Posts

Here we are, trying to think of a title for this post. A post about what the HELL happened to us in our first attempt to go home for Christmas 2010. The only thing we thought about is “The Shortest Christmas Holiday”. You will have to live with that! :) 10:20 - Early arrival at terminal and great weather Our friend Oz volunteered to bring us to Stansted Airport for our flight to Naples (what a lovely chap!). After 1 hour and 10 minutes, his little Panda brought us safe and sound to Stansted Airport. More than 2 hours in advance. ...

I’m sick home, but I can’t just sit in bed. It’s not how I work: I need to do something. So, I decided to give some love to Bloggart and put into proper code some features I already said I wanted to add. I just committed on my Bloggart fork quite a list of things: Support for JS and CSS ‘Minification’ (no obfuscation though) Support for JS and CSS ‘Templating’ (i.e. Being able to use App Engine Djiango Template grammar into JS and CSS files) Support for JS and CSS ‘Memcaching’ Show line numbers for ‘<pre>sourcecode</pre>’ areas in posts Even though this is simple stuff, two of them stand out I think: Minification and Templating. Why? Because even if those are not complex or new, they speed Bloggart up even more! Let me spend a couple of words on it, so that it can be useful for you, even if you are not planning to use Bloggart. ...

I have been thinking about a million posts to write, snippets of code to publish, CompSci problems to discuss. But I’m just really busy at work, and not finding the energy to publish anything worth more than a tweet. A pint for whoever gets why I putted this here Yes, Twitter. I do believe now that is what stops me from writing a post: sometimes thoughts are not worth more than a 140 characters. And the very nature of Twitter also pushes me to be as synthetic as possible. With the result that I don’t really post anything anymore. :-( ...

Last friday I have attended Full Frontal 2010, a one day JavaScript conference organised by Left Logic. This has been the second time the conference ran: the first was last year. Full Frontal 2010 It was a very inspiring and stimulating day, with a very very nice line of speakers, all coming from different, but yet connected, areas of the Front End Development scene. Left Logic is run by Remy Sharp, that made an very good job, together with his wife (sorry, I don’t recall her name right now), to organise, publicise and sell-out all the tickets, months before the conference. I guess next year the only problem for them will be to try to find a bigger venue: Duke of York’s Picturehouse in Brighton was a nice and cosy one, but the absence of decent WiFi connectivity, and the size of the cinema, will probably become a limit as this event gets more and more popular. ...

“X - Senza Titolo” - Il Film from Ivan De Marino on Vimeo. This video is something we were supposed to put together… 10 years ago! we were young, stupid, bored and lonely in a country-side city. The video is in Italian, unfortunately. But I’m sure you can have fun even not understanding the speech. :D This is a sort of “gift” to my friends and… to young me. Long gone. 10 anni fa, in una strana, calda, solitaria estate Pomi-Bruscianese, 3 fessi decisero di fare “Il Film”… invece eh asci’ e mettr eh man n’cul eh femmn… Senza copione, storia, mezzi, ma soprattutto senza TALENTO, questi 3 sfigati si armarono di telecamera, voglia di ridere e altri mezzi di fortuna. Il risultato è l’ABOMINIO INTELLETTUALE a cui avete appena assistito. Si, la storia si conclude qui: era cominciata senza senso, non vi aspettereste mica che lo acquisti nel durante. No? E poi questi 3 ormai vivono in 3 parti molto lontane del globo: l’unico modo per dar finalmente un senso a tutto questo, sarebbe convincerli a continuar l’opra. Dubitiamo ci sia qualcuno interessato a farglielo fare :) ...

Our lounge recently welcomed an Apple TV first generation. It’s a simple, slick, beautiful piece of hardware. It’s Intel-based, has good hardware specs and has all the necessary output ports that a modern media center should have. And can do 1080p because is powerful enough: the new one can’t. Very self explanatory I bought with one aim in mind: Boxee! This media center project is just super, and I wanted something to run it on. Initially I though about a Mac Mini, but figured out that was too expensive (even a 2nd hand one) to do “just” mediacenter. ...

I have been thinking of writing a post to “motivate” why this should have happened. My most tweeted rant is: Symbian is dead, long live S60 But today Nokia decided to do it out of the blue (not really). So now I just have to acknowledge that I’m late. :) What the heck am I talking about? Yes, I know, my ability to explain myself, sometimes, fails big time. But if you are here, I want to assume that you know who I’m and, more or less, where I come from. If you don’t, why the heck are you reading my intellectual blasphemy? Go home! ...

This post has been in my “TODO list” long enough. It’s time to put it in words. Let’s go! As you probably know, I decided to give up Wordpress.org in favour of Bloggart on App Engine. A great choice so far I must say. Migration, a proper one What I wanted to achieve My aim was to migrate more than 6 years of content (posts and comments) from my previous blog at detronizator.org into a bloggart installation. Why bloggart? Nick Johnson, the original author of Bloggart on Appengine, wrote a series of article on how to build a nice, little, smart blogging app on App Engine. At the same time, work on txty.mobi started to get more and more engaging, making me a lover (and advocate) of Google App Engine. Plus, I was interested in “starting from scratch”: Wordpress.org is a great project, but I just didn’t feel it “mine enough”. My blog must feel really mine: it’s about me after all. ...

My granma always used to say every time she was recompiling the Linux Kernel of her wash machine: Bash Scripting is GREAT! Be sure you learn it. One day will understand why it can make your life much easier. And she was right! I’m not an Bash expert, but when I spend that 10 minutes putting together that scripts that _makes that tedious task piece of cake, the satisfaction is as tick as a Mug of Coffee. ...

When I decided to migrate to this new blog I was confronted by a very important issue: how do I make sure that the (already modest) traffic going to http://www.detronizator.org/* would be redirected to this new URL? 301 Redirection I started searching and I found this article by Danny Tuppeny on how to use a Google App Engine application to do the trick. So, what I did was to take his code and started putting it in place for me at http://redirector.ivandemarino.me. But because I’m a Software Developer that likes to make elegant stuff, I noticed that quite few things were missing: ...