Ugo Cei’s Weblog
… is going to be hot hot hot when I land there next Saturday:
The tooltip says: “Sunny with the temperature approaching the record of 103 set in 2004.” And I thought that Portland was a cold and damp place! Actually it’s not all that bad, as I arrive at night, when the heat has mostly dissipated and Sunday doesn’t look so scorching. Still, 37° is hot as hell, but I plan to attend the photography walkabout anyhow.
Is Joanne Colan still ad interim host for Rocketboom? If it is so, I would like to suggest that Andrew hire Mélissa Theuriau instead. For Joanne can be pretty and have a nice British accent, but Mélissa is about a hundred times hotter and her French accent would be magnifique.
I’m currently stranded at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, after my flight has been delayed by 4 hours and 20 minutes (hoping it doesn’t get any worse than that), so I figured I could kill time taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr. Thanks god for Airport WiFi, though I wish it were free.
To make the long wait a little more bearable, I also bought a book: The Long Tail. An appropriate title, it seems. I wonder if I can manage to finish it before I get home. Probably yes, since it’s not very thick.
I cannot even watch the latest Rocketboom episode. Where art thou, Joanne Colan?
Update: Let’s just hope my fate is not as bad as Matt’s!
Technorati Tags: airport, schiphol, joanne colan, rocketboom, the long tail, chris anderson
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Some nations take to the streets to celebrate their independence or other important political events. We Italians usually do that to celebrate World Cup match victories, especially if it’s against the Germans.
Someone once said that “Football is a game with 22 people and in the end the Germans always win.” Well, that’s only if they don’t get to play against Italy. In the history of the World Cup, Italy v. Germany was played five times and Germany never won: three defeats (two semi-finals and a final) and two draws.
More photos in my Italy v. Germany 2 - 0: Post-match celebrations Flickr set.
Ever since I installed WordPress 2.0 and enabled Askismet, it has been working flawlessly and blocking comment spam like mad:
I still have to check the caught spam periodically, just in case it blocked some legitimate comment, which hasn’t happened so far. On the other hand, I don’t get that many legitimate comments, so it’s probably not a significant sample. But anyway: no false positives and no false negatives so far: Akismet rocks!
Why is it that everytime I try to upgrade from one stable Eclipse version (3.1 in this case) to a new one (3.2) I invariably end up having to do an install from scratch? Unzipping the new version over the old one resulted in lots of errors and non-functioning stuff, so I installed it all in a new directory, but then had to copy some plugins by hand and reinstall others using the Update Manager.
I also lost some of my preferences, like Java editing templates. Why aren’t those in my workspace directory, which is under my home directory and shouldn’t therefore get lost if I delete the old /Application/eclipse directory? The mind boggles.
Anyway, I’ve now got Eclipse 3.2 running on both my machines (the upgrade on the MacBook was relatively painless, being from a 3.2 milestone release instead of from 3.1). All is well that ends well.
After a decent amount of procrastination, I finally updated the version of WordPress this site is running on to the latest and greatest 2.0.3. This post is just to test that everything is hunky-dory.
Technorati Tags: wordpress.
Turns out worries about AllofMP3’s demise were unfounded. The site is back online and ordering is functioning again. In any case, it might be true that its continued viability is at risk, so I spent the last couple bucks of credit I had left there to buy Morrissey’s “Ringleader of the Tormentors”. If they finally close it down for good, I now have just a few pennies to lose.
In case you didn’t know, AllofMP3.com is a Russian based website selling music for literally a fraction of what it costs to buy it on iTunes or other more regular stores. Just consider that the price for the above-mentioned album is $1.41. Yes, the whole album, not a single track.
Even though their business is legal according to Russian law (at least until Putin opts for a crackdown to appease the RIAA in order to ease Russia’s entry in the WTO), the legality of your exporting music from Russia into your country might be questionable. You’ve been warned!
Technorati Tags: allofmp3, music, itunes, mp3, download, wto, russia, morrissey.
Dave Winer doesn’t even know where to begin with Second Life. I have the same impression. I’ve joined Second Life to see what all the fuss was about but I got bored after a few minutes. Must have been because the Mac client, being a PowerPC binary, is awfully slow on my MacBook, or because it just looks like a MMORPG with sketchy characters and landscapes, but I don’t think I’ll spend much time on it, or any time at all.
Honestly, the real reason I won’t get hooked on Second Life is because I already have a fairly satisfactory working life, plus a lovely family life, and find it hard to fully live both of them in just 24 hours per day. I don’t think adding a third life to the mix is going to make this situation any better.
Technorati Tags: second life.
After Dave Winer announced he was going to stop blogging soon, now it’s
Russell Beattie’s turn:
Yep, after four years and almost 3,000 posts I’ve decided to close up the Notebook. There’s lots of reasons, but generally this is a continuation of the full-reset I started back in January.
Hmmm… how about some real reasons for this, Russell? And how are you going to satisfy your craving for gadgets now that you’re losing your extra income from ads? 
Is this the beginning of a trend? Is blogging finally becoming so popular (think MySpace) and so uncool that early adopters will soon start flocking to something else? I don’t know, but I’m trying to keep going, even if lately I’ve lowered my posting frequency a bit. Too much work and too much traveling, probably.
Anyway, we’ll miss you, Russ.
Technorati Tags: macbook, intel mac, berlusconi, italy, elections, pilgrim, cadenhead, atom.
How to Lie with Statistics is the title of a nice little book that was first published in the 50’s and that details all the tricks that politicians, economists, journalists, and others use to present statistics in a way that, while not technically false, aims to deceive the public.
Here in Italy, we’ve recently had a particularly blatant instance of the use of this technique by our “beloved” (and soon to be ex-, hopefully) government. 11 million Italian families are the recipients these days of a glossy, 160 page booklet published by Silvio Berlusconi’s party, titled La vera storia italiana (The Real Italian Story). The propaganda booklet, among lots of colorful photographs, provides some interesting “facts”, like the one on page 154, where it is stated that in 2001, when Berlusconi’s government was elected, Italy’s average per-capita income was $24,670, whereas it is $27,119 now. Nice, I am already starting to feel richer.
You might wonder why the amounts are expressed in USD, however. Isn’t the Euro the Italian currency? Well, let’s convert Dollars to Euros, using the conversion rates that were current in 2001 and 2006. For 2001, we use the value of the USD/EUR exchange rate . According to the UIC, on May 22, the day after the latest elections, an Euro was worth 0.8685 Dollars. Yesterday you had to spend 1.2063 Dollars to buy an Euro instead. Quite a difference! So, converting the Dollar amounts above we obtain:
| Year | USD | Rate | EUR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 24,670 | 0.8685 | 28,405 |
| 2006 | 27,119 | 1.2063 | 22,481 |
Hmmm… This doesn’t look so nice anymore. We use Euros to buy things, not Dollars, and in five years we lost almost 6,000 Euros. Per capita. And not even taking inflation into account!
Berlusconi is the real king of spin doctors. It’s not at all surprising, therefore, that today he said that leftist voters are “coglioni” (retards). He probably consider all Italians as morons, and they probably are if they believe his numbers.
Technorati Tags: berlusconi, coglioni, italy, elections.
I really liked Werner Vogels’ (Amazon’s CTO) account of Scoble’s (no link, sorry, I’m not trying to be snarky just to get some backlinks) and Shel Israel’s presentation of their Naked Conversations book at Amazon:
This was my approach with challenging Shel and Robert at our lunch meeting. I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly.
I think Amazon is already doing enough to engage in a conversation with their customers and, as much as I believe blogging can be an effective communication strategy, it is by no means the only one or the right one.
It’s one thing to be a professional or a small company with no established PR policy or one that stinks. Blogging can do much in this case, but companies like Amazon, who got the two-way nature of the web many years before blogging was a blink in Dave Winer’s eye, need much more than a warm, fuzzy feeling to embrace blogging. They need hard facts, and if two “seasoned evangelists” are not able to provide them, who will?
Technorati Tags: scoble, vogels, amazon, naked conversations, blogging.
It took a while to examine 550 submissions, but at the end, we have a logo!
Congratulations to the winner, Lara Ariganello. Even though this particular design was not my favorite, I’m starting to dig it more and more.
Now that we have a logo, next thing we need, I suspect, is a decent website. Hmmm, we might do another contest to select a website design ;).
Before you ask: since, in the end, we decided that the company name is spelled Sourcesense and not SourceSense, the lettering in the logo is going to change to conform to it.
Technorati Tags: sourcesense, logo, contest.
It’s been almost a week since this website lost most of its ranking in Google and the effects of this on traffic seem to have stabilized. You can see for yourself how many visitors I lost on the graph below, which shows daily referrals from Google search (click on the images to read them better). Going from around 600 to less than 20 is not fun. What’s worse is that readers coming from other sources almost never click on ads. Not that I was doing any serious money, but at least I could afford myself some decent hosting.
Curiously, at the same time, referrals from Yahoo! searches have increased. Of course, they’re still nowhere near the number Google sent me before. And I haven’t got no reply to my enquiries yet. Not fun, I tell you.
Update: After a few rounds of email, I just got what looks like a definitive answer from Google:
Thank you for your reply. We understand your concern; however, these
changes are consistent with the normal fluctuations outlined in our
previous email. As we add new pages and incorporate updates to existing
pages, you may see changes in the ranking and inclusion of sites in our
index. Because our index changes regularly, it’s possible your site will
regain its ranking. In the meantime, we hope that you will review the
helpful tips posted on our site.
Yeah, sure.
Maybe I should add a new category to this weblog: rants. Yesterday I was pissed off at Microsoft, the USPTO and Google. Today, it’s the small guys’ turn, namely Kevin Burton and his Tailrank.
You see, I really like Tailrank. I like it so much that I wanted to support it by buying some ad impressions, as explained here. But soon after I bought the first set of impressions, all ads disappeared from the website and the RSS feeds. This was more than a month ago, and only after repeatedly bugging Kevin via email, ads started appearing again. But wait, the only ad that always shows on Tailrank is for Kevin’s own blog! Funny.
OK, so maybe I shouldn’t make all this fuss for ten miserable bucks, but these days I easily get annoyed. So I’m officially pissed off at Tailrank and I want you to know it.
Update: Kevin in the comments belows says that my ad effectively ran, a thing which I had not understood before. So it looks like it was just a communication problem. My apologies to Kevin.
I’m pissed off at Microsoft for patenting a dumb filesystem like FAT. The only plausible purpose this patent might have is going after Linux and other Open Source projects which implemented FAT drivers. We’ll see if Scoble has anything to say about this.
I’m even more pissed off at the USPTO for upholding this dumb patent. We’ll we ever recognize that software patents suck?
I’m also starting to get really pissed off at Google for practically throwing this website off their index and not giving me a hint of a reason.
Luckily, we had a great skiing weekend, and this somehow mitigates my pissed-offness today.
Jenstar: “If you are wanting an AdCenter account, yet haven’t received an invite yet, they are having a three hour open call period today where you will be guaranteed a shiny new account.”
Later…
MSN adCenter does not currently support the web browser you are using. Please sign in using Internet Explorer 6.
I shouldn’t complain, I think. You want Microsoft ads? Better use IE. Oh well, I think I’ll keep my AdSense ads for now.
Mathew Ingram: “The interface, as David points out, is ridiculous - a cheesy, video-game style rendering of a car’s cockpit, which you can switch from a regular car to a race car (complete with fire extinguisher). Quirky and fun? Maybe. I would add ‘stupid and useless’ to that list as well though.”
I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes Mike is prone to just hyping too much. And Scoble is hyping as well, which is understandable maybe, since this is a Microsoft product. But this does not guarantee that it’s a valid product. In fact, it sucks like a inverted hurricane.
You might have noticed that I didn’t link to either Scobleizer or TechCrunch. The reason why I didn’t is that I resolved to join the revenge of the M-listers. Sign me up as well! From now on, I’m going to link to a selected group of M-listers only. This group excludes software development guys, at least initially: I want to read more about business, marketing, the media and technology in general, for a while.
Technorati Tags: a-list, scoble, microsoft live, techcrunch.
Got this today in my comment moderation queue:
Good afternoon.
I found your website whilst searching for I-pod information. Perhaps the blog owner or the readers of this blog can help me with a problem I have. Mc Creative Zen Micro (4gb) keeps freezing up. I only bought it last week but it always freezes on boot. Any suggestions before I consider taking it back?
Many thanks,
Wayne.
Looks legitimate, no? A bit disconnected, considering the topic of the original post, but legitimate.
But then I notice that the guy put a link to a cheesy, online slot-machine game in the URL field … hmmmm, try again, Wayne, better luck next time.
