musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

What does the population need, in order not to think to their day to day reality?

1. a Romantic Fairy Tale http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/
2. a new Saint http://www.giovannipaoloii.va/
3. an Evil Guy to defeat http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead
    

Three cards have been played in a single weekend.

Welcome back to the Middle Ages, or welcome to Dreamworld.

[Note: To give due credits, this was posted by my friend Valentina in Italian at http://www.bastet.it/intheskywithdiamonds/2011/05/02/e-giochiamoci-queste-tre-carte/ - I thought it was worth spreading it a bit more and I asked her permission to translate it and republish it here]

The great majority of women In Italy is working both inside and outside home, they produce wealth, they look for a job ( one out of two succeeds), they study and make sacrifices to assert themselves in the chosen profession, they take care of their relations and look after children, husbands and aged parents.
Quite a few are engaged in public issues, in parties, in trade unions, in enterprises, in organisations and in voluntary services with the aim that the society they are living in might become richer, more civilized and welcoming. They have consideration and respect for themselves and for liberty and dignity achieved by the women who built our democratic nation, worth to be mentioned on occasion of the 150 th Celebration of Italian Unity.
This rich and important life experience is being deleted by the image of women constantly and indecently represented as bare objects of sexual exchange, in newspapers, advertisements and television programs. This in no longer bearable.
A wide-spread attitude offers to young people the idea of reaching glamorous goals and easy money by giving up their beauty and intelligence to the one in power , who is willing to pay back with public funds and positions.
This way of thinking and the consequent behaviours are polluting social life and the models of civil ethic and religious awareness. Inadvertently we crossed the bounds of decency.
The model of man-woman relation exhibited by one of the highest State Authorities deeply affects our lifestyles and culture justifying detrimental behaviour to women’s dignity and to the institutions.
Those who want to keep silence, support, justify and reduce the ongoing events to private matters, should take responsibility also in front of the international community.
We are asking all women, without any distinction, to protect the value of our dignity and we are telling to men: If not now, when? It’s time to proof friendship to women.

senonoraquando13febbraio2011.wordpress.com/

I got this sticker last APRIL at MMS2010 in JUST ONE COPY, and I waited till I got a NEW laptop in SEPTEMBER to actually use that…
It also took a while to stick it on properly (other than to re-install the PC as I wanted…),  but this week they told me that, for an error, I got given the wrong machine (they did it all themselves, tho - I did not ask for any specific one) and this one needs to be replaced!!!!

This is WORSE than any hardware FAILure, as the machine just works very well and I was expecting to keep it for the next two years

Can anyone be so nice to send me one of those awesome stickers again?

Some time ago I was reading www.caffeinatedcoder.com/book-review-the-c-programming-la…

[...] Since a good portion of the C# books are between the 500 and 1000 page range, it was refreshing to read a book that was less than 200 pages. Partly this is because when the book was published the surface area of the reusable API was a small fraction of what it is now. However, I also wonder if there was an expectation of disciplined conciseness in technical writing back in the late 80’s that simply no longer exists today. [...]

I think this is a very important point. But then, again, it was no secret – this was written in the Preface to the first edition of that book:

[...] is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of resrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages. [...]

I think it all boils down to simplicity, as Glenn Scott says in glennsc.com/start-a-revolution-with-confident-simplicity

[...] To master this technique you need to adopt this mindset that your product is, say, simple and clean, and you just know this, and you are confident and assured of this. There is no urgent need to “prove” anything. [...]

Another similar book on a (different) programming language, is "Programming Ruby, the pragmatic programmer's guide" which starts with

[...] This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you'll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more. [...] As Pragmatic Programmers we've tried many, many languages in our search for tools to make our lives easier, for tools to help us do our jobs better. Until now, though, we'd always been frustrated by the languages we were using. [...]

Of course that language is simple and sweet, very expressive, and programmers are seen as having to be "pragmatic". No nonsensical, incredibly complex cathedrals (in the language itself and in the documentation) – but quick and dirty things that just WORK.

But way too often, the size of a book is considered a measure for its quality and depth.
I recently read on Twitter about an upcoming "Programming Windows Phone 7" book that would be more than a thousand pages in size: twitter.com/#!/MicrosoftPress/status/27374650771

I mean: I do understand that there are many API's to take a look at and the book wants to be comprehensive…but…. do they really think that the sheer *size* of a book (>1000 pages) is an advantage in itself? it might actually scare people away, for how I see things. But it must be me.

In the meantime the book has been released and can be dowloaded from here blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-…

I have not looked at it yet – when I will have time to take a look at it I'll be able to judge better…

for now I only incidentally noticed that a quick search for books about programming the iPhone/iPad returns books that are between 250 and 500 pages maximum…

And yet simplicity CAN be known to us, and some teams really "Get it": take Powershell, for example – it is a refreshing example of this: the official powershell blog has a subtitle of "changing the world, one line at the time" – that's a strong statement… but in line with the empowerment that simplicity enables. In fact, Bruce Payette's book "Powershell in Action" is also not huge.
I suppose it must be a coincidence. Or maybe not.

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.

Yesterday, when trying to burn an Audio CD (to listen to music in my car) starting from MP3 files by using Windows Media Player 11, I kept getting this message "connect a burner and restart the player" and the “Start Burn” button was greyed out, like if the program was not able to seeing that my CD/DVD Burner is actually capable of writing CDs:

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.