It passes
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scratches
I want my money back! :)
A few days ago, Slashdot pointed out that the massive computers of the top investment banks failed their World Cup predictions: we are talking about firms like Danske Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and UBS. Now everyone on Earth knows that an octopus correctly predicted six eight matches in a row. Hire that beast or [...]
Time Lapse Across America
Counting out a well known 3D science fiction movie, though it’s 9 minutes in length, Time Lapse Across America is the most interesting film I’ve seen in the just ended first half of 2010: it’s a coast to coast trip made with pictures taken every 15 seconds. It might recall your last trip in the [...]
Caring about what?
I spent most of the last two days helping my mother after her cataract surgery so only yesterday evening I noticed the statement of our friend Carl-Henric Svanberg: as everyboby knows, he said that “We (BP) care about the small people”. Was it just a weak sentence of a non mother-tongue speaker? Perhaps, but even [...]
Drown
My doubts are gone and it’s clear to me that I’ve got a problem with violence and, more generally, with strong emotions: I’m not sure if the recent birth of my son is connected to it, still it’s a few months that I haven’t been able to watch movies anymore (how could I find a [...]
Alice and Gutenberg
I’ve just read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg and printed it on a few sheets: perhaps it’s the cheapest way to get such a classic of the English literature, plenty of puns of all sorts, indeed! Give Project Gutenberg a try.
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
This is my 15th year in ICT business: still, I have many, perhaps too many, things to learn. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is a book that collects words of wisdom from experts of our field and reading their experiences brings to my mind quite a number of past working events. Complexity, hard work [...]
Blind Poet
I’ve never read Ferlinghetti‘s recent poems before: my knowledge of his work was limited to a few writings collected in a well known anthology edited by Fernanda Pivano during the 60′s. His understanding of growth surprised me even more than his mastery as a poet; then, having read “Blind Poet” (translated with English text on [...]
Long term growing languages
While last month TIOBE elected Go “language of the year for 2009″, I noticed that, according to their data, only the following languages of the top ten have a positive trend in the long period (2002 – 2009): PHP; C#; Python; JavaScript.
Writing, 22 years ago
Last December, Andreas asked the following question: Were computers part of your childhood? When I was 15 or 16, I wrote a few science fiction short stories, printed by a small book publisher. It was 1988/89 and the web didn’t exist then: I used to write by hand or with a mechanical typewriter. :) Having [...]
Spreading Kiva
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: [...]