Today’s announcement from CEO Mike Volpi marks an important milestone towards this elusive goal: you can now watch Joost in your browser, even though it still requires the download and installation of a plugin, so this is not yet the promised Flash-based version. I understand it will eventually come, but this version at least gives you a first impression of things to come. Better than nothing, I guess.

This is good, and I sincerely hope it will really make Joost popular, at last. What is less good is that the choice of programs is still quite anemic, at least in Europe (but I know it’s much wider in the US, blame the majors and their being anal retentive with rights).

Another sore point is that, even after all this time, navigation among channels still sucks. Is it really hard to present shows according to the series they belong to? Channels usually contain several series, but I might be interested in just one of them, so why is it that I can’t get, say, all episodes of Total Recall 2070 on a single page?

I hope they’re reading this and will correct this oversight soon. As for the rest, keep up the good work, as I think the idea is still cool and sound.

Sadly, Roman Catholics and their bozo-in-a-funny-hat jefe supremo, El Papa Ratzo, usually fail this test, as exemplified once again by the recent brouhaha raised around an art exhibit held in Italy, where a statue of a crucified frog is on display. The silly Pope itself wrote a letter calling for censorship of the frog and the head of the local council even started a hunger strike. Too bad for them, I guess, as the museum board voted to keep the frog on display until the end of the exhibit and not bend over backwards to please the would-be censors, as too often happens in Italy and elsewhere. Kudos to them!

I think I should petition the Italian government to prohibit the display of crucifixes in public places: seeing an image of a man tortured and killed in the most horrible way deeply offends my sentiments, so it’s my right to demand that it be censored, right?

I also would like certain vignettes that appeared in a certain Danish newspaper to be censored as well, not to mention the display of beef in supermarkets, as it deeply offends Hindu religious sentiments.

You can read more about the whole affair on Pharyngula. Minor nit: Bolzano (Bözen in German) is actually in Italy, not Germany, though in a region where the majority speaks German, so the confusion is understandable.

To demonstrate how grateful you are that I notified this great opportunity to you, you can browse my London album or my Istanbul album: the more views a picture gets, the larger its chances of winning a runner-up prize, even if it doesn’t get on a guide cover.

• Faros Hotel, Istanbul. Conveniently located in the center of old Istanbul, a short walk from all major tourist attractions. Small and cozy, with newly renovated and elegant rooms. Can be a bit noisy, being situated on a very popular street, Divan Yolu Caddesi, so you need to keep windows closed if you like a quiet environment. We were initially not very happy with the quality of breakfast, but learned later that finding a good breakfast at a Turkish hotel is harder than we imagined. Recommended.
• Uçhisar Kaya Hotel, Uçhisar. Location is simply incredible, sitting atop Cappadocia’s Pigeon Valley. All rooms have a valley view. It’s got a nice pool and a spa with sauna and turkish bath. Rooms are adequate for two people but become cramped from families who need a third bed for a child, like us. Having recently been bought by a Japanese company, it tends to be full of throngs of Japanese tourists, which is not a bad thing in itself, but is probably the reason why they only offer half boarding and not B&B. Given the mediocre quality of the buffet restaurant, if you can convince them to give you B&B accomodation, you’ll be able to find better and more varied food in one of the many restaurants in the area.
• Ali’s Pension, Egirdir. We didn’t have many expectations about the hotel, but Egirdir looked like a nice place and it was just in the right place, allowing us to split a long transfer into two stages. It also had a good review on our Routard guide and was the only establishment who apparently offered a way to contact them via email, so we settled for it. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a big mistake as things started to turn sour upon our arrival, when the manager told us the pension was full and she had moved us to his brother’s pension (named “Choo Choo Pension”). Since Ali’s Pension is not exactly the Ritz, we only had a night to spend in Egirdir, and the other pension looked rather similar to Ali’s, we didn’t complain too much. The next surprise came when they told us they only had 4 rooms, instead of the 5 they had confirmed in writing, with a total of 14 beds instead of the 15 required. After some negotiations, they found a double room at Ali’s, so everything seemed to be more or less satisfactory for us, until we discovered that there was no running water in the bathrooms, but by then it was already after dinner and too late to scout the town, looking for accomodation. To add insult to injury, when we checked out the morning after, they asked us to pay for the fifth room, even though they had agreed in writing to the number of rooms and the total price. Unbelievable! They obviously knew there was no water at Choo Choo’s, as it had been missing for many hours already, so I suspect they moved people from there to our reserved rooms at Ali’s (which had running water) and then, instead of apologizing, they wanted us to pay more for the privilege! I’ve never experienced such a behavior, so I want to state it very clearly and loudly here, hoping that people looking for lodging in Egirdir via Google will take note: The owners of Ali’s Pension in Egirdir, Turkey are a bunch of dishonest, lying scumbags. Avoid Ali’s and Choo Choo pensions at all costs! You’ve been warned.
• Venus Hotel, Pamukkale. After our bad experience in Egirdir, we were a bit suspicious about the Venus, but I must say that our fears were totally unfounded. To put it simply, what we found there was the best hospitality we had in all of Turkey. Katryn and Ibrahim, the owners, geve us a very warm welcome and were very friendly and kindly responded to all our requests. Katryn is Australian and is very cheerful and open, whereas Ibrahim, a Turkish guy with a burly face and mustache, can seem a bit shady at times, but it’s just a façade that hides a very friendly person. The hotel is pretty, rooms have recently been renovated, it’s got a pool and dinner is nice. On top of it, it cost us just 198€ for seven rooms (dinner aside), which is incredibly cheap. I would give it five stars, were it not for the fact that bathroom furniture in our room badly needed renewing, as it compared unfavorably to the rest of the room. Overall, I highly recommend Venus Hotel to anyone wanting to visit Pamukkale.
• Kale Han Hotel, Selçuk. Conveniently located along Selçuk’s main road, it is a hotel which tries to have some kind of “country” style but ends just looking a bit dilapidated. Not despicable overall, with a garden and a swimming pool, but avoid its restaurant and have dinner at the Istanbul Pide Salonu just 100m farther down the road (recommended by Enrico).
• Pirat Hotel, Kalkan. Shiny on the outside, rotten inside. Well, maybe not rotten but certainly disappointing. To start with, the location is splendid, right atop the marina of Kalkan, possibly the nicest seaside town in all of Turkey’s Lycian coast. It’s architecture is pretty, being made of an agglomerate of smallish, two-storey blocks all of which front the seaside (this refers to the so called “Pirat 2″, whereas the “Pirat 1″, just across the street, is an anonymous building). Unfortunately the room furniture is very cheap and there are no shades on the windows, just white cloths, which can be a problem in the morning, considering all the rooms face east. The pool is OK, aside from being infested, when we were there, by a group of British families with teen-age kids, who obviously thought that spending the day pool-side instead of going to one of the many splendid beaches along the coast was the right thing to do, and in any case it closes at 7PM because the restaurant has tables around it and it opens at that time. Speaking of the restaurant, breakfast was the worst we had and if you want fresh orange juice or an omelette, you have to shell out 3.5 YTL (about 2€). We didn’t try having dinner there, which seemed silly, as the town is full of restaurants, many of them quite good. I especially recommend the Aubergine Patlican: Absolutely excellent food at a decent price (just remember that portions are so large that you can feed two people on a single main course), though they should start presenting a real wine list.
• Marina Residence, Antalya. Not much to say, as we came in late and checked out early in the morning. It’s got a lot of charme, and the breakfast is the best we had, so I can definitely recommend it, even though the A/C in our room was broken and they agreed to move us to another room only after I insisted a bit.

First of all, I want to thank a guy who has helped us make the most of our trip: Enrico Radrizzani (he’s the guy on the right in the picture below). We met Enrico on our first night in Uçhisar, in the center of Cappadocia and made friends immediately. He fell in love with Turkey years ago and has been spending long months there every year since then.

What’s great about Enrico is that he knows a whole lot of stuff about Turkey, including plenty of useful information that is not usually found on travel guides. He will gladly advise you about places to visit, how to avoid big tourist flocks, which guides are the best, where to eat, and much more. If it weren’t for him, we would have never seen places like Maziköy, which wasn’t even on our map, or done a trek along the Rose Valley in the wee hours of the morning, when hot air balloons fill the sky in an eerie silence.

You will usually find Enrico in the main square of the village of Uçhisar. If you can’t locate him, ask Faruk, the owner of the carpet shop which opens on the same square, right below the “castle”.

You can also find him online, either at La Compagnia del Relax (Italian language only), a website which provides information about Turkey, with an accent on Cappadocia, suggestions about places to visit and things to do, and various other initiatives like a photography workshop. You can also read his blog (again in Italian) Il Gran Turco.

Thanks, Enrico, and see you some time in Italy this fall!

ASF membership cannot be bought: people earn their individual membership by merit, and there’s no such thing as ASF member companies.

As with any other sponsor of the ASF, Microsoft’s sponsorship only means that they’re giving money to the ASF, money that the ASF can use freely, as the ASF does not accept directed donations.

Thanks to Bertrand for setting this straight, even though fighting sloppiness in news reporting is a losing battle.

But anyway, this is indeed great news. I’m not sure we can really get Microsoft’s love, after all, but the money is more than welcome

And as a matter of corporate pride, let me congratulate Gianugo and Sally, who contributed quite a lot towards this agreement!

I am also happy to learn that all issues concerning Microsoft-funded contributions to POI made by Sourcesense have been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.

London this week, Nicosia (Cyprus) the next one, with barely the time to empty a set of bags and fill a new one in between planes. Both trips are for work and not for pleasure (though I’m bringing my family along to Cyprus, they will get all the pleasure I think).

Then, in August, Turkey, this time for vacations. I feel like I’m spending more time organizing trips (flights, hotels, cars, etc.) than working.

More details about my trips on Dopplr.

Well, since I am not prepared to spend a grand or so on a fast zoom yet, I dusted off my old 50mm f/1.4 and took a few shots with it. This is a lens from circa 1976, it’s totally manual and pre-AI, which means you get no metering whatsoever, you just have to guess exposure.

As luck would have, even though the lighting of the place is poor, it is pretty uniform. Focus wasn’t much of a problem even at large apertures—the D60 has a good focus indicator in the viewfinder—at least for subjects that weren’t moving towards or away from me.

What really made it hard to get good pictures, however, was the difficulty of finding a good position to shoot from: I had to take most of them from too far away, with the camera wedged between two glass panes and elbowing my way between other parents armed with cameras and camcorders. So I have been able to save just a handful of them worth of uploading to Flickr, like the one below:

The Nikon D60 is a “sucker” camera sold mostly to people who are not professional photographers, but who are impressed by meaningless megapixels.

I guess I’m a sucker then, since I just bought a new Nikon D60. But Ken also writes:

The D60 is an excellent camera, but for most of the people who will buy it, it’s the same thing as the $300 less expensive D40. I’d suggest getting a D40 and putting the $300 towards more lenses and/or a bouncable flash.

The fact is that for me the difference would have been only about 70€, since I could get the D60 for £391 (about 490€) at the Gatwick duty free shop, where they do not have the D40, which I was only able to find in Italy for about 420€. I guess that with some research I could have found the D40 in London for a much better price, given the current, favorable EUR-GBP exchange rate, but I decided that the convenience of taking out my credit card and grabbing the D60 while on my way to the boarding gate was too good to miss.

The D60 is also quite a bit cheaper than the Canon 450D, which is a very nice camera too, but I wasn’t prepared to pony up the extra money.

In the end, I give you the permission to call me a sucker, but I’m pretty happy so far with my purchase, and this consideration very much trumps everything else.

Via: PZ Myers.

So I posted a question to the Confluence Forum but got no reply in three days :(. Should anyone be able to help me, the forum thread is here but I am also reposting here the text of the question:

I’m looking for examples and guidance in using the Search (v2) API in Confluence, specifically from a plugin.

I got hold of a SearchManager via Dependency Injection and obtained some results with code like the following

SearchQuery query = ...;
Search search = new Search(query, null, null);
SearchResults results = this.searchManager.search(search);

My problem is that I have no idea about which implementation of the SearchQuery interface to use and in particular how to specify a phrase to search for, since no subclass seems to provide for a way to set a query term.

Thanks in advance.

We’re looking for developers who would like to work for a small company with a strong orientation towards Open Source, as in wanting to actively participate in Open Source communities and give back as well as take. We like agility, focus, getting real. We like to communicate openly: Open Source is mostly about communicating with your peers, after all. We have strong international ties, so you could find yourself traveling a bit, mostly across Europe, but we can also offer telecommuting arrangements if you like working from home.

What we need mostly are young software developers who are well versed in the Java language and its platform. You will need to become familiar with one or more of the products of our partners. This means: Alfresco, Atlassian, JBoss, Terracotta, Hippo CMS and others. Ideally we’d like to have at least one product specialist for every one of those, helping customers implement solutions based upon them. Working towards this goal, we will define with you an appropriate learning path.

If you’re interested, send your resume (in text, HTML or PDF formats only; any other format will be rejected immediately) to recruitment@sourcesense.com. We’d love to hear your story.

What’s more amazing is that all he got was just a yellow card. What did he have to do in order to deserve a red card? Spit on the adversary’s grave?

For the record, this happened during the Hamburg vs. Werder Brema match in the Bundesliga. More shocking pictures here.

I was only briefly stumped because for some reason, hashing my password using openssl did not give the same result as hashing it via PHP. Turns out I had forgotten to use ‘-n’ with ‘echo’ D’oh!

Somehow I was hoping this OpenID stuff would have been a bit easier…

I’ve been traveling too much as of late and it shows, especially when you consider how seldom I have updated my blog. However, one of the joys of traveling to the US is that hotels will typically leave a complimentary copy of USA Today in front of your room every morning for your reading pleasure.

I don’t find USA Today to be a particularly good read, but the other day I was glad to find that their “Money” section carried a long interview with David “Mr. Strobist” Hobby. Kudos to David for having become famous: he certainly deserves it!