Paolo Donadeo — LifeLOG
A blog about my life, job and thoughts

Just subscribed, but it’s not for me. I don’t have time to make frequent updates, and the scanning of my Gmail contacts revealed that only a few of my friends and colleagues use Twitter.

In any case I strongly appreciate the possibility to delete an accounts. The “delete” link is not hidden the innermost depths of the site and the deleting procedure clearly states that every updates will be deleted from Twitter’s servers, forever. That’s good.

Paul Graham has a very popular blog about his activity of venture capitalist, and sometimes about his beloved Lisp.

The last article, however, focuses attention on the battle between Internet and TV. The opinion of Graham is that TV has lost the battle, and this is my very same opinion, since at least a couple of years.

If you, like me, you hate TV and the stupidity of most TV shows, read the post of Graham, it contains a lucid analisys of the current situation and some very penetrating considerations about the near future.

The world of information technology is made by men and, like any other activity in which human beings are involved in, mistakes happens. Sometimes huge mistakes. And huge mistakes turn out into disgraces. One of these disgraces has a name: PHP.

Here is the story: some days ago wordpress.org released the latest version and I decided to upgrade. No db changes, everything seems ok. But, wait a moment… the sidebar is broken! To be honest, the page itself seems to be broken. I did nothing strange. Ok, let’s rationalize this: ssh on the server, cd to the wordpress directory and issue:

$ php index.php
Segmentation fault

What the frack?!? I had no time to investigate more, and I decided to install the most recent working backup (I use GIT to track everything, including db backups) and forgot it for some days. Tonight I decided to solve the problem. I installed everything on my PC and, by hacking the DB, I was able to remove all the sidebar widgets, among which I suspected the guilty should be. Than, from Wordpress admin I added exactly the same widgets, in the very same order and with the same configuration.

Result? No more segfault.

Now, how can a so popular application be so fragile? Are Wordpress guys stupid, or what? No, this time the problem is with the technology. One word suffices: PHP.

Yes, I know, I perfectly know I shouldn’t focus myself on this or that technology, I now Facebook is made with PHP, I know everything, but… as an engineer I simply can’t ignore how poor this language is!

Hey, if I considered the language choice unimportant I should work in the marketing :-)

End of this rant: I started my own blog, I’ll write it in a real programming languages, Objective Caml, I’ll never be rich but at least I’ll never ever spend 3 hours of my life debugging a PHP buggy blog.

Mi piace ascoltare la radio, specialmente quando programmo. Siccome siedo davanti ad un PC e siamo nel 2008, pretendo di ascoltare la mia stazione preferita, Radio Monte Carlo, usando il mio sistema operativo, cioè Linux (Debian “Sid”, per la precisione).

Purtroppo navigando sul sito della radio faccio fatica ad interagire con il player integrato e poi, visto che uso il browser per provare il software che scrivo, trovo scomodo avere una finestra impegnata ad ascoltare musica.

Così, smanettando un po’, ho trovato la URL da cui proviene lo stream, ascoltabile con MPlayer con il semplice comando:

$ mplayer rtsp://151.1.245.2/broadcast/2

con buona pace della terribile pagina web sul sito.

Buon ascolto…

Sono sempre così preso dal lavoro che non ho mai il tempo di pubblicare su Flickr le (poche) foto che scatto. Con sei mesi di ritardo ho messo on line questa sera quelle di… capodanno!!! Da non crederci. Per la cronaca, si è trattata di una festicciola solo con gli amici più cari, ospitato a Varese da Valeria.

Ho quindi approfittato per fotografare qualche angolo di Varese.

Ad ogni modo per tutti gli interessati le potete trovare qui.

Oggi ho deciso di fare l’upgrade del mio blog, essendo uscita la versione 2.5 di Wordpress. Già da un po’ di tempo mi ero riproposto di cambiare l’impostazione grafica, i colori e l’immagine di header del sito, così ho approfittato dell’occasione per aggiornare anche il design, anche perché quello vecchio non era più supportato ed è incompatibile con la nuova versione di Wordpress.

Ho fatto anche pulizia di tutti i vecchi plugin che avevo installato ma non usavo, o perché parzialmente incompatibili con gli ultimi rilasci di Wordpress, o perché semplicemente inutili :-)

Beh, vi piace la nuova grafica?

For Christmas I made some cleaning in my PC, so I removed a SCSI CD burner, with its interface complete of the bulky cable, and the glorious floppy disk drive, unused since many years.

The first and more visible consequence was a drastic reduction of the CPU temperature, dropped of about 20°C (36°F), from 65°C (149°F) to 45°C (113°F).

I always considered my AMD Athlon 64 processor the only responsible for the high temperature, even in normal condition of working, without CPU intensive tasks. I was wrong: the very bulky SCSI cable was probably the guilty.

Second and less important consequence was the considerably reduced boot time: I have no precise measurements but under both Linux and Windows the driver of the SCSI interface took several seconds to initialize.

So the quote of Henry Ford «Whatever you have, you must either use or lose» is still true today!