I want no monuments

I divide free software people this way:

• almost everybody can proudly say to be a free/open source software user
• most of us develop software with free software
• some of us participate to free software development
• and a tiny small group of coders does the hard work

I stick on the first and second groups.
On time to time, I release a new free software, taking part in the last group, at least for a few lines of code.
More often I’m part of the third group, by submitting bugs and (sometimes) patches.
I’ve decided to list those patches here, since somehow they give a feeling on how, why and when I do what I say to do to friends and colleagues asking me about linux and the rest.
And by the way, that improves my curriculum.

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?

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!

Vi copio/incollo la richiesta di aiuto di Francesco Cariati del MiLUG relativo all’organizzazione dell’edizione milanese del Linux Day. Se potete dare una mano, metteteci qualche ora delle vostre! Nel frattempo io prenderò parte all’edizione torinese come speaker

Ciao,
abbiamo assolutamente bisogno di risorse umane per il Linux Day 2007 a Milano (ad esempio vi copia-incollo in calce una delle richieste), chiunque pensa di avere anche solo 1-2 ore da dedicare al LinuxDay il 26 ottobre (serata preparazione evento) o il 27 (evento vero e proprio), per favore si iscriva alla ML del LinuxDay (vedi link alla riga successiva) e si offra come volontario, indicando la sua disponibilita’ orario e le preferenze sul lavoro che vorrebbe svolgere

http://www.milug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ml-linuxday

Grazie
Ciao

Segue una delle richieste di aiuto:

Ciao,
come coordinatore della install fest e del network, mi servirebbero delle persone per le seguenti aree:

- aiuto al networking per i visitatori (manca un cavo, il cavo e’ rotto, aiuto non mi va dhclient,…)
-”cuoco” addetto alla “cucina” (ossia una persona che masterizza al momento i vari cd delle distro, assicurando sempre una certa cache di cd gia’ pronti e raccoglie i contributi spese per i cd)
- aiuto per la install fest in qualita’ di tecnico installatore di distribuzioni (quasi sempre ubuntu)

Servirebbe inoltre un aiuto tecnico e fisico il 26 ottobre sera per preparare il LD del giorno dopo, sistemando network, tavoli e altro

Ciao

Amir, ti sto pensando sai? :)

Non posso non inoltrarvi questa bella notizia: è nato BarberaWare, SourceForge in bagna càuda

Ciao * ,

Mi permetto di inoltrare questa mail alle liste di tutti gli Users Groups che operano in Piemonte, perche’ e’ proprio agli amanti del software libero della regione pedemontana che rivolgo la mia attenzione.

Negli ultimi mesi i miei soci ed io abbiamo lavorato su una piattaforma di sviluppo collaborativo, raggiungibile presso l’URL http://barberaware.org , rivolta esplicitamente ai developers di freesoftware e con una spiccata passione per le tecnologie open. In breve, ci proponiamo come un modesto SourceForge a livello locale, ed offriamo a tutti coloro che li richiedano servizi per la gestione dei propri progetti rilasciati con licenza libera: spazio web, strumenti ditracking, gestione delle mailing lists, repository SVN e quant’altro.

Per quanto le attivita’ di promozione e diffusione della cultura del software libero siano importantissime, crediamo che il modo migliore di contribuire alla nobile causa della condivisione della conoscenza sia arricchire e perfezionare costantemente il patrimonio di codice e di informazione liberamente fruibili; proprio per questo miriamo a sostenere l’opera di coloro che attivamente, ogni giorno, dedicano il loro tempo e le loro energie nella creazione di applicazioni utili per tutti.
Uno spazio costruito non di parole e buone intenzioni, ma di risorse effettive e di strumenti concreti accessibili ed usabili da tutti.

Per questo, mentre il progetto muove i suoi primi passi, mi rivolgo in primo luogo a coloro che quotidianamente dimostrano passione ed entusiasmo nei confronti del tema del software libero, per raccogliere pareri, commenti, critiche e spunti per migliorare e perfezionare la piattaforma ed i servizi offerti.
Cosa ne pensate dell’idea? E dell’implementazione della stessa? Cosa vi piace di piu’? Cosa modifichereste?

Attendo feedback ;-)

It’s July 3 news that Microsoft will help the UK National Archives to get all its proprietary format files back to the future.

Sold as Microsoft will to “save the UK Archives”, Microsoft is actually recovering its own fault: as a matter of fact, most of the old, legacy format documents are Microsoft Word 97 (and previous versions) files. Formats that even the most recent Word can no longer read.

As reverse compatibility has never been an interest to Microsoft, the only way of recovering the docs will be to use virtualisation. They will install virtualised version of Windows95, Windows 3.1 and co. and will save the documents from one version to another.

Say you have a old Word document (done on Windows 3.1) that Office XP cannot read, but that’s readable by Office 97. They will open the document with Office 97 and save in 97 proprietary format. Then they will open it with Office XP and save in XP format. Then they will finally open it with the latest Office (I don’t even know its name…) and will save it in the OOXML format.

Easy, repetitive and boring. Have a nice day, pigeon!

Ok, I promise, that’s the last blog entry about advocacy.

But it’s just too funny and true not to blog about it, at least to make its rank go higher ;)

So, it’s worth-reading, have fun with this Inquirer article: “Microsoft admits Vista failure“

On March 28 post, Dell comments the results of the Linux survey, starting the countdown to see linux on more than some servers and the only Precision workstation.

The most important part of the post is the link to Direct2Dell today’s post, whose title says it all: “Linux: Driver Support is Key“.

Exactly! As a home user, I like to choose my preferred distro, given the availability of all the modules I need to gain the maximum from my hardware. As a company, I would prefer support and therefore choose a pre-installed linux box.

Punto-Informatico riporta l’appello dell’ex senatore, ora membro del Comitato consultivo sulla Governance di Internet del Ministero dell’Innovazione, Fiorello Cortiana.

Il testo dell’appello è disponibile qui.

Si sta allestendo uno strumento per raccogliere le adesioni: nel frattempo è possibile inviare una mail a Punto-Informatico (l’indirizzo lo trovate in fondo alla pagina)

It really seems like Dell has discovered how many GNU/Linux users out there would like to buy and use Dell computers!

Latest news is the Linux survey Dell has started on March 13. You can give Dell some more hints about things like how you would like to be supported and what GNU/Linux distribution you prefer.
Here you can access the survey directly.

A personal note. A long time ago, I thought advocating about linux was just a waste of time. Someone told me I was wrong.
The answer to the question “How could have Dell ignored Linux for so long?” is “They just didn’t know about it. Until someone told them”. So keep on advocating.