Twitter Updates

Barack Obama may visit Genoa (Italy) on October 12th

Posted by h3rald Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:09:00 GMT

Barack Obama may visit Columbus’ birthplace on October 12th 2008, and take part in the city’s celebration of the discovery of America, which is held in the city every year. As reported by Il Secolo XIX, Genova’s local newspaper.

Although the invitation has not been officially accepted by the American Presidential Candidate, Genoa’s mayor Marta Vincenzi is working very hard to make it happen.

Kerry Kennedy (Bob Kennedy’s daughter), is said to be in charge of liaising with Obama on the US side.

“[…] Kerry Kennedy and her family – among the first and most unexpected of Obama’s supporters in his challange against Hillary Clinton – are said to be organising his visit to Genoa. It all started when Kerry came to the city at the beginning of July, for the Week of Human Rights initiative promoted by the city’s council. Kerry was introduced to Nando Dalla Chiesa’s ‘Columbus Day’ program plan by Vincenzi .

The proposal of inviting Obama to Christopher Columbus’ birthplace was immediate, and a significant move. That could have important consequences, because Genoa has been involved in battles for civil rights in the last few months while also trying to restore its relationship with the United States, which have often been identified as a symbol of evil globalization since the G8 summit [held in the city in 2001].”

After Bush – the “king” president among the other 8 powers protected by the Red Zone [the restricted area of the city where the G8 summit was held] – a black presidential candidate who speaks of dialog and integration to the people of Genova (and obviously also tens of thousands of Italians), from De Ferrari Square [the city’s main square]. […]”

This could be a truly important occasion for Genova (and Italy) to re-establish dialog with the United States after the G8 summit (which cost the city a death and millions of Euro of damage caused by vandalism). However, there is still no official confirmation that the event will take place at all, especially due to the upcoming Presidential Elections in the same period.

If he comes, I’ll definitely be there!

Posted in Blog | Tags politics | no comments | no trackbacks

Git for the Locals

Posted by h3rald Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:18:00 GMT

“This is a local shop for local people, we want no trouble here!”

— Edward, The League of Gentlemen

I’m normally quite cautious when it comes to IT novelties like new frameworks, new methodologies and similar, especially when it feels like they’re over-hyped. Especially nowadays, it is sometimes very hard to tell whether something new is over-hyped or really a Good Thing™ without spending some time looking into it. And especially nowadays, finding the time to look into something new can be a real challange.

I deliberately didn’t look into Git properly since it went “mainstream” (maybe I shouldn’t use this word), but when this tutorial came out I couldn’t resist. Sure, I knew Git was an amazingly fast distributed version control system, that GitHub offered free accounts, that all the cool guys were slowly starting to use it in place of Subversion, etc. etc.

What I didn’t realize though, that the most obvious advantage of this DVCS was the fact that it was distributed, i.e., it didn’t need a centralized server.

Let me repeat this: Git doesn’t need a centralized server.

Really.

Posted in Blog | Tags programming | 4 comments | no trackbacks

Rails-Doc.org - A First Look

Posted by h3rald Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:30:00 GMT

When you decided to learn Ruby on Rails (if you did, that is), chances are that you bought a book. I did, too, actually: there are a lot of very interesting and fairly comprehensive books out there after all.

I actually never bought a book to learn PHP, in the past though. Why’s that? Well, for two simple reasons:

• The PHP manual can easily be searched and provides enough documentation, in most cases.
• When the documentation is not enough, there’s always plenty of comments by experienced developers to save your day.

That being said, PHP is still an awfully disorganized language, but believe it or not, coming from PHP I didn’t find Rails documentation useful enough simply because it didn’t have these two simple but very powerful features.

Sure, there’s the Rails Documentation Project which provides more organized docs, and Noobkit does a nice job with its search-as-you-type feature… but still is not quite enough: you’d expect something much better than that for something like Rails!

Posted in Articles | Tags Rails, review, ruby, writing | 3 comments | no trackbacks

Firefox 3 Revealed

Posted by h3rald Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:46:00 GMT

When the SitePoint staff asked me to write an article summing up all the new features of Firefox 3, I gladly accepted: I wrote about Firefox before, and I thought it was just going to be a 2-3 hours job maximum. After diving deeper into Firefox 3 development, reading dozens of different blogs and scouting Mozilla’s web sites, I realized I was wrong: Firefox 3 introduced a lot of new things, and keeping track of all of them, I admit, was quite a hard task.

Nevertheless, I wrote the article and delivered it to SitePoint in time fore the release, but my editor “complained” that 8,300+ words was about 3 times over the minimum requirements for a feature article! “I don’t really think that people can read the whole thing online” —, he said, and I somehow agreed.

In the end, they decided to pack my “article” into a 30-pages PDF eBook which can be downloaded absolutely free of charge from SitePoint web site as well, so here it is:

Firefox 3 Revealed

If you prefer though, you can still read the article directly on SitePoint, here.

This guide aims to give you a comprehensive overview of virtually all the new features and improvements introduced by Firefox 3.

I would like to thank the whole SitePoint staff for giving me the opportunity to write this eBook, and in particular Matthew Magain for his help and support (and for creating the PDF on a Sunday evening!). Additionally, I would also like to thank the Mozilla Development Team for their awesome job with Firefox 3 and everyone else who made this eBook possible.

Update: Feel free to digg this eBook!

Posted in Blog | Tags books, browsers, Firefox, review, writing | no comments | no trackbacks

Thoughts on Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5

Posted by h3rald Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:18:00 GMT

Opera 9.5 is out, Firefox 3 too (more or less), so, which browser are you going to use today? This new generatio of browsers offers plenty of new, innovative features and improvements over the past, in both cases:

• You can finally use Firefox because it finally doesn’t eat up all your RAM
• You can finally use Opera because it is finally “understand” ajaxified web sites like Gmail

Amazingly, these two releases have a lot in common…

Posted in Blog | Tags browsers, Firefox, Opera, review | 6 comments | no trackbacks

10 reasons why I didn't update my blog

Posted by h3rald Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:30:00 GMT

“It has been a while since my last post, sorry about that” I read this sentence (or something along those lines) on many blogs on the Internet, including mine. As a matter of fact, I actually didn’t write a meaningful post on my blog for a long time and no, probably this is not going to change that either.

Yesterday I started thinking why this happens, not only to me but to a lot of other non-professional bloggers. A professional blogger &emdash; for what I can tell &emdash; is someone like Michael Arrington or Gina Trapani: someone who has the luck (or course) to be able to just blog for a living.

I don’t blog for a living: my site is self-sustaining via a few very unobtrusive ads, just that. I have a full time job, and I blog in my spare time about my interests, without even trying to make “proper” money from my site. There’s nothing wrong with it: I believe there are some other people in my condition, and that’s quite normal.

That being said, let’s examine the ten most common reasons why I (and you too, maybe) end up not updating my blog, even when I have time to do so.

Posted in Blog | Tags internet, personal, rant, writing | no comments | no trackbacks

I'm on Twitter, anyway...

Posted by h3rald Sun, 18 May 2008 17:04:00 GMT

I’ve been neglecting my blog, I know. The truth is that I’m quite busy in this period: I have more responsibilities in my daily full-time jobs, my lunch breaks are getting shorter and I don’t have much free time. At any rate, here’s what’s going on:

• I’m writing a new article for an online magazine (assuming I’m gonna finish it)
• I signed up for a freelance technical reviewing job, for a new Ruby book which will come out soon-ish
• I’m getting ready to finally visit Rome (again), this time with my fiancée, for our fifth anniversary.
• I’m slowly preparing a version 1.0 of RedBook, which involves quite a lot of refactoring (and hopefully better documentation and tests).
• I’m trying to learn a little bit of Haskell: it seems to be one of the few non .NET languages able to produce standalone .exe files, nowadays…

Last but not least, I now decided to use Twitter regularly, so you can follow me there, if you wish!

Posted in Blog | Tags personal, programming, review | no comments | no trackbacks

Book Review: Design Patterns in Ruby

Posted by h3rald Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:41:00 GMT

I finally got my hands on a shiny new copy of Design Patterns in Ruby¹. The book itself is not brand new and it was already widely praised by many different people online, so I wanted to take a look for myself.

To my surprise, the book is a hardcover edition, which makes it look more professional and more durable than the average programming book². It’s also smaller and shorter than the average programming book² (340 pages), which makes it much easier to carry around and less intimidating to read. It’s also not meant to be a reference book, so it is actually pleasant an easy to read all in one go, as you’ll soon find out.

What is it about? — well, design patters in the Ruby language of course. But it’s not the usual brainwash of programming theory you would expect by a typical book on patters, it has plenty of examples of real code. When I say real code I don’t mean the usual Dog/Cat/Horse/<insert animal here> classes or juke-box simulations which don’t work at all etc. etc., I mean actual snippets from well known Ruby applications, like RubyGems, FXRuby and, of course, Rails. OK well, there’s an exception perhaps: Russ did include a few wild life simulations (ponds with frogs and similar), but it’s only for your own good, and for the sake of tradition.

Anyhow, let’s start from the beginning…

Posted in Articles | Tags books, review, ruby | 1 comment | no trackbacks

New Release: RawLine 0.2.0

Posted by h3rald Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:33:00 GMT

InLine RawLine 0.2.0 is out!

RawLine is the new name for InLine, in case you didn’t guess. The name was changed to avoid name collision problems with the RubyInline project.

Here’s what’s new:

• Added /examples and /test directory to gem.
• Escape codes can now be used in prompt.
• It is now possible to use bind(key, &block) with a String as key, even if the corresponding escape sequence is not defined.
• Added Editor#write_line(string) to print a any string (and “hit return”).
• Library name changed to “RawLine” to avoid name collision issues (Bug 18879).
• Provided alternative implementation for left and right arrows if terminal supports escape sequences (on Windows, it requires the Win32Console gem).

In particular, I decided to provide an “optimized implementation” for the left and right arrows using escape sequences rather than shameful hacks. This is now possible because the Win32Console gem now enables ANSI escape sequences on Windows as well (weehee!).

So:

• If you’re on *nix all good, your terminal is smart and can understand escape sequences => the new implementation will be used.
• If you’re on Windows and you installed Win32Console, your termnal is smart and can understand escape sequences => the new implementation will be used.
• If you’re on Windows and you didn’t install Win32Console, then your terminal is stupid and it doesn’t understand escape sequences, so the old implementation will be used.

The new implementation is significantly faster than the old one, on Windows at least, and the cursor now blinks properly when left or right arrows are pressed.

I re-emplemented only cursor movement because I’m still having some problems in getting the delete/insert escapes to work properly (or better: how I want them to work!).

Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, programming, RawLine, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks

InLine name change: what's your opinion?

Posted by h3rald Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:30:00 GMT

I’ve been kindly asked by the lead developer of RubyInLine to change the name of my InLine project, due to potential confusion and conflicts.

This makes sense, and I’m ready to change the name of my project, although I’m not that good at choosing original and smart names, so well, any suggestion is more than welcome!

I was thinking of something like:

• RawLine
• EditLine
• RawInput
• RubyInput
• RubyLine

I personally think that RawLine is probably the best option, but please, if have any better idea just speak up!

P.S.: “RedLine” is taken, unfortunately, otherwise it would have been my first choice since the beginning.

Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, programming, RawLine, ruby | 3 comments | no trackbacks