For the benefit of our nation and of search engines: today’s editorial comment from the Financial Times says in english what less than half Italians think.
In the meanwhile, WALL-E is coming to tidy up Naples.
Gentoo is a source based distro: usually, every software you need will be downloaded in source code form and compiled right on your box.
This opens up a whole set of optimizations, making Gentoo usually a bit faster than other distros, as it is more specialized and can take advantage of your own CPU instruction sets (think about MMX, SSE and 3DNow!).
These optimizations make some guy see Gentoo as an environment friendly distro: software is optimized, therefore less energy is required to accomplish the same task.
But even the less intuitive can understand that having a computer stuck at 100%, compiling for hours, it’s not really good for the environment.
Nonetheless, I still use Gentoo and I suggest using it to my coworkers. To me Gentoo is the perfect distro for every developer as it helps you understanding your box (and even the differences with other’s boxes, if you start contributing your ebuilds)
Understanding the main tool you (as a developer) use, will make you more efficient: you’ll start having answers to others questions, because you have seen your installation growing up, step by step.
That’s my point in using Gentoo: my box is in the palm of my hand. I know almost anything of it. I usually know why things happen, on the contrary of my coworkers, that waste time and productivity finding workarounds to things they don’t know.
Something that reflects the quality of their job, as they produce software that sometimes misbehaves.
If you want to be a good developer, start understanding your box now. Whatever operating system you use, shit is unlikely to happen: everything happens for a reason. If you think your OS makes it hard to understand, try another.
I’ve just watched this beautiful video on TED.
If your eyes will closely follow the things he uses, you’ll be amazed by the 3D shapes he’s drawing in the air.
And you’ll learn something about learning, maybe recalling some old feeling.
Don’t want to anticipate, just sit and watch it
This friday, May 23rd, I’ll be at the Underscore _TO* Hacklab, the local hackers club, learning Python.
I’ve always been too lazy to start learning it, while always being attracted by it.
If you are interested, follow the signs (courses are in Italian).
Some friends of mine have asked about the reasons for this blog name change.
It’s due to my recent frustrations about the company I work with, the quality of its developers and the vendor lock-in they suffer AND sell.
It’s a general opinion that the project I’m working on was born old. Old technologies, old tools, old libraries.
Nevertheless the architecture is quite new (the SOA thing). At the time the project was plotted, SOA was really new.
So why have they chosen to stick on old tools?
Would you use the Apollo 11 to go to Mars? Nice job with the Moon, but Mars…
Ok, this can’t be a rule of thumb, but sticking on the “Never change a winning team” mantra is just the opposite, so, to me, it’s safe to consider some middle point alternatives.
At the time I was conspiring with my coworkers, looking for ways of giving the thing some fresh air, our beloved (!?) tourism minister, Francesco Rutelli, was magnifying the italian monuments and I was thinking: “Are monuments (and pasta) the only thing we offer to the world market? Wait! I’m working with tools and libs so old that they look just like monuments!!”
So I’ve decided: no more monuments.
Technologically speaking, you can read that as “no big names” or “no corporations”.
Feasible? I’m doing it, so, yes it is. BTW, what do you expect from a penguin like me?
I’ve run into this problem two times so I need to take note of the solution for further reference.
If you are trying to host a virtual machine with a public IP address and you are experiencing the
-3100 (VERR_HOSTIF_INIT_FAILED)
error message, then all you need to do is running the following command as root
tunctl -t vbox0 -u YOUR_NON_ROOT_USERNAME
vbox0 is the name of your tap interface. If you follow the almighty gentoo-wiki instructions, it will be vbox0.
My script for having everything set up on demand is
modprobe vboxdrv
chown root:vboxusers /dev/net/tun
chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun
tunctl -t vbox0 -u federico
I run it whenever I need to work with VirtualBox.
As you may know, I’m on a new business, that’s something like bringing a company back to the present days, technologically speaking.
Since it will be quite hard to “attack” the software part and since the technologies that I’ll use will be all open source, I’m working to give my coworkers proof about the actual value and reliability of OSS technologies in general, replacing windows boxes with linux ones.
The aim is: if it has worked when switching from windows to linux, it would probably work when we’ll switch from VB to Java.
It’s a matter of trust. If they don’t trust me, I’m not the right man for the job.
The first thing was setting up a decent networking. I’ve found an old and noisy box, perfect for such critical tasks such as DHCP and DNS ;)
So everybody now has a fully qualified hostname, with Bind caching DNS queries.
Then I’ve chopped the Vista server. Wait a minute: Vista server? Yes. It’s a Dell box, bought right after the release of Vista: it was cheap but equipped with the most useless operating system ever.
I have proof (even if it’s too long and boring for writing it down here) that it has the useless networking ever: something like a hardcoded limit of 5 TCP connections… and people cracking it to surf the web faster… can’t be real…
Well: chopped. Samba is doing the job right now: faster (and therefore more productive) and cheaper. Indeed I’ve found another old box, plugged in two brand new hard drives, set up software raid 1 and voilà: 30 megabytes is the average memory occupied.
How many Gs do you have on your Vista notebook!? Ahahah, bye bye!
This Tuesday I began a new adventure: I’m technical director in the business company my sister has founded. The company relies on a software done years ago by another company, now partnering with us.
These very first days were not very happy.
First of all, I didn’t write a single line of code. Gosh, terrible!
Second, the whole app is a mix of VB6 and VB.NET, glued together in (yet another) data driven app where the (fluscking) db has MUCH more power that it deserves. It costs a lot to extend (because of the Microsoft licenses… naah really, don’t tell me!! I can’t believe that! … ) and is generally slow.
Third, the current team members are a bit aged and they probably fear a loss of control by using technologies they don’t know.
Quite hard to find a breach where I can place a Glassfish/JBoss/Tomcat instance. If you have advice about it, I’ll really appreciate.
In the meanwhile, my friends at Reply are struggling to get ready for the new demo. Even if I’m officially out until April, I’ll join them next week.
Last, this evening I’ve met Reply local boss, in order to find a way for the JUG Torino to use their meeting room. And they are happy to have the pleasure to host us: so they will, probably next month.
So, why fresh air? Well
So definitely some new things are going to happen in the next weeks/months and my “Italian Silicon Valley” dream, day by day, is getting more real.
Just a dream anyway. I’m not in a hurry: I’m having fun.
Today we host Vaclav Pech, JetBrains evangelist, that will show us the functionalities of IDEA, the famous IDE.
IDEA has always been one step ahead when talking about refactoring: it will be great to have Vaclav himself speaking to us about his product.
So: don’t miss it!
Che per inciso era un WMA… eh vabbè… almeno è senza DRM…
Cosa ho acquistato? “Parco Sempione” di Elio e le Store Tese, perchè mi piace il finale!
