Yesterday it’s been Linux Day in Italy. Open source entusiasts all over the country organized happenings, one in each city. There’s been workshops, installation parties and general outing. This was the 6th yearly edition of this event and nowadays this is considered a solid tradition. I partecipated to all of the six and still I have lots of fun with it.
This year something new happened. For the first time ever, the most popular national TV news service talked about Linux Day in prime time. Good morning italian journalists! They took only 15 years to notice the open source movement. 
At least now they discovered us.
They said linux users are 29 millions. I wonder what’s their source for this number, anyway according to Clickz stats internet users add up to 1.2G, therefore linux would account for 2.4% of total internet users worldwide!
It looks like Beckham is the most famous football player in UK. I didn’t know. I’m not exactly the average italian soccer entusiast. Anyway, Jess (Parminder Nagra) is an indian young girl living in London and dreaming to become a football player. Beckham is her hero. She meets Jules (Keira Knighley) who plays football in a local team. Jess joins the team, but her parents are very upset. Indian traditions are strict and girls are not allowed to wear short pants and play soccer. They should marry and cook dinner. Jess is even frustrated by her sister who’s going to get married in a big fat huge traditional wedding.
This is the first Bollywood movie I happen to watch. It’s a playful comedy but talks about racial integration, sex discrimination (since they are girls, everybody tries to stop them on the path to success, they are misbelieved as lesbian, they have a gay friend), surpassed traditions, generation gap and how hard it is for youngsters to choose their future life in spite of their parents thinking they know better. And of course there is the mandatory romantic love story with the team coach. Enjoyable, lots of fun.
Bend it like Beckam,
UK 2002, by Gurinder Chada, Comedy
with Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
IMDB 286499
Several states in the world are going to change their clocks at the end of this month. Unfortunately they don’t do it all at the same time, nor they do the same thing. All of Europe is going to change clock one hour backwards at 01:00 UTC Oct 29th. USA change the same night, but each timezone on its own 02:00. Normally I am six hours from New York, and nine hours from Los Angeles. Starting at 2am Oct 29th CET and for the next six hours I’m gonna be only 5 hours from NY and 8 from LA. From 7am until 10am I’m going to be 6 hours from NY and 8 from LA. After 10am hour relative time difference wiil be the usual one.
China doesn’t have a daylight saving policy, so this is simple. Currently Beijing is 6 hours from Italy but will be 7 after we switch our clock. But much worse happens for countries in the other emisphere. For example Sydney is currently 8 hours away. They are going to switch their clock the same day Oct 29th, but their 2am will happen at 6pm of my Oct 28th and they’re going towards summer, so they will change their clocks one hour forward! Between 6pm and 2am we’re going to be 9 hours behind them, and after 2am we’re going to be 10 hours away! Same twist happens for Rio de Janeiro, but they will change clock on the first Sunday of November. And, by the way, not all of Brazil and Australia observe DST.
I wonder how people who developed the software used to book flights managed all of this mess. They deserve a medal.
Yesterday was Friday 13th. According to Wikipedia, the traditional belief that Friday 13th is unlucky started exactly 699 years ago:
There have been a number of events known as “Black Fridays“ in history. Usually, these events are devastating. Some historians propose that the origin of the “Black Friday” was the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of Knights Templars on October 13, 1307 (Friday), to be later tortured into admitting heresy.
It is interesting to note that 2006-13-10 adds up to 13 (2+6+1+3+1). It also adds up to 2029 (2006+13+10) that in turn adds up to 13 (2+2+9), again.
Now, since I’m a geek, I have also to note that the Gregorian calendar makes the 13th of each month slightly most likely to be on a Friday. Since not all months have the same length, it happens that on the 13th of the 4800 months composing a 400-years cycle we have 688 Fridays, 687 Sundays and Wednesdays, 685 Mondays and Tuesdays, 684 Thursdays and Saturdays. Wow, Friday 13th is 0.048% more likely than average 13th…. I mean, there has to be something fishy going on.
