musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

I have changed the tagline for this blog, leaving the first part of it ("Superior Dedication") and adding a further explanation to it ("Specialization is bullshit").

This should give a better insight on my feeling about some trends I have observed (and keep observing) in the IT World: management wants higher specialization, replication of work, the possibility to render persons much more similar to machines than to artists.
It is capitalism applied to the intellectual capabilities of people.
"If what you can do can be replicated, can be made a procedure, or even a batch, you become easily replaceable and they can make bigger bucks with your work".

I tend to see myself more as an artisan than as a robot.
An artisan: no, I did not say "artist" because that might sound arrogant….
But what I mean is that IMHO Information Technology does not need replaceable parts and new dotcom explosion of big bucks for the rich ones. It needs more dedicated, creative people. People that love to learn. People that actually read the manuals when trying something new.

Replication, standardization, "specialization" – how boring is that ?

Most students in this photo have a laptop!
They were visiting Italy with their school, and were having a lesson on the square in front of Santa Caterina Church (behing the Pantheon).

Funny thing is how much difference there is in the amount of technology that is actually available to people in different geographical areas of the world, and how it is spread.

I will explain it better: they were probably american, most students have a laptop – I remeber them (the laptops) being MANY – I can count at least SIX laptopts in this photo, there are probably more….
That's so much money already, and a laptop is used so much over there…. but that explains to me something I had never really understood: why they were pushing so much the TabletPC…. here in Italy not even COMPANIES buy those….

As far as school goes…. an italian school would not have that many computers NOT EVEN in a special class/laboratory. It would be a miracle if it had an internet connection that's not dial-up, and it would already be great if there were computers at all, quite often….

Software vendors usually do "special deals" or discount prices, or donations… but that's never enough for the small budgets of public schools….

In 1997, this has been paid by one half of my salary…. now you can find it on eBay for FIVE dollars….. ((

Oh I hate spammers, you know ? In fact I've also got this goal I would like to mark as "done"….
…but that's more for laughing than to be serious, really.

Coming to comment spam, I've been dealing quite a lot with the old 'b2' (WordPress's progenitor) at one stage, while I could not be asked to upgrade yet. At one stage I'd even coded my own unofficial fix for it to keep it going and mantain my sanity…

Then with WordPress I've enabled a CAPTCHA plugin which takes care of robots and only lets HUMANS place comments.

But now it's the turn of trackback spamming….
Sure, a lot of people have seen it AGES before me, simply because people DO read THEIR blog more than mine….
In a way, this might mean this is starting to be read – gosh! Who makes you read this ? Are you really THAT bored to get to read me?

Anyway, here's a couple of useful links proposing approaches to tackle comment and trackback spam. They might be useful to you too:
http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/spam/
http://photomatt.net/2005/01/05/trackback-spam/

Also now, I could get some of those plug-ins…. probably. For now I don't have time to test the plug-ins, so I've just hacked my own fix, see if it does. Probably I will have to 'touch' it again, as I might have broken the trackback feature altogether. Well, it will pretty much test itself. Spammers, where are you now ? I'm watching my logs, please try….

[edited: 20th May 2006 - Ok they did send trackbacks tonight and my fix did work ]

I have had several processes getting stuck and eating up memory, till the webserver did not work anymore.
So this site has been off the net for 12 hours or so
I'm back online now. Sorry.

How two kids can be happy and have fun with something as simple as a fountain.
Kids teach us a lot, all the times.