Tag: misc

Happy Christmas and Great New Year to you all.

Sometimes it happens that reality baffles my expectations and my ego pretends that electronics, physics, computer science or whatever it is not responding the way I expect, work just for chance. No matter what you do, the result will always be random.Consider a wifi USB dongle. It behaves pretty badly indoor. Let’s face it, all manufacturers claim a 100m range, but, in practice, in real apartment environments it works fine within 10m, it becomes unreliable at 15m, stone dead at 20m. If you want to do real time communication, in my experience, you’d better halve the ranges above.
Ok. It may seems stupid trying to reduce the range, but it is handy when you want to test what happens at the range limit, without wearing out your shoes.
Now well over a century of science tells you about Faraday cages, roughly put – a metal sheet shields radio waves. So if I enclose my wifi dongle in a pretty solid metal box I would expect either no radio communication or a dramatic cut of the range. Right?
Well, time to rethink.
I experienced the very same range of the unboxed dongle.
With the same reliability.
It is like Laws of the Universe consider themselves superior to my request and diregards my experiment, saving themselves for more worthy causes.
BTW, in the meantime, I have read Stefano Benni’s “La compagnia dei Celestini”, Roberto Ierusalimschy’s Programming in Lua, Eoin Colfer’s “The Secret safe”, Alfredo Castelli’s “Rama’s Left Eye”… I suppose it’ll take quite a time to write review for each one of them :-).

Software project management… I read a number of books about this since, as I said in one of the previous post, it is an intriguing matter. One of the most frustrating aspects is how far are the best practices preached in those books from the industrial realities that I have experienced or that my friends and ex-coworkers tell me about.
I am quite confident that the techniques and approaches proposed in my readings are correct and proper, but everything has been written by Americans, based on researches in the US companies and deeply rooted in the US working culture.
Sometimes this is not applicable here in Italy. E.g. if in your team you have a person with a negative attitude toward the work and the team, at least one book suggests to fire him/her. This works in US where employees have not the right to be fired only for Good Reasons, not just because the employer changed his/her mind.
But this is mostly about details. There are stronger issues.
One could argue that part of the approach to working and to solve problems is part of the culture. I mean, every (US) study reports that programmers are by far more productive when they have their own private office. Peopleware suggests team-oriented (quiet) offices with no more than 4-5 people. In Mediterranean culture, people is considered much more socially oriented, so it could be possible that an Italian programmer would be more productive in an open space environment.
In the same way it could be possible that those, who would considered bad managers by the current literature standards, would be instead the best managers for Italians.
There is just one possible answer: try different approaches and measure the outcoming.
Given the current state of the Italian software development industry (which industry?) I am really doubtful that this could happen. Our industry is composed by ridiculously small companies that could face bankruptcy at every project gone wild. In this situation daring to risk a new approach that is known to work elsewhere, but could possibly not work here.
From my experience I could tell that I am much more comfortable (and productive) when the office is empty, rather than when it is crowded; also I am quite annoyed by interruption, not always, but I’d like to have a flag “do not interrupt” to have consistent time to concentrate. But… ehy I don’t like soccer, could I be considered Italian? 🙂
Apart from jokes, what do you think?

Just uploaded the pictures of my last holidays in Naxos, Greece. [images/photoalbum/Greece/200608/index.html|Have a look]!

Back from holidays! Very productive holidays: I read 5 books and wrote their respective review. I’ll post them here in the next days, just let me be fully back… I’m trying to figure out what I am supposed to do here in this office, and why I am not under my umbrella in front of the sea…

I found two interesting links for all Terry Pratchett’s fan: The annotated Pratchett File with a detailed description of all citations and joke organized by books and the The Pratchett Quote File with one liners and quotes from all his book. Enjoy!

Everyone knows it, soon or later we’re doomed to run out of oil. The question is just when this is due to happen. I remember when I was a child, back in the seventies, when first oil crisis arose, then awareness that oil was a finite resource started to be shared by most. Time passed and, apart from a constant rise in the gasoline price, nothing happened.
Yesterday I was at the local mall bookstore and found a book about this. Curious as I am I couldn’t resist to a (not so quick) glance through the text.
Unfortunately I don’t remember the title, nor the author; he is a geologist who worked for many oil corporations, so he should know his stuff.
The most alarming thing I read is that we’ve consumed about half the oil available on Earth. Within ten years we’ll reach the production peak and then oil will be scarcer and scarcer. Considering that beside western countries, with an ever growing energy need, we have emerging countries like China and India that are… emerging, the end of the oil era could be really soon now. Think twice before buying a new car.
What is going to happen to us? How this will impact on our lifestyle?
Our economy is strongly based on oil, so economic problems will cause an increase in poverty and stagnation.
We need something that could replace oil really fast. Unfortunately Hydrogen is not the answer, for the simple reason that we cannot mine it, despite being the most common element in Universe (beside stupidity, they say). To produce a liter of Hydrogen from water we need more energy than what the same liter could give back when employed. Nonetheless Hydrogen could be good to “store” energy for vehicles, as long as we keep ignoring its high explosive potential.
What about nuclear power? In the fifties it was the panacea – everyone and his brother expected to have an atomic powered vacuum cleaner in a matter of years.
I am not an expert, but from what I read if the current energy demand had to be satisfied just by nuclear fission, the nuclear fuel on Earth would last just 3 years. While debries would stay with us for thousands.
Maybe nuclear fusion is better, but not everyone agrees. Those that don’t think fusion is the answer are not just a bunch of green, environmentalist, hippies, but respectable scientist are among them. One for all, Nobel prize Rubbia.
So what’s the answer? Apart from renewable sources like wind and tides, an interesting source of fuels could come from vegetables – soy and rape could be converted in bio-diesel fuel and alcohol produced from fermentation is another good fuel. Maybe not so efficient like gasoline and diesel, but we won’t have the choice.

Ok, I have to admit it – they tricked me. Maybe I’m becoming old… There was this picture of an egg between two mobile phones. The text: “Set the two mobiles to call each other and after an hour or so you’ll find that the egg is cooked.” (For a more convoluted story in italian or another one in english). Now there should have been some warning signals. I mean, I know that the maximum emission of RF-energy from a mobile phone is from its back, so that it won’t waste energy into your brain, but in the opposite direction which is more promising for being obstacle free. Also, the GSM frequencies are not the same of your microwave oven. And microwave oven frequencies are tuned to have the best warming effect on the water molecule in foods. Alas, believing that something so simple and dramatic at the same time could reveal the real danger of pervasive wireless communications was too tempting.
The hoax is easily spot if you could do some math. I should have done it first, before blindly believing.
Talking about believing, I found this site (in Italian) that is plenty of food for thoughts, just be careful of not eat too much. Avoid it if you are sensitive on religious topics.
The link of the day is the Linux revenge for my rants against it. If you have Windows XP then you may have tried to search a bunch of file for a specific word. If files are recognized by Windows then there is no problem, but if files are not recognized (maybe just an unknown extension) then you won’t find anything. To “fix” this behavior is really simple, just twiddle bits in the registry. Enjoy!