Part of my job is to select technical people to be hired in the company.  Few months ago I happened to interview a guy for a developer position.  This guy has a degree in chemistry but his career then oscillated between system administration and programming in the java world. Read the rest of this entry »

Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.

Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

I know how it feels…

Google led the creation of Open Handset Alliance, a consortium involving a number of telco and manufacturers . As its first act the Alliance released Android, an open source operating system for mobiles complete of SDK and API. The SDK includes a working emulator and half a dozen example applications. The idea to establish an open platform for mobile developers is very good but not particularly new: project Openmoko has been working to a similar concept for several months and went as far as to release a developer version of the handset. Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I’ve been to PyCon Uno, the first italian conference dedicated to the Python programming language. It’s been very interesting, in particular Alex Martelli‘s keynote on managing the tech development and a presentation on sqlalchemy, but this post is not about the conference.

Marco Pesenti Gritti’s final keynote was about One Laptop Per Child, a project to bring a low cost computer to children in those third world countries where the benefits of worldwide information and education technology would be otherwise impossible. With the help of UN and MIT, they are trying to build a 100$ book-size laptop with a 1200×900 colour display and consuming just about 2W. It’s going to be developed using open source software only, and to use Python and GTK+ to develop a revolutionary environment that discards the desktop/office metaphor and puts emphasis on children activities. Several states already joined the project and did preliminary testing on some of their schools.

I think they did a very good job and hope this is going to be a great success.

Is there anybody out there who doesn’t know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are? Everybody and his brother know that they are the leaders of Apple and Microsoft and have been dominating the personal computer industry for the last 30 years. In all of this time, they’ve been very careful to appear together very rarely, but last Wednesday they shared the stage at the D: All things Digital conference. They chatted about how the industry evolved during their kingdom and talked about how they think our digital future is going to be. A warm and friendly chat, like a get together for long-standing friends who finally relax and nostalgically recall the common past. But wait, look at the picture, is that a real smile? Read the rest of this entry »

In case you are a stock trading geek like me, or if you just want to monitor the stock of some company while working on your linux server, this is a very useful configuration you can put in your .bash_profile. Thank you Yahoo!

TICKER="QQQQ"
PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\`GET 'http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=$TICKER&f=sl1d1'|cut -f2 -d,\` \u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \$\[\033[00m\] "
export PS1

Happy monitoring!

I don’t usually waste my time on java, but today I was in the right mood and tried to write a very simple network daemon, just to learn how hard it was. After some quick google I found that java can’t daemonize itself (it has no access to relevant native system calls) and therefore the Apache guys developed a nice component called org.apache.commons.daemon. I though Apache guys are smart, after all they developed the Apache web server, Subversion and more interesting stuff, so they have to know very well how a network daemon works. So I happily started with the test app, SimpleDaemon, bundled in the commons tar file, just to prove it works.

Unfortunately at the 1st attempt I got:

pioppo@roentgen ~/sandbox/daemon $ jsvc -verbose SimpleDaemon.class SimpleDaemon
24/12/2006 00:32:53 32525 jsvc error: Cannot execute JSVC executor process

Gosh, what is this?  Read the rest of this entry »