Ludoo

Like many others, I got fooled by Keith's and Garrett's staged quarrel. Unlike many others though, I can plead less guilty since due to my living in Italy I was about to get into bed when I read Keith's post, and did not have the time or clarity required to spot the prank.

On his followup post to the staged quarrel, Keith makes a few well thought out observations on originality, and the difficulty of dealing with imitation when designing. Having an architectural background, and one where a lot of emphasis was placed on the theory and history of architecture, I tend to have a different approach than Keith's to the whole issue.

Less than one month after the first redesign of this blog, I have done it again. This new design is virtually the same as my Italian blog except for the header image, a picture I shot from Enrica's old apartment in Cambridge a couple of years ago.

As I have already written a few days ago, it seems that spring is bringing new ideas and designs to more than a few blogs: waiting for May 1st Reboot and CSS Reboot, Keith Robinson has given a new layout to Asterisk, and promptly got accused of having ripped off Koi's Subtraction. As much as I love quarrels, this one seems pretty vain especially coming from someone who has taken quite a bit of "inspiration" from 37Signals it turns out this one was a joke.

I will be in Paris this weekend at Les Blogs taking part to the Nanopublishing panel. Speaking of nanopublishing, the brand new 9rules Network Blog looks very promising. Nanopublishing with a twist.

I'm not really sure I want to try the upgrade to Hoary, the latest Ubuntu release which includes Gnome 2.10 and xorg, as the last time I tried it I had a few problems with fonts, and the new GPG authentication system for APT. As my desktops and laptop are running fine with Warty, I fear the hours spent on customizing/troubleshooting a new install. In case I decide to upgrade here are a few resources that will come handy, I will add new ones as I find them.

GPG authentication for APT. The AptAuthenticationInstructionsForHoary Wiki page details the steps needed to add Christian Marillat's gpg key. The other key you will probably need is for the Blackdown Project's repository, to install Java on your system:

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --search-key [email protected]
gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 529B8BDA
gpg --armor --export 529B8BDA | apt-key add -

At long last it seems that BeOS is back! YellowTab is getting ready to release Zeta 1.0, a revamped BeOS with lots of improvements. Having been one of the few who bought and used a copy of the original BeOS, I'm excited by Zeta and I can't wait to try it on my desktop. Zeta supports most of the stuff I use on Linux, so the switch should be relatively painless provided there's a decent JVM to run J on. Lots of screenshots on OSDir.

As much as I usually like John Lim's excellent PHP Everywhere, I don't particularly agree with his comments on Ian Bicking's Why Web Programming Matters Most. Being a longtime PHP programmer (since when it was called PHP/FI) and PEAR contributor, and having heavily used (and loved) Python for all my projects in the past couple of years, both Ian's

resolving Python's problems with web programming is the most important thing we can do to market Python

what made PHP successful is not what PHP is lacking but the features that PHP has that are superior to Python

What I don't particularly agree with is John's list of things PHP "does better" than Python:

As you may have noticed, I have moved this blog to a "proper" blog engine (BTW I apologize if my new feeds have screwed up your aggregator) instead of the mess of Python scripts I used before to generate static pages. I am still convinced that generating everything dynamically is overkill, but since I have been working with WordPress on our commercial blogs for the past few months, I have come to appreciate the enormous gain in flexibility versus my previous approach.

I did not use a stock WP though: given my usual inclination towards dismantling (often) and reassembling (rarely) everything to try to "make it right", I have spent a good part of those past few months rewriting a new frontend for WP from scratch. It's working wonderfully on our commercial blogs, handling a decent traffic on a very old machine, and more importantly it's cleaner and faster than WP, uses less queries, and it's much more flexible. Now that it's somewhat stabilized I am going to rewrite the backend too, so as to be able to remove all WP code and use a single installation (and user/post base) for all our blogs.

I hope this faceblog-lifting will make me write a bit more, even though this is fast becoming the busiest time of my life. If you will be in Paris for Le Blogs on the 24th-25th of April drop me a note, I will be there since I'm supposed to take part to the Nanopublishing panel. Oh, and please help me find a better name for my blog...

Scoble writes a letter to Bill Gates on what Microsoft should do to compete with the iPod, and gets the Most Insulting Blog Entry Of The Year award. I agree he's getting it all wrong, in typical big corporate thinking (I work for a huge company, and know a bit about corporate hype, and reverence to those in power, myself).

The irony is that Microsoft already has all the ingredients for the iPod killer. Windows Media Player on the PocketPC is the best portable audio application around, and PocketPC hardware has become cheap. Would you prefer to buy an expensive iPod that forces you to use iTUNES (at least officially), is plagued by Apple's firmware updates, and only allows you to listen to music? Or would you prefer a sub-100$ handheld, powered by two AA batteries, with a monochrome touch screen to fast forward through a song easily and read ebooks, a CF card slot, and a bundled CF card reader? I would prefer the second, in fact I'm using a retrocomputing version of the same minus the AA batteries, and it's the perfect audio device. Powerful audio output to be able to listen to anything in noisy subway cars, audio playing that remembers what you were listening and where when you power down the device, swappable storage, easy connectivity with any operating system via a minuscule CF card reader.

Scoble, you're a blogger and you should know this, you don't need big names, you need users. No need to "Pay whatever big money it'll take to get stars like Elton John, Ludacris, Eminem, Shania Twain to work on designing an entirely new player from the ground up.", just hire me and a couple other audio-ebook obsessed geeks, who know their way through the IT maze. :)

Oh, and if you are wondering why I did not update this site in a long while, I've been busy on a few other projects.