I have been talking to Ariel last month, asking for a Microspotting T-Shirt since I had mentioned her earlier on my blog.

I have been on holiday in the meantime… but the T-Shirt had arrived and was waiting for me in my letterbox in the office !! How cool is that???

So today I am walking around the Rome office in it… and I am looking at people’s faces: you need to understand that Italian dress code is more or less the opposite of how people usually dress in Redmond… Italy is historically more formal, and it would be the norm to dress fancy… one would definitely look BAD here if he would show up in sandals in the office… and VERY bad going on sandals to a customer…

So this is a screenshot from my new Quad-Core Intel Q6600, 8GB RAM with Windows 2008 Enterprise x64, running Hyper-V.
I have bought it and installed it a few days ago, and migrated my home Active Directory off the old windows 2003 machine to Windows 2008. Yes, because I have an Active Directory at home. I know, I am probably nuts, but you already knew that much.

Today, I just updated Hyper-V to RTM version. Oh yeah, because Hyper-V has been Released To Manufacturing today! You can get it HERE.

I am having lot of fun with this. I had not bought a new PC in about 7 years and could not really test anything on that old one anymore…
I paid 8GB roughly 100euros, which is not a lot if you think about it. These days even standard "budget" PCs for just doing email and web surfing ship with 2 or 4GB…
With that amount of RAM, I expect it to last several years like the previous one. The one I bought 7 years ago had 512MB when everybody was buying 128 or 256MB. Kinda the same story here.

Wonder what happens to the old PC? That glorious machine that has been my server for years has now been converted to the new kids' PC and will go on for a few more years like that, I hope.

After that, I took a different approach: I kept sending the mail on the SAME server as the backup, and using IMAP I could DRAG-and-DROP the backup attachment from the mailbox on one server to the mailbox on another server (=GMail). They did not mark me as a spammer that way, of course.
So that worked for a while, but then I got tired of doing this manually.

So the following ruby script is the way I automated the "move offsite" part of that backup.
For completeness, I will give the due credits about who set me on the right track: I started off by this example by Ryan.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
begin_ = Time.now

#includes
require 'net/imap'

##Source Info
$SRCSERVER="mail.muscetta.com"
$SRCPORT=143
$SRCSSL=false
$SRCUSERNAME="daniele"
$SRCPASSWORD=""
$SRCFOLDER="INBOX.Backups"

##Destination Info
$DSTSERVER="imap.gmail.com"
$DSTPORT=993
$DSTSSL=true
$DSTUSERNAME="muscetta@gmail.com"
$DSTPASSWORD=""
$DSTFOLDER="Backup"

#connect to source
puts "connecting to source server #{$SRCSERVER}... \n\n"
srcimap = Net::IMAP.new($SRCSERVER,$SRCPORT,$SRCSSL)
srcimap.login($SRCUSERNAME, $SRCPASSWORD)
srcimap.select($SRCFOLDER)

#connect to destination
puts "connecting to destination server #{$DSTSERVER}... \n\n"
dstimap = Net::IMAP.new($DSTSERVER,$DSTPORT,$DSTSSL)
dstimap.login($DSTUSERNAME, $DSTPASSWORD)
dstimap.select($DSTFOLDER)

# Loop through all messages in the source folder.
uids = srcimap.uid_search(['ALL'])
if uids.length > 0
	$count = uids.length
	puts "found #{$count} messages to move... \n\n"

	srcimap.uid_fetch(uids, ['ENVELOPE']).each do |data|
		mid = data.attr['ENVELOPE'].message_id

		# Download the full message body from the source folder.
		puts "reading message... #{mid}"
		msg = srcimap.uid_fetch(data.attr['UID'], ['RFC822', 'FLAGS', 'INTERNALDATE']).first

		# Append the message to the destination folder, preserving flags and internal timestamp.
		puts "copying message #{mid} to destination..."
		dstimap.append($DSTFOLDER, msg.attr['RFC822'], msg.attr['FLAGS'], msg.attr['INTERNALDATE'])

		#delete the msg
		puts "deleting messsage #{mid}..."
		srcimap.uid_store(data.attr['UID'], '+FLAGS', [:Deleted])
		srcimap.expunge

	end

	#disconnect
	dstimap.close
	srcimap.close
end

total_time = Time.now - begin_
puts "Done. RunTime: #{total_time} sec. \n\n"

One of the pictures I took in Pisa at the Hackmeeting has been published in June's issue of "Internet Magazine", a famous italian IT magazine.

The article talks about Internet Privacy and the "Piano R*" project by Autistici/Inventati.

This is the cover of the magazine:

Not having one of the "supported" platforms pushed me into playing with the provided Management Packs, and in turn I managed to use the MP for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a base, and replaced a couple of strings in the discoveries in order to get a working CentOS 5 Management Pack.

I still have not looked into the "hardware" monitors and health model / service model, so those are not currently monitored. But it is a start.

A lot of people have asked me a lot of information and would like to get the file - both in the blog's comment, on the newsgroup, or via mail. I am sorry, but I cannot provide you with the file, because it has not been throughly tested and might render your systems unstable, and also because there might be licensing and copyright issues that I have not checked within Microsoft.

Keep also in mind that using CentOS as a monitored platform is NOT a SUPPORTED scenario/platform for SCX. I only used it because I did not have a Suse or Redhat handy that day, and because I wanted to understand how the Management Packs using WS-Man worked.

This said, should you wish to try to do the same "MP Hacking" I did,  I pretty much explained all you need to know in my previous post and its comments, so that should not be that difficult.

Actually, I still think that the best way to figure out how things are done is by looking at the actual implementation, so I encourage you to look at the management packs and figure out how those work. There are a few mature tools out there that will help you author/edit Management Packs if you don't want to edit the XML directly: the Authoring Console, and Silect MP Studio Lite, for example. If you want to delve in the XML details, instead, then I suggest you read the Authoring Guide and peek at Steve Wilson's AuthorMPs.com site.

Disclaimer
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

"[...] What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It's hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. [...]"

In fact, being made by Microsoft people or not, the list of open source software on CodePlex keeps growing too. Mentioning CodePlex and interviews, another interesting one is that of Sara Ford, Program Manager for CodePlex posted on Microspotting. But Microspotting is awesome in general. My favorite quote by her:

"[...] Hey. My name is Ariel and I'm the person you thought would never work at MSFT [...]".

In fact, just as I do, she is running that blog on Wordpress, posting her photos on Flickr, using a RSS feed on Feedburner and in general using a bunch of things that are out there that might be seen as "competing" with what Microsoft makes. In fact, this attitude towards other products and vendors on the market is what I am mainly interested in. Should we only use flagship products? Sure, when they help us, but not necessarily. Who cares? People's blogs are not, as someone would like them to be, a coordinated marketing effort. This is about real people, real geeks, who just want to share and communicate personal ideas and thoughts. I had a blog before being at Microsoft, after all. Obviously I had exposure to competing products. My server was running LAMP on Novell Netware in 2002 - after which I moved it to Linux. It is not a big deal. And if I try to put things in perspective, in fact, this is turning out to be an advantage. I am saying this, as the latest news about interoperability comes from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit): and that is the announcement that System Center Operations Manager will monitor Linux natively. I find this to be extremely exciting, and a step in the right direction… to say it all I am LOVING this!!! But at the same time I see some other colleagues in technical support that are worrying and being scared by this - "if we do monitor Linux and Unix, we are supposed to have at least some knowledge on those systems", they are asking. Right. We probably do. At the moment there are probably only a limited number of people that actually can do that, at least in my division. But this is because in the past they must have sacrificed their own curiosity to become "experts" in some very narrow and "specialized" thing. Here we go. On the opposite, I kept using Linux - even when other "old school" employees would call me names. All of a sudden, someone else realizes my advantage.  …but a lot of geeks already understood the power of exploration, and won't stop defining people by easy labels. Another cool quote I read the other day is what Jimmy Schementi has written in his Flickr profile:

"[...] I try to do everything, and sometimes I get lucky and get good at something [...]".

Reading on his blog it looks like he also gave up on trying to write a Twitter plugin for MSNLive Messenger (or maybe he never tried, but at least I wanted to do that, instead) and wrote it for Pidgin instead.  Why did he do that ? I don't know, I suppose because it was quicker/easier - and there were API's and code samples to start from.

The bottom line, for me, is that geeks are interested in figuring out cool things (no matter what language or technology they use) and eventually communicating them. They tend to be pioneers of technologies. They try out new stuff. Open Source development is a lot about agility and "trying out" new things. Another passage of Brad's interview says:

"[...] That's true–the open source projects I contribute to tend to be the "by developer, for developer" kind, although I also consume things that are less about development [...] Like one tool that I've used forever is the GIMP graphics editor, which I love a lot".

That holds true, when you consider that a lot of these things are not really mainstream. Tools made "by developer, for developer" are usually a sort of experimental ground. Like Twitter. Every geek is talking about Twitter these days, but you can't really say that it is mainstream. Twitter has quite a bunch of interesting aspects, though, and that's why geeks are on it. Twitter lets me keep up-to-date quicker and better (and with a personal, conversational touch) even better than RSS feeds and blogs do. Also, there are a lot of Microsofties on Twitter. And the cool thing is that yo can really talk to everybody, at any level. Not just everybody "gets" blogs, social networks, and microblogging. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be on top of the tech news, or use experimental technologies. So in a way stuff like Twitter is "by geeks, for geeks" (not really just for developers - there's a lot of "media" people on Twitter). Pretty much in the same way, a lot of people I work with (at direct contact, everyday) only found out about LinkedIN during this year (2008!). I joined Orkut and LinkedIN in 2004. Orkut was in private beta, back then. A lot of this stuff never becomes mainstream, some does. But it is cool to discover it when it gets born. How long did it take for Social Networking to become mainstream? So long that when it is mainstream for others, I have seen it for so long that I am even getting tired of it.

For some reason, geeks love to be pioneers. This is well expressed in a digression by Chris Pratley:

"[...] some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we're not actually normal - you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress. [...]"

But I have been digressing, too, all along. As usual.

When I end up having conversations such as this, I get really sad: I thought we had finally passed the arrogant period where we had to spoon-feed customers, and I thought we were now mature enough to consider them smart people and providing cool, empowering technologies for them to use. I also thought that pretty much everybody liked Microsoft finally opening up and actually talking TO people… not only talking them INTO buying something, something - but having real conversations.

I get sad when I find that people still don't seem to be accepting that, and wanting back the old model, instead. Kinda weird.

The conversation goes as follows (words are not exactly those - we were speaking Italian and I sort of reconstructed the conversation - you should get the sense of it anyway):

[...]

Me: "The SDK service allows you to do quite a lot of cool stuff. Unfortunately not all of that functionality is completely or always easily exposed in the GUI. That is, for example: it is very EASY to define overrides, but it can get very tricky to find them back once set. That's why you can use this little useful tool that the developer of that SDK service has posted on his blog…"

Cust: "…but we can't just read blogs here and there!"

Me: "Well, I mean, then you may have to wait for the normal release cycle. It might be that those improvements will make it in to the product. That might happen in months, if you are lucky, or maybe never. What's wrong if he publishes that on his blog, bypassing the bureaucracy crap, and makes your life easier with it RIGHT NOW?"

Cust: "It is not official, I want it in the product!"

Me: "I see, and even understand that. But right now that feature just isn't there. But you can use this tool to have it. Don't worry: it is not made by some random guy who wants to trojan your server! It is made by the very same developer who wrote the product itself…"

Cust: "It is not supported, what if it breaks something?"

Me: "So are all resource kit tools, in general. written by some dev guy in his free five minutes, and usually unsupported. Still very useful, though. Most of them. And they usually do work, you know that much, don't you?"

Cust: "But why on a blog?"

Me: "What's wrong with this? People are just trying to make customer's life easier by being transparent and open and direct in their communication, just talking RIGHT to the customers. People talking to people, bypassing the prehistoric bureaucracy structure of companies… the same happens on many other sites, just think isatools.org for example… those are just tools that a support guy like me has written and wants to share because they might be useful…"

Cust: "But I can't follow/read all the blogs out there! I don't have time for it"

Me: "Why not? I have thousands of feeds in my aggregator and…"

Cust: "I don't have time and I don't want to read them, because I pay for support, so I don't expect this stuff to be in blogs"

Me: "Well, I see, since you pay for support, you are paying ME - in fact I am working with you on this product precisely as part of that paid support. That's why I am here to tell you that this tool exists, in case you had not heard of it, so you actually know about it without having to read that yourself on any blog… does that sound like a deal? Where's the issue?"

Cust: "Sgrunt. I want something official, I don't like this blog stuff"

[...]

I thought this was particularly interesting, not because I want to make fun of this person. I do respect him and I think he just has a different point of view. But in my opinion this conversation shows (and made me think about) an aspect of that "generation gap" inside Microsoft that Hugh talks about here:

"[...]4.30 Hugh talks about a conversation he had with a few people inside Microsoft- how there’s a generation gap growing within the company, between the Old Guard, and the new generation of Microsofties, who see their company in much more open, organic terms.[...]"

Basically this tells me that the generation gap is not happening only INSIDE Microsoft: it invests our customers too. Which makes it even more difficult to talk to some of them, as we change. Traditions are hard to change.

"I have not posted in a while" …well you certainly will have read tons of posts beginning this way, right?
But that's the truth. One of the reasons is that you can follow very well a lot of what I do and write elsewhere on the Internet by using my lifestream RSS feed, which includes much more than just what I post on this blog. Our minds are not stuck on one subject matter only, but our thoughs just go around in many different directions. I mentioned the integrated feed/lifestream in a previous post, but I found that the concept gets explained very well by Yongfook in this post:

"[...] We interact with various websites and create content on them - why should I then have to come to my own website and reconstruct, repost or repackage the same content? It already exists out there on the internet, and it’s grabbable and usable. This is not to say I think conventional blogging is dead. I do however think it is evolving. The pace at which we consume and create content - photos, videos, links etc - is getting faster, more frequent. If we wanted to republish everything manually on our blogs, we’d just run out of time. [...]"

So at least even if this SITE does not get updated often you can see I have quite a busy digital public life on the web.

Very interesting to also read this post by Scott Hanselman on the subject. He rather just focuses on twitter/microblogging as an evolved form of blogging which was getting boring and time-consuming to people:

"[...] The rise of blogs brought conversations on the 'net more out in the open. Blogging enabled conversation via essay, but as blogs have matured, posts have gotten longer and longer and threads more difficult to follow. Now, most posts are jumping off points for the more interesting conversations that inevitably move to the comments. [...]"

He then goes into more detailed/structured analysis of what you can or could do with Twitter. While his analysis is pretty good about the many ways you could use Twitter as a broadcasting tool (and in fact loads of companies do already), I rather use it as public instant messaging. Or maybe not just. I don't actually know and to be honest I am not too much into classifying things, really. For example, if classifying what this blog is… I really am not sure I know myself what this blog is. It has been very funny when other people have tried to classify it… one said it was about "programming" (that would be nice, if I really was a better developer!), other people said it was "personal", other thought it was just about "IT" in general… Heck, there is no classification possible I am afraid. Therefore, not knowing what this blog is, I at least think that I know what this blog is NOT:

• it isn't a marketing blog
• I am not here trying to sell anything
• I am not promoting anything, anyone, or any brand
• It isn't just focused on one subject, on one area of interest

…and so are all my other "expressions" on the Net. Just me. Sprinkles of me all around. No special industrial plan for it. Just be myself. You might like me sometimes. You might hate me. You might not care at all. It's all good, anyway. Sorry for wasting your time.

I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest "we want to interoperate" fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).

Anyway, what do you think ?

I just created an account for myself on the site… as you know I like PowerShell, so even if I usually prefer writing stuff in english, I will try to hang out there and see how can I contribute to it.

After all, I am italian…

Simply Works, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I don't know about other people, but I do get a lot to think when the end of the year approaches: all that I've done, what I have not yet done, what I would like to do, and so on…

And it is a period when memories surface.

I found the two old CD-ROMs you can see in the picture. And those are memories.
missioncritical software was the company that invented a lot of stuff that became Microsoft's products: for example ADMT and Operations Manager.

The black CD contains SeNTry, the "enterprise event manager", what later became Operations Manager.
On the back of the CD, the company motto at the time: "software that works simply and simply works".
So true. I might digress on this concept, but I won't do that right now.

I have already explained in my other blog what I do for work. Well, that was a couple of years ago anyway. Several things have changed, and we are moving towards offering services that are more measurable and professional. So, since it happens that in a certain job you need to be an "expert" and "specialize" in order to be "seen" or "noticed".
You know I don't really believe in specialization. I have written it all over the place. But you need to make other people happy as well and let them believe what they want, so when you "specialize" they are happier. No, really, it might make a difference in your carrer

In this regard, I did also mention my "meeting again" with Operations Manager.
That's where Operations manager helped me: it let me "specialize" in systems and applications management… a field where you need to know a bit of everything anyway: infrastructure, security, logging, scripting, databases, and so on…
This way, everyone wins.

Don't misunderstand me, this does not mean I want to know everything. One cannot possibly know everything, and the more I learn the more I believe I know nothing at all, to be honest. I don't know everything, so please don't ask me everything - I work with mainframes
While that can be a great excuse to avoid neighbours and relatives annoyances with their PCs though, on the serious side I still believe that any intelligent individual cannot be locked into doing a narrow thing and know only that one bit just because it is common thought that you have to act that way.

If I would stop where I have to stop I would be the standard "IT Pro". I would be fine, sure, but I would get bored soon. I would not learn anything. But I don't feel I am the standard "IT Pro". In fact, funnily enough, on some other blogs out there I have been referenced as a "Dev" (find it on your own, look at their blogrolls :-)). But I am not a Dev either then… I don't write code for work. I would love to, but I rarely actually do, other than some scripts. Anyway, I tend to escape the definition of the usual "expert" on something… mostly because I want to escape it. I don't see myself represented by those generalization.

As Phil puts it, when asked "Are software developers - engineers or artists?":

"[...] Don’t take this as a copout, but a little of both. I see it more as craftsmanship. Engineering relies on a lot of science. Much of it is demonstrably empirical and constrained by the laws of physics. Software is less constrained by physics as it is by the limits of the mind. [...]"

Craftmanship. Not science.
And stop calling me an "engineer". I am not an engineer. I was even crap in math, in school!

Anyway, what does this all mean? In practical terms, it means that in the end, wether I want it or not, I do get considered an "expert" on MOM and OpsMgr… and that I will mostly work on those products for the next year too. But that is not bad, because, as I said, working on that product means working on many more things too. Also, I can point to different audiences: those believing in "experts" and those going beyond schemes. It also means that I will have to continue teaching a couple of scripting classes (both VBScript and PowerShell) that nobody else seems to be willing to do (because they are all *expert* in something narrow), and that I will still be hacking together my other stuff (my facebook apps, my wordpress theme and plugins, my server, etc) and even continue to have strong opinions in those other fields that I find interesting and where I am not considered an *expert*

Well, I suppose I've been ranting enough for today…and for this year
I really want to wish everybody again a great beginning of 2008!!! What are you going to be busy with, in 2008 ?

The last few months have been very busy with work. As much as I enjoyed them anyway, and learned a lot in the process and from the people I worked with, I now really want to enjoy these few coming days of Christmas holidays and RELAX and spend some quality time with my family and friends.

So I wish the same for all of you: that you may spend a Merry, relaxing Christmas, and have a great start for a grand, brilliant new year!

As a side note, having been very busy I have blogged a lot less. Blogging implies that I already have a sort-of-well-formed thought, that should span a few lines or paragraphs, otherwise I don't find it worth it. That does not mean I don't have small ideas or other things I like to share when I come up with them. That is why I am using microblogging and Social Networking a lot lately, so I remind you that even if this blog's builtin feed only includes the REAL FEW blog posts, then I also have another (very "chatty") feed that you can use to "follow me" and that one includes all of the following combined feeds: my status messages from Facebook, my Twitter messages, my pictures on Flickr, the stuff I read somewhere else and then share on Facebook, the places I visit and mark on 43Places and the goals I achieve, want to achieve, or I simply talk about on 43Things, as well as the REAL posts on this blog. It is my implementation of what has been called a "lifestream" by other bloggers.

Role Playing | Technology, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I had not been playing Role Playing Games anymore for nearly 15 years. My wife recently thought that Joshua would be big enough to try, so I am trying to introduce him to the world of RPGs. This, as you can imagine, after all of that time, took back memories, ideas, and also made me think of how much the technology changed this all.

I am not at all referring to VIDEO or ONLINE games, even those that are marketed as being RPGs: most of them are not "real" RPGs anyway, they merely borrow some rules. I am saying that technology changed the way people ORGANIZE and prepare their role playing gaming experience (=the one played with real RPGs where you have to ACT a character), and how they interact with each other, and how the "knowledge" spreads.

When I was playing RPG a lot, in the 80's and early 90's, everything was paper-based, no Internet and technology in sight. For example, we photocopied a lot of stuff back then, as opposed to today when I just downloaded and printed a character sheet. But it was not just printed material that was being photocopied: in those years I remember myself handwriting my own extended set of rules, manuals, scenarios, description of places (I even kept and found back some of those!). Everything was handwritten: text, drawings, maps. A lot of work, very hard to mantain. But passion was driving me (and my friends at that time too). That has also been a big enabler in how I taught myself to read and write english: by translating handbooks that nobody had translated in italian. But I digress.

We use to go to a couple of highly specialized shops that were able to import and resell one or two copies of some rare handbooks of a strange game that would otherwise not sell at all. Sometimes even the specialized shops did not manage to get the originals of some of those rare books. Therefore, some of the expansions were sold as photocopies.
Some other times there had been some guy somewhere who did have one copy bought in the US and he took the effort to make an UNofficial translation and TYPEWRITE it in italian. Photocopies of this "product" was all that was circulating.

I am not talking or caring of copyright or "pirate" issues here. We were not "avoiding" the original stuff: if anybody would have told us that the stuff we wanted was actually available in its original format, we would have bought it. But it just wasn't available at all, and we wanted it. This kind of material was really close to impossible to get, with high costs, and all that us busy kids wanted was books with descriptions of imaginary fantasy worlds to place our characters in, and improvise and narrate our stories and saga's…

Also, all in paper format, what was circulating was a certain number of fanzines, also photocopies of an original, wonderful, "master copy" that someone had made with a typewriter and sticking pictures with glue on the paper. Desktop publishing was not that common nor easy yet. But the layout is not really what interested me, it was the CONTENT that was hard to spread.

At one stage, the thing improved slightly: I finally managed to convince my parents that I was allowed to get a modem, so I started using it to connect to various BBS. A couple of those BBS of the time were related to RPGs or had a related discussion area. I was interested in technology and in knowing how it was doing its magic, but most of all I was also pretty excited at the possibilities I saw for the technology as an enabler in connecting people. Just like I am now.
I have met some good friends on BBS's at that time. I'm still in contact with some of them, I've lost some other ones, like it happens in life anyway. But the possibility was showing quite clearly: those BBS were mostly text-based, with high connection costs (in italy were you pay every call, also local ones, per minute)… even in those circumstances they were managing to aggregate some people and were used as vehicles to spread the knowledge.
In Italy, thought, they were mostly local. International calls were prohibitively expensive. Of course we did hear of what happened to similar BBS in the US.

In fact, after pencil and paper, through a typewriter, the revolution started there: being able to type stuff on a computer and pass your file over to someone else made it easier for it to spread. But again, I am not talking about copyrighted material. I am mostly talking about self-produced material. I still remember I had troubles with digitalizing maps because I did not own a scanner… on some of the BBS people were sharing their works, and you could find good adventures and extra stuff on them. I also got to publish somewhere a couple of those I had written, and they even made it on a fanzine first, and then on a real magazine.

At one stage, though, I really got distracted. I probably thought I was "big enough", or I got too interested in the "serious" computing business, or I was too busy with other stuff. Probably a combination of many factors. So I sort of abandoned playing for a long time.

Now, looking back at that world, more than a decade later, I can see how it all changed: you go to the Internet, use any search engine and find dozen if not hundred of sites with forums, people playing online using Live Messenger, people sharing their adventures or their stories of the adventures they have played, other sites that collect all of the covers and information about all the booklets and manuals ever existed for any possible version of any game. Even the vendors are giving out stuff to play for free.

PCs and the Internet DID change the world, if anyone was still doubting. And yes, Role Playing Games and computing ARE related interests.

The world changed, yet it stayed the same: you still play those games with people, with the help of your imagination. It's the resources that are now at your fingertips.

But in my blog I don't require or need people to actually log in to do anything. I actually like anonymous/free comment. A CAPTCHA takes care of spammers and I am fine with it so far. Probably for a big site with a lot of users it might make sense, but for my blog so far it doesn't. But there's one thing for which this is instead useful: I have always been worried, when logging in through HTTP (thus, without SSL) to my blog from networks I don't manage or completely trust, that my password could be sniffed over the wire and stolen. Live ID solves my problem by letting Microsoft validate my identity: I have associated my Live ID to the blog's main user account(=myself), the one writing this post. So the plugin in its current form is used as a replacement of the login form (the standard wp-login.php wordpress form CAN still be used if you like, of course, you just don't HAVE to. Also the use of xmlrpc will still require local user/pwd combination.). Anyway, this new form will authenticate you thorugh Live ID and then check if your Live ID is associated to any local user. If it is, it will log you on to wordpress with that account. Otherwise it will inform you that you are successfully logged on to passport Live, but unfortunately there is no corresponding local account for you, and that it would need to be set up. Setting it up is as difficult as adding a line to the database… probably adding a form or a property page would be nice, but in my case I just did it with a query:

INSERT INTO `wordpress`.`wp-usermeta` (
`umeta_id` ,
`user_id` ,
`meta_key` ,
`meta_value`
)
VALUES (
NULL , '1', 'LiveID', 'f11fa1d3e82c68776f94a3a5c459b70b'
);

which adds an extra "property" for the first user (admin) called 'LiveID' which contains your Live ID (the one above is not my real one, in case you were wondering). When you are authenticated by LiveID and you get back this value, the plugin checks in this table which WordPress userid in the database has been associated with this Live ID and - if it finds one - it authenticates you as that user. Of course you should not have duplicates.

My code is mostly based on the SDK PHP Sample, with some modification to integrate it in WordPress as a plugin. Of course I removed the file that is used as "user database" and used wordpress DB instead.

There's a ton of things that could be improved. I just did not put any more effort and time in it. As you might know if you read this blog, I am not a full time developer. Actually I shouldn't write code at all for work and I am mainly considered an "infrastructure" guy. Anyway, I would like to code more and even if I am not supposed to, I always try to find stimulating situations that require a bit of integration, thinking out of the box, some scripting, etc…

[updated: november 3rd 2007] You can download the sample plugin "AS-IS" here: liveauth.zip . This has only been tested and only works with Wordpress 2.3.x serie (but should also work with earlier versions - not tested)

[updated: march 30th 2008] Wordpress 2.5 has changed the way the authentication cookie is generated, therefore here is an updated version of the plugin that works with the new secure cookies: liveauth02.zip
I should really invest some more time in this and clear up the code. I should also make an interface to make the configuration easier, and maybe make a version that works on both 2.3 and 2.5 branches. I am not sure when I will have time for that, though…

[updated: april 20th 2008] I have released version 0.3c of the plugin which now finally includes a simple configuration page, and should work on both WordPress 2.3 (and older) and on the 2.5 brach. Please visit the new Windows Live ID Authentication WordPress Plugin Page.

Disclaimer:
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

Praktica!, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

My backward walks in technology.
The old Pentax still makes nice pictures, but it is gradually falling apart. So I found this one for a very low price. During the weekend I am determined to test it, let's see how it behaves…

Some months ago Christian discovered a hack to change your Facebook status. Some other people also used it and extended it. I also ported it to C# and made a winform using its unofficial method.
Suddenly after, Facebook asked us to take down the code, as it violated their terms of service.

It has taken a while, some struggles, but now they finally recognized the need for federated status, and implemented a user.setStatus API.

Twitter is the first to pick it up, so now you can update twitter and have your status propagate in Facebook!

Well done, guys!

When I'll have some time I might think of rewriting my app using the SUPPORTED method, maybe finally writing that Live Messenger plugin… it would be nice
When I'll have time…

Ubuntu on Virtual PC 2007, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This was a VMWare "virtual appliance" with Ubuntu that I was using for testing. As I mostly use Virtual PC or Virtual Server, I found it annoying having to switch to VMWare player to use that specific machine, and I could not be asked to install a new one. So I converted the .VMDK to .VHD format (the other way around than it is described on this article ).

After that, I had to change GRUB's configuration to inform it that the SCSI disk (/dev/sda1) was all of a sudden become an IDE one (/dev/hda1), and then I also had to reconfigure X.

After that it runs like a charme!!!

[...] The phrase surprised the marquess, because it was the same thing that he had thought when four o'clock had passed. To the bishop it looked like it was a natural coincidence. “The ideas are nobody's” - he said. It drew in air with his finger a series of continuous circles, and concluded: “They fly there in circles, like angels” [...]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Of Love and Other Demons"

5° Festival Romano di Giocoleria, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This weekend we have been at the 5th roman festival of juggling, organized by the "C.S.A. La Torre".
You will find a bunch more photos here.

I used to have Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Messenger on my Windows 2003 Server box. Now, this new fantastic integrated setup says it won't install on this operating system. Ridiculous. You read the release notes, and in fact it only says Windows XP and Vista.

I see.

Well, I happen to use a Windows 2003 Server at home - the same machine for day to day use (like writing this post or checking private email) and doing some study/testing. I don't have loads of machines. I don't actually have money for a new machine (even if I would really need a new one to test stuff).
I try to do more with less.

Well, if this does not install, what am I supposed to do ?
I want to chat with people, which means I'll keep using Pidgin on this machine. That way I also have my GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo buddies all in one place. And it eats up much less memory that the "real" live messenger. And without advertisements. How nice.

I am sorry when my employer does this kind of stupid things. This is not interoperability. It does not even work on OUR operating systems!

As for Windows Live Writer, read Phil's post. It seems like FrontPage, all over again.
For writing this post I've used Flickr.
Since I happen to post quite a bunch of photos or images on my blog, I find it ideal. The ONLY thing Flickr is missing, when used as a blogging tool, is the ability to post tags/categories too. Otherwise it would be perfect.

[...] I've been pushing the idea that every app should be a platform for a long time, that in addition to a user interface, every app should have a programmatic interface. For me the idea came from growing up using Unix in the 70s, where every app is a toolkit and the operating system is a scripting language. Wiring things together is an integral part of being a Unix user. It's why programmers like Unix so much [...]

It is entirely true. The limits are blurry, IMHO. In the Unix world it is common to find full-fledged "applications" which have been written by the ground up by people that were doing SysAdmin tasks, and those "applications" are usually just… scripts. Simple shell scripts, or something more evolved (PERL, PHP, Python) it does not really matter.

I am so tired of the division traditionally made in the Microsoft world between "Developers" and "IT Professionals". We even have separate sites for the two audiences: MSDN and Technet. There are separate "TechED" events: for"Devs" and for "IT Pros". There are blogs that are divided among the two "audiences"…

There aren't two different audiences, really. There are people, with various degrees of expertise. There is no such a thing as a "developer" if he doesn't know a bit how the underlying system works. His code is gonna suck. And there is not such a thing such a "IT Pro" that builds and integrates and manages systems if he does not have the palest idea of how things work "behind the GUI". He's gonna screw things up regardless of how many step-by-step (click-by-click ?) procedures you spoon feed him.

That's why automation and integration are best done by people who know how to write a bit code.

The PowerShell folk GET IT.

I Wish, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Tomorrow the new school year will begin for Joshua and Luca (and for all the other kids in Italy).

For me and for my kids, after having moved to another city, this is a more important event than the *real* new years eve that will come in december: september, after the holidays (even tough we have not really been on vacation) is the real moment when the "year" starts in Italy.
Even my company ends its "fiscal years" in June, and the real work starts back in september…

I do hope this school year goes well for my kids and that they can find a bunch of new nice friends in the new school. It is so important for them. I am sorry I had them move, furthermore for the second time (first time having been when moving from holland to Italy, in 2004) but it was the only place we could afford to buy a house in, while still being relatively close to Rome. Having to pay an ever-increasing rent and having no security was not really helping us.
So we moved to Velletri in June, leaving Castel Gandolfo.
With Velletri being a bigger town compared to the village we were living in earlier, everything should be better organized when for they grow - there is more to do, more schools, more shops, more life, more opportunities. This time we live very close to the school, so they can walk to it, instead than being taken by car. This also means that their new friends are going to be the kids living around us. Which makes for more opportunities to play and study together.
It's gonna be tough at the beginning, but in the long run they should be fine.

For this reason, I had to pull down the code of the small application I had previously released, which was "logging" into the mobile web application "pretending" to be a mobile browser and change your status. Big deal!!!

I am quite sure there are a lot of people writing "official" applications (that is using the "platform API" and so on) that are collecting A LOT of information about users who install their applications. They are being sent the info about the visitors by facebook, they are storing them, they might do whatever they please with (study it, sell it to spammers, to marketers, to making-money-assholes) and nobody will ever notice because it is on their servers and nobody can check that.

But a script that changes your status from remote - since this is not a functionality they CHOSE to expose in their API - then THAT is a big issue. Doh!
It's just plain ridiculous, but that's it.

Sure, the terms of service for app developers say a bit more in this regard:

[...]
4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;

5) You may store and use indefinitely any Facebook Properties that are explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; provided, however, that except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any such Facebook Properties: (a) if Facebook ceases to explicitly identify the same as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; (b) upon notice from Facebook (including if we notify you that a particular Facebook User has requested that their information be made inaccessible to that Facebook Platform Application); or (c) upon any termination of this Agreement or of your use of or participation in Facebook Platform;
[...]
You will not directly or indirectly sell, export, re-export, transfer, divert, or otherwise dispose of any Facebook Properties to any country (or national thereof) without obtaining any required prior authorizations from the appropriate government authorities;
[...]

Are we sure everybody is playing by these rules, when every facebook "application" really runs on the developer'server ? How do you know that they are really storing only what you want them to store, and deleting what you want them to delete ? Everybody knows how difficult it is to really "delete" digital content once it has come into existance… who knows how many copies of this database/social graph are floating around ?

Of course that is not an issue because people don't talk about it enough. But a script that changes your status - now, THAT is a very terrible thing.

I just don't get this "politically correctness". It must be me.

Oh, no… look! It's not only me!
I had read this post of Dare, but I problably had overlooked the last bit of it…. because he did point out this Hypocrisy going on:

[...]
Or (5) the information returned by FQL about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address) so it is pretty useless as a way to utilize one’s friends list with applications besides Facebook since there is no way to cross-reference your friends using any personally identifiable association that would exist in another service.

When it comes to contact lists (i.e. the social graph), Facebook is a roach motel. Lots of information about user relationships goes in but there’s no way for users or applications to get it out easily. Whenever an application like FacebookSync comes along which helps users do this, it is quickly shut down for violating their Terms of Use. Hypocrisy? Indeed.
[...]

He then insists in a more recent post in calling things by their name:

[...]
I will point out that 9 times out of 10 when you hear geeks talking about social network portability or similar buzzwords they are really talking about sending people spam because someone they know joined some social networking site. I also wonder how many people realize that these fly-by-night social networking sites that they happily hand over their log-in credentials to so they can spam their friends also share the list of email addresses thus obtained with services that resell to spammers?
[...]
how do you prevent badly behaved applications like Quechup from taking control away from your users? At the end of the day your users might end up thinking you sold their email addresses to spammers when in truth it was the insecure practices of the people who they’d shared their email addresses with that got them in that mess. This is one of the few reasons I can understand why Facebook takes such a hypocritical approach.
[...]

Thanks, Dare, for mentioning Hypocrisy. Thanks for calling things by their name. I do understand their approach, I just don't agree with it.

I did pull my small application off the Internet because I have a family to mantain and I don't want to have legal troubles with Facebook. Sorry to all those that found it handy. No, I cannot even give that to you per email. It's gone. I am sorry. For the freedom of speech, especially, I am sorry.

I will change my status more often on Twitter.

Sure, gapingvoid has got 700+ users in 3 days, I know. But hey, he's famous, and I don't see the point of cluttering my already busy Facebook profile with a cartoon. I do read him and generally like his cartoons, and I am in the "friends of the blue monster" group (so to say I like him).

But I prefer reading him in my "normal" aggregator.

I think Facebook apps should rather "inject social objects" (where did I read this definition? sorry I cant recall it or I would appropiately link to you… I swear).

There are of course other similar applications that just pull comics in your profile (like Dilbert, Garfield, etc) but again - I think this is all stuff that YOU are interested in, and thus should just go into your aggregator - so YOU can read it; on the opposite your profile in Facebook should talk about YOU and things YOU are doing, for example. Occasionally they can be YOUR posts or they can even be someone else's posts that you read and want to share/let other people see (that's why I pull in my Google Reader's shared items for example - things I read and want you too to see). If this includes importing other social objects/information from other social networks, like the music you are listening to on last.FM, or the photos you published on Flickr, then it is fine. That's why I wrote an app that shows the things you want to do, pulled in from 43things.com and one that shows the places you want to visit pulled in from 43places.com. Because I felt those social objects from another network were missing. In fact a user commented "[...] Glad someone finally took a step forward to create this, though [...]".

But of course what I wrote about which kind of applications you should or shouldn't have in your profile, remember that this is just my personal opinion rant, and everybody is free to put whatever stuff he/she likes onto his/her profile, in the end :-)

[...] Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion) [...]

Facebook mobile is not working from mobile operators not in the US, I suppose.
I can't even log on to m.facebook.com with my WIndows Mobile SmartPhone.
I can't send status updates through SMS.

I can't even send them by mail, or I get the following back:

So, now, I am updating Twitter.
Twitter can be updated with an SMS even from Europe. Or it can be updated with a bot running GTalk. Very easy, can do it from everywhere.

I then wrote a small command line application (based on the same "hack" as the one described before) that runs every five minutes from the scheduler on my server and keeps th