How many times you have gone somewhere (public demonstration, event, concert, etc) where yo saw other people shooting photos and you though "some of them MUST be flickr'ers"…. but you never had the guts to go and introduce yourself?

Now it's time to show off that you are a Flickr'er, and let other people figure it out.

Polo:

www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product.aspx?clear=true&am…

Cap:

www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product.aspx?clear=true&am…
NOTE:

This is just an idea and it is NOT endorsed by Flickr itself.

Also, I do not get any money for it - those are just the prices imposed by the online shop used to create them. I just thought it was a funny idea and I wanted to share it.

Every year proud Romans celebrate the birth of the Eternal City (21 April), founded by Romulus in 753BC, with a series of events at venues throughout Rome, including the Roman Forum and the Campidoglio.

Celebrations include parades, gladiator shows, traditional Roman banquets and public speeches galore from local historical societies.

See the complete set of picture I took this time.

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 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 ?

Cum grano salis, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I like salt. I don't usually cook with a lot of it, and I don't particularly like very salty food. But I really like salt on its own.
When I was a child, I used to go to the kitchen, at my granny's home, and steal a grasp of salt from its jar, and I went hiding under a bed. Once hidden, I ate my trasure.
An homeopaths once asked me (among the whole lot of strange question they ask you) if I did, indeed, eat raw, uncooked salt, just like I told you I did as a kid. At that time I got impressed and surprised by the thing.
Now I realize he was trying to figure out if I was a person of the NATRUM MURIATICUM type.
I am not sure I am one of that kind, maybe partially. Actually I am more towards the SILICEA type.
At least, that remedy (silicea) has worked with me a bunch of times.
Probably, even in homeopathy, I don't fit exactly in one classification.
Salt was also used in the ancient times as money.
The modern term "salary" (wage, payment) comes from this use that was done of it, from its value back then.

Luca | in the Wind, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

One of the best portraits I took lately.
On Flickr it has been on Explore: flickr.com/explore/interesting/2007/8/31/page12

Who said the Sigma 28-300 is crap ? You need to know how to use it

Coccoina, a piece of Italian history.

"Italy, for example, is a puzzle [...]. Family businesses, therefore, form the backbone of the Italian economy. There are businesses which grow rich by doing small things very well. [...] "Better not bigger" is their preferred route to to wealth because bigger inevitably means the eventual sharing of power with people you cannot know well enough to trust." - quote: Charles Handy - "Beyond Certainty"

The complete story of the Lemmings
www.dmadesign.org/Lem_1.htm

(read from Jeff Atwood on twitter, where I also discover that it can now be played online)

Searching for myself on Yahoo Image Search, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Here I start a quick comparison of what search engines actually find about me.
I am glad to read that Live Search can find Jimi Hendrix's face, and Google can spot those portraits of Paris Hilton.
Unfortunately I am not as famous as them, so not enough people have tagged me. Not on "normal" web pages or newspaper.

Yahoo did a great/smart thing buying Flickr.
It gets people doing the TAGGING for them.
So the results are accurate for pretty much everything.

Ok granted. All of these pictures are coming out of Flickr.
But while that is a limitation, it is also its power.

This is also why I was able to search for "blackberries" the other day and find the thing I was searching for, that is FRUIT that grows spontaneously in the woods, rather than a bunch of stupid mobile telephones.
try: images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=blackberry+OR+fruit

Doing the same search on Google:

Ok this is not all from flickr anymore, they actually have the rest of the web in their database. Most of them are pictures I made - granted. But only one OF me, and definitely not the first one. Ninth position.

try the blackberry serch images.google.com/images?svnum=10&q=blackberry+OR+fruit

And now Live Search:

Same as Google: images from everywhere. Less images than Google. Most of them made by me (not all). An actual picture of myself is in 9th position.

my blackberry search here finds a lot of fruit…

strangely enough, there's an IPhone among them!!!!

Anyway, the post goes about Microsoft Surface. Which is something really cool. Eileen goes saying that she's worried if her cat would jump on the touch-screen table doing some damage to her information / data /accounts…. when I first saw the technology presented, I actually thought sort of the same thing…. what about my son going to the table with his hands dirty of chocolate paste ?? I have blogged in the past about the danger he poses…

Since kids these days do use the computers, having to replace keyboards because they are full of biscuits'crumbles or because they spilled fruit juice on them is quite common. Just less expensive than the special touch-screen, at the moment….

Scoble Spam ?, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

In reply to Dare….. he's Hijacked my news feed too!!!!

Windows Management Instrumentation, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

If you can't see what I am referring to in this picture, try to take a look at the large picture.
Or just look at the title bar.. eeeehhhmm… at the window….
If you still don't get it, you are probably not a geek. In that case don't worry: it is not you; it's us.

Here, in my home, we are affected by a serious colorful plastic shoe addiction. They have already outnumbered us…. please help: if you know how to get de-intoxicated feel free to contact us…

Ballet, uploaded by jyothi76 on Flickr.

This is an old picture (1983) of the ballet school my wife was attending when she was a little girl. Can you figure out who she is in the pic ?

Digital Printouts.
I often find it funny to use the old reflex camera with films, but I mostly use it as if it was a digital one: I make many shots, some are good some are bad - I don't bother printing them, I just let it develop and I scan the pictures I like from the film (several ones are even posted here this way).
I have even been talking about this with fellow flickerer's: www.flickr.com/groups/romamor/discuss/72157600009019234/p…

On the opposite, it often happens that I want to print some photos made with the digital camera. So I take them to the shop on the Compact Flash, or more often on a USB pen drive.

Today, tough, something strange happened: the machine they use to print digital photos (some very big professional system for printing on photographic paper with a proprietary application which manages it) hanged while it was trying to load this one photo which was on the USB pendrive.

The guy at the shop got panicked: he said a week earlier a guy got the machine infected with a Virus through his USB pen, and he had to stop working for three days, spend a lot of money to get the system reinstalled…

I tried to tell him to close the application but he did not even get what I was talking about. He was saying that the system was not responsive… I was pretty sure the system WAS responsive, it was just the APPLICATION which was hanging, and since it looked like an NT-based system I tried to guide him through CTRL+ALT+DEL, to start "Task Manager", kill the application (this whole procedure took several minutes, and I had to show him which keys I was talking about as he was abel to find "ALT" but he had never hear of CTRL, left alone "DEL"). It was a Windows2000 Professional… so I wondered how did he logged in if he did not know that key combination….. I asked how did he get in when he started the machine…. "it opens automatically" he said. I see. I though it must be configured for autologon then. After killing the application he asked "how do I get out of this now??" "This" being Windows Explorer… I mean, the desktop. I pulled out my USB pendrive he was afraid of, I helped him reboot. He was nervous and he said it took much longer than normal to start up (I don't believe ONE word of it, it just took much less time than my laptop with Vista takes to start up… but he was worried and that makes one anxious and makes time flow slower). He was afraid and nervous that the "thing" could have been broken somehow by trying to load a JPEG…
NOTHING made him confident about me: I tried to reassure him I am an IT Professional, that I work for Microsoft (unfortunately I did not have my business cards with me today, that would have probably helped!), that I put my hands on much more complex and "missioncritical" systems, that I would not bring him any virus whatsoever and I am paranoid about computer security…
Nothing. Nothing worked to re-assure him that there wasn't anything to worry about my pen…

While the machine started I saw it doing AutoAdminLogon with Administrator… with a password of TWO characters.
Oh my god!
Then he wonders that he gets viruses from strangers. He runs as Administrator all the time!!!

But then I though and asked… "is there maybe a LIMIT on the SIZE of the file?". "Of course there is!".
Right.

Since the photo I wanted to print is actually a composition made of two photos pasted together, and each of the original was a 8 Megapixel photo, the resulting is a 16 Megapixel picture, a JPG file of roughly 8 megabytes in size. Well, this days it isn't much anyway. We nearly have cameras which produce files with that high resolution…
..but if THAT application has a limit… WHY on earth doesn't it CHECK for the bloody SIZE of the file BEFORE trying to load it ?

I mean, those are professional systems which - he said - cost around 150 THOUSAND of Euros… which they let run with an application which does NOT do any input checking/validation, runs the whole time as Administrator… while letting people bring in their own CD-ROMs, USB pens, flash memory cards….
and they expect it to be safe?

Now the guy was panicked and wouldn't let me plug my pen in the machine again.

Then he's keeping his shop closed in the afternoon since it is saturday, and I need that photo (and other ones) printed for tomorrow, because tomorrow it is my grandad's 91st birthday and I wanted to bring them printed for him and framed as a present!

Morale: I have to find another place to print them in the afternoon, in a rush, because some company sells print systems which are written like crap, which need to run as Administrator and won't do any input validation in their code. This is one of those situations where a design flaw matters.

April 8th 2007 it was Easter Sunday.
It was also my mum's birthday.

I had just missed the new, but I am catching up now, that Debian Etch shipped.

What a day!

Rome Calendar 2007, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I've used these photos to publish a calendar that you can get here: www.lulu.com/content/512186

Ok, I won't get rich from it, but I thought it was funny.

Too much specialization is a pitfall of its own. Have you ever worked on projects where you had "the database guy", "the testing guy", "the web guy", and so forth [...]" - Jeff Atwood

I love this. It "clicks" and "sounds" a lot similar to my "Superior Dedication" tagline. Or at least, to what I mean with it. BTW, Have you noticed that I changed it to a nicer, stronger, les polite one lately ? You didn't ? Well, it used to be touting "Superior Dedication - You notice the difference"; but I just grew even more pissed off at certain claims and a while ago I decided to change it to "Superior Dedication - Specialization is Bullshit". Which has pretty much the same meaning, it just smells stronger.

The previous post I quotes gets crowned by a very nice first comment, attributed to Konrad Lorenz:

"[...] Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing. [...]"

It is nice to see that you are not the only one thinking out of certain schemes. Especially on sundays. It makes you ready for tomorrow, when you'll have to go to work again… when you will be with the customer, and what REALLY counts is not specialization, but dedication, passion and intuition

my wife: "Oh, look: they DO sell finger paint here in Italy as well"
myself: "Sure, why not?"
my wife: "Well, kids are usually not supposed to get dirty from their parents, right ?"
myself: "ROTFL :-)"

it's quite a comedy (or a tragedy). They really aren't supposed to have fun in many occation because "you get dirty". Sure. That is what washing machines have been invented for, right ? At least these days we have those….
I have seen kids at the playground that were not allowed to get in the sandpit because they would have got dirty or…. well, why did you get them to the playground then if they are not allowed to play ?
Anyway, excluding some moments when my italian genes come forward and try to take ownership of my brain, our kids ARE allowed to get dirty. At least they have fun.

You might find this book of Tim Parks to be quite amusing on this topic

We already had a cat, but two days ago I found this kittten that had been abandoned and was sick, so I took it to the vet, and then home.
We accept suggestions for a name that suits her

]]> http://www.muscetta.com/2006/06/17/with-my-head-in-the-clouds/feed/ http://www.muscetta.com/2006/06/13/besaamsterdam-and-other-stuff/ http://www.muscetta.com/2006/06/13/besaamsterdam-and-other-stuff/#comments Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:15:30 +0000 Daniele Muscetta http://www.muscetta.com/?p=117 My friend Daniele Besana, founder of IT Virtual Community has relocated to the Netherlands lately. I just think he wanted to copy me for having been living there a few years…. let's see if he also falls for a dutchie ?? In the meanwhile I will keep an eye on his new blog.

Other news of the last few days include what you've already read elsewhere, for example Scoble leaving Microsoft, so I won't go into many details there even because I don't know much about the choice, the person, and the above link surely have already commented better than I could. I only wish Robert the best in his new carrer.

Then I'll take the time to do a bit of shameless self-promotion and talk of one more personal thing to note: some of my pictures of the typical roman pavement (the stones called "sampietrini") have been published on www.sampietrino.it. In particular, I took these five photos.

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….. :-(((

Sure, Italy is divided in two, as we saw from the last political elections, but…. these days everything gets sold no matter what: how can you possibly THINK of placing these two characters side by side with each other ?

Today, for the first time in months, I had some time to go through several unread posts in several of the blogs and sites that I keep in my aggregator.
Some random things I found interesting (not all, just some - maybe I should consider sharing links with stuff like delicious os similar….):

Dare's comment of simplicity (I oversimplify it now, but I really like his comments: this is not the first, won't be the last, good good, I enjoy them, I really do). Here is the part I liked most:
"[...] how one should build RESTful applications is actually different from how the Web works. Few web applications support HTTP methods other than GET and POST, few web applications send out the correct MIME types when sending data to clients, many Web applications use cookies for storing application state instead of allowing hypermedia to be the engine of application state (i.e. keeping the state in the URL)
and in a suprisingly large number of cases the markup in documents being transmitted is invalid or malformed in some ways. However the Web still works. [...]"

Scoble (and others) talking of relaxing, simplyfying your life, taking it easy, disconnect, unsubscribe from mailing lists, etc.
Sure, I know what it means. The problem for me is that information IS addictive, so even if I leave the
information flow go for a while (because I'm too busy actually *working*, for example), after a while I feel the urge to catch up. Like today.

Another interesting thing I read today is Jesper Johansson blog post about a discussion on risk management with his son.
Quite amusing, it happens to do some of those discussions with my kids as well, sometimes.
Well, really, so far only with the older one of my two kids, of course, since the younger one IS THE threat/risk himself

Another useful thing I found out today is that some VB.Net books are available for download in PDF format. Nice.

Then I figured out my most excellent colleague Luca Bandinelli had been mentioned by Arpan Shah, so I told him that, and he asked me "why are you looking for my name on the Internet?". No, really, the honest answer to this is that I was already subscribed to Arpan's blog, again.

Coming back home I saw a wonderful rainbow on top of Albano's lake, ranging from one side to the other, but of course I did not have my camera with me
I've heard once in India that seeing a rainbow has to be considered a blessing. Well, in this case this was a HUGE one

On a side note, while dusting my feeds I also found out why I could not get updates on my beloved "Calvin & Hobbes" strip.
Since the original site has apparently asked not to redistribute those strips, I suspect I will have to set up my own copy of phpGrabComics to get that. I probably will.

Well, now I am going to watch this video on MOM, then collapse Night!

that is soooo nice - spring again!

I am only figuring out *now* that Joel Spolsky has written (nearly a month ago!) this post.
It's funny because he mentions that Java might be the new Cobol ("[...]is java the new Cobol ?[...]").
Hey! I've already said this! It gets more and more common. Keep having this topic at hand, for example - do you remember those older posts ?

This assertion (Java being the new Cobol) comes out again and again. It must be true, then

Well, Joel in that same post also says he's been travelling quite a while.
Actually, I did as well. This might be the reason I am catching up with blogs now and I only ready his post a month after he's written it!
I have been around too, but not to conferences and pseudo-funny things: I went to customers in other cities either delivering workshops, or projects, and other stuff. It has been quite a lot of going around, anyway, since when this year has started.

I am starting to find some time to enjoy my family a bit more again now, finally, and relaxing a bit!

Oh, and I even turned THIRTY old, this past March.

It's a turning of a decade… sure, I am not *old* (ain't I ?) … but it sounds soooo weird.

What I wanted to write now, instead, is a link to an article I just read and wanted to share, which is quite interesting as it tells a bit of the story of how Flickr has born. Quite interesting.

Especially, the two things I linked here make you think of the "top-down" vs. "bottom-up" kind of approach.

You are .dll
You are dynamic.
You are constantly in danger of bringing down the house, because you don't play well with others.

If you want to take the same test yourself, here you go:
Which File Extension are You?

I was searching for the "public registry" on MSN Search, the public registry being the office where houses are registrered, so you can search for their history, when they've build, who owns them, if there are pending mortages on them, and so on.
Of course the word I wrote "REGISTRO" is the correct Italian term for "registry". The only use of the word "registry" (in english) by an italian would be for one reason: he knows about IT, and Windows, and yes! he refers to the windows registry, the ocnfiguration database.

So it looked rather funny (but it makes sense, because I use english settings and not italian ones when using MSN Search ) to get this suggestion:

it sounds pretty much a kind of office that should exist in Microsoft somehwere… "office of the Registry"…
which could even be useful to someone, to have an "office of the registry"… sure that would hold the complete list of keys….

… sorry, just being silly today

La Befana vien di notte
con le calze tutte rotte
con le toppe alla sottana
viva viva la Befana!

We have been spending the "Befana" holiday of the 6th of January in the area "pigneto" where the people of the cafeteria/bookshop "lo Yeti" were doing a nice initiative for kids and for the people of the area.

Next time someone complains to me about "windows time" (no, not the w32time service, but the fact that copy operations across the network in windows sometimes show times that are increasing instead of decreasing, and the like…) he better remembers this…

Is is notoriously a joke day, and I've seen many of them today.

That of NMRC (www.nmrc.org) was the best.
I mirrored it here

Also XS4ALL's helpdesk team instructions on how to connect a coffe machine in broadband weren't bad at all. Also mirrored this here.