stanno prendendo casa. non solo vecchio, ma pure underachiever.
… the final frontier
le notti insonni che ogni tanto mi capitano vengono di solito messe a frutto recuperando serie tv che non sono riuscito a vedere. l’altra notte ho recuperato Castle1. questa notte ho recuperato i primi tre episodi di Defying Gravity2.
il fatto che venga marketizzato come Grey’s Anatomy in space sarebbe ragione bastante per crocifiggere i responsabili intorno al VAB. fortunatamente, dell’hype ho imparato a fregarmene in tenera età, quindi non mi sono lasciato abbindolare.
la storia, dopo tre episodi, sta cominciando a prendere forma. devo dire che la parte di esplorazione spaziale mi ricorda molto Virtuality3 con due principali differenze:
la differenza numero uno porta ad alcune interessanti4 considerazioni su quanto una serie di fantascienza debba lavorare per evitare che la mia funzione suspension of disbelief non venga obliterata dalla magica funzione it’s fucking science, bitches5.
la differenza numero due è mitigata dalla presenza di un cast di volti noti di serie tipo: Reaper, Dead Like Me, Band of Brothers, Arrested Development.
sinceramente, sono in attesa. dato che si tratta di una serie da 12 episodi voglio vedere dove andrà a parare prima della metà, per esprimere un giudizio. la verità è che sono così in bisogno di una serie di hardcore sci-fi che qualunque metadone andrebbe bene.
Today I got an invitation for Jolicloud, I was really excited about that project and I’m really happy for this opportunity to test it.
Jolicloud is not the first Linux distribution I have installed on my Samsung NC10… I’ve tested also Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic, Fedora, Arch Linux and Moblin (latest snapshot).
Basically Jolicloud is a derivate of Ubuntu Netbook Remix with wide Prism usage across the desktop environment: the majority of “applications” you have seen in the screenshots are small packages which provide an independent Prism session on a specific website: for example, if you install the twitter application you will get a new icon inside your application list, that icon will start a new fullscreen Prism session for twitter.com.
Common desktop applications are also included, like Firefox or VLC, but it is highly focused on web services.
It is just like Ubuntu, nothing more/nothing less (you are in the Jolicloud desktop, but the installer is the same used by Ubuntu).
As said, the “core” is an Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so we firstly see an Usplash booting sequence (nice and simple theme)…
Followed by the GDM session (simple and nice theme too)…
After the login procedure the desktop environment starts. It’s a GNOME desktop with the Netbook Remix session: the custom panel on top shows the title of the current application in the middle, a list of the running application on its left and the status icons on its right. In the center of the screen Jolicloud asks to login on the website and then it opens the default screen you might have already seen (the dashboard shown in the screenshots is nothing more than a Prism session running http://my.jolicloud.com).
Jolicloud is now ready.
As said, the main screen is a Prism session (so a website, no Clutter, no Cairo, no Gtk+…) with useful links to your applications and your settings. It is great to see how it is simple to use, really: installing and removing applications is a matter of a click, browsing and viewing the catalog of applications is very easy. For everyone. I like it.
The separated fullscreen Prism sessions work surprisingly well… In the reality you’re running a web browser, but they give you the feeling that they are just like normal applications: if you run gmail, twitter, facebook (etc etc) you have their icons in your taskbar and you switch between them like they were a real application.
It’s the web now the protagonist of your netbook because you are actually using each web 2.0 service as an individual application: something that has been imagined for years by almost every company (Microsoft too) realized in Jolicloud really well.
This distribution is absolutely amazing to surf the web when you’re on a train, in the university, when you just want your social websites up and running, when you want to update all your services and work with your documents.
But just like Moblin, in my opinion it is not meant to replace your Ubuntu… it will be likely added to your grub in a small partition dedicated to your social virtual space. And that is a good thing… when you need you have a quick access to the web. Great!
They are two completely different projects, even if they share the same love for the web.
Moblin is like a smart interface for your netbook providing a mix of useful applications with incredible tecnologies behind (KMS, fastboot, Clutter…) optimized for your netbook, with Jolicloud the web becomes your operating system (it provides the applications) trough an efficent environment for your small laptop.
I’m sure they will live together on my hard disk soon
Well, not so lazy… I’ve spent a couple of hours looking into this but didn’t find a solution.
Is there a way to set default size of a widget (or better just of a GtkDrawingArea) without limiting its minimum size?
It seems that the only way to have a drawing area of the size I’d want is to set a size request.
Thanks!
Hey I’m back on planet gnome isn’t it cool? Many thanks to Lucas and Jeff!
Some of you may already know that I’ve been laptop less in the past three months. Since about mid September display started to behave odd: it randomly turns off the lamps until I close and reopen the lid, then after about half a minute it turns off again, then again on, and so on. Sometimes it even starts blinking like a crazy stroboscope 
.
Long story short, here is a little video of the crazy display. Awesome, isn’it?
Unfortunately this little issue is a bit difficult to reproduce, sometimes it does it the whole day, and believe me, it’s quite irritating, sometimes it doesn’t for several days… Sometimes it does it only early in the morning (cold lamps?).
I contacted HP Support and they argued it could be a motherboard issue.
A motherboard issue, at least in Italy is under a 2-year pick-up-and-return warranty.
So they sent it to their repair center (actually an external one: A-NOVO Italia, Saronno) and sent it back after about two of weeks with a nice HP headed sheet stating they didn’t find any issue at all and just restored the operative system (a laptop coming with a motherboard issue and they did just that?). They also installed and ran a couple of benchmarks and other test software that said everything was ok, and I guess nothing more.
Guess what… display started blinking again 2 days after.
I contacted again HP, already a bit upset, I talked with another technician and he said his colleague was surely wrong. I had no motherboard issue but just some lamp or hinge one. It was covered by one year warranty with the producer and one with the seller.
Ok, I then went to the seller and told them about the previous story.
They sent the laptop to the very same repair center with a long description saying that it was a bit an unpredictable issue, that it was just been there some week before and suggesting to test it carefully this time. It was the December 1st.
Three days ago I was called to take back the laptop. Same HP headed sheet, all tests were successful, no issue found. Oh, they did a BIOS update, damn you receive a laptop for repair twice with the very same issue and you just run some test and do a BIOS update? Seriously, a BIOS update?!
Needless to say screen started blinking again soon. You can see it in that video taken a couple of hours ago and I can see it in front of me right now.
I don’t know if I feel more upset or frustrated… still I cannot believe how a repair center can suck this way… they didn’t even try to replace the lamps! they didn’t even unmount the display to check the cables!
Hi everyone,
Last week I have been to Istanbul, to attend GUADEC. It has been an amazing time there, and I have been really happy to meet, socialize and share ideas with the other SoC students and some of the GNOME gurus 
Together with Bastien, Clemens and Felix, we planned the next final steps for the MediaManager project. Also, it seems that Felix’ project (Cheese integration) will be one of the first clients to use my MediaManager library to expose cool features in the GtkFileChooser!
== Work to be done ==
- Write a set of widgets wrapping around the backend code
- Write a GtkModule that hooks up into the GtkFileChooser to achieve my ultimate SoC goal of integration with it.
== Timeline ==
I don’t know how much work I will be able to do in this following week until the 23rd of July, as I’m having some exams in this timeframe. Anyway, afterwards I’ll be home until the 10th of August at least and working again full-time on the project, so I came up with this plan, which would be perfectly synced with both the SoC timeline and my holidays
- 24th of July to 31st of July, writing of the widgets
- 1st of August to 5th of August, writing of the GtkModule
- 6th of August to 10th of August, final bugfixing & release
Feel free to mail me for any suggestions on the widget part or if you think your application needs some specific widget to use my library. I will start coding them in the next week, so there’s still time for thinking/designing.
Da repubblica.it, clic per ingrandire
Option "AIGLX" "true"Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
