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 I had stumbled upon Old Boy. I wasn’t really in the mode of staying up late, but something made me. ...
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 to slowly learn to live our new life together: while we learn how to be parents, Leonardo will be learning how to be a baby. What now looks like a difficult, consuming and intense task (ask me how much we sleep at night!), will at some point become “daily routine”. A sweeter routine with Leo at the center of it all! ...
This message is for the few souls that care. This is for the few people that maybe are waiting for me to fix/implement stuff on GhostDriver or PhantomJS (for the latter you have coverage, as the team on that is rich of geniuses - so you won’t miss my average-hood). I’m getting married (crazy, right?) and will be mostly off-line. I should be back from the second week of April. Surely there will be the usual casual-tweet but nothing major. ...
It’s widely spread opinion that at some point of our career we, software people, should start giving speeches and talks. I’m firmly convinced that THAT is not for me, and I want to carve my ears out of my head every time I hear my heavily-accented-english, mixed with my ability to cut words and make the message come across barely understandable. But, this presentation was really important to me: I presented my-work-so-far on building a PhantomJS WebDriver. I call it GhostDriver (provisional name). ...
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: ...
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). ...
Think about it. We are still paying the consequences of Windows. The User Interaction and User Experience expected by most of the normal people are widely based upon Microsoft Window’s own (ehm…) patterns. The bad design and usability choices that are at the very base of that software (from version 1 up to latest 7), shaped how contemporary users expect to interact with their personal computer. How they should do things. What are the predictable consequences of their actions. ...
I’m impressed. Today a lot of important things just happened, and I think it’s work putting them down. Tahrir Square pushes Hosni Mubarak down After what he said yesterday night, I was not expecting this to happen so soon. Mubarak stepped down! In addition of being a great news for all my friends that are directly or indirectly related to Egypt, this is an INCREDIBLE news for something I tagged as “lost”: hope. ...
This video is great! Yes, quality wise is quite poor, it looks like the first movies from Pixar. But it’s quite amusing and “teasing”. Take a second to watch it: Definitely, Motorola is looking better and better at every new product (even though their market share is still ridiculously small). This video, with the whole set of products presented at CES 2011, like Atrix 4G and Xoom, is sign that they are ready to fight and fight hard. ...
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. :-( ...