Last Sunday was a wonderful day with clean blue sky.  A sunny day in winter is rare and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to enjoy the old town and take some pictures.  After almost four years living in this place I’m still impressed, expecially by some of the buildings from the middle age.  This palace, Palazzo Vecchio, was built seven centuries ago.  Can you believe it?

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.

Four thousands kilometers in thirteen days, across Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. It’s been a long and amazing trip, visiting wonderful cities, looking at breathtaking landscapes, having great meals and unfortunately a lot of rain showers. We mostly followed the path of two major central European rivers: Rhine and Meuse. Rhine (Rijn in NL) springs up in Switzerland and flows in the North Sea, traversing Germany and forming a large delta in The Netherlands after a long path of 1320 kilometers. Meuse (Maas in NL) springs up in France and runs 925 kilometers across Luxembourg and Belgium before finally draining in the same delta.

A great deal of history happened along these two rivers and in particular they have big symbolic value for Europe: they delimit the field where France and Germany fought for centuries (including two world wars) but they also merge in The Netherlands thus keeping Europe together. No wonder most of the European and international institutions are in this valley: Strasbourg, Brussels, The Hague. This is also the place where bishops used to be rulers and the Protestant Reformation developed, and the place where many renowned beers are produced.

To complete our tour we visited Geneva (again on a river, this time the Rhone) and the United Nations palace!

I’m posting more pictures and details, stay tuned!

UPDATE: here is the photoalbum