Posts

In the past few weeks/months an interesting trend started: game producers want to bring back to life genera that have come and gone. The most famous (has been on the tech-news channels for weeks) is Double Fine Adventure, the same people that have crafted incredible games that have colored my (our?) past: Double Fine Productions Founded in 2000 by industry veteran Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango), the San Francisco-based company has established itself as a unique creative force with critically-acclaimed titles such as Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, Once Upon a Monster, and Double Fine Happy Action Theater. This year, you’ll be given a front-row seat as they revisit Tim’s design roots and create a brand-new, downloadable “Point-and-Click” graphic adventure game for the modern age. ...

I have been spending a lot of time on PhantomJS in the last couple of months. But feels like I could have done much more: there are so many interesting issues to work on in the official tracker. ** Hey, why don’t you give us a hand? :) ** Some English expressions still puzzle me… Here is where my stake is. REPL I just finished putting down a new wiki page that explains a bit about the REPL and how it works. Give it a read and let me know if you want more clarification. ...

After 2 months of on-off working on this, I finally managed to make something I’m happy with: a REPL for PhantomJS. The last post I wrote about this was in November 2011 (!!!). But I started putting code together only in Jan 2012. So, overall, from the first commit until today is almost 2 months. First thing first: how do you get to try it? Well, you can get my fork, switch to the dev-repl branch and try it out: ...

Articles like this one and initiatives like “pre-fix the Web”, aim to highlight to web-developers how important is to build a cross-browser web. The importance of such a point has been explained in so many places, there is no point in me saying anymore. People like Tim Huegdon can give you a far better lesson on this. But if you are after a “one sentence to blame them all”: If you write a website caring only to test it on WebKit based browser (worse, only your iPhone!!!), you are a MORON. ...

Last week I started implementing W3C Sockets API into a Rhino based JavaScript runtime. It seems like plumbing API from one environment to another is one of the activity I do the most. And if you dare doing a joke about my Italian-ness and Super Mario… you will be pointed in the direction of the door. Here I want to share a couple of findings. Rhino is not bad at all Yes, I said it. And who has worked in the past with me, knows how my opinion are hard to change. But they do sometimes, fortunately. ...

As a guy that tries to live his professional life in the middle of the dichotomy “C/C++ - JavaScript”, I often find myself discussing the discrepancies, differences and implementation details of the latter (an half-assed prototypal language) using the former. The other day I was chatting with Luca (@lucabox) about scope in JS, and we were describing the different situations you can end up with… and how we work our way out of those culprits. ...

In 2006 I decide that I wanted to leave my home country. I wanted to try hard and make some space for me in the world (well, the tech-world). I was really tired of being paid fuck all, dealing with a country driven by old-and-hard-to-die politicians, not seeing any foreseeable future in front of me. I made a decision, and I started working towards my leaving (I finishing uni, so this required a bit of planning). ...

I have been thinking about what to write in this post since the day I took the final exam of the Stanford Online AI Class. I have so many things to say (and still to do), that I have a mess of mixed thoughts in my head. So, I apologise in advance if thoughts will sound a bit random. Amazing experience That’s what this class has been for me. I have learnt tons of new things, all thanks to the great work of prof. Thrun and Norvig. I digged into the amazing topic of Artificial Intelligence, and now I feel a bit more “round” as a Computer Scientist. ...

I borrowed the title from a guy who kickstarted all of this. Thanks Ariya ;) I’m leaving Betfair. I owe a lot to this company: for a bit longer than a year I have had the pleasure to work with smart, enlightened, knowledgeable people from which I learned loads. Leaving was definitely not an easy choice. The only thing didn’t happen, is that I didn’t become a proper punter: I just learned that even something sounding “boring” as betting on sports, can actually be a very big challenge in terms of the technologies involved. Even more, if you try to do it in the Betfair way: with million of customers, all constantly hammering the servers to make the most out of their money. ...

I decide that is very little point in keep writing posts just to highlight new notes, as I finish to write them. So, I decide to just share with the world all my notes about the ai-class. You will find them in (sort of) chronological order, and will give also an idea on how I studied so far (as every material I produced is in there). About the homework, I’ll make sure NOT TO PUBLISH THEM BEFORE the respective deadline: I don’t want to break the Stanford Honor Code. ...