Ugo Cei’s Weblog
In a few hours we’ll be leaving for our Winter vacations in the Alps, hoping to find good weather and plenty of snow. Any kind of online activity is going to be spotty if not completely null until after Jan. 7.
Here’s wishing a Happy New Year to all my readers.
Don’t play the video below if you value your mental health and your stomach. I did and my life will never be the same.
Celine Dion and Anastacia doing a cover of AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long. Urhg!
(Via The J Train.)
No, really. And you can be, too, if you have a Mac with iSight, OS X Tiger and Safari or Firefox—they say Safari is required, but for me it worked with Firefox 2).
Head over here and use Shift+Cmd+4 to grab a screenshot or use Grab.app, to your liking.
Nice trick, huh? Well, I was thinking of adding a line to my resumé stating:
2006 – Named Person of the Year by Time Magazine.
Now I can even prove it 
.
(Via James Duncan, who didn’t even notice I had tagged him a few days ago. 
)
Looks like quite a few people are coming here via searches for “when will it snow in the Alps”.
Of course, I have no better answer than “not soon, probably”. Luckily, it snowed a couple of weeks ago and temperatures are cold, so almost all slopes are open. If you want to come to the Alps for skiing, you shouldn’t be disappointed.
Me, I’m heading to Monterosa on the 29th and will be there until January 7th, so I sure hope there’s enough snow.
May your days be filled with terror and tentacles!
Don’t forget! Cephalopodmas falls on December 22nd by the human calendar! Get your special squamous someone something fetid!
Picture by Gwen
Technorati Tags: cephalopodmas.
Since I’ve been prodded by Gianugo, I cannot avoid taking part in the latest meme: list five things about you that most people don’t know, then link to other five people and ask them to do the same.
Here’s my list:
Now on to you: Duncan, Philipp, Ted, Steve and Tim, but please post something interesting, even slightly embarrassing, not things like “I can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the piano while blindfolded.”
As a Java architect, I’ve always been curious to learn about what makes large, enterprise Java systems tick. One of the biggest Java systems out there is certainly eBay, and if you want to know more about its architecture, now you can read the slides of an SDForum presentation titled “The eBay Architecture – Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance and cost”.
Attending the live talk would have been great, but even form the slides only (PDF version here), there are many important lessons in there, particularly regarding scalability. Some of them are nuggets of often repeated wisdom, like “Keep application tier completely stateless” and “Cache where possible”. Others are more unexpected, like:
All in all, a very good read.
An interesting interview appeared today on the Financial Times (here’s the online version) with the top people behind the Venice Project: Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom. The project has started attracting a lot of buzz after going public last week, and with the buzz also a whole lot of gossip and wild inaccuracies, so it’s nice to hear about it from a reputable source.
However, the article is a bit thin on information and not devoid of inaccuracies, like when it says:
The service, currently being trialled by 6,000 people, is capable of displaying high-quality, full-screen video on a computer screen. Users download a piece of software to their PC or Mac (although the service can be transmitted to a TV, it is currently designed for computer screens) and can then search for channels from a menu on the left hand side of the screen.
While it’s technically true that you can download the software to your Mac, in order to run it you have to have a Windows system. Running it on Windows on an Intel Mac with BootCamp is fine, but I’ll be truly happy only when I’ll be able to run the OS X version (real soon, hopefully) with my Mac Remote.
If you see this website not responding from time to time, it’s because it’s currently being targeted by a network of spambots that try to post with such violence that they manage to bring the system to its knees.
The problem is not so much identifying spam—Akismet does that perfectly well 99.99% of the time. The problem is that, precisely because of Akismet, each post will tie up an Apache child process for a significant interval of time and those bots are posting so quickly that they will make the server reach the configured limit on the number of server processes in a matter of seconds.
I could raise that number, but this system hasn’t got a whole lot of memory, and I would hate shelling out more money just to keep those bots at bay. Barring a reconfiguration of Apache to use a different multiprocessing model or anything that would cost me a significant amount of time—after all, one of the reasons for using WordPress on Apache is just because it simply works, most of the time, and requires very little maintenance— one option left to me is harvesting the IP addresses of those bots and block them using iptables.
Of course, it’s an uphill battle, and I’m afraid I will quickly reach a point where the kernel will start sweating just to check every packed against a huge list of source addresses (I have more than 700 right now in this file, which you are free to reuse if you have the same problem). Probably most of those PCs (fuck Microsoft and its idea of security, by the way) have dynamic IP addresses, which just makes the problem bigger.
Anyway, this strategy seems to be working for now, so I’ll stick to it. If you’re curious, all the bots in this recent wave exhibit the following User-Agent string:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Maxthon)
Old news, I know, but I just want to underline how some of these releases tie together, possibly to indicate an important trend.
First of all, we have Java SE 6, with Javascript built-in, thanks to Mozilla Rhino.
Then we have JRuby 0.9.2, with a slew of enhancements, bug fixes and performance tweaks.
Finally, after a long wait, Groovy RC-1.
All signs pointing to 2007 as the year of dynamic languages on the Java platform? It really seems likely.
On an unrelated note, I am also pleased to announce the relase of Apache Abdera 0.2.0 (incubating). Nothing revolutionary here, but an impressive number of features already for a 0.2 version. Very stable and surprisingly bug-free also.
The Venice Project just released a new beta version and this time they’ve released some screenshots as well, so if you couldn’t get invited as a beta tester yet, you can at least get a peek at how the UI is looking.
Technorati Tags: the venice project.
Just uploaded some pictures from our trip to Umbria to this Flickr photoset. I didn’t get many good shots, since weather was generally bad and lighting far from perfect. Luckily, my Aperture trial period hasn’t ended yet, so I was able to correct some of those to make them look a bit better.
There’s just no comparison between Aperture and iPhoto when it comes to correcting luminance and colors: I was able to rescue some pictures with Aperture that I had given up any hope of fixing with iPhoto. If my camera were able to shoot RAW, there’s no doubt that I’d be buying Aperture as soon as the trial period ends.
I already mentioned that weather was mostly bad, but the countryside and the towns of Umbria are gorgeous even under the rain. Moreover, we were lavishly treated by our host, as far as food and drinks are concerned: on our first dinner, he presented us with a couple bottles of Sassicaia, one of the most renowned Italian wines. Now that I’ve tasted it, I must admit that it lives up to its fame.
After an unusually warm and dry November, snow has finally started falling on the Alps and it’s probable that lifts will begin operating this week-end, which actually starts tomorrow, a national holiday here in Italy. People from Milan are even luckier: today it’s St. Ambrose’s Day, Milan’s patron saint, and most businesses are closed as well.
Not living in Milan, but just a few kilometers away, we decided to take at least half a day off, for sympathy , and so we are leaving this afternoon for… no, not the Alps, but rather Umbria, where it will be raining, with all likeliness. Oh well, this trip had been planned some time ago, so no skiing yet this week-end. We hope temperatures won’t be so warm during next week as to melt off all the snow that will be falling, at least. Fucking global warming!
You know what happens when you get a new boss who’s been working for 11 years at Sun? He starts sending out OpenOffice documents, that’s what .
I think I should be happy that he’s not sending MS Office documents, and cannot really in good conscience recommend the exclusive use of Apple products like iWork, in preference to a true Open Source solution, no matter how much I love Keynote. Moreover, we still need to get him a Mac.
The only problem I had, to be honest, was that I didn’t have Open Office installed on my MacBook Pro, and didn’t want to install and run X11 just to open a few documents. So I thought of using NeoOffice. After all, I’ve seen Simon Phipps use it on his Mac when he did his presentation at OSBA, so if it’s good for Simon it must be good for me.
Problem is, the main download site for NeoOffice appears to be down. Looking for an alternative location, I came upon a torrent for NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 for Intel Macs which led to a speedy download and now I can open ODF files without having to suffer X11.
To make this post a little less self-serving, I’m linking to the torrent here, for the benefit of those that might be searching for it. Personally, though, I think I will continue to use Keynote for doing my own presentations.
Technorati Tags:
openoffice, neooffice
Deepak Chopra: “This last question is the most pressing one, for both believers and non-believers. To claim that the swirling, chaotic quantum soup that erupted from the Big Bang evolved into human life by random chance is only believable because science has no urgent need to find a credible alternative.”
What Mr. Chopra says is that science doesn’t have all the answers. That might be true, but the real problem here is that his theory is just a lot of unfounded assertions with nothing to back them. In short, all he has to offer as an alternative is just bad pseudo-science, vague, undefined concepts like “infinite quantum field” and such drivel which is the trademark of charlatans, mystics, and peddlers of woo.
What’s saddest is that there are hundreds of comments there syaing basically the same thing as I’m writing, yet he completely ignores them.
And he even resorts to old creationist canards like describing evolution as the product of “random chance”. This is beyond ignorance and beyond intellectual dishonesty. This is just stupid.
Starting today, Giovanni is our new boss. If you wonder what happened to Gianugo, don’t worry: he’ll be moving higher to be the head of our European operations. I’m not sure what this mean in practice. I think he doesn’t know either, exactly . We’ll have to figure it out as we move along, as things here are happening at an incredible pace, which just makes it all more exciting.
Back to Giovanni, he’s one of the leading figures in the Italian Java landscape, having started with it while at Sun, back in 1995. I’m sure working with him will be a great source of motivation and knowledge, while we could teach him some of the ins and outs of the Open Source landscape.
So here is my most heartfelt welcome to him, together with an invitation to start a blog. I need someone to link to.
