By Carlo on 2010-02-02
Using the common “business as usual” models, someone might say that the global systemic crisis hit me too: well, I can still help people. :) A friend of mine invited me to join Kiva which is a very useful and interesting mashup website.
I’ve just loaned a few Euros to a small farmer in Bolivia: an easy way to make my day, indeed! :)
Posted in English | Tagged human, scratches
By Carlo on 2010-01-18
Jacopo Corso, cercando la ISO della knopILS (ormai da tempo non più disponibile sul server FTP di ILS) mi scrive che
Nel forum di Ubuntu, molti vorrebbero provare la Sua distribuzione, anche se relativamente vecchia.
Non frequento il forum di Ubuntu e quindi non lo sapevo: queste richieste, a così tanti anni dalla fine del progetto, mi stupiscono sempre molto facendomi altrettanto piacere.
Ho quindi riportato online, dal mio archivio privato, l’ultima ISO (la 0.8): è di circa cinque anni fa, il supporto non c’è più e ripeto tutti le avvertenze del caso. :)
È possibile scaricarla su Wuala.
Posted in Italiano | Tagged free software, ILS, knopILS
By Carlo on 2010-01-07
(English)
I’m happy to announce that my son, Vittorio, was born on 2010-01-07 at 15:18 CET.
While he and his mother are doing well, I think I’ve finally found a good reason to live. :)
(Italiano)
Sono lieto di annunciare che mio figlio, Vittorio, è nato il 2010-01-07 alle 15:18 CET.
Mentre sia lui che sua madre stanno bene, io penso di aver finalmente trovato una buona ragione per vivere. :)

Posted in English, Italiano
By Carlo on 2010-01-04
It seems someone has estimated that half of the world’s languages will disappear in the next fifty years: “fifty percent in fifty years” sounds suspect to me.
As I heard from a British professor, we could see this phenomenon either as the triumph of the unimportant language spoken on an island close to the the shore of Europe (which ended ruling the world) or like a global biodiversity disaster.
However you prefer to see it, there is something I’d like to suggest which is hiding on the title of this post: I would have used “farewell” rather than a word like “requiem”, coming from an already dead language. :)
Posted in English | Tagged English, languages
By Carlo on 2009-12-15
Si deve essere diffusa la notizia, tra le varie ONLUS italiane, che ho la lacrima e il portafoglio facile, sopratutto quest’anno. :) Con l’approssimarsi di quel giorno, mi arrivano parecchie richieste di versamenti con bollettino postale: tra le varie, c’era anche Amnesty Italia, alla quale ero iscritto negli anni ‘90 e che, per motivi sui quali qui sorvolerò, ho evitato di finanziare.
Le altre associazioni che ho invece sostenuto con i “classici” 30 Euro sono:
A parte NTC che è un po’ diversa dalle altre, mi piacerebbe che facessero anche un discorso sistemico ogni tanto ma non arrivo nemmeno a sperarlo realmente (anch’io poi navigo in grosse incoerenze, sia chiaro).
Posted in Italiano
By Carlo on 2009-12-10
This is just a short reminder for me and a note for you on how to write a valid XHTML strict snippet to insert a YouTube video.
<p>
<object id="video_o" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/JaJbDln7oGA" width="560" height="340">
<param id="video_p" name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JaJbDln7oGA" /><img src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JaJbDln7oGA" width="560" height="340" alt="titolo_video" />
</object>
</p>
Posted in English | Tagged XHTML
By Carlo on 2009-12-04
I’ve bought a Iomega Storcenter ix2 which should be a 1 TB NAS and even though it offers a good list of features, I’m sorry to say that I’m quite disappointed with it.
- In the previous sentence, I wrote “should be” rather than “is” because its interface shows a warning like “second disk missing” so it lets me use just 500 MB (no second disk, no RAID): I still haven’t opened it so the second disk might be there but in this case I couldn’t understand the reason to show such a message;
- another disappointing message is something like “no UPS, no low power mode”: it’s displayed even though I connected it to a real UPS (I don’t know what it needs to recognize that it is powered through a UPS: a USB link, perhaps?);
- on its website, it was stated that it is able to “copy or backup files to and from (…) any other NAS” but I wasn’t able to program it for this task: it can backup and sync even on schedule from NAS to NAS but only saving and running the task from a PC.
A QNAP TS-219P might have been a better choice (a little more expensive, though).
Posted in English
By Carlo on 2009-12-01
(This should be a crosspost written with Massimiliano)
It seems that MarkerClusterer has a bug, fixed with this patch (*) written by Massimiliano while we were hunting together for it on this application (now working fine): after the ajax submit and zooming out, the library was still displaying old clusters and markers, because, after destroying MarkerClusterer, the event assigned to GEvent wasn’t correctly removed.
(*) the patch is created against the r1159 version on gmaps-utility-library-dev.
Posted in English | Tagged Google maps, javascript, trivial hacks
By Carlo on 2009-11-16
Often I have to use my Huawei E176 (which I previously described) inside an area not so well covered by HSDPA signal: in order to increase the bandwith I can use, I bought a 5 dBi GPRS/UMTS antenna.

Does it work well? Answering is measuring. :)
Thanks to the very good list of AT commands written by Fredrik Lindberg, I was able to determine the power increase of the received signal: passing a simple AT+CSQ to my modem through Minicom, I got a number in the RSSI scale.
The sequence to convert it to Watt is:
dBm = (RSSI * 2) - 113
W = (10 ^ (x / 10)) / 1000
For example, without the antenna, one of the RSSI values I got with AT commands was 3.99, while with the antenna it increased to 8.99, so:
3.99 RSSI => -105,02 dBm => 3.14 * 10 ^ -14 W
8.99 RSSI => - 95,02 dBm => 3.14 * 10 ^ -13 W
The power of the signal received by the system with the antenna was ten times greater than without it.
Posted in English | Tagged free software, HSDPA
By Carlo on 2009-11-10
Pare che fino a pochi secoli fa, la Pianura Padana equivalesse a circa un terzo della terra fertile afferente al Mediterraneo: non sono in grado di riportare un riferimento bibliografico ma non mi sembra un dato inverosimile.

Potrei aggiungere molte cose ma sarebbero meno importanti delle seguenti azioni minime:
Posted in Italiano | Tagged Fai notizia, italiana, Rientrodolce