Ugo Cei’s Weblog
My new Herman Miller Mirra chair has arrived! I still have to tweak its many knobs until it fits perfectly my body, but I can already feel the difference with respect to my previous nondescript chair. I can sit for hours and not feel a hint of fatigue or pain. Great chair!
Still waiting for the rest of the furniture…
Case 1: I just discovered that I cannot call abroad using my home phone. The telephone company (Wind) asserts that my line is not limited in any way, so there’s apparently a technical issue but they cannot open a new ticket if I don’t call them again with the same problem and not before another 24 hours.
They also have a website for customers, where I could probably check the status of my account, but they require you to register first and then call an 800 number to get your password. Huh? Anyway, the 800 number rings busy.
Luckily, I have a cell phone that can call abroad without problems. And there’s always SkypeOut.
Case 2: My Amex credit card expires this Sunday and I haven’t received the new one yet. I called them and they said that I should receive it real soon now, but if I haven’t got it by Monday or Tuesday, I should call again and ask for another copy to be sent.
Problem: On Monday I am leaving for Rome where I should rent a car and they want a valid credit card for that. Luckily, I have a Mastercard also that won’t expire before 2007.
Moral of the story: Having a contingency plan is good.
If, on the heels of the announcement of Yahoo!’s acquisition of Konfabulator, you might be tempted to upgrade to the latest 2.1 version, which is free and won’t nag you with constant reminders about how great it is to be a registered, paying user, take care!
They upgraded the Weather widget which now uses Yahoo! Weather as its source, instead of AccuWeather.com. The problem with that is that the new widget covers much fewer locations (my hometown is not there, for instance) and won’t give forecasts. What’s the point of a weather widget that doesn’t show forecasts? Fortunately, you can still copy the widget from version 2.0 into the new ~/Documents/Widgets folder and it will still work.
Oh, by the way, I have been a registered customer for more than one year. Konfabulator was well worth its price then and much more so now that it’s free. Dashboard? Who needs Dashboard?
ApacheCon is over and I have to say that it was great, as expected. The organization was flawless and everything went perfectly, almost without a hitch. Nice job!
I have just one suggestion for the organizers: Next time, record the audio of the sessions, or at least of keynotes and distribute them as podcasts.
Apart from some interesting sessions and the keynotes, whose level was really above average, the best part of these type of conferences is meeting people. There was the usual bunch of Cocooners, most of whom I already knew, but I also had the possibility of finally meeting face to face for the first time with some really nice guys like, in no particular order, David Crossley, Brian McCallister and Steve Loughran.
Netx up is ApacheCon US, in San Diego, December 10-14. Don’t know if I’ll be able to get there, but it would be great.
In case somebody wants a copy of my slides, here they are.
So, it’s finally the time for me to learn something about what everyone’s so much excited about: Ruby on Rails. I’m quite amazed that there aren’t more people attending, but maybe it’s because it’s only 9AM and many are still recovering from a night of sausages and beer.
From what I see, I can figure myself using RoR to very quickly develop prototypes. Active records and code generation should really shine in this respect. Being much of a conservative, I’m not going to drop my usual, all Java, bag of tools any time soon. But using RoR for prototyping could be a way to learn more about it and maybe I could really like what I learned, who knows?
Battery University: “If you have a spare lithium-ion battery, use one to the fullest and keep the other cool by placing it in the refrigerator. Do not freeze the battery. For best results, store the battery at 40% state-of-charge.”
Damn! If only I had known this one year ago, when I bought my extra battery!
(Via Michele.)
This morning I held my talk in front of a packed audience: more than 80 people, some of them sitting on the floor. Some people were even sitting outside the room, looking through a glass door and unfortunately someone turned away after seeing that there was no more room.
I can’t say if it was my name that attracted them 
or either one of Cocoon and Spring, but sure it was gratifying. What’s more gratifying is that nobody stood up and went away in the middle of the talk. From this and from a few compliments I collected later, I think the talk was well received. I’m eager to see the results of the evaluation forms processing.
I was interested in this talk because I am applying in The Open Source Zone some of the techniques mentioned in the talk’s introductory blurb. Thus I wanted to see if what I’m doing right now is the best possible way or if there’s space for further optimizations.
Apparently I should seriously think about adding E-Tag and Last-Modified headers. This shouldn’t be too hard and give a much larger payback than just using the Expires header as I’m doing now. Of course, I need to check how easy it is to do this on Cocoon’s side.
One thing I just learned is that in order to force a refresh of the cache, I can issue a request with a Cache-Control: max-age=0. Nice to know.
I attended this talk hoping to find an answer to my problem of finding similar documents in a Lucene index. I pretty much expected not to find anything. After all, the title of the talk clearly gave away its introductory nature, but even asking the speaker did not elicit much. I know I have to use “Term Vectors” but was unable to find a digestible explanation on the web before, and Christoph couldn’t point me to one either, so I’ll keep looking.
I’m not really into J2EE application servers, but I have an interest in following what’s happening in this field, since from time to time it happens that one of your applications needs to be deployed inside one of them. Open Source J2EE appservers, in particular, are becoming more and more used. Though Geronimo is the new kid on the block, it seems to have enough momentum to become a worthwhile competitor to the established leader in this field: JBoss.
I even briefly considered exploring GBeans as a mechanism for enabling Cocoon “Real Blocks” once. Even though it seems like we’re headed in the OSGi direction, it might still be cool to be able to deploy the Cocoon core as a GBean inside Geronimo.
Carsten Ziegeler is presenting “Maven is your friend”. I always saw Maven as a foe, but my opinion is entirely based on unverified assumptions, so I decided to attend Carsten’s session to see if my assumptions are correct or not.
Turns out Maven has lots of interesting and useful features, but I don’t think that’s enough to make me change my old habit of just using Ant. The problem is, I don’t think I’m going to invest a significant portion of my time to overcome the learning curve, however gentle it might be. But if I happened onto a project that already uses Maven, or someone proposed to use Maven on a project I am already contributing to, I won’t certainly oppose it.
I’m sitting in ApacheCon EU 2005 opening session right now and listening to Horst Zuse’s keynote about “The Origins of the Computer”. “Horst who?” I hear you saying. Well, turns out he’s the son of one Konrad Zuse who is credited with inventing “the first functional tape-stored-program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941″. I always suspected those Germans had invented everything before their American and British counterparts ;).
Anyway, the keynote is mildly interesting, and with videos of working reconstructions of stone-age computers too! It surely beats having to listen to a local politician telling us that Apache is behind more than 50% of websites and it runs on Unix and Windows. Wow! Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined that ;-).
Update: this Zuse guy was really ahead of his times. In 1969 he wrote a booklet hypothesizing that the universe is made up of computers at the subatomic level and all this 35 years before Wolfram.
Sacha Labourey: “As I was thinking about the way companies (mostly software vendors) position towards Open Source, I realized I could try to categorize them.
Here is what I came up with:
- The truly committed
- The mixed-codebase
- The pragmatics
- The anti-strategist
- The headless chickens
- The in-denial
- The anti-OSS”
I like to think that we can be characterized as mixed-codebase:
The second category, the “mixed-codebase”, gathers companies with an increasing commitment to an Open Source strategy but that also have some existing critical revenue streams to protect, and hence cannot simply switch to a full OSS strategy overnight. “Mixed-codebase” companies not only deploy on/use Open Source software (as an ISV), but also actively contribute to (or even lead) OSS projects and have some clear OSS alliances reinforcing this strategy. Examples of such companies include Novell and Computer Associates. I mostly see the “mixed-codebase” category has a transition step: companies will eventually move to category 1 (successful transition) or 3 (retrenchment), depending on how well they execute their transition, how well they can convert their existing revenue streams, how frequently they change their CEO, etc. I do not know of any company that would have successfully switched from a traditional company to a category 1 company yet. My bet is that such a thing will take place in the next 2 years.
We are probably also trying to move to category 1, but it’s going to take lots of time and sweat. Where are you on the above scale?
The Cocoon Blockathon is well underway in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, I won’t be there until tomorrow night. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the weather forecasts and feeling a bit worried. With 12/14C less degrees on the average, I’ll be leaving shorts home and bring a jacket instead.
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Phil Wainewright: “The price of software is inexorably grinding towards zero. Software is becoming infrastructure, and that infrastructure is progressively becoming commoditized. A key part of this evolution is the abstraction of application logic out of software and into standards-compliant XML documents. Once all of the identities and rules that define a set of processes (ie an application) can be expressed as XML, then creating or modifying an application becomes an editing task rather than a programming job. That editing task will still have to paid for, and it might well accumulate intellectual property of some value — but the money will not go to software developers. Some software experts will earn a living from operating the infrastructure that processes the XML documents. But the infrastructure itself will be built with open-source software.”
I mostly agree with what Phil Wainewright writes in this post, particularly about the commoditization of infrastructure via Open Source software.
I suggest you read the rest of the article. However, I has some reservations about expressing all application logic as XML documents. Application logic is inevitably bound to be more complex — save for trivial applications — than what can be comfortably expressed as declarative XML. XML is not a scripting language and trying to turn it into one has invariably led to less than desirable effects.
Also, I don’t understand the distinction between “editing” and “programming”. If you are editing files (XML or otherwise) that describe some form of application logic, what are you doing if not programming?
Here’s someone else acknowledging what someone wrote some time ago: “The new API is HTML”.
Steve Rubel: “Today, the Web is where the action is. It’s the new OS. This means I can safely return to my old flame - the Mac - and yet still experience most, if not all of the hot new applications that are being built on AJAX on my new 15′ G4 PowerBook. In addition, I don’t have to put up with patches, viruses, spyware, slowdowns, bloated registries anymore.”
Just one question, Steve: “Why did it take you so long?”
The Holy Inquisition was evil, but it wasn’t probably stupid. Its successor, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was lead by Card. Joseph Ratzinger until he became Pope. He’s no Torquemada, apparently. By the way, someone should tell the Vatican’s webmaster that Ratzinger is not heading the congregation aymore.
Anyhow, when he was still there, having no heretics to burn at the stake, he contented himself with attacking Harry Potter’s novels for “eroding Christianity in the soul of young people” and blurring the boundaries between good and evil. Talk about lameness!
If that’s true, I’m going to recommend the reading of Harry Potter to my daughter when she is old enough. Nothing like a good erosion of Xian beliefs, lest she starts having trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction (like turning water into wine, walking on the waters and resurrecting the dead).
Or worse, lending credit to bullshit like “immanent design evident in nature is real.”
(Via Skeptico)
Nat Torkington: “Google Maps now has street maps of Japan, but you have to be able to read Japanese to use ‘em. There’s also detailed satellite imagery for Tokyo, as this map of what I hope is the Apple store shows.”
Still no street maps for Italy or other European countries besides the UK, though. I can’t wait for the moment when I’ll finally be able to stop using Maporama or other similar mapping services and use Google Maps exclusively.
I know it doesn’t amount to much, but I noticed that this blog’s Google PageRank value just went up to 6, while it was 5 until yesterday.
With this, I seem to have regained all the PageRank I had with the old domain and blog. It took just a bit over six months to get here again.
In case you’re curious, the screenshot shows PageRank as displayed by Firefox’s pagerankstatus plugin.
