Gioorgi is born

I am happy to annouce to the world a new website, which will substitute the old Vamp site

It is Gioorgi.com, the italian blog of Giovanni Giorgi.
Gioorgi.com will also spot a new technology "gym" during the year 2009.

Stay tuned!

The Family site is born

I am happy to announce a new site is born!

The site of my Big Family, is being rolled out. In less then three days, ObjectsRoot.com spoted out a new brand new site. Stay tuned!

Site redesign

After some time, I have decided to start redesigning the content and the look of ObjectsRoot.com
I have slightly reduced the tags section, over-simplifying the access to my huge set of articles. With over 100 posts, there is no need of so much tags.
The search engine will help you to find old articles: do not worry anyway, permalinks will remain valid for a long time!

For a short introduction to the new site look, follow this link

In the next weeks you will see a new site look too, clean and clever... like no one before. Stay tuned!
Updated 14 May 2008: Site redesign is in progress. You will find the new site for the 23th of May. Comments are always wellcome!

Updated 21 may 2008: The basic look is finalized, and will not change.

Updated 6 June 2008: Suggested resolution is 1024x768 or higher. The page is dynamically rendered, anyway an 800x600 resolution is discuraged. Fixed some broken links

Asus EEE-PC better then Mac Air?

Finally I managed to buy a Asus EEE PC 700  this week. I would thanks a lot Next Store and its kindly clerks, which I will prefer in future to Mediaword :)
If you are at Milan and you plan to buy it, Next Store is a good choice.

There are a lot of sites and articles around the net about the EEE-PC, because it is a very new article in the IT consumer world.

The EEE PC is the First  full featured PC sold at 300 euros. The Register tries also to compare it with the Mac Air, and we'll see why this is not a so crazy idea.
In these days in Italy was launched an overpriced version (320 euros) with Windows XP preinstalled. We are waiting also the more powerful version (EEEPC 900) at 400 euros. Anyway, what do the product is the 300 euro price: powerful and richer model at an higher price are no so stunning as the EEE PC 700.

Introduction: the hardware

The Asus EEE PC come with 3-usb 2.0 ports, and one SD Card reader. It is expandable a lot, considering it has the same usb ports of my Lenovo Thinkpad R60.  It has no DVD reader, but it is very small and tight. The  battery charger is similar to that of a GSM phone, and it sounds great because of its reduced weight.
The screen is tiny, but very very bright, so it can work if you are not too much greedy as me.

Even if the keyboard is too small, and the fan is noisy, for the rest EEEPC looks well.
With an external monitor&keyboard attached,  your trouble are reduced, at least at home.
You can compare it to a Mac Mini, sold at 600 euros, which has a similar but powerful hardware: so having half the ram for the EEEPC is not a surprise.
But the EEEPC 701 is easy to expand, and on Internet some guys managed to install 2Gb of RAM.
And it is not shipped by deafult with windows but with a linux operating system... another big news, isn't it?

Games
I code every day. So in my spare time, at home, I have two priorities: my girlfriends, and games.
And EEE-PC come with some funny games like Frozen Bubble, so it is definitively a very good machine.

 Vodafone & EEE-PC

In Italy, Telecom Italia sells a branded version of EEE-PC, with its USB connect key. If you have a Vodafone Connect Key, I have found an italian article to try to connect it. I will do some tests, and then translate it in English if it is worth of it.

The Software...

The operating system is a commercial version of Linux. Anyway it is well packaged, and it is reasonable fast. The File Manager does not start in a snap, but it could be worst.

...the ideas

Because ObjectsRoot.com is  heavly focused on software development, I am searching a set of article to how build a small cluster of EEE-PC, for doing small distributed computing. The cluster should be easy to set up, with no installation of new operating system, and should have decent performance.
I will report  my experiments in the next month.

Hacking it [Update on 11 june 2008]

Ubuntu has relased a specilized version of ubuntu linux

Conclusion: Why it is great

All these stuff fit in about 300 euros, and there is no decent PDA  at this price...even a good Nokia GSM phone is difficult to find for a such price. The EEE-PC weights less then 1 Kg, and it is very easy to carry on. The webcam is good if you have sufficient light to give it, and you can record at 44.1 khz your voice.
Skype comes preinstalled, giving you a lot of freedom with its VoiceOverIP technology.

iPhone programming

iPhone Open Application Development
 By Jonathan A. Zdziarski
 First Edition  March 2008
 Pages: 280
 ISBN 10: 0-596-51855-2 | ISBN 13: 9780596518554

Boosting Squeak: RockSolid images

As some of you know, I was a Smalltalk fan&developer in the last twelve years. I have stopped working on smalltalk years ago... anyway, I am happy to  look forward the Squeak Smalltalk Community from time to time.

I republish here an original article posted by me on SqueakPeople, over 4 years ago.
The reason is simple: I am very happy to see a Squeak code fork called "Sapphire" which share most of my thoughts:

Sapphire wants to take a fresh look at the Smalltalk philosophy and current implementations. The idea is to produce high quality open-source packages that will be loadable on a micro kernel. 

 I will take a look to Sapphire, and you will find my throughts here in the next months.

Python Search Engine

The Valueteam PDFGenerator

Per un importante cliente, abbiamo sviluppato una applicazione chiamata PDFGenerator, che è stata pacchettizzata come un vero e proprio prodotto.
Vediamo come è stato possibile...

Postgres performance tuning

After a bit of work, I have managed to optimize the performance of my Postgresql Server.

I have spent a saturday morning digging around postgresql, using the fantastic komodo editor, and I am happy with the final solution.

I followed  some suggestion on power PostgreSQL site, and now my postgres is blazing fast. For small needs, tuning postgres is easy as working with MySql.
And with postgres you get for free Transaction and PL/SQL without the need to do extra configuration or tuning or your database.

The major trick is extending  the shared_buffer,  and tuning the max_connections, trying to reducing it to the minimum

For tuning max_connections, remember, for instance,  10 max connections can be able to serve about 100 concurrent "real" users; this metric is not valid for robot like wget robot or similia, which generate much more traffic.

Anyway is not difficult to get a fast PostgreSQL installation "out of the box", and the resulting database is very robust.

Italy 2008's Election

Updated on April 15th: Berlusconi wins

[First Published on 23th of March]

If you like to have a view of Italy, I am writing a set of article on the Italy's 2008 Election.I have written it in italian, but the final thoughts will be in English.

Apple as hardware only company

In the last year, "Apple Computer" has changed a bit its focus.

First of all, Apple has erased the  word "computer" in the company name.

Then,  has shifted its focus on new products like the iPhone.

iPhone is a GSM telephone, and so it is quite different product for a computer company.

I see a very huge and strong alliance within these players:

• Apple (hardware part)
• Disney (via the Pixar,Steve Jobs can ask some movies to Disney :)
  
• Google/YouTube (media and "network computer" part) 
• Sony: HD Video consumer/DVD standards and so on
  

Apple software part is true strong, but it will be difficult to hunt competitors if the company is busy building new hardware.

It'd be better to focus only on one thing.
MacOSX is a very innovative product, but its developement had become slower in the last nine months.

Leopard is not so innovative, and it is similar to Vista: a lot of GUI fetures, but little on the surface.
And last, Lepoard is still quite slow and sub-optimized, for being a full MacOSX release.

Javascript and Smalltalk

There is a future for SmallTalk? I was a very strong fan of the SmallTalk language, but in the last five years I have seen more and more contraction of its usage in the IT field.

The OLPC project, which uses also Squeak Smalltalk and its done by the core team fo Squeak, is not going very well.

Anyway, Dan Ingalls, one of the father of Smalltalk, is working on a new project called Lively. It is a rewrite of Morphic in Javascript, especially target  for building a Squeak-like interface.

 The interesting part of this work is a paper outlining the limitation of javascript as programming language. I have tried in the past years to look for ajax and or web 2.0 javascript libraries, but I feel very difficult to develop with them.

From the Paper we underline these parts:

Loading multiple JavaScript applications into the same virtual machine is problematic.[...] For instance, if two programs
happen to use the same names for global variables or functions, the overlapping variables or functions of
the first program will be replaced with the corresponding features of the second program, resulting in
unexpected behavior in the subsequent execution of the first program. Since JavaScript will not typically
give any warning messages or errors in such situations, the resulting behavior can sometimes be a total
surprise; in many cases the errors resulting from such situations may not be discovered until much later.

 

Evolutionary development approach is a necessity. Due to the highly permissive, error-tolerant nature of
JavaScript, JavaScript programming requires an incremental, evolutionary software development
approach. Since errors are reported much later than usual, by the time an error is reported it is often
surprisingly difficult to pinpoint the original location of the error. Error detection is made harder by the
dynamic nature of JavaScript, for instance, by the possibility to change some of the system features on
the fly.

 

A lot of room is left in optimizing JavaScript performance. Current JavaScript virtual machines are
unnecessarily slow. Even though JavaScript is a significantly more dynamic language than, for instance,
the Java programming language, there is no fundamental reason for JavaScript VMs to run two orders of
magnitude slower than Java virtual machines.

 

Memory management capabilities of the current JavaScript VMs are poorly suited to large, long-running
applications. Current JavaScript virtual machines have simple, 1970's style garbage collectors

 The reason of these issue are simple:JavaScript was intially a language for web developers, small and easy to use, and very compact.
Absence of errors or warning is a nightmare, if you care of your digitating time.
And Javascript is slow because no one will write  long script with it.

A very compact and clean discussion can be found in http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html 

Fixing these problems is hard. Until the current  implementation will not provide a better way of error detection, writing javascript code will be a very long and time-consuming task.

And using a so old garbage collector, give a chance to a c/64 BasicV2 to beat your code:  you are awared, guys :)

Anyway, there is a good set of javascript libraries out of there (prototype and jquery, for instance but not only), so you should be quite happy 

About macosx

We read in wikipedia:

"Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984 [...]

Dynamic languages troubles

I have read http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/chandler-failure and I think it is very danger way of exposing concepts.

In the article pointed out, the quite dead Chandler project is compared to the multi-billion Eclipse project. And then a too easy analysis is done against dynamic languages, where Java is the absolute winner.

I will try to fix some of the things said there, and to add also my two cents here :)

Shopping in the IT

Oracle buys BEA and Sun buys MySql.

In reply,Migrosoft is hungry and is watching Yahoo :-)

Let's play a bit with these ideas :)