Iron Man, the movie

In questi ultimi anni abbiamo visto un numero sempre maggiore di film tratti da fumetti noti e meno noti. Alcuni ben riusciti (Batman begins, Daredevil, Sin City, 300, etc.) altri che e' meglio dimenticare (Punisher, Superman..). Ecco ora una new entry: Iron Man, l'eroe piu' tecnologico della Marvel. Ho letto le storie a fumetti di Iron Man con emozioni contrastanti, benche' il personaggio mi piacesse, l'idea del personaggio, la sua realizzazione, salvo pochi casi, mi ha sempre lasciato molto... freddo. Speriamo ora nel film, il trailer promette molto bene! E' gia nella mia lista di film da vedere!

Safari 3.0.2 for windows.. At long last!!

At the WWDC 07 Apple announced that it would the Browser-Wars proposing its own Safari web-browser on Windows too.I think that a new player in the field can be a good thing and push the market in a new direction. Well, I was so excited and curious that I downloaded Safari for Windows as soon as the Apple servers were ready to deliver it. Imagine my disappointment when I tried to use the webpages I visit every day and.. nothing was working as it was expected. GMail, blogspot, Libero, etc. all of this pages had big font rendering problems due to some issue with international OS version (I'm using Windows XP in Italian). On another machine I got XP in English and there Safari was working better.
Today I read the Safari 3.0.2 has beee released, so, a quick run of "Apple Software Update" and here it is my new shining Safari installation. Let's try GMail.. works! Blogspot: perfect! So, Kudos to the Apple team (and to all the people involved in WebKit and khtml) for the good work. I'm looking forward the possibility to make Safari my new default web-browser.
Anyway, does somebody know about embedding scenarios for WebKit on Windows? I'd be interested in incorporating WebKit in a C# application....
Anyway, go to www.apple.com/safari and give it a try!

La TV del futuro.. e non solo

Ho "trovato" questo filmato in rete, che parla di una nuova tecnologia per una sorta di "realta' virtuale". Sara' deformazione professionale dovuta ad alcune mie esperienze passate, ma per me e' impossibile non pensare alle applicazioni in spettacoli TV, programmi per bambini (e non solo), live shows, etc. Guardatevi il filmato, in alcune parti e' impossibile trattenere uno "WOW"!
Total Immersion Technology

Pasquetta 2007

Con un bel po' di ritardo ho aggiunto al blog le foto della fantastica Pasquetta passata dal nostro amico Augusto: ha avuto la grande idea di chiudere il suo ristorante (La Bruschetta, a Tronzano.. andateci, ne vale assolutamente la pena!) e di invitare "pochi" intimi (40 persone :-) )per un pranzo all'aperto. Lui e sua moglie Daniela han fatto da supervisori (e non solo) perche' ogni cosa fosse ottima come al solito e la festa e' stata un successo! Dopo una mangiata cosi', complice il bel tempo e l'alcol in corpo, cosa c'e' di meglio di dimenarsi un po' al ritmo di balli latino-americani? Ho anche un compromettente filmato del sottoscritto che prova a ballare... ma credo che lo nascondero' in qualche posto remoto che nessuno possa mai vedere :-)
Comunque, anche se fino a qui ho lodato, come al solito, la cucina, l'ingrediente principale e' stata la buona compagnia!
P.S. Ho anche aggiunto qualche foto alla galleria di Pedro :-)

A new player in RIA

Yesterday Microsoft announced their new proposal in the "RIA space": Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E). You can read more about it here (Tim Sneath blog). Having worked a lot with WPF and a bit with Flash and HTML I'd say that it is really good news to have a new standard (it will work on Mac OS X too) to create rich graphics/applications on the web (or desktop): with Flash it was rather difficult to generate from a custom application a SWF file (ok there are tools to do it, but..) while with Silverlight you are jsut manipulating XML. I cannot wait to see what people will come up to using this new tool. And, given what Tim Sneath says in his blog, we still did not see everything!
Update:
The reply from Adobe. Well.. what to say, it is not a technical problem but rather a "political" one: let's see.

E nevica...

22 Marzo, secondo giorno di Primavera e.... Zurigo e' coperta di neve! e non poca, per giunta.
Ha continuato a nevicare per 3 giorni, anche se non era mai molta, e ora, per prepararci ad un bel fine settimana, ci siam svegliati con uno spesso strato di neve a ricoprire tutto.
Provate a guardare questo link: http://www.musee-suisse.ch:16080/livecam/ e' una telecamera posizionata sul Landes museum, giusto dietro la stazione principale.
Ecco, comunque, per i posteri una foto della vista di cui si puo' "godere" ora:

XUL Explorer 0.3

Mark Finkle released a new version ( 0.3 )of his XUL Explorer. New features include a tabbed editor and the integration of XUL Validator. Go and grab it here.

Komodo Edit

Wow, I've found a new editor! Ok, there are tons of text/programmers editors out there, but since I left my dear old Mac-world and the beloved BBEdit, I never really felt at home with text editors on Windows. By now my favourite is SciTE and it is my favourite editor that I install on every windows-box I use. SciTE is very small, flexible, it has syntax coloring, handle multiple open files and so on, but it cannot handle projects unless you use some external tool. I usually work with Visual Studio 2005 and I love its features (syntax highlighting, hints, tab completion, etc. etc): so working in XULRunner with a bare bones text editor was a bit hard and not so pleasant. Today I've stumbled upon Komodo Edit by ActiveState. I always appreciated the hard work on ActiveState in making ActivePython, one of the best Python distribution, at least on Windows, some useful extensions packed as defaults, good and extensive on line help, well a really nice working environment. Now they are releasing this Komodo Edit for free: it is an advanced code editor with syntax highlighting, editing tips, project management features, etc.
What bought me, despite the big sized download, it is that there are hints when you edit XUL files! Hitting space after a XUL tag (button. description, etc.) makes a nice popup appear with the list of possible attributes! For me it is a killer feature that will save many "trips" to the XUL reference! I appreciate the same feature in Visual Studio and I can tell you that it is a great time saver (it helps avoiding misspellings) and it is really useful when you are just learning a new language or environment because it makes exploring easier.
Furthermore Komodo Edit uses Mozilla as a platform, making it a nice tool to use.
So, download it and give it a try.

I Milanesi ammazzano al sabato - parte 2

Rieccomi qua. Ho terminato il breve libro di Scerbanenco e.. che dire? Mi è piaciuto? Si e no. La storia "si lascia leggere" e scorre bene, ma mi urta il modo di descrivere dell'autore: ogni volta che parla di un delitto, di un episodio efferato, indulge in mille particolari, sceglie aggettivi e immagini che lo rendano ancora più pietoso. Non lascia nulla all'immaginazione del lettore o alla sua sensibilità, ma, un po' come i telegiornali di oggi, espone i particolari più raccapriccianti e lacrimosi, solletica la macabra curiosità del lettore. Sicuramente, però, il libro contiene molti spunti di discussione e accuse alla società contemporanea, ci ricorda cosa esiste fuori dalla porta di casa, un mondo parallelo che molti di noi hanno la fortuna di non incrociare mai. In definitiva si tratta di un buon libro ma non è adatto agli animi sensibili. Vi ho trovato un'altra frase che mi è piaciuta e che può dare un'idea dei contenuti del romanzo :

Perchè i criminali non sono mai intelligenti. La delinquenza è una forma di sordida e pericolosa idiozia, nessuna persona, appena appena intelligente fa il ladro, il rapinatore, l'assassino.

Questa frase mi ha ricordato un po' il personaggio di Batman, il giustiziere dei fumetti che si traveste da pipistrello perchè "i criminali sono gente stupida e superstiziosa". La stessa frase da un'idea anche del tipo di personaggi che si trovano nel romanzo: scordatevi il criminale affascinante e carismatico, il fuorilegge che è anche uomo d'onore, no, qui i criminali sono esseri umani corrotti, che hanno abbandonato ogni decenza e si sono dannati irrimediabilmente l'anima, carogne che banchettano sui vizi e sono incapaci di sperimentare altro che corruzione e violenza.

I Milanesi ammazzano al sabato

"I Milanesi ammazzano al sabato" è il titolo del libro di Giorgio Scerbanenco che sto leggendo ultimamente. La storia è molto cupa e, a tratti, mi son ritrovato a dover richiudere il libro per riprendere la lettura più tardi: il tema trattato è molto pesante e triste e devo veramente "assumerlo in pillole". Con l'età starò diventando troppo sensibile?
Questo libro mi è stato prestato da un mio amico, Angelo, e vi ho trovato una frase sottolineata, che è molto simpatica:

"... Duca guardò con piacere Livia che faceva una vendemmia di brioches nel suo cappuccino, pensò che le donne che non hanno paura di mangiare sono le migliori donne."

Beh, come dargli torto? ;-)
Per ora sono arrivato solo a pagina 74, altri commenti quando raggiungerò l'agognato finale (temo, però, che non ci sarà un bel "e vissero felici e contenti" :-( )!

Gates vs Jobs!

Fantastic. Listen to the words of the Old Sage C64 at the end!
The author seems to imply that the Mac Finder has too many "Bells & Whistles".. but did he see the new Vista ;-) ?

Cool Cat!

My brother just sent me this nice video on YouTube.com:

Really nice! :-)

Fantastic XUL Blog

Now I'm surfing the web in order to find interesting stuff about XUL. Here is one of the best blogs I've found so far: Mark Finkle's Weblog. It is packed with interesting examples, ideas and software. I'm thrilled to find a tool like XUL Explorer. I did not have time to play with hit extensively, but I already think that it will be really really useful :-)

Rapid Application Development With Mozilla

This is a book stuffed with useful information about XUL, RDF, JavaScript, XPCOM. You can download it all from here. I'm just browsing through its pages and I think that it is not really the right book for an introduction to beginners: it speaks about too much stuff already at the beginning (CSS, W3C standards, etc.), it shows the differences between XUL and HTML approach in styles.. to much stuff at once, I was lost! For a gentler introduction maybe it is better to go to the XUL Tutorial on XULPlanet. Really extensive.

By the way, I'm not saying that RAD with Mozilla is a bad book, just that it is not what I needed right now! Maybe in the future I'll appreciate it more.

SimpleXULApp

In this post I will introduce the simplest possible XULRunner application. I tried to run some of the other tutorial I have found on the web and, for one reasons or another I was not able to do it. Maybe they were a bit outdated. This SimpleXULApp will run on XULRunner 1.9a3 and 1.8.0.4: these are the two versions I tried.

• Download a copy of XULRunner from here.
• Download SimpleXULApp.
• On Windows I extracted XULRunner in a folder and added that folder to the PATH variable.
• Extract SimpleXULApp in another folder.
• Open a DOS Window and type XULRunner -register-global
• cd into the SimpleXULApp folder .
• type XULRunner application.ini -jsconsole
• Actually you do not need the "-js-console" but it comes handy because it shows the Javascript console where you can dump messages.

What's inside the archive?

Well it is really the bare minimum that you need to open a window. First of all it is important to notice the folders structure:

• SimpleXULApp
• SimpleXULApp\chrome
• SimpleXULApp\chrome\content
• SimpleXULApp\defaults
• SimpleXULApp\defaults\preferences

inside these folders we got:

• SimpleXULApp\application.ini
• SimpleXULApp\chrome\chrome.manifest
• SimpleXULApp\chrome\content\main.xul
• SimpleXULApp\defaults\preferences\SimpleXULApp.js

application.ini

It is a simple file that identifies our application:

[App]
Name=SimpleXULApp
Version=1.0
Vendor=TrickySoft
BuildID=20070213

[Gecko]
MinVersion=1.8
MaxVersion=1.9

There is not much to say, just that I put the strictly necessary tags. It is interesting to note the MinVersion and MaxVersion tags in the the [Gecko] section: XULRunner checks them in order to see if the application can run with the current runtime version.

chrome.manifest

By now, for me, its content is a simple act of faith:

content SimpleXULApp file:content/

It has something to do with telling XULRunner where to look for content.

SimpleXULApp.js

Here too it is still a leap of faith:-)

pref("general.startup.SimpleXULApp",true);
pref("toolkit.defaultChromeURI", "chrome://SimpleXULApp/content/main.xul");

It indicates somehow where to start from, i.e. the main.xul

And main.xul? well I did not forget about that, it is the main piece here, but.. that is XUL, so let's introduce it another time. Today I just wanted to introduce the bare minimum needed to start with XULRunner and what made it work for me.

XULRunner

I (re)discovered XULRunner! What prompted me in doing that was learning that SQLite is now part of the platform (mozStorage). For me it means that now I can easily (or, at least, I hope it will be easy) build small databases that sometimes I'm required to do. So here it begins my adventure with XULRunner. The first problem I found was that I could not make even a simple "Hello World" application work. At the end, looking at several tutorials on the web and peeking into xulmine, I was able to do it. Expect, therefore, more posts about this experience.

A couple of interesting Python links

I've been a Python programmer for a long time, even if recently I really did not have the chance to use it. Anyway I always keep an eye on the Python world because it is very interesting and full of ideas. Today I stumbled upon a couple of links that I'd like to share:

• The Python Journal
• wxBlog

The issue of Python Journal that is online now covers these topics: Practical Tasks -- Map Display, Text-Filtering, Python Embedding, Dynamic Website Generation.
wxBlog, on the other hand, does not directly relate to Python, it is a blog dedicated to wxWidgets, a cross platform GUI framework that is the base of wxPython, a port of wxWidgets to Python.

Windows Update Error 0x8ddd0018

Ok, today it happened to me that a worm (or who knows what) stopped something on my PC and so I was not able to use Windows Update anymore. Going on that page gave me the 0x8ddd0018 error. What to do? The UpdateXP site helped me resolving the problem! Thank you very much!

The Black Cat

Just a test for this blog. This is a nice cat I met in Fremont, it was guarding a courtyard :-)