Yesterday I went to Sun Microsystem's Milan offices, to see a presentation on Sun Ray, their thin client architecture, and a running example of their new Linux desktop, Mad Hatter.

I have to say I was a bit skeptical about the whole thing, the presentation had been arranged almost a couple of months ago and I had totally forgotten about it. From what I had heard about Mad Hatter in previous meetings, I was not convinced it could add any benefits compared to other corporate-oriented Linux distributions, apart maybe for a single source of support.

Moreover, I had already been bitten a few years ago by Sun's thin clients, when I convinced the company I worked for to buy a few JavaStations for testing, and after fiddling with them a while we found them completely useless (or at least not up to the hype that was surrounding them).

Plus, after the summer vacations schedules are still a bit fuzzy around here, so I was lucky one of the sales engineers called be the day before yesterday to remind me of the meeting, or else I would have totally forgotten it.

Despite all this, the presentation turned out to be very interesting. I came out of Sun's building totally impressed by what I had seen.

Sun Ray is a wonderful architecture. The clients are beautiful and sufficiently fast, sessions get transparently restored across geographical networks, and with Solaris supporting Gnome you feel right at home in Sun Ray's desktop. Moreover, rumours say the server software that controls the thin clients will soon be able to run on Linux, giving you the option of using 386 servers instead of expensive (but reliable and beautiful) SPARC servers.

After the presentation, the Sun people let me play around a bit on a couple of Sun Rays, one attached to a guest network, one attached to Sun's worldwide network. The real thing was even better than the presentation (which was very interesting already), and that's not something you see often.

Now I'm trying to convince my boss to spend some money on a start-up bundle (15 Sun Rays and a small Sun Server for 8k euros), so that we can properly test them. Unfortunately, we're becoming more and more Microsoft-oriented at least on the desktop side of things, and technology decision are usually based on politics rather than technical merits, as is always the case in huge organizations.

As for Mad Hatter, I had a quick look and was favorably impressed. It is based on SuSe, not on RedHat as they told us a couple of months ago. It sports all the usual apps, Star Office (ofc), and a beautifully themed Gnome Desktop. What surprised me is that the Gnome packages are pretty bleeding edge. I was prepared to find the usual corporate-oriented distro, ie slow to accept changes and favouring old and stable packages vs new and potentially unstable ones. Instead, the feel of Mad Hatter is of something built by affectionate developers, with a very careful eye towards the professional user's needs.

I'm very curious to see how it feels using it on a day-to-day basis. I hope we're able to join the beta test in a few weeks.

To sum it up, a well spent and interesting morning, in a beautiful (if empty -- we crossed lots of rooms without seeing anybody around) space, with very kind and knowledgeable people (they even let me play a bit on a Mac OSX system they had lying around, lol).

I tried Mozilla Firebird as soon as it was announced, and was not impressed enough to switch from Mozilla. Plus, I was using Mozilla Mail as my email client, and it felt a bit funny to use something else as a browser.

Lately I started using Evolution, which I like a lot apart from some minor annoyances (no context menu in the message pane for copying, poor LDAP support compared to Mozilla Mail), so I went around shopping for a new browser.

I tried Epiphany, which is still a bit rough, and Galeon. One or the other of them messed up my Mozilla installation (on two different machines, so it's not a localized issue) so much that I had to wipe it and reinstall it from scratch.

This morning while having breakfast an entry on AMK's Diary mentioned the Mozilla/Firebird blog, where new builds are announced daily. I went to have a look and there's a Linux+gtk2+xft nightly build. I installed it and liked it so much it's now my default browser. Definitely recommended, if you can overcome the .rpm .apt addiction and simply untar an archive somewhere. Of course, using Slackware I'm not annoyed by these things. =)

Grr I hate internet explorer-only sites. I'm enjoying watching the 9th World Championships in Athletics (ever since I have been able to watch TV on my computer I am watching a lot of sports events), but the IAAF site does not work under Mozilla/Firebird.

The site looks pretty nice and displays flawlessly, but the left navigation menus do not work. You open up the source to try and find the links to the competition's timetables (which are buried deep in their site ofc), and nothing comes up. Grrrrrr.

For those of you who like watching the Championships, here is the link to the timetable. BTW I am always amazed at how pretty most of the athletes(ses) are. A good body usually goes with the job, but it's not only that. Maybe the greeks where sort of right?

The second and last part of our report from the Gibigianna. In the image you can see on your left, a car has been brought on stage. I wonder what kind of car this is (the year is 1928). update: I was fooled by the picture, looking at the .tif scanned from the original, the car is not a real car but a stage replica. Even more impressive. =)

A writing by my aunt on the back of one of the pictures identifies a few of the participants and sets a different location from the one given on the silver ashtray (my grandmother is the 4th from the right standing in the first row)

in Castellazzo di Bollate party at Marchesa Crivelli's

in the 1st row grandmother, Marichette Valentini, with the mage's hat Vico Sormani

below the panel on the wall Alberto Sormani, at the far right Donà dalle Rose

1928

It's 1928 then, and the place is Castellazzo di Bollate not Rovellasca. Rovellasca is a small town near Como, where the Marchesi (marquis) Crivelli had their villa, villa Arconati-Crivelli. The Crivelli where cousins to my grandmother via her mother Beatrice Sormani.

Castellazzo di Bollate is a small town near Milano, where in the XVII century the Conti (counts) Arconati built their splendid villa. As was usual for rich noble families of the time, the villa had an impressive art collection and library, where for a time Leonardo's Codice Atlantico (now at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milano) was kept. In the villa gardens, one could find fragments of the funerary monument of Gastone di Foix, duke of Nemours and nephew of Louis XII, or the statue of Pompeo at whose feet Caesar was said to be killed.

It is in this impressive settings then that my grandmother's recorded Gibigianna took place. The panel affixed on the wall in one of the pictures says:

O! What is life?

It's a gibigianna

who glitters here and there

it's fate

For those who have missed our previous report, Gibigianna is an old term used in Lombardy meaning either a glitter of light reflected from a mirror or glass, or used as a humorous term for a woman who displays elegance.

That's all for my first Report from the Past. All the images of the Gibigianna are available in a separate directory (since getting text to wrap around multiple images in a blog page is a tedious, error prone and a bit futile process).

Since I'm a bit fed up with programming, but as usual the idea of going to sleep (well, actually of lying in bed with a book, currently the 7th of the 26 in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) does not look so great, I might as well start putting on my blog my family's ancient pictures. Ancient because that's what came out writing in (more or less) American English on a computer, but thinking about it stuff from the early 1900 should be considered old not ancient.

Scanning all the family pictures scattered around my relatives' homes is an old pet project of mine, one I started last year but never managed to stick to. I hope this will be an incentive towards scanning a few more pictures and letters (especially my paternal grandfather's sometimes humorous letters from the first World War, a good number of them written to his parents by his attendant on pre-signed -- by my grandfather -- stationery, or so the family lore says).

I am starting this fragmented slideshow with the gibigianna. It's a regional (the region being Lombardy, in Italy, where Milan is), pretty disused word meaning

• a glitter of light reflected from a mirror or glass
• humorous, for a woman who displays elegance

A beautiful word, isn't it? It's a special language where you have a word for a glitter of light reflected from a mirror, whose other meaning has to do with a woman's ostentatious display of elegance (but then I suspect most languages have beautiful, very special words). Not very politically correct, but it fits perfectly my grandmother's pictures.

In my grandmother's case, the gibigianna was a sort of party where young people dressed in costumes and reenacted historical or literal scenes (or so my aunt tells me). My paternal grandmother was the daughter of a noblewoman (who unfortunately does not appear to have been one of the heirs to her family's huge fortune or at least to part of it), and had relatives among some of Milan's noble families, and so got to take part to this kind of events.

I have always found these pictures wonderful, and appalling. Imagine a few teenagers (one of the pictures has 20 people in it) that spend a day dressing up in stage-quality costumes, only to reenact historical scenes in their family's private theater inside their villa. Not only that, but they also have silver ashtrays made for the event.

Full coverage of the Gibigianna coming soon, if I manage not to get distracted by something else, as usual. =)

update: the second and last part of this Report from the Past is now online. All the images of the Gibigianna are available in a separate directory (since getting text wrapping around multiple images in a blog page is a tedious and error prone process).

As promised in a previous entry, I managed to give a look at PHPTAL. Since the entry is a bit long, I copied it as a standalone article, and left only this brief notice on the blog.

Read with interest today A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP (via PHP Everywhere), a nice article by the author of the MagpieRSS parser.

Posted a couple comments to the site, to which the author kindly replied by email. Nothing much, the usual "don't name your php files with an extension other than the one defined in your webserver", and an observation about error handling.

As all PHP developers know, PHP has no exceptions (and thus no try/something clauses), errors are either stored in special variables or accessed by calling functions, depending on what extension you're working with (PHP5 will introduce exceptions). All pretty messy, as the article author correctly points out.

One thing most developers don't know is that PEAR (the default PHP library bundled with the PHP source code) has a nice PEAR base class with great error handling features (why a good number of PHP developers stay away from PEAR is another matter entirely from the topic of this entry).

Basically, if your classes (you use PHP's OO features when writing reusable code, don't you?) inherit the PEAR base class, you get error handling for free (and a few other things, like destructors).

Using PEAR error handling is very easy, a quick example will suffice:

// our imaginary library (not very useful, is it?)
define('MYLIB_ERROR', 100);
require_once 'PEAR.php';
class myClass extends PEAR {
    function myClass($myargs = null) {
            $this->PEAR();
    }
    function &raiseError($message, $method, $line) {
        $error = PEAR::raiseError(sprintf("%s.%s() line %d: %s",
            get_class($this), $method, $line, $message),
            MYLIB_ERROR);
    }
    function myMethod() {
        $this->raiseError("hmmm something went wrong.....",
            'myMethod', __LINE__);
    }
}

For our libray developer, that's all there is to it. Basically you import the base PEAR class, and use it as a base class for your library classes. Whenever you need to "throw" an exception, just raise a PEAR error. The raiseError method is what I use in my classes, makes much easier debugging what went wrong by appending the method name and the line number where the error occurred, and a constant I use to trap errors depending on the originating classes.

Let's see the user part of PEAR's error handling routines:

// user code accessing our library
PEAR::setErrorHandling(PEAR_ERROR_CALLBACK, 'errorHandler');
function errorHandler($err) {
    echo("<b>PEAR error</b><br>message: <i>"
        . $err->getMessage()
        . "</i><br>user info: <i>"
        . $err->getUserInfo()
        . "</i><br>");
}
// or use any of the standard PEAR error handlers, eg
// PEAR::setErrorHandling(PEAR_ERROR_PRINT);
// for development or a more sophisticated handler for production,
// eg mailing a copy of the error or saving it in a log
$myinst =& new myClass();
$res = $myinst->myMethod();
if (PEAR::isError($res)) {
    // do something, the error is handled
    // (in our case printed) by the handler routine
} else {
    // do something else
}

The user only needs to import the PEAR base class (or alternatively use $myinst->isError() since it extends PEAR) and check method return values for possible errors. An added benefit of using PEAR's error handling routines is that by changing the function used to handle errors you can switch from debugging (ie print verbose error messages) to production (ie don't let the user see errors, handle them in your application) just by changing the error handling routine. A common practice is to automate this sort of things by checking the environment of the running server (eg hostname, etc.).

I will slowly migrate my bookmarks (currently scattered on at least 3 machines at work and at home) to this site, even though I'm still undecided about how to do it. One possible option is a new category type for bookmarks, whose entries are not displayed in the front page/RSS feeds, but which can accommodate folders. We'll see.

In the meantime, I will transfer from time to time useful links from my old site (they're stored in a MySQL DB, things would -- ahem -- be much easier if they were in ascii files).

Here's tonight's batch, in no particular order:

• ELM (Multiple Boot Manager) a tiny, useful Japanese bookmark manager that reads the partition table and allows you to boot any valid partition on the disk, very handy when you totally mess up things =)
• WinMerge and (better, IMHO) ExamDiff, Windows visual diff tools
• StrokeIt mouse gestures for Windows, pretty nice if you're into this sort of things

After 9 years of going back and forth from Windows to Linux with brief periods on various commercial Unices, a few months ago I finally managed to get rid of Windows (thanks to Slackware, which I unfortunately overlooked for a loong time), so these links are the first to go, and will slowly be buried at the bottom of my archives. =)