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.

I have had a "new year's resolution" post in draft for more than two months… since we now reached march, I have wasted it – not much point anymore posting it.
One thing that was NOT written in that post but that did work out, tho: I smoked one last cigarette on the 31st of december and I decided to quit smoking. So far so good.
I also have a draft of a technical post sitting there for a long time… I'll eventually finish it at one stage.
I thought I'd post a picture of my beautiful little girl, instead, in the meantime.

Sara, my granny, is very old, and very sick.
I was afraid she wouldn't even have lived long enough to meet Sara, my daughter.

She has Alzheimer, Osteoporosis, and a million other diseases; She had a heart attack two months ago, then another one, and also a stroke. She can't walk anymore, she can't see much anymore, her whole body is giving up. The doctors now say that she probably won't live much more than another month.

But she made it to meet newborn Sara, even if the encounter has been somewhat different than I might have hoped earlier on.

"what a cute baby! is he a boy?"
"no, granny, this is Sara, your grand-grand-daughter, and she's called Sara, just like you…"
"Oh, how nice! This is a honor for me… you called her like me? how sweet of you!"

Of course we had told her this earlier, but she forgets things.
In a way it is nice to make her happy and give her this honor multiple times, but at the same time it isn't.

She does not understand what surrounds her anymore and most of the time she is in a dream-like state. Some old people have this, but their dreams are good, and they become just like young kids with visions that make them even happy at times.
But those dreams she's having are obviously bad ones, as she sighs and puffs and seems to be having a very hard time. And a lot of fear.
She is too afraid of letting go: after she dreamed a couple of times of my granddad and her mum (in the dream they were calling her to come and join with him in heaven), she is even afraid of falling asleep. And with little sleep she gets even more confused and depressed. And fearful. In a vicious circle.

She does have some moments of lucidity, and you can have short conversations with her, even if these moments tend to be shorter and shorter. And when they happen they even frighten her – I suppose because she realizes how she is the rest of the time.

But inevitably, five minutes later she will ask you again the same question:

"who is that cute baby I see over there?"
"dear granny, this is Sara, your grand-grand-daughter; she's called just like you"
"Oh how nice. This is a honor for me…."

She has lived so long, has had bad and good times, and done many good things, as well as many mistakes just like anyone does a lifetime.
Seeing her suffer is heart-breaking for us all.
I hope her suffering stops and her fears abandon her and that she might find her well deserved peace.

Amen.

I printed a tshirt for Sara with a baby-friendly Powershell cmdlet ("Get-Milk").
She already seems to be wondering what script she can write with it.

Last night at nearly 3:00am my daughter Sara was born.

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.

Bought for 2 euros in a second-hand market, found under a pile of junk. You understood right: TWO euros.
The electrical contacts for the flash are ruined as someone probably forgot his batteries inside and they leaked. But I was not planning to use the flash anyhow.
For the rest, it just works. See for yourself something scanned from the first film: www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/tags/mf3/

Download audio file (Impatience.mp3)

I looked back though my past year of photo making and these are my own personal favorites: regardeless of what people (and Flickr's interestingness algoritm) think, this is my own selection.

1. Elin, 2. Follow your bliss, 3. Soap Bubbles, 4. Morning Fog, 5. Don't look back, 6. Plough, 7. Quattro Gatti, 8. Ein deutsches Requiem, 9. Munich | S-Bahn, 10. Sunset Behind Castel Gandolfo, 11. Prayers, 12. Roma Multietnica | Mercato Esquilino, 13. Pantheon, 14. Romanian Cat, 15. Bucharest | Garden at Stavropoleos Church, 16. Reflection of the East, 17. Musician, 18. Juno's temple, 19. Memories or the Past, 20. Joshua | Thinking, 21. Esha Tizafy, 22. Prague by Night, 23. Sicilian Meditative material, 24. Scala dei Turchi, 25. Scala dei Turchi, 26. The Puppet Maker, 27. Mazara del Vallo, 28. Cappella di S.Crescenzia, 29. Trapani | Abandoned Place, 30. Marsala, 31. Luca | Lemon, 32. Luca Photographer, 33. Switzerland from the Train, 34. Old Friends | Generations, 35. Elin, 36. Old Friends | Generations
The application at BigHugeLabs.com only lets you do mosaics of up to 36 photos.

My selection really includes my favourite 50, which are arranged in a specific SET

Two days ago I read the following Tweet by Hugh MacLeod:

"[...] Early Adopter Problem: How to differentiate from the bandwagon, once the bandwagon starts moving faster than you are [...]"

That makes me think of early adoption of a few technologies I have been working with, and how the community around those evolved. For example:

Operations Manager… early adoption meant that I have been working with it since the beta, had posted one of the earliest posts about how to use a script in a Unit Monitor back in may 2007 (the product was released in April 2007 and there was NO documentation back then, so we had to really try to figure out everything…), but someone seems to think it is worth repeating the very same lesson in November 2008, with not a lot of changes, as I wrote here. I don't mean being rude to Anders… repeating things will surely help the late adopters finding the information they need, of course.

Also, I started playing early with Powershell. I posted my first (and only) cmdlet back in 2006. It was not a lot more than a test for myself to learn how to write one, but that's just to say that I started playing early with it. I have been using it to automate tasks for example.

Going back to the quote above, everyone gets on the bandwagon posting examples and articles. I had been asked a few times about writing articles on OpsMgr and Powershell usage (for example by www.powershell.it) but I declined, as I was too busy using this knowledge to do stuff for work (where “work” is defined as in “work that pays your mortgage”), rather than seeking personal prestige through articles and blogs. Anyway, that kind of articles are appearing now all over the Internet and the blogosphere now. The above examples made me think of early adoption, and the bandwagon that follows later on… but even as an early adopter, I was never very noisy or visible.

Now, going back to what I do for work, (which I mentioned here and here in the past), I work in the Premier Field Engineering organization of Microsoft Services, which provides Premier services to customers. Microsoft Premier customer have a wide range of Premier agreement features and components that they can use to support their people, improve their processes, and improve the productive use of the Microsoft technology they have purchased. Some of these services we provide are known to the world as “Health Checks”, some as “Risk Assessment Programs” (or, shortly, RAPs). These are basically services where one of our technology experts goes on the customer site and there he uses a custom, private Microsoft tool to gather a huge amount of data from the product we mean to look at (be it SQL, Exchange, AD or anything else….). The Health Check or RAP tool collects the data and outputs a draft of the report that will be delivered to the customer later on, with all the right sections and chapters. This is done so that every report of the same kind will look consistent, even if the engagement is performed by a different engineer in a different part of the world. The engineer will of course analyze the collected data and write recommendations about what is configured properly and/or about what could or should be changed and/or improved in the implementation to make it adhere to Best Practices. To make sure only the right people actually go onsite to do this job we have a strict internal accreditation process that must be followed; only accredited resources that know the product well enough and know exactly how to interpret the data that the tool collects are allowed to use it and to deliver the engagement, and present/write the findings to the customer.

So why am I telling you this here, and how have I been using my early knowledge of OpsMgr and Powershell for ?

I have used that to write the Operations Manager Health Check, of course!

We had a MOM 2005 Health Check already, but since the technology has changed so much, from MOM to OpsMgr, we had to write a completely new tool. Jeff  (the original MOM2005 author, who does not have a blog that I can link to) and me are the main coders of this tool… and the tool itself is A POWERSHELL script. A longish one, of course (7000 lines, more or less), but nothing more than a Powershell script, at the end of the day. There are a few more colleagues that helped shape the features and tested the tool, including Kevin Holman. Some of the database queries on Kevin’s blog are in fact what we use to extract some of the data (beware that some of those queries have recently been updated, in case you saved them and using your local copy!), while some other information are using internal and/or custom queries. Some other times we use OpsMgr cmdlets or go to the SDK service, but a lot of times we query the database directly (we really should use the SDK all the times, but for certain stuff direct database access is way faster). It took most of the past year to write it, test it, troubleshoot it, fix it, and deliver the first engagements as “beta” to some customers to help iron out the process… and now the delivery is available! If a year seems like a long time, you have to consider this is all work that gets done next to what we all have to normally do with customers, not replacing it (i.e. I am not free to sit on my butt all day and just write the tool… I still have to deliver services to customers day in day out, in the meantime).

Occasionally, during this past calendar year, that is approaching its end, I have been willing and have found some extra time to disclose some bits and pieces, techniques and prototypes of how to use Powershell and OpsMgr together, such as innovative ways to use Powershell in OpsMgr against beta features, but in general most of my early adopter’s investment went into the private tool for this engagement, and that is one of the reasons I couldn’t blog or write much about it, being it Microsoft Intellectual Property.

But it is also true that I did not care to write other stuff when I considered it too easy or it could be found in the documentation. I like writing of ideas, thoughts, rants OR things that I discover and that are not well documented at the time I study them… so when I figure out things I might like leaving a trail for some to follow. But I am not here to spoon feed people like some in the bandwagon are doing. Now the bandwagon is busy blogging and writing continuously about some aspect of OpsMgr (known or unknown, documented or not), and the answer to the original question of Hugh is, in my opinion, that it does not really matter what the bandwagon is doing right now. I was never here to do the same thing. I think that is my differentiator. I am not saying that what a bunch of colleagues and enthusiasts is doing is not useful: blogging and writing about various things they experiment with is interesting and it will be useful to people. But blogs are useful until a certain limit. I think that blogs are best suited for conversations and thoughts (rather than for "howto's"), and what I would love to see instead is: less marketing hype when new versions are announced and more real, official documentation.

But I think I should stop caring about what the bandwagon is doing, because that's just another ego trip at the end of the day. What I should more sensibly do, would be listening to my horoscope instead:

[…] "How do you slay the dragon?" journalist Bill Moyers asked mythologist Joseph Campbell in an interview. By "dragon," he was referring to the dangerous beast that symbolizes the most unripe and uncontrollable part of each of our lives. In reply to Moyers, Campbell didn't suggest that you become a master warrior, nor did he recommend that you cultivate high levels of sleek, savage anger. "Follow your bliss," he said simply. Personally, I don't know if that's enough to slay the dragon — I'm inclined to believe that you also have to take some defensive measures — but it's definitely worth an extended experiment. Would you consider trying that in 2009? […]

Flickr Cake, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Here the photo of another creation by Jyothi, that we have eaten two days ago with a bunch of Flickr-crazy friends: a Flickr cake! That wasn't only nice to see, it was also tasty!

Basically hat is happening is that Rome's major announced today that this is the first episode of a battle against the "Social Centres" and the he means to close/clear many of them. With the excuse that they are illegal places, filled with dangerous people. They even invented the presence of rudimentary "molotov" bombs that really turned out to be bottles of wine in it, to justify the action.
Once again, the old ghost of "security" is being used to repress spontaneous aggregation of people and use of spaces that were otherwise left to rot.
Should "Social Centres" be considered scary or dangerous? Just consider that last sunday I posted the photo below on Flickr and commented:

[...] The alternative people in Rome are growing. A lot of us have kids now, therefore you start seeing refurbished playgrounds and spaces for them inside of the various "Social Centres" [...]

Can you read? Playgrounds. Not bombs.

But what is a "Social Centre" anyway, for those reading this who don't know it? Here I found an interesting discussion about the translation of the term "Centro Sociale" from italian to english. An excerpt of that discussion follows:

[...] "centro sociale" is a place, usually occupied without police or government permission (the people staying there don't pay rent or anything basically) where militants, or politically aware groups, gather to discuss about issues and in some case prepare demonstration and revolt acts…For those of you knowing Milan like "Leoncavallo" once. Would you say "squat" or something similar?
[...]
I don't believe there is a one-on-one equivalent in English for this culturally-embedded term. [...] I'd like to underline that also in italian we use the term "squat" but it is slightly different from "centro sociale"; maybe we are poaching in the political nuances…but with "squat" in italian we refer mainly to an illegally occupied place where people live (they sleep,they cook…etc etc), while "centro sociale", especially way back in the Seventies, was mainly the center of great political awareness, of political activists, at least in the Far-left activists' intentions and point of view.
[...]
Despite there being a tradition of social spaces in occupied buildings (also known as squatting), the recent upsurge in (legal) social centres has come about in the last five years. List of current UK social centres, either squatted or legal [...]

In the meantime, the Wikipedia page for "Social Centre" has also become pretty complete in its description. It says:

[...] Social Centers are community spaces. They are buildings which are used for a range of disparate activities, which can be linked only by virtue of being not-for-profit. They might be organizing centers for local activities or they might provide support networks for minority groups such as prisoners and refugees. Often they provide a base for initiatives such as cafes, free shops, public computer labs, graffiti murals, legal collectives and free housing for travellers. The services are determined by both the needs of the community in which the social center is based and the skills which the participants have to offer. Social centres tend to be in large buildings and thus can host activist meetings, concerts, bookshops, dance performances and art exhibitions. Social centres are common in many European cities, sometimes in squats, sometimes in rented buildings.
[...]
"Social centres are abandoned buildings – warehouses, factories, military forts, schools – that have been occupied by squatters and transformed into cultural and political hubs, explicitly free from both the market, and from state control… Though it may be hard to tell at first, the social centres aren't ghettos, they are windows — not only into another way to live, disengaged from the state, but also into a new politics of engagement. And yes, it's something maybe beautiful." (Klein, 2001).
[...]
The social centre concept has taken root most successfully in Italy, beginning in the 1970s. Large factories and even abandoned military barracks have been "appropriated" for use as social centers. There are today dozens of social centers in Italy, often denoted by the initials CSOA (Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito). Examples include, Pedro in Padova, Spartaco in Ravenna, Officina 99 in Naples and Forte Prenestino, Corto Circuito and Villaggio Globale in Rome and Leoncavallo in Milan. The historic relationship between the Italian social centers and the Autonomia movement (specifically Lotta Continua) has been described briefly in Storming Heaven, Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism, by Steve Wright. Social centres in Italy continue to be centres of political / social dissent. Notably the Tute Bianche and Ya Basta Association developed directly out of the social center movement, and many social forums take place in social centers. They are also used for hacklabs, activist copyleft centers (for example, LOA Hacklab in Milan). [...]

So well, what Wright has written is certainly true, and historically the Social Centres might have been tied to the extreme political dissent of the seventies. I don't say that that old model was right; but over time they grew to be very different and beautiful aggregation places where a lot of different activities take place. People have grown up, they calmed down, and are now building spaces for everybody who wants to join in and enjoy and share. There are places for concerts, and theatre, and kids play.

In certain occasions beautiful stories are told, and the audience listens, open-mouthed and enchanted:

There are happenings where a lot of creativity takes place, such as the yearly juggler meet-up, that is filled with so much joy and fun:

There is sharing of ideas, knowledge, and interests, such as the Hacklabs / Hackmeetings:

Someone commented ironically on the above, stating they found it strange to see a Microsoft employee joining that crew of the Hackmeeting.
I say that there is nothing wrong in passing by a computer geeks convention. Because that's what it is, after all.
Only difference from commercial conferences is that, well – it isn't commercial or sponsored by any company. Nobody will try to sell you anything, but nonetheless you might be able to learn something.

Talking about non-commercial, non-profit sharing, another example is the terraTERRA market that started in Rome at "Forte Prenestino" a couple of years ago:

[...] terraTERRA is the experimentation of an economic model where producers and consumers are committed to each other in order to subvert distribution chains, shorten food distance, value social relations, pleasure and taste. [...]

With all this amount of activities, even tourist resource recognize their importance and you start find reference of them on the net when searching for "what to do in Rome". From the previous link:

[...] If a visit to a squat doesn't rank high on your list of holiday priorities, think again. As any local musician will tell you, the best place to feel the pulse of Rome's music scene is in the Centri Sociali – semi-legal social centres organising concerts, film screenings, theatre and dance events, evening classes, language courses and a host of other activities. Some bands such as Rage Against the Machine play only in the Centri [...]

So why would you go and fight and declare war against these places and people?

Because they offer socialization and fun and aggregation, but they do it FOR FREE, and outside of lobbies and commercial interests. Because they undermine the logic of having to buy and own something in order to feel well.

It really boils down to what seems to be the only accepted way of socializing today, in some circles: free sharing and respect are labeled as dangerous, and the only accepted form of a social place is what turns around money: shopping centres, cinemas, restaurants, and any other place where you can be part of society by spending. If you can't spend you have no place. Anything that does not involve money but sincere expression and sharing is not allowed, when not even actively banned.  Talking about the squatted building that has ben emptied yesterday, it had been left to degrade for decades. Now that is was used for something useful, the owners decided they want to build a supermarket in it. So the occupants had to move out. No bombs, no dangerous people. Just money talks.

Download audio file (Waiting.mp3)

After several years not touching my midi keyboard not my guitar, this is the natural evolution of having bought a new PC, I suppose: I got inspired and wanted to play music again. Sure, I also study and test stuff on it, but I also want to do something that really is for myself. And something that makes me help relax, instead than working around the clock.

It is then that I figured out how much has changed in these few years: cheap soundcards don't come with MIDI interfaces anymore, these days. That's probably because they were shared with the so called "GAME Port"…. but since most joysticks these days are USB…. also the MIDI disappeared.

Therefore I did a bit of research, and I found an interesting external sound card that does everything I want (and more) and (most importantly) has drivers for Windows Vista x64. I am actually using this on Windows 2008 Server, but since Vista and 2008 really have the same kernel – it just works.

Esha Tizafy gets born in Madagascar. She leaves her island when she's only seven years old with her parents, who arrive in Sicily, in Palermo, where she still lives.

Author, composer and singer, she follows a musical path that helps drawing a bridge across cultures.
Her research grows from tradition and modernity at the same time.

I had heard her in 2007 in a previous concert in Rome and she had found on Flickr the pictures I took in that occasion. Therefore she asked if I could take some new pictures next time she would hold a concert in my area. This occasion has been on the 9th of August, in Rome.

I hope that her record will be ready soon, because she really deserves to be heard! I also suggested she registers on last.fm and share something there. For now you can contact her on MySpace.

I am not sure about why I went to sicily on holiday: it might be because my ancestors came from that land; it might be because in Holland I felt like Dorothy at the beginning of "the wizard of Oz" every time there was a thunderstorm ( = I was afraid the house would fly away); it might be because I have a physical need for a "Granita di Mandorla" every so much time.

Whatever the reason, Holiday is over and tomorrow I'll be back at work for a new busy year.

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.

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:

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.

Canon – The Assignment – My Submission, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I have decided to try and partecipate in the photographic contest "the assignment", sponsored by Canon.
Even if I have shot technically better portraits, I thought that this one was one of the most spontaneous, plus it suited the theme well:

"[...] Are you able to capture pure emotion in a single shot? Can you portray a person's life-story with one photograph? [...]"

The other I considered, the picture of the Arrotino would have been a person's life story… but that was shot with an old film camera, a Pentax…. I thought it might not be seen that well in a Canon contest…

But this picture – it is about emotions.
It is about having fun no matter your age.
Who says when we grow up we must be serious ?
So I called it "Youth is a State of Mind".

Anyway, the picture is posted here:

ta.canon-europe.com//?pg=gallery&cc=it&lc=it&…

If you like it, please vote for it – after the 5th of May when the votes will be actually open.

"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.

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…

[...] 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.

Energia Pulita, uploaded by Lupinanto – Antonio Pennisi on Flickr.

This last couple of days the italian news have been filled with FUD about the energy problem.
That is a real problem, for the whole world. We are even killing and going to war for petrol, regardless of how they try to brainwash us with "terror".

But we have not been quick enough to start using the alternative, clean sources of energy. I don't know how it goes in the rest of the world on the local news, but here in Italy in this last couple of days the politicians have been talking and thinking about the energy problem and said that they care.
A lot of Wind-powered centrals have been active for years in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in a lot of other countries.

Italy has been slow in the adoption. We have some example installation, but they won't produce as much.
If we were smart we should really leverage the amount of sun we have all year long. Cover all of our roofs of solar panels. There should be a law where every new house MUST have a solar panel. They should let normal people have HUGE discounts and promote the possibility of being autonomous by installing solar panels at home.

Instead of doing that, our brave politicians with their interests and lobbies are pushing again towards Nuclear Power (that has been REFUSED as an option by people who votes against it in a referendum in 1987) or old-fashioned stinky carbon-burning centrals. How can you even think of calling that a "clean" energy ? Do they think we are all dumb ?

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.

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.

[...] 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.

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

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.

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"

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 :-)

Copying the advice by Small Potato, I made a different page for the 'Photos' category/tag on this blog. It has been a bit trickier than I first thought, because he keeps his picture uploaded into wordpress itself, while I had to write a small plugin using a regular expression to extract the "IMG SRC" portion of the post content. This way I also experimented with WordPress templates, plugins and structure a bit more than I had done before… and I am even more convinced than before that it can easily be used as a CMS rather than *just* a bloging software.

They are very simple: you enter your user name and they connect to their REST web service, extract the information about your places and/or goals, and show them as a list in a box in your profile.

I don't know why I did not blog about them before… maybe I thought they were too simple ? Well, they are, but, seriously: who cares?

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 the two in sync.

I wrote it in C# as a Console application because that's usually what I do when I want it to run it both on my windows machines and/or on my Linux server (with MONO). I already used this approach in the past and I found it to be successful. As long as you keep the application simple enough and check out the documentation for the implemented classes on mono, it runs without modification both on windows on the "real" .Net framework and on Mono on Linux. i just copy the executable and I am ready to go.
Not this time, though.
I am hitting what seems to be a bug in mono. I might be able to find a workaround, but I haven't had the time to dig in the issue yet.
I posted some info about this on this forum.

Luca on the Swing, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

We've passed the sunday visiting my grandparents in the village where I've used to spend my summers for many years.
Seeing Luca playing and having fun on the very same swings I've used as a kid showed me part of myself. As I was. Probably as I should still be.

Facebook StateTray, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This is a Screenshot of the small application I first described in my previous blog post.

It is a simple Windows Form that lets you change your status on Facebook without having to browse to the site. It does not rely on Facebook's API (as they won't let you change your status, at least to date) but is really uses a hack on the Facebook mobile pages. It is based on PHP code posted by Christian Flickinger, ported to C# (.Net 2.0) by me.

When you pull down the form you get to see the settings:

Those can be stored in an XML file, that gets loaded automatically every time the program starts.
Beware that password ARE displayed and stored in clear text.

The idea so far is that you run it on your PC and you just keep it resized so it does not show the "dangerous" bits.
You can keep it minimized on the tray in windows, pop it up when you need to update your status, write your new status and click "change" – it will freeze for a couple of seconds while updates your status, since it uses synchronous calls – then you can minimize it again.

UPDATED –  September 1st 2007: I have been asked by Facebook to pull down the source code from the Net, as it violates their terms of service (I had not realized that). Apologies to all.

Facebook_Daniele, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Yet another social networking. I am on there too, now.
http://www.facebook.com/p/Daniele_Muscetta/742258687

Ah, and by the way, I really find it incredible that every time I invite some people to a new social networking site (it has happened for all of them), it happens that some (many) of the persons I have invited reply to me or call me asking me "is this really sent by you ?" "it looked like spam" "what is this thing" and the like.

Come on, guys, we are in year 2007, you still don't know what social networking is… especially if you work in IT you are sort of a dinosaur, you know?

What do you want?, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

More light? Less light?
More Water? Less Water ?
SPEAK!!!

Does anybody know the name of this plant ? It is greatly suffering in the new house and I can't figure out what it needs….

Now I am back at work and I am very busy catching up with work during the day, and still finishing things at home in the evening.

But I am here, I have not gone anywhere (nor I will, I can't really afford any holiday).

Living Room, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

We are removing the old wallpaper from the house we are going to live in. Then we will be painting it. Then we will start relocating.

We've done the first room today (with removing the wallpaper)..

Whoever feels like helping in removing it from the rest of the house and help painting too, is welcome.

We will also welcome anybody who wants to come with a 10mm or similar lens to actually take better/wider pictures of the rooms

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 ?

I could not attend, as it turns out I am the only guy in Rome, among all of them.
That is strange. What is also strange is being all of a sudden in a list of *Microsoft* bloggers. I had never thought of myself like a *Microsoft* Blogger. Sure enough I work at Microsoft, but as my disclaimer says it clear "The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in anyway.". I just feel like I am myself. And I also have a blog. MUSCETTA.COM has been online for 5 years now, and I have only been working for Microsoft for less than three years now.
For sure, I do blog about technology, also Microsoft technology. Of course, I also talk and write and blog about NON-Microsoft technology. In the past I did try to get an official blog (which I called a "corporate blog") but then I preferred to keep using my own domain, just because a lot of what you find here is often personal, politically incorrect and even – yes, I am gonna write it – open source.

Don't get me wrong, I love being at this company, because there's a lot of brilliant people and you cannot find anywhere in any other company such a huge mix of techies that rock so much and are so passionate about what they do! Those other bloggers in that list are this kind of people.

This said, this will stay my random and personal thoughts' basket. I like being in the community, but don't take my word for "official" please. Those you find written here are just my ramblings written from the couch after dinner.

There is not a lot of documentation for System Center Operations Manager 2007 yet.
It is coming, but there's a lot of things that changed since the previous release and I think some more would only help. Also, a lot of the content I am seeing is either too newbie-oriented or too developer-oriented, for some reason.

I have not yet seen a tutorial, webcast or anything that explains how to create a simple unit monitor that uses a VBS script using the GUI.

So this is how you do it:

Go to the "Authoring" space of OpsMgr 2007 Operations Console.
Select the "Management Pack objects", then "Monitors" node. Right click and choose "Create a monitor" -> "Unit Monitor".

You get the "Create a monitor" wizard open:

Choose to create a two-states unit monitor based on a script. Creating a three- state monitor would be pretty similar, but I'll show you the most simple one.
Also, choose a Management pack that will contain your script and unit monitor, or create a new management pack.

Choose a "monitor target" (object classes or instances – see this webcast about targeting rules and monitors: www.microsoft.com/winme/0703/28666/Target_Monitoring_Edit… ) and the aggregate rollup monitor you want to roll the state up to.

Choose a schedule, that is: how often would you like your script to run. For demonstration purposes I usually choose a very short interval such a two or three minutes. For production environments, tough, choose a longer time range.

Choose a name for your script, complete with a .VBS extension, and write the code of the script in the rich text box:

As the sample code and comments suggest, you should use a script that checks for the stuff you want it to check, and returns a "Property Bag" that can be later interpreted by OpsMgr workflow to change the monitor's state.
This is substantially different than scripting in MOM 2005, where you could only launch scripts as responses, loosing all control over their execution.

For demonstration purpose, use the following script code:
 

On Error Resume Next
Dim oAPI, oBag
Set oAPI = CreateObject("MOM.ScriptAPI")
Set oBag = oAPI.CreateTypedPropertyBag(StateDataType)
Const FOR_APPENDING = 8
strFileName = "c:\testfolder\testfile.txt"
strContent = "test "
Set objFS = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objTS = objFS.OpenTextFile(strFileName,FOR_APPENDING)
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
Call oBag.AddValue("State","BAD")
Else
Call oBag.AddValue("State","GOOD")
objTS.Write strContent
End If
Call oAPI.Return(oBag)

[edited on 29th of May as pointed out by Ian: if you cut and paste the example script you might need to change the apostrophes (“) as that causes the script to fail when run - it is an issue with the template of this blog.] [edited on 30th of May: I fixed the blog so that now post content shows just plain, normal double quotes instead than fancy ones. It seems like a useful thing when from time to time I post code...]

The script will try to write into the file c:\testfolder\testfile.txt.
If it finds the file and manages to write (append text) to it, it will return the property "State" with a value of "GOOD".
If it fails (for example if the file does not exist), it will return the property "State" with a value of "BAD".

In MOM 2005 you could only let script generate Events or Alerts directly as a mean to communicate their results back to the monitoring engine. In OpsMgr 2007 you can let your script spit out a property bag and then continue the monitoring workflow and decide what to do depending on the script's result.

So the next step is to go and check for the value of the property we return in the property bag, to determine which status the monitor will have to assume.

We use the syntax Property[@Name='State'] in the parameter field, and we search for a content that means an unhealthy condition:

Or for the healty one:

Then we decide which status will the monitor have to assume in the healty and unhealty conditions (Green/Yellow or Green/Red usually)

Optionally, we can decide to raise an Alert when the status changes to unhealthy, and close it again when it goes back to healty.

Now our unit monitor is done.
All we have to do is waiting it gets pushed down to the agent(s) that should execute it, and wait for its status to change.
In fact it should go to the unhealthy state first.
To test that it works, just create the text file it will be searching for, and wait for it to run again, and the state should be reset to Healthy.

Have fun with more complex scripts!

[...] In Sanskrit, "yoga" means "union." Indians believe in a universal mind – brahman – of which we are all a part, and which ponders eternally. Everyone has access to this knowledge.

Knowledge in ancient India was protected by caste lines, not legal or economic ones. The term "intellectual property" was an oxymoron: the intellect could not be anybody's property. [...]

It is on most newspaper today, read on for example at Herald Tribune.

This patent and copyright thing is becoming more and more ridiculous every day.

Purble Place is a new educational game that ships with Windows Vista (even with Starter and Home Basic editions) that can help teach colors, shapes, and pattern recognition.

My kid absolutely LOVES it, especially the section of the game where you have to make and decorate cakes .

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.

WordPress.Net, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

It has been quite a while that I wanted to experiment a bit more with ASP.Net but I don't have a windows machine on the internet. Not one that performs enough anyway. My server runs linux. I have had mono running on it for a while, but its support was not complete with the old release of Debian, so part of my mono and mod_mono installation were a custom compile and they were breaking from time to time, each time some library got updated. So I did run a "Hello World" page with it, but nothing more, because it was a bit of a mess to mantain and, moreover, because I had not yet figured out how to have it connect with mysql instead than with MS SQL Server.
Also, I did not have any real project or idea to implement in my mind.

Now that I have upgraded to Debian Etch, mono support seems to be much more out-of-the-box and stable on this release. I also got an idea of what to do with it, so I finally gave it a try.

As a starter, I am trying to re-publish my blog, historically running at www.muscetta.com, on my other muscetta.NET domain (it makes sense to use a .NET domain, right?). But this is not a new site, it is a republish of the same content, but done using C# – just pointing at the same wordpress' mysql database. Connection to MySQL is done with MySql.Data (the ADO.Net driver for MySQL).

I still need to implement a lot of things/features, such as comment posting (you can only read them now), some layout/styling/framing to make it look nicer, some sidebar/blogroll, feeds, and a many other things. I am not aiming at a complete rewrite (for example I won't do an administrative interface or a webservice so far), but just a republish/frontend to the visitors.
I don't know when I will have time to continue writing it, but all in all I am glad it works so far, and I had fun doing it.

Writing ASP.Net for mono on linux in the absence of Frontpage server extentions and WebDAV and the remote debugger is proving slightly more challenging than just dragging and dropping controls in Visual Studio and let it do a lot of work with you. You have to write the code, upload it, and see if it works. No debugging, no intellisense. Just the hard old way of trial and error, which makes development slower, but you learn a hell of a lot more that way. Of course you need to keep the MSDN library handly

[Edit of December 2009 - I killed the above experiment. I had fun doing it, but there is not time for all, it needs a lot of work to keep it running/update it with every wordpress update, and mod_mono is wasting too many resources on the server.]

You should have OTHER people talk about YOUR stuff because it is really cool.

Self-promotion does usually the opposite effect on peopple these days.

I am not into this: I just talk about technology when I feel like to, and I talk about other stuff when I want to talk about other stuff. And when I talk about technology it is usually about what interests me at that point, be it Microsoft or not. I talk of MOM as well as of Linux, of C# just as much as of Ruby. It depends what I'm hacking with at that point in time. I like cool technology, it does not matter if it comes from one side or another. I even like to integrate them when it makes sense (and it makes sense a lot of times). But I've already written about this here in the past. So I'll stop this rant here.

The start of the new year according to the traditions of Bengal, being welcomed by bengal and indian immigrants in Rome.
Is a great opportunity for integration.
You don't really see many italians walking around, but there are some who do come and talk.

This is happening in Rome, right now, started last sunday and goes on until the end of the month.

For more information:
www.romamultietnica.it/inside.asp?id=166&idNotizia=842

And yes, I feel very "debiany" today. In fact I just finished upgrading my server from Sarge to Etch and it went very smoothly, even if I had to reconfigure / migrate some settings – for example moving all the virtual server configuration from Apache 1.3 to 2.x … but it was about time for me to move my ass off 1.3! Among other things I am quite glad now I can use mod_mono and have it update with apt-get, instead than having my own compiled version with all sort of broken dependencies… also, it performs better – faster, and takes up the same amount of resources, which I would not have believed and I was in fact slightly concerned about. Nothing to be worried about, it turns out.

Some other guy was pointing me out today all the other improvements in the desktop-feature-space. I would not know, I am a runlevel-2 guy when it comes to linux.

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!

This is a collection of photos first appeared on the "Bianco e Nero" user group on Flickr, under the common theme of talking about "the invisible cities":

"[...] Le città invisibili sono i nostri buchi neri, cioe' quelle parti di città che vengono dimenticate e lasciate a se stesse, al buio, fino a quando l'ennesimo caso di cronaca non le riporta alla ribalta per qualche giorno. Sono i quartieri che non si sono mai sviluppati, sono i quartieri che si degradano negli anni, i quartieri nati sotto l'emergenza e dove prevalgono problemi di degrado abitativo, di occupazione e di integrazione fra i vecchi e i nuovi emarginati. [...]"

There are two versions:
the cheap version, but the quality of the print is not very good;
the more expensive version, where the quality is ok.
Or you can even download a PDF here and spend nothing

Yesterday I was talking to someone and he asked me if I ever look at the mirror, if I do see a different person sometimes or would like to be one; they wondered if there was anything that I would change: "do you ever wonder what it would have been if you were born as another person, or more in general – what would you change if you could?".

I did not know what to answer.

At first, I thought it would have been very unpolite to say "no, not really, not since I was 16 years old, more or less…". Well actually that's what I was thinking, tough. Maybe he'll read this. Who cares. I don't feel like I need to make everybody happy anytime, anyway. Who are they after all ? What are they trying to sell ? I don't need to buy things because this society wants to make you think you need them. I don't need to be thinner, fatter, taller, blonder, I don't need an iPod, I don't need a TomTom, I don't need all of the crap this society pushes you to think as being necessary.

That is why I am posting this picture. I was angry back then when it was taken, I was wanting to be someone else like most teenagers who haven't found themselves yet.

What would I change of myself now ?
Nothing, not really. If something has changed, is that I DO like myself these days.

Sure, it would certainly help having more money. We could have a house of our own. Currently we live with my one and only wage – me, my wife, two kids and two cats – and half of this salary goes away in paying the rental of the house – so it's not exactly easy to get on; but that is just material things. We are healty, we are happy. I've even stopped feeling miserable and sorry for myself like a lot of people do. When sometimes I feel weaker and I realize that I might start getting caught in the consumistic trap (nobody's perfect) – which happens when I feel sorry and unfortunate….
to get out of it I usually read something about people in the real poor countries, people at war, people who don't have to eat, and I think what have we done to them to sustain our richness. Then I don't feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for them, I feel thankful for what I do have. I feel like I should be doing something for them rather than for myself. I there was anything I would change is to have the courage to need even less. Because it is among the poor people, the less fortunate that you mostly discover humanity.
Rich people tend to complain, they forget to be thankful for their situation, they always want to have more.
Sure that if "successful" people, people who think of themselves as being very important, people who make a lot of money and are enterpreneurs, if those people still think they want to change something, if they get excited by stuff like "second life", if they get shaken by looking at themselves in the mirror and they expect you to be like them… if all of these things I have seen are true, then well, then my answer is NO and NO – sincerely I don't want to change anything in my life in the way they mean. There is no project for any killer application or business that I would borrow money for, there is no dotCom follow-up I would be getting rich for.

Probably for this reason, I do LIKE looking at myself in the mirror.
I even laugh like a kid making funny faces at myself, and that is all about.
I don't have to be afraid of my shadow.

This one is a post regarding my first test writing a cmdlet for PowerShell. After a few days since having change my blog's title to "$daniele.rant | Out-Blog" (where Out-Blog was a fantasy cmdlet name, and the title just meant to mimick PowerShell syntax in a funny way), I stumbled across this wonderful blog post: http://blog.boschin.it/archive/2006/09/21/4375.aspx that describes how to use the assemblies of "Windows Live Writer". Then I saw the light: I could actually implement an "Out-Blog" cmdlet. I am not sure what this could be useful for… but I thought it was funny to experiment with. I followed the HOW TO information on this other blog post to guide me through the coding: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/10/lets_all_write_1.html

The result is the code that follows. you see is pretty much Boschin's code wrapped into a cmdlet class. Nothing fancy. Just a test. I thought someone might find it interesting. It is provided "AS IS", mainly for educational purpose (MINE, only mine…. I'm the one whose education is being improved, not you )

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.Management.Automation;

using WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients;

using WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient;

using WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices;

using WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Settings;

using WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient;

using Microsoft.Win32;

namespace LiveWriterCmdlet

{

[Cmdlet("out", "blog", SupportsShouldProcess=true)]

public sealed class OutBlogCmdlet : Cmdlet

{

[Parameter(Position = 0, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Title

{

get { return _title; }

set { _title = value; }

}

private string _title;

[Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=true,ValueFromPipeline=true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Text

{

get { return _text; }

set { _text = value; }

}

private string _text;

[Parameter(Position = 2, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string BlogApiEndPoint

{

get { return _blogapiendpoint; }

set { _blogapiendpoint = value; }

}

private string _blogapiendpoint;

[Parameter(Position = 3, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string UserName

{

get { return _username; }

set { _username = value; }

}

private string _username;

[Parameter(Position = 4, Mandatory = true, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string Password

{

get { return _password; }

set { _password = value; }

}

private string _password;

[Parameter(Position = 6, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public string ProxyAddress

{

get { return _proxyaddress; }

set { _proxyaddress = value; }

}

private string _proxyaddress;

[Parameter(Position = 7, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty]

public int ProxyPort

{

get { return _proxyport; }

set { _proxyport = value; }

}

private int _proxyport;

[Parameter(Position = 8, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public string ProxyUserName

{

get { return _proxyusername; }

set { _proxyusername = value; }

}

private string _proxyusername;

[Parameter(Position = 9, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public string ProxyPassword

{

get { return _proxypassword; }

set { _proxypassword = value; }

}

private string _proxypassword;

[Parameter(Position = 10, Mandatory = false, ValueFromPipeline = false, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName = true)]

public SwitchParameter Published

{

get { return _published; }

set { _published = value; }

}

private bool _published;

protected override void BeginProcessing()

{

base.BeginProcessing();

ApplicationEnvironment.Initialize();

if ((ProxyAddress != null) | (ProxyAddress != ""))

{

WebProxySettings.ProxyEnabled = true;

WebProxySettings.Hostname = ProxyAddress;

WebProxySettings.Port = ProxyPort;

WebProxySettings.Username = ProxyUserName;

WebProxySettings.Password = ProxyPassword;

}

else

{

WebProxySettings.ProxyEnabled = false;

}

}

protected override void ProcessRecord()

{

if (ShouldProcess(Text))

{

ISettingsPersister persister = new RegistrySettingsPersister(Registry.CurrentUser, @"Software\Windows Live Writer");

IBlogCredentials credentials = new BlogCredentials(new SettingsPersisterHelper(persister));

IBlogCredentialsAccessor credentialsAccessor = new BlogCredentialsAccessor("dummy-value", credentials);

credentials.Username = UserName;

credentials.Password = Password;

MovableTypeClient client = new MovableTypeClient(new Uri(BlogApiEndPoint), credentialsAccessor, PostFormatOptions.Unknown);

BlogPost MyPost = new BlogPost();

MyPost.Title = Title;

MyPost.Contents = Text;

client.NewPost("dummy-value", MyPost, Published);

WriteVerbose("Posted Successfully.");

}

}

}

}

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.

News of this Microsoft-Novell deal are all over the web.

I'd like to comment by cross-posting: this post in particular hides a pearl of wisdom:

"[...] But what does this mean to the end user?  Probably not very much. 

SLED aficionados will continue to praise Novell while espousing the virtues of free Linux – pretending all the while that Novell is not just as anxious to turn a profit on enterprise versions of their Linux products as Microsoft is to push its Windows wares. 

Others in the Linux camp will criticize Novell as a 'turncoat' to the Linux movement — never mind that everyone pushing their own Linux distribution is desperately trying to make money off of the open source software movement [...]"

But this is something you could see a long time ago. I even fell in the trap at the beginning when I started looking at Novell's move in the Linux and Open Source market…. but they did not fool me for long . In the second article I wrote:

"[...] There are people who might not like this. I even understand it. An I am not referring to Microsoft. I am referring to people who love and advocate free software. This behavior does not look fair. It looks like the competition to Microsoft is trying to use all possible weapons to regain market, using (and abusing) open source software they did not create in the first place. This might be true, but to those who might not agree, being idealistic about linux… I have to say that unfortunately the dream of 'complete freedom' of software has already vanished. Haven't you noticed it already ? It would be great, in theory, but talking of IT is rather obviously talking of a market, rather than of just a hobby. And a market is where companies play. After all, RedHat is charging money for its up2date, while WindowsUpdate is still for free… …you might say that other distributions don't charge people for the updates… but for how long is it really going to last? Companies have stepped in, and they are going to stay. I am not trying in any way to defend their position. I am just making an analysis of this phenomenon. [...]"

And that was already three years ago.

Still you get people insisting on free software, and how companies should use it to stop paying Microsoft. Yeah, right. And to start paying IBM or Novell. They'll always pay someone anyway.

I stepped out of the dream and started working at Microsoft when I realized this.

I also still use FREE-OSS (like Debian or Gentoo Linux Distros) for myself. But companies can't really depend on those. Their mentality requires them to pay someone to do things. And this is not that terrible. It actually keeps the market going and it gives me a job after all. Why should I despise it ?

It's a shame that people don't see things in advance, they sometimes are even hard to figure them out when they are already old. Some other people instead do look around and see things when they are preparing to happen. They are probably those that keep their eye open. Even if not directly related to open source, Roberdan wrote this concept in Italian here:

"[...] ma perchè dicono che ho una visione? perchè sembra che io sappia esattamente come andranno le cose, che veda quello che accadrà tra 1 mese, tra 1 anno o tra 10 anni. Chiaramente dal punto di vista tecnologico, ma anche organizzativo. Avrò quindi poteri soprannaturali?? Sarò un fenomeno paranormale come Alberto Sordi? (e quindi riuscirò a monetizzare questa facoltà mettendomi a fare il santone? ….o SEMPLICEMENTE…

Semplicemente ho gli occhi aperti? una bocca e due orecchie per cui ascolto il doppio di quanto parlo? Un istinto non ancora represso e ingabbiato nei meandri della moderna società del lavoro? Secondo me si.

Volete essere dei visionari? Aprite gli occhi, non fermatevi a guardare la goccia che cade dal vostro naso, non arrendetevi all'evidenza. Scavate. Se non capite fate domande. Se avete dubbi confrontatevi, SE VOLETE CAMBIARE QUALCOSA CAMBIATELO [...]"

It's a shame it is not written in English, but – hey, he was probably referring to an Italian audience. I love Italy, but Italian readers should really move their asses and learn english. He probably thinks different so he addresses them in writing in Italian… as of me, I just don't care anymore (I have probably never done) about those little italians who can't read english. Those who can't read my posts in english are probably also the same people that need to be spoon-fed and told everything, those who can't figure it out themselves. And when they can't figure it out themselves, that usually also means they take themselves too seriously… so why bother ?

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

On a side note, I honestly ignore why do you need to UPLOAD photos there and you can't just LINK or REFERENCE photos you've already uploaded on Flickr (isn't it a site they bought ?). So I don't see the effort in any INTEGRATION here. I don't get why. If I had a photo platform like Flickr I would use its Web API to let registered users just "PASS OVER" some pictures from one site to the other.

But, hey…. regardless…..it looks really COOL. It really does. More cool than actually USEFUL (it reminds me of Intrusion Detection Systems… but I digress), but that's how this amount of community things are. It's not useful for your business, but it is good for your heart.

In fact i consider GMail as being one of the best interface for reading mail that exist out there – I love "tagging" (oops: it's called "labelling" in their syntax), speed of search through messages (even tough Outlook 2007 is faster on indexed content, but still you have to buy it and install it on your PC)… I also especially love the way it shows THREADING… so that I moved pretty much EVERY mailing list I read on their account:

(ok, they could do better with the localized version of "Re:" in replies…. in Italian a lot of broken MUA's translate that into "R:" and that isn't understood by GMail and will make it think it is another thread…. but that's a minor issue, and also one that every MUA handling threading has – including "mutt" – the real problem is the broken MUAs sending the "R:" in the first place. But I digress too much….).

I also keep GMail continuosly opened in a browser during the day because a lot of informative mail and that sent by friends goes there. This to say that I do get a lot of their ads (that is – the point of having such an application, for them…). On the contrary, Windows Live Mail reduced its ads to show only one… not to annoy you too much.
But the ads in GMail were not *really* a problem (I don't read them anyway, I just plain IGNORE THEM).

But this week they REALLY pissed me off. They REALLY have. And here is the reason:
I have been using a script for MONTHS to backup my database (the one powering THIS blog) and send it "off-site" to my GMail mailbox. Pretty much something like a lot of other people do, described in various articles and blog posts. Then I was labelling them with a rule, so that I could access my backups easily in case I needed them.

Now I don't know if this violates their terms of use in any way… because I am not really using it as storage with those programs that circulated at one stage that had "reverse engineered" it. Those were bypassing the web interface altogether so people did use it as storage with a program without having to see their ads. That was the issue, I think. In my case, I am just sending MAILS to myself. One per day. I also delete the old ones every now and then, and they are not even huge in sized (attachments of 40 to 50KB so far!!)… anyway, I know a lot of people that store documents and all sort of stuff even in their corporate mailboxes in Outlook (then maybe index them with Windows Desktop Search of Google Desktop to find it back)… I was only doing the same with GMail. I don't see the big issue here….. they might think otherwise…. but from what happens I don't think that's the issue.

Anyway, now it's been three or four days that my backup mail gets rejected. My SMTP Server gets told:

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[66.249.83.27] said:
550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited
550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been
550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review
550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

Now for fuck's sake. You know how much I hate SPAMMERS and what I would like to do with them. But I also know that it does happen to end up in RBLs and such sometimes. Fine. But GIVE ME a way to tell you that I am NOT one! If you go to the link above, all you find is a form where you can specify that mail that ended up in your "junk" folder actually wasn't spam. Yeah, right. In my case it does not even go into my "junk" folder! How am I supposed to give me the original header that arrived to THEM if I only have the one sent by my mailserver ? They just blacklisted my mail server's IP Address! As they say, I even have an SPF record, I always use the same address, etc….
So I tried to fill in the form, the day after I also tried to contact their abuse@google.com and abuse@gmail.com addresses.
Still nothing.
They even tell you (in the automated reply when you contact "abuse":
"[...] For privacy and security reasons, we may not reveal the final outcome of an abuse case to the person who reported it. [...]".
How great. How am I supposed to know if they even READ my complaint ?

You anti-spam people at GMail: "I am NOT a fucking spammer!!!!!". I 'haven't found a better way to tell ya this, you know, than writing it on my blog… this is just RIDICULOUS!

But to date my mails still get dropped. I'll probably have to send my backups somewhere else. At this point they pissed me off so much that I am also seriously considering getting back to use my own mailserver also for receiving and reading my mailing lists. Then I won't get ads there.
Afzetterij!
(I hope you have some dutch guy on board at Google, as "Google Translate" does not translate from/to dutch yet…. )

Edited on October, 8th - While GMail REJECTS those mails (it SAYS it is not accepting them), Hotmail simply DROPS them (that is: it does not even SAY it is not accepting them):

to=, relay=mx4.hotmail.com[65.54.245.104], delay=3, status=sent (250 <20061008061010.GA19807@muscetta.com> Queued mail for delivery)

This way you THINK it is going to be delivered, but it NEVER shows up in your inbox. I don't know who's behaving the worst…

I've bought a present for myself: a negative scanner. Now I only need to have the time to scan those 2 or 3 kilos of old negatives that popped out of that old drawer….

Anyway, it's wonderful to run through old memories!

This one photo of me and Joshua was taken by Jyothi in 2000.

My dad has had a hearth attack last week, and has been kept at the hopital, in intensive care.
He will have to quit smoking, and drinking, adn being so "busy" as he usually is.
Now he's still at the hospital, but out of intensive care.
The worse part is over.

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 !

At the end of September I'll have to go to England for work. Not being able anymore to carry a hand luggage, I think I will have to leave my camera home. I cannot afford to get that stolen or broken by sending it as luggage. I'll have finished paying that in 2008… you can imagine I am worried…

I am actually tempted to show up in this T-Shirt to be honest…

"[...] I didn't think subscribing to feeds in a conventional aggregator would ever become used by a widespread percentage of the population. Subscribing to feeds seems cool to geeks because it solves a geek problem; having too many sources of information to keep track of and optimizing how this is done. The average person doesn't think it's cool to be able to keep track of 10 – 20 websites a day using a some tool because they aren't interested in 10 – 20 websites on a daily basis in the first place. [...]"

In fact, this reminds me I am a geek, as I could not stay up to date with the load of things I wanna read, withuot his wonderful RSS Bandit.

This guy is right. Stephan, you really got it – and you described it well too.
I am just crazy about this Flickr thing. It's the HUMAN and collaboration features that make Flickr that cool, addictive and popular. Those really make it emerge over ANY other photo-gallery software or service available.
That is the reason why I use it (and I pay it) even if it has been bought by a competitor of my company, even if I have my own server where I could indipendently publish my galleries at no cost, even if…. [insert random reason here about why I should not be using it]. It is for those "countless stories intertwined" that I like it so much.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).