Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

The news should have spread around enough right now that starting from last tuesday, July 1st, I work as an Independent Information Technology Consultant. 

I left Ksolutions after almost 15 years: just saying that these years were formative to me is pure understatement. I was hired as a Junior Software Engineer at Alsoft, became later a Project Manager at Aleph, then I joined as an Associate of Alsoft and later of Aleph and became finally a Technical Director at Ksolutions. The names changed (Alsoft, Aleph, Ksolutions) but the company was the same (or sort of... from 2005 it was not really the same anymore...). From a technical perspective I really did a lot of different things (development, system administration, project management, quality assurance inspections, ISO9001 auditing, chief technical officer, R & D director, presale consultant, doing a bit of service management and marketing support when needed) and learned a great deal of stuff, mostly - as usual - from my own mistakes.

I'm really happy right now to move on but I'd like here to remember with a "TOP 3 list" the nicest moments in Ksol: there were lots to choose from but right now these are the things that bear the most particular meaning to me.

# 3: the first official "Company Dinner" in 1993, in Viareggio. 

The restaurant was small and cosy and opened just for us. There were Monica, Enrico, Jean-Claude, Emilio (Aleph/Ksol original associates), Silvia, Ilaria 1, Matteo, Ilaria 2 and I. My attire was not really professional to say the least: I was dressed - as usual - in black with an ultra-goth T-Shirt (with an exorcism in latin written on it...). I had my army jack-boots on and had long curly hair. I spent the whole evening pretending I could divine the future of those present through palm-reading. Despite all that (or probably because of that) they later on hired me full time!!!

# 2: working there on 1999.

I just joined the company as an associate, getting on board together with Marco and Davide. We were in the heydays of the Internet era and were working very hard. Things were very difficult but we had the feeling that together we could solve every problem. We were a tight and powerful team, a supernova of creative energies. Together we were not afraid of anything, and could deal face-to-face - with no fear at all - with super-big partners, suppliers and customers, from Gruppo Espresso to CNN US or Netscape Corporation.

# 1: going to India in 2000.

On those days the hype in the Information Technology industry was "outsourcing" to India. The group Ksol belonged (and still belongs) to sent my colleague Jean-Claude and I to Delhi just to evaluate the opportunities to collaborate with Indian companies. We spent there just a few days, basically a week-end where we roamed around Delhi and Agra, and two days of business meetings. From a mere working viewpoint this travel was totally pointless but as a personal experience visiting India was simply gorgeous! I just published on my Flickr account a few pictures I took there.

Now, enough with nostalgia... It's time to move on!

Python IDE: search no more!

I've always looked for a nice and modern IDE for Python. I used to do my hacking with BBEdit which is still my favourite text editor on Mac OS X but I looked for something a bit more sophisticated, with code completion and stuff. I initially gave a look at Eclipse with the PyDev plug-in but loading the IDE took forever (not to mention the amount of RAM and CPU consumed while working on it).

I finally found Komodo Edit which is the open source, slimmed down version of the Komodo IDE by ActiveState. I immediately liked it very much! It's not ultra fast and slim like a text editor but it's not even a hog for my machine. The only thing I really missed was a feature to see the list of functions in your code (which is included - of course - in the commercial version). Luckily there's a free plug-in called Source Tree which implements nicely this functionality.

Everything is free and runs smoothly. I haven't honestly tested for long but for my quick hacks is definitely a great thing.

Give a look to Komodo Edit at the Open Komodo site. 

An interesting PC Mag article

Should I stay (with Mac OS X) or should I go (with Linux)? Which will my next desktop and laptop OS be? 

You can't care less I fear (and you are right) but if you have similar doubts or simply are curious about it, just check this interesting PC Magazine (yes PC!) article: OS Wars: The Battle for Your Desktop.

Apple is really getting on my nerves...

It seems Apple is doing everything to get on nerves of its loyal supporters: just read this.

I wonder how intelligent could be moves like:

1. disallowing coders to install at free their applications on the iPhone. Just imagine you do a small hack for your personal use: you can't definitely deliver this kind of apps through the Apple Store.

2. blocking killer apps like Skype to work on the iPhone

3. blocking the porting of Java and of scripting languages on the iPhone (or at least making life terribly hard, also from a legal point of view, to those who want to try the port).

Considering also other annoying things that I noticed recently in the Cupertino company including:

- the inability to use the latest iPod Nano on my sister's Macbook where "only" Mac OS X 10.3.9 is installed (an upgrade to 10.4 for an old machine with a G4 400 Mhz and 256 Mb of RAM doesn't sound as an option). Since the iPod Nano works smoothly on Windows XP (an OS which was first introduced in 2001; Mac OS X 10.3.9 was released on October 2003) it seems there isn't any technical reason to disallow this but just a marketing strategy to force Mac users to upgrade.

- the insane price for the Mac Book Air

- in general, the insane price of Macs here in Italy, despite the strong value of Euro against US Dollar

- the supposed agreement with the Italian telco TIM/Telecom to sell the iPhone in Italy: just ask Italians why (like the "locking" on the iPhone wasn't annoying enough).

Not to mention my problems with the 10.5 upgrade I already blogged about.

I used to "bleed in six colors" (just google for that) but now I'm really asking myself for the first time if my next computer will be a Mac...

One step forward to openness for Microsoft?

If  you are into conspiracy theories you'll look for hidden purposes in this Microsoft press release. Probably there are many of them, but at the end I think this initiative from Redmond is a success for everybody in the IT industry, first of all for the open source communities.

I especially look forward to the implementations related to these two actions: "Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products" and "Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions". 

Specifically with the former I expect/hope to see in the near future a full compatibility with Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendaring client apps (Apple iCal to start with); the latter should ease the complete support of Office documents: much better than resort to reverse engineering each time.

Wait and see...

An interesting (yet "borderline") web site

For those into tech books this web site can be of great interest. Check it out!

P.S.: I really love "real books" so when I find something that I need and like I'm more than eager to buy it. That's the same with Music. So "services" like these can be of great usefulness to evaluate the quality of a book (like going to a Bookshop and give a look around to see if something is good or not). At the end, the old saying "Never judge a book from the cover" bears some truth...

Mac OS X 10.5.2: a quick glance and an update

Last friday I updated my Mac to the latest release 10.5.2. The update was 180 Mb in size, quite large but definitely smaller to the expected "monstrous" size according to the rumors (or at least the power PC update is not "this" big; maybe the Intel version is larger).

Apparently this release fixes a lot of bugs but besides some changes in the User Interface (the option to turn off the transparency in the menu bar, more options for Stacks) it didn't seem like a great change. Unfortunately it isn't still supported the possibility to use Network Shared Volumes in Time Machine which apparently was a feature that should be official in 10.5.2. Anyway I just checked the web for that and found in the very interesting Volker Weber's blog a suggestion that allows you to backup on "unsupported volumes" like Network Shares. No hope anyway to use a FAT-32 USB drive (it still requires an HFS+ disk in this case).

In my first weeks with 10.5 it seems that my Mac is a bit slower so I'm not this keen on upgrading my wife's Mac which is a bit older than mine (1 Ghz G4 with 512 Mb of RAM). In particular some applications seems to perform worse, especially Firefox, that's why I'm using more Safari these days, which by the way is improved dramatically with these latest releases. For example all Gmail features seem to work: there is a minor weird behavior here on the WYSIWYG interface of Blogger, that is, it seems you can't cut from another application & paste in the Blogger Post form (you should switch to the HTML interface, do the paste and get back to the WYSIWYG form) but definitely this is a small issue. Great job WebKit team!