Blog

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 has been merged already into PhantomJS master branch so, if you are really keen on putting your hands on it, just do a ./build.sh of that branch. ...

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. ...

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. ...

A lot is changing in my life. I’m getting older, I’m getting wiser, I’m getting “stupider” (like it was even possible :-P ). New Job Last Friday (3rd of Sep 2010) I left Orange Labs UK. After 2 years and 2 months, my work at this the UK branch of France Telecom R&D is over. I have been involved in a number of projects with various degrees of commitment: some full time, some to land a hand, some to just criticise and make fun of colleagues (just kidding: it was more like trying to shutdown wasteful project branching and focusing on the good targets :-P ). ...

1 $ echo "Hello World!" This is my first post from a whole new backend. Yes, I’m leaving the underperforming and unreliable Bluehost Hosting for a scalable, distributed, load-balanced, reliable, powerful platform. I’m going Google. I’m moving to App Engine. To make App Engine serve my purpose, I picked a small, cute, interesting project to do the job: Bloggart, made by brilliant Arachnid (Nick Johnson). The old posts you ask? Yes, I’m working on a strategy for that. Most probably will work a bit on Bloggart to welcome my Wordpress’s data, and use the App Engine Bulk Loader. Of course, there will be quite few bumps on the way: Bloggart is not Wordpress. I’m sure there will be tons of features that will be left out. But Bloggart and App Engine suite my primary purpose: Speeeeeed. In fact, I recommend you take a good look at this series of article on Nick’s blog where he goes step-by-step through the development of his project: really cool stuff. ...

Last episode of the latest “Passate Parola” episode of the great Marco Travaglio. I wish it was in English: it would simplify a lot the life of who would like to understand the “Berlusconi’s Story”. There are Italian subtitles though: it could be useful for someone that is able to read Italian at lease.

I just wrote a comment to an article I read on the Symbian Foundation blog: "Improving the developer experience", by David Wood. I think it’s worth replicating it here: detronizator Says: May 18, 2009 at 9:58 AM @Mark Burton: I had EXACTLY the same experience. It was like jumping back to the “future” of software development and see that IT’S NOT MANDATORY to have to deal with ANCIENT C++ to write software for mobile. More funny: it’s all based on Open Source/Open Standard technologies, like gdb and qemu!!! @wtr1: Did you ever see Android running on the Emulator (because that’s what it is: WINSCW is a SIMULATOR)? And Symbian itself? I did when I was there. A guy started working on Symbian for QEMU, achieving to start th OS in a 10th of the time, if not less. Even faster than ANDROID to boot!!! But at that time people took me as a fool for supporting this guy so strongly… Seriously: WINSCW is “theoretically” faster but so badly written that it’s actually slower. @David Wood: I basically agree with you, but to say that “there isn’t such a Symbian controlled by manufacturers”, it’s what I’ll call “more than just a personal and partial opinion”. The control and the “steering” of THE manufacturer (who said “Nokia?”) was in every step that was taken in Symbian. And that was absolutely “correct”: after all Nokia owned the most of it. Now you are “step by step” trying to change this. But the problems you are dealing today are heritage of a “not so far past”. And, as you said yourself, “it’s not going to change overnight”. A last thought: I’m realizing that the most of those posts are focused on discussing the “technical philosophy”, “political moves”, “current market”, “business model” of Symbian but… are we ever actually going to discuss technical and more interesting stuff? And, bear in mind, this is not a critic to the audience here, neither to the bloggers (who always arise good, important and interesting points): my critic is to make people realize that the problems of this Platform are so “deep in developers soul” and “frustrating for beeing so old complex”, that the main discuss driver is always away from the technical stuff. For example: what about “common mistakes made by C++ developers and how symbian address and solve them” or “how to build a Client-Server architecture in 5 minutes” or “how to optimize performance of a UI-intensive application” or “how to generate JSON files in your web-based S60 app”… and I could say more. Developers, at least of my age, want code, snippets, smart patterns and so on… My 5 cents. PS Please, bear in mind that WINSCW is a “SIMULATOR”, while QEMU is an “EMULATOR”, like the ARM one that Nokia preferred to QEMU… and we are still waiting here! :P PPS At least this is the definition you can find on books from Tanenbaum or Sterling. ...

A dear friend of mine made me think about what I wrote in this previous post about the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Christmas Speech. I’m sure that, who follows regularly my blog, knows, or at least has an idea, of what are my Political beliefs. But, just for the sake of being sure that no one gets insulted, I’d like to specify few simple facts: * I don't hate the American People, I actually like them very much * One of my oldest, but not doable, desires is to get a Master in USA * I hate the America's Politicians and their decisions of the last years * I think it's fault of those politicians if the World has now as major fear "Terrorism": they needed it to make more money out of the status of perpetuals fear * I don't hate Jews and I believe that a big part of the Israeli People are against the War * I believe that Israeli politicians are nothing but just controlled puppets in the hands of America's Politicians, who tries to get more and more control over the Middle-East through Israel * I believe Israel creation is a crime made by the British, despite the world was just going out of a terrible war: the lesson was never really learnt * I believe Jews that lives in Israel are, for the majority, not involved in the "willing" of doing any war against any race: most probably Muslims and Israeli would live in peace easliy if they were not ruled by criminals * I do have [hope](http://www.detronizator.org/2008/11/05/while-we-will-be-sleeping/) in [Obama](http://www.detronizator.org/2008/11/05/the-butterfly-effect/): I hope this man can, leap after leap, bring USA to a change Hope this clarify my position: the only people that should get upset for what I say are too powerful to care about me…

Yes, I did it. Finally. It was on my todo-list since last year and I decided, in this moment of confusion and 100 things to do, to update. Why? Because Wordpress 2.7 was released recently, and I decided that I was “late enough”. Codename of this release? “Coltrane”! Yes, like [en:John Coltrane] ;-) . Update: And this update comes from my iPhone! I can finally use the WordPress app.

About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog. Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO? ...