In the last couple of weeks we have been driving thru America from the east coast (New York) to the west coast (Seattle).

I figured out I needed to show my family the Microsoft campus too. Of course they know I work at Microsoft… but having only seen the office of a subsidiary – the one in Rome, with about 250 people at its max – might not have given them (especially the kids) an idea of the actual size of the company.

But I knew the DVD/CD burner was connected and working, because I had used it the very same day (with another program) to burn an .ISO image, and it worked from there!

I searched all over the place for this error message, and there are many posts in forums with this message, which suggest you to do the strangest things, from changing your computer, to deleting important pieces of the registry, to reinstall the whole system… most of them are bullshit.

I went to my wife’s PC to test…with her PC it worked. It looked mostly the same: she’s running Vista, not 2008 (but it really is the same kernel, isn’t it?), she has exactly the same DVD burner installed as I do, the same motherboard, both machines and OS’s are 64bit, we both have installed Internet Explorer 8 (and keep it with “protected mode” turned ON), we both have Media Player 11, we both keep UAC enabled…

But then in the end I tried using elevation:

And here we go, it worked:

When running the process as administrator, Windows Media Player is able to query the hardware to determine if we have a capable device on Windows Server 2008. It remains a mystery to me at this point why this works on my wife’s Vista machine without elevation, though…

It sure is not a problem to do this operation “as administrator” when needed – but it just took me a minute to figure it out, for some reason.

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.

Paolo Coelho has written in his last book, "The Zahir":
"[...] One day, I am going to write a travel guide containing only maps, addresses of hotels, and with the rest of the pages blank. That way people will have to make their own itinerary, to discover for themselves restaurants, monuments, and all the magnificent things that every city has, but which are never mentioned because 'the history we have been taught' does not include them under the heading 'Things you must see'. I have been to Zagreb before. And this fountain does not appear in any of the local tourist guides, but it is far more important to me than anything else I saw here – because it is pretty, because I discovered it by chance, and because it is linked to a story in my life [...]".

When reading this last night I have been thinking that he does not need to write such a guide: this is already happening on the web these days. Right now. You don't just buy a tourist guide anymore. The Internet can act as a guide. Other people's comment about places, and their stories, can guide you.
It's not anymore just buying a guide from some publisher, it is being part of the publication as well. And contributing back what you discover.

This is what happens on 43places, for example. See what the are saying over there: http://www.43places.com/entries/view/1239344 - "These are YOUR places" – "If you’re new to 43 Places you may not realize that all the places on this website have been added by users. Once upon a time, all we had were country names and a few major cities. 43 Places is a community effort where users are actively filling up the site with their favorite spots and the places they want to visit.

Along these lines all of us users can also correct and enhance data on 43 Places [...]"

43Places fits perfectly with the example of the tourist guide. But there is more than just a tourist guide. The great news is that the web is becoming an immense platform for sharing stories, experiences, feelings.

Hugh MacLeod describes this aspect (that is: the evolution of the web in the way it lets people and companies interact) on his famous blog: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003358.html
"[...] Dotcom basically built glorified Yellow Pages. You go, you get the info you need, hopefully you buy something en route. The relationship between the user and the website is impersonal, not unlike the realtionship between the Yellow Pages and its readers. They show, you select. They give, you take.

The architecture of Web 2.0, however, is about people giving away their stuff i.e. "sharing". Whether its a well-written blog post, or photos uploaded onto Flickr, or videos uploaded onto YouTube, the act of you giving is every bit as important as people other people receiving. This is why the number of blog readers isn't that much larger than the number of blog writers. Writing is as important as reading. Giving is as important as taking.

Suddenly for the first time in history, the world's most powerful form of media is about giving, not taking. The implications are vast.[...]"

Ravi and his son, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Ravi has been living in Italy for not such a long time: not even two years.
He works as a manager for a hi-tech factory, in Italy, so that's why he moved here.
He already knows he won't stay here forever, but he's enjoying his stay so far.
It's good to see how hard working people actually CAN be successful here.
Even when they move from another country.

So far he doesn't know many italian people, and hangs up mostly with the other indian people he has met here. Which is something I definitely can understand, as I also met all the italians in town when I was living in Holland, and I know it isn't extremely easy to get along with the local population, for how friendly they can treat you on the surface (even tough I bet that italians are much *warmer* than dutch people in their "welcomes").

His kids had loads of fun playing with mine, today, and we (the grown-ups) enjoyed the conversation and the food very much.

I am one of those people that loves living in a globalized world (despite all its weirdness and the bad consequences globalization also brings): at least for this fact that you get to know people from everywhere on the globe, and exchange different ideas and experiences.
People have all sort of stories to tell, and we all have to learn from each other.

'mot je ?, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Have you seen how pretty has she become ?
This is the same cat I found – little and sick – here:
www.muscetta.com/2006/07/21/find-me-a-name/

Amma @ Heathrow airport, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

A coincindence meeting?

I don't know, but I'll tell you a story:
I have been in england all week for a training: I left on monday and I came back yesterday (friday).
When I booked my flight to go to england I should have come back with the flight that takes off at 8:00pm. It would have been late (coming back home to midnight) but there was no place in the earlier one (4:40pm). Then my ticket was disappeared. Not "physically", because it was an electronic ticket. Just its presence in the computer system of Alitalia was vanished. The booking on my name appeared strangely "cancelled", and both Alitalia and the American Express agency that had booked that for me could not explain me WHAT actually went wrong with my ticket.
It looked like it had been requested, but the process stopped half-way through and never ended, it never spat out my ticket (don't remind me of the concept of TRANSACTION, please).

So, at the last minute, in order to leave on monday (I *really* wanted to attend this training, and furthermore the hotel WAS booked and I could not cancel it anymore without paying a penalty), I had to buy another ticket at the airport. But at that point there was not place anymore on the evening flight for the return. So I had to take place in the 4:40pm one (hey, wait a minute: wasn't THAT FULL as well, when I tried to book it myself, earlier ??).

So when I came back, look who's at the airport.
I was not even sure it was Her, and I did not really dare come much closer. Both because I was afraid I could disturb, and also because I was scared of airport security (you are not supposed to take pictures in airports, I have already been told off other times, and with the current paranoia in London I really did not want to take the chance…).
She was about to travel, and was writing down the text of some bhajan with her followers and her singers and all the other people who travel with Her.
Also a woman, who was working in a shop just in front of this scene, not having any customer in at that moment, was looking at the scene with curiosity but (or at least I thought I could read that in her eyes) without prejudice.
Nice surprise.

PS – If you don't know who Amma is, please visit www.amma.org or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mata_Amritanandamayi

Black Tea, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Finally the first complete weekend.
After four weeks of holidays, I had pretty much got used to relax and do my stuff.
On monday 28th I started working. I worked the usual 5 days, and customers were waiting for me anxiously. I also had to work on friday night for some updates they had waited six months to do (when I was telling them "let's do this") but they could not wait anymore NOW obviously.
Then, late friday night I had weekend… sort of. Just saturday.
In fact, I had to be ready to leave early sunday morning to go to the "company meeting". Sunday and monday. Awesome. Not.
Tuesday to friday: work, work, work again.

Not THIS weekend I am doing MY stuff, actually trying to relax.
That's more my cup of tea.

Yesterday from a lot of places all over the world was possible to observe a partial lunar eclipse.

A couple of links with news and information about the event:
1) Nu.nl
2) news.com.au
3) Indianews
4) Nasa.Gov

My pic has also been published on nu.nl !

Cool. Transparency in this RC1 build finally works on my laptop. I mean, even with a DECENT resolution.
Everything is much more stable than in the previous beta1 and beta2 builds.

And yes, the background image I am using is this photo of mine.

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

Yes it can be circumvented, BUT… there are seveal "but"s I can say; In fact, I have been presenting Windows 2003 R2 to several customers and I got asked this question several times, and I usually explain this in the following way:

first, it would be too heavy of a performance hit to get and check the real "nature" of a file, rather than just its file name.
Also: how would you technically do that ? Checking some headers in the file ? In this case you would need to mantain a database of known file types, keeping it up to date as new versions of that file format appear…
and then what about executables which have been passed through a "packer"
(one of those utility that effectively shrinks them while mantaining them executable) ?
What about encrypted files ? What about… ?? It just doesn't plain work. Just like many other signature-based detection mechanisms (Antivirus or IDS). Or at least, to KEEP working needs to be constantly updated (or be useless).

The file screening thing is not meant to be impossible to circumvent, rather is a way of saying to the user that he/she's not allowed to place that content there, to get notified about that, to get this information TRACKED somewhere possibly….
Of course this can be circumvented. But is not going to be very practicle, especially when your users are USERS and are restricted so that they can't associate new extention to be opened from within their media player as you are suggesting….

Moreover, file screeing is just ONE of many features of the component called "File Server Resource Manager" in Windows 2003 R2. Those features are meant to be used altogether: So, for example, while a user COULD circumvent the restriction and copy ".mp3" files by calling them ".xyz", but then with the useful reporting an admin would very easily spot them by looking at those directory that strangely contain a lot of ".xyz" files that happen to be roughly 5MB in size (all of them)…
In the same way by using the reporting feature you could see those huge ".doc" files are actually divx by looking at the "large files" report – how many pages would you have written to get that Word document up to 700MB ?? It can't be the usual letter Mary writes, it looks a lot more like the size of Encarta… something is then fishy about it.

You get what I mean ? It won't block the user ALL the times, but it will still drastically reduce the user abilty to waste our space, and if implemented with the proper controls and procedures and preocesses (think ITIL) in place, this can still be a valuable tool.

(I also posted this answer as a comment on the above-mentioned blog).

Looking at the computer screen, trying to understand a complex configuration…. headache. These days I am very tired, I would like to sleep more, to work less. I need holidays….

"[...]
For example, in response to "How do I write a batch file that…" some people will say, "First, install ". This doesn't actually solve the problem; it merely replaces it with a different problem.
In particular, if the solution begins with "First, install…" you've pretty much lost out of the gate. Solving a five-minute problem by taking a half hour to download and install a program is a net loss.
[...]
So be careful when you suggest a solution that has a high activation energy. Sure, something could be taken care of by a one-line perl script, but getting perl onto the machine is hardly a one-line endeavor.
[...]"

[...]
I had a dream.
Ho sognato che giravo per la mia città e c'erano tutte bandiere tricolori, gente che dai balconi sventola strilla "Italia Italia".
Sono convinto che sia per il fatto che la nostra Costituzione Repubblicana è stata difesa dall'attacco dei leghisti che con il tricolore si puliscono il culo.
Poi però mi sveglio e mi accorgo che si, la Costituzione è stata difesa, ma le bandiere erano per una partita di pallone. Vinta dar pupone al 94' minuto su rigore.
M'è venuto da piangere.
[...]

Also, my dad started leading some turistic trips and excursions with an association of friends. If you want to visit Rome and have a great turist guide who knows what he talks about, give them a try! The association also leads some trips in the countryside, to enjoy the nature.

]]> http://www.muscetta.com/2006/06/17/with-my-head-in-the-clouds/feed/ 0 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 About Daniele Muscetta

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.

]]>

Only this time the sentence gets applied to Microsoft products, rather than to OSS…… Interesting

It provides several links and things to think about. If you are into .Net, or Ruby, or both, or simply interested about how things can interoperate, give it a read.

It was already more than three years ago and they are still fighting.
I can remember it well, the start of this Iraq war, because they attacked on the 20th of March – that is my bday.

The photo is of the huge demonstration that was held in Amsterdam. Actually it was kept in a lot of countries, and they were all huge.
Still they did not listen, they went further, and fought this war anyway, regarless of people's will. It's always time to remember.

I get this old memories, also to say that tomorrow it is "Festa della Repubblica" in Italy, and in Rome they want to carry on this idiotic military parade they have been doing for some years now.

But there's also a counter-demonstraion of people that dislike the military forces and that want PEACE.
Guess which demonstration will be more colourful and HAPPY ?

I'll try to get there tomorrow and take some photos too. But I am not sure I'll make it…. my kid has got a basket match first that he cares about. So I'll go there, and then I'll try to go to Rome, park *somehow* *somwehere* (it will be madhouse) and catch the "Peace-Parade" that will be already started of course…..

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 ?

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

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 ]

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

So far, just not to loose visibility of the old pictures I've posted there, I've decided to cross-post the photos that are on Flickr to my MSN Space. Check them out there…. (I am still in the process of posting them, as I write this, so that is not complete yet, but it will eventually be).

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 ?

Yesterday evening we've been to the event that the Bangladesh, Indian, Pakistan, and other Asian people that live in Rome hold every year to celebrate the beginning of their year – according to an old traditional calendar of those places.

It is absolutely fantastic, it was like being in a piece of India inside Rome. People were extremely friendly and the food was delicious.

In case you are in Rome and you're interested, this still goes on till tomorrow, you can find more information here (in italian):

http://italy.indymedia.org/calendar/event_display_detail.php?event_id=10422&day=22&month=4&year=2006

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.

Seems like the Rome council is setting up public wifi hotspots in parks!
I haven't personally tried if they actually even *work* but nonethless this is cool
I even found official information about this:
www.comune.roma.it/was/repository/ContentManagement/infor…

These puppets seem to be running home like I am doing when I am finished wih this post, for a nice long weekend.

Yep I know it is Thursday, but tomorrow, the 6th of January, is the Epiphany, the day the Kings came to visit Baby Jesus… and in Italy the name has been changed to "BEFANA", that is a sort of good witch who brings sweeties and presents to the kids, dropping those in their socks

The script is INCREDIBLY simple (but it had to do a simple thing nonethless):


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

puts "#{count} messages with flag #{$FLAG} \n\n"
total_time = Time.now - begin_
puts "RUNTIME: #{total_time}"


There is another interesting example about this at Will's Blog. It's funny how people try to do the same things at similar times

Of course official doc for this is here.
But If you want to snoop at a more complex webmail application using IMAP from Ruby/Rails you should seriously check out Mailr.

All in all, in this case, I tend to partially agree on some points but slightly disagree on others with Joel.

In fact, while I do acknowledge the need of "hardcore" developers to fix and build lower level things and mantain current code (and know WHAT they are doing), there are also many cases where coding in a high level language which abstracts complexity IS actually more efficient and cost effective, not having to reinvent the wheel every time.
So there are a lot of useful and nice programs written by people who DO KNOW what happens under the hood (as good in C as in Assembler), that for simplicity and flexibility run in sandboxes, high level languages, even interpreted ones! An example is Dave Aitel's CANVAS, written in Python. But that's just an example.

But I do agree with En3pY that I don't like Java myself, and I consider it being too "heavy", in general.
Solution on my side, tough, is that you don't need C or assembler to get cleaner, smaller, more efficient code, you just need better languages. An example of this is a situation I have been involved in some time ago: in that case a colleague (that works with a very large customer who has a very large exchange deployment) needed to do some performance testing of this Exchange system. He had done the testing from some Windows IMAP clients, but the customer also wanted to see the same performance values measured from a Linux box accessing the same exchange via the very same IMAP protocol.
So I wrote a nice and sweet Ruby script – and at the same time another colleague developer a similar application (in Java).
Result: 45 kilobytes of .JAR to do the same things I did in 20 lines of Ruby (20 lines – including comments!).

Now I am usually not very good in this kind of things, so I'll leave it here and won't try to make it longer. But those who know me will know that I am sincere in writing this.

Now there is one more thing I wanted to blog about but I forgot to do it some time ago, and it came to mind now, so I'll do it now:
This photo I made of Villa Adriana in Tivoli

has been sent by my wife to Italie.nl, a dutch site that talks about Italy (for turists, or for people who want to come live here in Italy, or who are Ital-crazy in general…) and they republished that photo of mine on this page about the region LAZIO. Cool, nice ! I like that

If somewhat late to wish you all a Merry Xmas, I might still be in time to hope you all have a great end of 2005 and a great start of the new year!

It is funny to see how different people at different times get to think the same things. In fact, I would not like to seem arrogant as I never wrote such an accurate analysis, but I used to think myself (and say, mostly as a joke tough) that "Java is the 21st-century's COBOL" – which is pretty much the same thing

And if you don't believe that I actually was already saying so, En3pY can confirm. I can remember having him cracking up laughing when I first said so to him.

…this guy up here in this post I quote, has really got the same idea as I do.
http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2003-August/009153.html

I am in a position where I need to make people aware in a large organisation where I work… They need to understand WHICH are the risks out there going on at the moment and WHY should we take some technical steps to address those issues… and it DOES take time.
Before you're allowed to install a patch, change whatever, you need and have to be "in synch" with the other colleagues, of the same and other departments.

They need to understand and prioritize with the other activities.

Loads of people screaming at us, stupid admins who don't patch, and bla bla…
Well, my machines at home ARE patched in time, and I even rely on automatic systems with some of them. On the other hand, in a big company this isn't simply possible or desiderable to have.
It's the truth.
You need a more controlled/throughly-tested environment/configuration and you simply can't rely on fast and automatic patching.

Some other people should stop shouting against we lazy admins…

The operation is also described in the following two papers:
http://www.aiea.it/pdf/documenti/banane.pdf
http://www.aiea.it/pdf/documenti/hunters.pdf

All of this made me think how the history evolved, and which the important events have been in the "hacking" or "security" scene, even at that time when that (security) was not a fashion like it is now.

After that event, we see, the year after, a massive seizing of devices, that someone has compared to "the hacker crackdown" happened in America in 1992.
Even a chapter of a book has ben published on the matter:
http://www.apogeonline.com/openpress/libri/529/capi4.html.

Those were really different times!