October this year, while I was in the process of changing job, I started working on an open source project to monitor Kafka consumer lag. At New Relic, a previous gig, we used a lot of Kafka, and we cared equally about monitoring its usage: there are some great articles on New Relic own blogs, published over the years. In ... read more

Gimme the TL;DR A new Terraform provider is available, designed to interact with ZooKeeper ZNodes: TFZK. The latest stable version is v1.0.3, and you should give it a go. Ah! And here is the doc. OK, I got more time - go ahead! Earlier this year I decided to scratch a long-standing itch: build a Terraform Provider for Apache ZooKeeper. ... read more

Yet another take on expensive housing. I’m not sure I fully agree with the idea that poor aesthetic (actually, ugliness) has a dominating role in the pricing bubble. I still believe the the biggest issue is with political choices, that most probably are driven by lobbist interests. Nevertheless this video is an interesting and watch-worth perspective. After watching this video ... read more

Britain, you have a problem: house prices in the East/South East have grown ridiculous. See 2014 house pricing data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that compares prices with the pre-crisis ones. +31.6!?!?!?! We all know that UK is very much London centered, and this is reflected in the graph above. The government doesn’t shy away from policy that ... read more

Moses didn’t know what to do any more with those idiots. So he decides to go out for a wander. The pressure was too much. He knew that, sooner or later, they will just crash his skull with a stone. He needed a plan. He needed a way to survive (both him and them!), without ruining it all. Without having ... read more

tl;dr; Latest stable release of PhantomJS is 1.9.7, and you should probably go and download it. It contains GhostDriver 1.1.0 “Banquo”, and that’s it. 1.9.6, released not more than 2 weeks ago (1 week?), was a coordination went wrong and I take part of the responsibility for it. Just discard that release. What’s the long story? So, for a few ... read more

It’s long overdue. Last time I have cut a release of GhostDriver (1.0.4) was… July 2013. And blogged about it only in August!!! I gotta take a look at my GitHub commits over the 2013: something tells me that year-in-commits nicely overlaps with my eventful 2013. But let’s try to stay on topic. So, GhostDriver 1.1.0, codename “Banquo”. This time ... read more

It was 10 years ago. A night just like this one. Winter. Everyone in the house was asleep. Well, Leonardo isn’t really sleeping right now but you get the idea. I was alone in the kitchen. Alone with the TV, an .avi file and an .srt file. I had just started watching movies in foreign language and during the week ... read more

Puff, Pant! THAT was not easy! But finally, “normality” seems not too far away. Many things have happened in the recent months: we got married; I helped my lovely wife with the pregnancy (well, she did all the hard work); and, on the 7th of November, we have became parents of this beauty: Leonardo Antonio DE MARINO-SIMOLA Now, we have ... read more

Yes, I’m not blogging enough. Yes, it’s a shame that the world can’t read my terrible English on a more regular basis. Yes, I’m lazy. Well, here is a quick update for the few eager souls I have let down. GhostDriver I have release GhostDriver 1.0.4 - “Arghan Div”. It should be released in the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9.2. The code ... read more