On Jan 1st 1999 a new currency was officially born: the Euro.  It was the result of the efforts of most members of the European Union aiming to create a single currency to foster growth in the area, be strong against market storms and cut down on banking costs.  That day the exchange rate with respect to the 11 initial participating currencies was set in stone and the European Central Bank took control.  For three years the Euro remained something untangible, but on Jan 1st 2002 actual coins and notes were circulated and the now obsolete national money retired.

I remember that day when we started to convert our money.  Paying in Lira and getting back change in Euro was a little mess but also fun.  Luckily enough the confusion only lasted for one month and then almost everybody was quickly up to speed doing math with the new coins.  Due to the roundings and the psychological effect there’s been a period of hidden inflation, with prices rounded up but then our economy became stronger and the inflation was kept very low.  People was able to get loans as low as 2.5% interest rate, something unheard of in this part of the world.

Initially the Euro was weak, declining from $1.16 down to $0.82, but soon after that it started a slow but steady recovery that this year culminated in a peak at $1,60.  Even during the current credit crunch crisis, our currency is stable.  Nations like Sweden, Denmark and The United Kingdom chose to stay out of the game to maintain control over their own monetary policy but now they are changing their minds, as they see their currency plunge.  The British Pound in particular is sinking quickly and almost down to parity.  More countries, especially in the Eastern Europe are now trying to join the club and don’t forget the Euro is now popular even in New York.  All in all we can certainly say the Euro delivered.

I’ve never been so happy to live in the Eurozone!

A new tradition has been established in Ferrara lately.  Every year we celebrate the new summer with a city-wide night party thrown on the solstice day.  In yesterday’s edition I attended a wonderful fireworks show where music and light synchronized together built a moving synesthetic show.  Fireworks went on for about 45 minutes, with a sequence of several songs, each one with a different choreography.

Meanwhile, every corner in the city center had some entertaining event to offer: museums exceptionally opened till late, theater and live art performances, open air mega-screens running movies and the football match of the European championship, several concerts of all sorts of music, free salame with ciupeta bread, card games tournaments and more.  The city center was packed till at least 2am.

After the fireworks we’ve attended a theater show by Teatro Comunitario Pontelagoscuro, a grass-root show created by the citizens of Pontelagoscuro and the help of Teatro Nucleo, talking about the dramatic history of that place in the 20th Century.  It impressive how professional is the result achieved by the will of a few dozen normal people getting together to act in their spare time.

The Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg owns so many pieces of artwork that they cannot handle them all in one place. For this reason they routinely organize exhibitions abroad and opened a few branches around the world. They have one in Las Vegas, one in Amsterdam and recently opened a third one in Ferrara. To celebrate its birth, Italian Hermitage organized an exhibition dedicated to Benvenuto Tisi, also known as Il Garofalo, at the Estense Castle.

Benvenuto Tisi was born in Ferrara in 1481 and is one of the most prominent painters of the School of Ferrara. He began gravitating around Domenico Panetti, Lorenzo Costa, Dosso Dossi and then refining his style under with Boccaccio Boccaccino. He already had a distinctive style, with bright colors and strong use of light as it was common in the Venetian school, when he eventually visited Rome and met Raffaello. That was a breakthrough and his style dramatically improved, so much that out of Italy his paintings sometimes are mistakenly attributed to Raffaello, even if Garofalo kept a distinctive mannerism.

What strikes me the most in Garofalo’s paintings is the use of light/dark and bright colors to highlight the subject and yet the obsessive presence of background stuff, as if he were shy of wasting the corners of the canvas.  Also very interesting the ethereal mood his characters can express.

The exhibition also features a few paintings by Garofalo’s contemporary artists and the ticket includes a visit to the Castle. This alone would be worth the money. Several inner rooms were recently restored and feature astonishing ceiling frescoes and the atmosphere of renaissance lifestyle and parties. Just looking at the kitchen you get an idea of the huge banquets the Este family used to throw in their golden period, to say nothing of the Giardino degli Aranci or the underground Jail.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

Looking at this dithered GIF makes me so nostalgic…
Today AOL announced Netscape Navigator has been discontinued. Time for a new chapter in Mozilla’s book.

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.

Surfing the normal web with this technology was basically impossible. If you wanted to make a small page accessible from the phone you had to write in a special markup called WML which was not compatible with HTML and in fact represented a very different paradigm. Instead of pages you had decks and cards. For people used to the web, WML was real hard, first because it was XML based (which had been just released and mostly unknown – very few people could tell what well-formed and valid meant), second because it was a different set of tags, third because mobile browsing was a very different user experience. With no mouse, no qwerty and a very small display you had to design your decks very carefully, with usability in mind.

All of this was the brainchild of a company called Unwired Planet (nowadays known as Openwave) that was able to create a consortium together with the leading handset manufacturers. They called it WAP Forum (nowadays known as Open Mobile Alliance) and issued a complete suite of spec documents featuring a transmission protocol stack (WDP, WTP, WSP), a markup language (WML), an image format (WBMP), a binary compressed representation for XML (WBXML) and a middle-ware component architecture (the WAP gateway). A huge undertaking that also happened to be the topic for my master thesis, so I intimately knew every single bit of those documents.

Coding for WAP was very exciting, but experimenting with a real phone was expensive, slow and cumbersome. When something was wrong, the phone didn’t yield any meaningful error message, just a plain dumb 500 internal error. In order to easy development, a few emulators were developed by manufacturers, mostly as win32 native applications. None of them was satisfying to me, so I ended up developing my own.Usability was a big deal. Not only each phone had different display size, form factor and soft keys. On top of that, each manufacturer rendered some tags in a very different way. For example selection lists could be displayed similar to drop down lists or radio buttons.

There were a few wap sites available, some of them linked from the carrier’s WAP portal. There was no usable search engine, so you had to rely on word of mouth or list of links, just like the early days on the web. In the end none of those services became successful, mainly because the price you had to pay for a WAP session was so high.

I remember there were a good number of start-ups flourishing around WAP. In UK they were concentrated in London and used to gather in a periodic event they called the WAP Wednesday while in Italy they were spread over at least 4 different cities and had no pulse to gather together. Unfortunately I had just graduated and had no money to flight to London just to attend a meeting.

I remember many people abandoned WAP after the first navigation attempt, either because they were scared by navigation costs, or they found very bad services (bad for usability or for lack of interesting content). The industry was technologically ready, but the market was not and WAP became known as a big flop. One year later GPRS arrived and it was marketed as the next technology after WAP, when in fact it was just a substitute for CSD. Companies needed a way to make investors quickly forget the flop, who cared if WAP as a technology remained central for everything that came later?

Guglielmo Oberdan was born in Trieste in 1858. Back then, the Italian nation struggled to reunite under a single kingdom and Guglielmo lived his youth during Garibaldi‘s legendary fights. Garibaldi couldn’t conquer Trieste, so that remained domain of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. People from Trieste strongly felt they had to fight to become part of Italy. The revolting movement was know as irredentism.

Guglielmo moved to Vienna to study engineering, but escaped to Rome – he deserted – when he was called in the Austrian army to go conquer Bosnia-Herzegovina. While in Rome, in 1882 he participated to the funeral ceremony for Garibaldi and quickly decided he had to do something to make Trieste rise and declare independence from Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, even if that needed the sacrifice of his own life. While traveling to Trieste to pursue his plot, he was captured and sentenced to death for allegedly planning to kill the emperor.

Now, the interesting fact is this guy was called a terrorist by Austrian, while he is known as a martyr of freedom in Italy. Sounds pretty similar to what happens nowadays in Palestine or Iraq, doesn’t it? Maybe both sides are biased and the truth is somewhere in the middle, and this story tells us that we should always check both versions.

From Wikipedia:

The Alhambra (Red Castle) (in Arabic الحمراء = Al Ħamrā’)) is an ancient mosque, palace and fortress complex of the Moorish monarchs of Granada, in southern Spain (known as Al-Andalus when the fortress was constructed), occupying a hilly terrace on the south-eastern border of the city of Granada. It was the residence of the Muslim kings of Granada and their court, but is currently a museum exhibiting exquisite Islamic architecture [...] The palace was built chiefly between 1248 and 1354, in the reigns of Al Ahmar and his successors;

In this place, seven centuries ago Jews used to live in peace with Muslims. There was tolerance and mutual acceptance. But in 1492, Granada was taken over by Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and they immediatly issued a decree ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and its territories and possessions by July 31. At that time Torquemada was leading the Inquisition, burning Jewish and Arabic books.