Tomorrow I’m flying to Vienna to attend YAPC::Europe. Will stay there most of next week.  I’m sure I’ll enjoy this trip because I’ve been to Austria in the past and I loved wiener schnitzel, sachertorte, Stiegl, Augustiner bräu, the general mood and of course the many wonderful monuments and sights in and around Salzburg. And oh, by the way, one more tick in the travel page.  I’ll keep you posted.  Stay tuned!

This week Ferrara celebrates the 20th Buskers Festival. For seven days straight, every night the medieval town center will be invaded by a few hundred street performers coming from all over the world and playing the most amazing instruments and music styles. It’s like the whole town became a giant stage 50 acres wide, surrounded by monuments and typical shops and shared by many parallel concerts. If all those performances were to be executed one after the other, they would continue uninterrupted for over 100 days. Read the rest of this entry »

This is post number one hundred! This blog was born 445 days ago, so on average I posted once every 4.45 days.

This is a great accomplishment, congratulations to myself. Started as nothing more than a joyful experiment and a way to improve my English, this blog slowly changed in something that I care for. My posts are still mostly useless, but maybe some of you will like them.

I’ve just read this article appeared on the last IEEE Spectrum issue. They talk about a breach in Vodafone Greece’s core network, a list of phone numbers intercepted and the apparent suicide of a technician in charge of Network Planning Management after he discovered the problem and alerted his supervisors about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I wanted to go to the movies, even if unfortunately in August you take what is available. The only open-air theater in town ran Borat. I knew I wasn’t going to like it, but I thought I had to see in order to better criticize… Read the rest of this entry »

Oh yes, I do remember those days at the end of last millennium when WAP was the latest innovation in mobile technology and the first phones equipped with a browser were hitting the market: Siemens S35, Nokia 7110, Ericsson R380, Motorola Timeport… I had an S35i and I loved it. Black and orange straight monochromatic display, just 3 lines by 14 chars worth of text, almost no graphics.

GPRS was yet to come, we had just CSD at 9600bps and we had to pay by air time, just like a normal phone call. It basically felt like going back to BBS age and use a modem over analogic PSTN, but with a textual browser that you could carry with you anywhere.

Phones didn’t come pre-configured and setting up one was tricky. For each carrier you had to enter a different dial-up number, user and password, gateway IP address and port, plus strange settings like connectionless. Of course people would never remember those parameters by heart and would look them up on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like we are again at a turning point in the Value Added Services space. Apparently this market undergoes at least one paradigm shift every three years. Read the rest of this entry »