Maybe my quest for a good RSS aggregator is over. This baby works on Mozilla and seems pretty cool.
Too bad it's screwing up, for some unkown reasons, my MozBlog setup: MozBlog now appears as a right sidebar and no more as a bottom pane, which makes a bit painful to edit stuff. I'll see if there is a solution tomorrow, but so far I'm quite impressed with NewsGator.
Breaking news: Vadim, Carsten and Sylvain were just declared ASF members. I'm really happy for them: they fully deserve this position, they really did (and do) a great job for our Cocooners, and without them Cocoon wouldn't be where is now. Kudos guys, and thanks for your hard work!
Today I was casually googling for Orixo, and I found out that Google was suggesting me to search for "orixa" instead. I was curious and digged a bit on that word, to find just misterious portuguese sites citing that name but in a way that I couldn't really grasp (very little portuguese spoken here...).
Luckily, one of my bosses is quite fond of Brasil, so I finally found out that Orixà (accented) is a word linked to african religious traditions imported by the slaves, mixed in centuries with Christianity and part of the popular culture of many north-eastern brasilians.
The exact meaning should indicate altogether the deities of this religion, something like Exú, Lógunnède, Nanã, Obá, Obaluayiê, Ogun, Òrúnmìlà, Ossain, Oxalá, Oxóssi, Oxun, Oxumaré, Oyá, Tempo, Xangô, Yemanjá. Now, if anyone knows more on this topic, expecially on the exact translation of this term, I'd be very interested to learn.
Nice to see, on another site, that Orixà is translated as "forces of nature": not exactly what we meant when we finally decided for the Orixo name, but nevertheless it sounds good. :-)
Yes, you never stop learning.
From time to time people discover that actually I am a lawyer and start wondering how is it so and how I found myself doing Open Source and tech stuff instead.
I got tired of telling the story every time, so now that I have this mini-site I can finally tell people "this information is on my weblog". :-) Beware: it's quite a long read.
When I finished high school I had to choose a university. My high school was the "Liceo classico", geared towards an humanistic approach: no science, almost no math, but tons of Latin, Greek and Philosophy. Actually I still think this is the best education ever: some more science teaching wouldn't hurt of course, but the alternative, what we call "Liceo Scientifico" is more a joke than a high school (OK, I'm kidding: there is a long time rivality in Italy between "classico" and "scientifico", not to mention that my wife's high school was the latter ... since she's watching over my shoulders I guess I'll be sleeping on the sofa tonight :-)).
Anyway, the poor math education I received, together with my sincere belief of being totally unable to handle math, ruled out every faculty that had to deal with science, so I was left with the more scientific faculty in the humanistic branch, law. Actually I really enjoyed it: I was even thrilled by the fact that law (somehow like CS) was a pure human science, with little or no nature involved: it was built from scratch by humans so it wasn't based on observing natural phenomena and trying to understand how they worked.
I did pretty well: I was able, on a 4-years course, to pass 22 exams out of 26 in two years and a half, so I was ready to get my degree and start working in the law field. I had three career opportunities: public notary, judge or lawyer. Too bad that public notaries in Italy are a close clan almost impossible to join. I also realized that I wasn't given the firness that you need when you're a judge since I tended to be driven by feelings, so the only option left was to work as an attorney.
I tried it for a couple of months in the summer, and I found out that while I liked the theory behind law as a science, the profession sucked big time: it wasn't just my cup of tea, and I felt so uncomfortable that I decided that I needed a change and almost stopped my university efforts. That was back in 1992.
Meanwhile I was into computers since I was 14, playing with C64s, then PCs. I was playing with BASIC, having fun and writing some small accounting software for my parent's company. On 1992 my parents bought me a modem card on their way back from a trip to China and Taiwan. It made little or no sense at that time, where almost no one had a modem: i didn't ask for it, but my father wanted to buy me a gift and he picked up a random card from the shelf.
I was doomed. That lousy 2400bps modem, who was able to dial only a couple of numbers and only on long-distance calls, connected me with the world of BBS, and my interest in computers and telematics climbed as steeply as my parents phone bill. In less than one year I was a happy Fidonet point, thinking about setting up my own BBS.
I didn't have enough money anyway to afford a dedicated computer, so I started looking for a solution. I tried OS/2, of which I've been a great fan back to 2.0 then I found out Linux and fell in love with it so much than in less than one month I had a public BBS giving away free shell accounts for people dialing up and willing to try Unix (and for the curious in you, I was DOS'es in a week time by the most classic int main(void) { main(); }).
I used to monitor on my spare time the users logged in, sending sometimes a talk request to gather feedback and find new friends. One night a guy accepted my talk request, presented himself as the newly appointed system administrator of the local branch of my university that was about to open and asked me if I had some free time to help him out. The week after this I had my first SLIP connection to the Internet, of which I knew little or nothing, and I was doomed again. I remember me staring at my screen with a gopher client and asking my friend that was helping me in setting up the connection "what?? You mean that we have just reached a machine over the ocean?". I was doomed again.
I started working in my free time in the university labs, getting more knowleadgeble with Sun's and Linux. I spent all my free time on the Net, excited at finding new friends (...good old times where you could actually *use* IRC) and curious about those guys that were programming all that neat stuff for free. I co-founded the Italian Linux Society in 1994, the first official Linux association in Italy, and I was enjoying my time in helping CS students while studying civil law for an exam that was rescheduled so many times that I can't remember how long it took to handle it.
In the end of 1994 a few Internet cafe started to appear in Italy. One night I was attending a concert in a local pub when I heard the owner talking to some guy about starting an Internet point, but whining about not having any technical clue about it. I offered myself for a consultancy, and my life changed.
After a while some friends of mine started a couple of Internet companies which I couldn't join since I was forced to join the Army instead. After one more year lost trying to learn how to fight a war (well... looks like it might even turn out useful these times :-/). Back from the Army I was finally able to start working seriously on the Internet, so I worked with my friends for some time, until I decided that with no more exams left it would have been a shame not to get my degree, so I took a six months "sabbatical" and finally made it, so I'm officially a lawyer now (well, not really: it would take me a couple of years of practice and a state exam before being entitled to work as a real lawyer). Since then, I haven't opened a law book anymore, but I learnt quite a bit of "practical" CS.
Courier sucks. Today I had lots of problems with a mail server accepting mail but not doing local delivery. The puppy was a Courier machine, and I spent a good hour fiddling around the documentation only to see that there was no real way to check the queue status. OK, now a full horde of courier fans will hit me with "hey, it was as easy as doing xxx and/or yyy". But folks, queue management should be prominently noted in the documentation, and this is definitely not the case.
Well... I don't like the design, I don't like the implementation, I don't like the documentation. What else can I say... long live Postfix!
Crazy days. Incredibly busy and running around to ensure that everything will be settled for the upcoming event of next week. Really interesting though: it has been great working with nice guys scattered on different countries, with different background and cultures but sharing a common mindset and working towards a common goal to build new and interesting stuff. More to follow on Monday... now it's time to rest for the weekend and help my little brother with his final high school exams (and if you're Italian, you know what I mean).
Note to myself: for the future, avoid PR agencies as the plague.
This blog stuff is quite amazing. You want to try and post something just for the sake of it, but then you face this blank screen and just don't know what to do. Anyway, this is a test from MozBlog: I like the idea of surfing and blogging at the same time, but still have to understand if this baby can really do what I need: for one, links don't work as advertised.
(And if you don't know what the "tilde syndrome" is, just fire up 'vi'...)
It took me much longer than I expected, but finally I gave up and opened my blog (thanks Steven!). This is actually a good time to see if this blogging stuff actually works: I must admit that I'm still a bit skeptical about people actually wondering what's up with me and caring about what I write here, and this was basically the reason for waiting so long before opening my space.
Truth is I find myself more and more into reading other's blogs, and from time to time I'm willing to reply to others, so it might well be that, from time to time, someone might be interested in reading mine too. So here we go.