In the last couple of days I read these two interesting news, science related:
Deep Impact mission
Japanese undersea volcano eruption (I’m posting the MSN link since it has a really cool picture)

Just wanted to share these couple of cool news.

I know this is a hot topic and everyone talks about it, so I would like to spend my 2 cents. This post is just to think, if you want to post your comments you’re welcome, if you totally disagree think about trying to make me change my mind.

Why should we protect people’s privacy? What is it all about? It’s hard to find a good way to start what I want to try to express. I think I am an honest citizen, I do my best to be respectful and not hurt anyone else. I can’t say I have ALWAYS respected every single rule and law. I happened to drive too fast and sometimes I haven’t payed the ticket on the subway. Said this, do I mind about protecting my privacy? Is it really a problem if a big company gets my address and sends me publicity in the mail? Is it really such a problem? WHO should I protect my privacy from? Why does people not put their name on the doorbell? Are they afraid that someone will read their name and do bad and mean things? If so then we are trying to protect our privacy from someone who wants to do something illegal against us, such as steal or hurt. Shouldn’t someone else take care of this?

A few years ago I worked in a building and we had our own door, BUT the other people living in the same building could use the same door to access their garages. We installed a camera for security reasons. A woman living in the building asked to remove the camera because she said it was against her privacy because she might want to walk through that door and did not want anyone to film her doing it. Why would she require or need that? Why would I bother to see her walk through that door unless she’s doing something she should NOT be doing? So basically are we saying that some people will take advantage of the right to protect their privacy to do illegal actions?

And now to my “problem”. 2 weeks ago someone stole my girlfriend’s bag and her cellphone was in there. Now, I can’t call the Italian operators and has (having the IMEI handy) WHO is using the phone (which was STOLEN) because that would be against their right to the privacy. So basically we’re protecting the privacy of someone who is using a phone that was stolen to me (who actually paid it!). Is it really his right to protect his privacy while using something that he got illegally?

I know that the real problem here is defining a rule that applies to anyone and to any case and that the problem in real life is that there isn’t black and white, but it’s disappointing sometimes to discover that something that should be made to make our lives better in the end “protects” who does something that is not entirely correct or completely illegal.

I know it’s a longer thing and that we can’t simply sum it up in a few words and a few lines, but I wanted to say this loud.

For many years I wondered about buying a notebook and I never did. Eventually about 2 years ago, I fell in love with Apple and bought a Powerbook 15″.
In the beginning I was playing with all the time, of course, but not doing anything serious. I had my own desktop at work and used the notebook to trasfer files at home, such things. In the beginning it hadn’t been really worth the money it costed, except for being a really nice toy.

Almost a year later I started a new part-time job (actually mostly during nights and weekends) and the notebook suddendly was NECESSARY. I could work anywhere at anytime, and when I got online I simply uploaded what I had done. I was mostly working from home, but then I had to go to meetings and to work with other developers so the notebook was simply perfect, I moved to other offices met different people and I always had everything I needed in my comp.

Now more than 2 years have passed. I have already killed 1 battery and bought a new one. I also “burnt” a battery charger and purchased a new one (of course).

A few days ago I opened my powerbook (it was nicely sleeping) and noticed there was some dirt near the left bottom corner, when I generally put my arm while typing… I was about to get something to clean it up and I noticed that it wasn’t dirt! I have used my Powerbook SO much that now some paint has gone away! I wiped some paint for too much use!

NOW I KNOW IT WAS WORTH BUYING IT!

The bad part about travelling is that when you come back you simply have the same amount of work as if you had been at work and didn’t do anything.
It looks like people don’t think that you’re away and that basically you CAN’T do the things you would do while at work, send you emails and requests as if you were at your computer/terminal and when you come back after your trip (a really pleasant work trip in my case) you have a BUNCH of emails of things to do.

Of course saying that you were away doesn’t solve the problem, people will simply sit there and wait for you to have done everything…

Is it just me that suffer from the multi-tasking, multi-window, multi-desktop “desease”? I can’t live without at least 4 desktops and I think at least 10 windows open, but the drawback is that sometimes I get lost in the windows and don’t complete things. When it’s like today, that I have a 100 things to do and 10 people trying to talk to me and tell me things, I often get lost in the windows I open (and leave open to remember I have that thing to do) and have difficulty to complete tasks.
It’s a great relief when I start completing some and so I can close some of the windows.

This is also somehow reflected in the chat windows. When you work with someone far away instant messaging is VERY useful, but if you don’t reply instantly people think something has happened. Don’t they know it’s not like the phone?
Sometimes I read the message, but I leave it in the background for later and when I reply I receive back replies such as “oh, I hadn’t seen you replying so I thought the message had been lost somewhere on the internet…”.
In my opinion one good thing about instant messaging is that the messages remain written and you can also read them a little bit later and the text will not change!

For Mac users I would like to suggest adiumX and growl. The cool thing is that you can read the message in the growl popup and decide if you should open the message and reply instantly or leave it for later. Really cool, but sometimes distracting, I have to admit.

So yesterday the MWI DDWG meeting reached an end.
The second day was totally different from the previous, while the first day we talked a lot and discussed about what we should do and on what we should concentrate, the second day was focused on trying to write down the things we talked about and decide what should be written in the papers we will have to write.

Once again it was good to see the team at work and considering the fact that the documents could be read by anyone in the world, terminology was very important and sometimes a good amount of minutes was dedicated to picking the appropriate word.

The final line is that I really liked to be part of the team and I can’t wait for the rest of the work that will come. This is a great experience and I hope that great things will come out.

EDIT: I am a little in a rush, but I would like to write more on this topic, but I also have to catch back with the “normal work” so I will see what I can do.

The first meeting day was really interesting. I spent most of the day listening to others speaking and looking at them trying to catch their expressions and the thoughts they were not expressing.
It was really amazing to see all this different people around the same table.

Everyone was really nice and we also went out to drink a beer (or a coke, or anything) all together and chat. Fortunately the chat was about many things and not simply “what do you do at work” or things like that.

Today I’m back for 2 day. Unfortunately part of the group had to leave to go back to their daily occupations so the group is smaller.

I am really interested about the two MWI working groups and I expect great things to happen. Then next months will tell us.

Tonight I’ll be back in Milan and tomorrow back at work.

I have spent quite some time on the Samsung Z107 which runs the Samsung Mobile Browser 3.0 and I have to say that this browser is NOT full featured.

It is said to support xHTML-MP, but this is not entirely true. It does render xHTML pages and supports some extra tags such as the “format” attribute as I described in my previous post, but then has some features that I would have lived much better without!

Prepare a page with your head, title and body. Put an image in a p tag and then create your form. You can use a div tag or a fieldset, or whatever you like and then your good old submit button. The use of GET or POST methods is not influent.
If you use the Content type for HTML (text/html) or xHTML-MP (application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml) and the phone will show you the logo ONLY. If you click the left softkey (options in English) a special item appears labelled “Accept”, if you click it you will see the form fields.
If you use the content type for xHTML Basic (application/xhtml+xml) magically the page will be rendered all together and look much nicer (even if you haven’t changed anything at all).
While xHTML basic is not supposed to support forms, selects and other elements, even if you use the normal DTD, these elements will work fine.

Another thing? Using the xHTML Basic content type the device will also accept part of your CSS, but don’t forget that you can use only *1* external CSS file (or better write it inline).

Another thing? This is really strange. Setup a page with a select with, let’s say, 3 elements. None of them is selected, but of course the first one is automatically visualized to the user. If you don’t open the select and simply click on “submit” or open the select, pick the first item and click on sumbit, the browser will pass an empty value! But you add a selected=”selected” to the first item it will work even without opening the dropdown and picking that element.

Using the xHTML Basic content type you should use the CSS property to define the format of an input field (style=”-wap-input-format:’*N'”) while using the xHTML-MP content type you should use the format attribute (as I was suggesting in the other post; consider this an update!).

Oh well, back to work and testing

an Italian title for this new post which means, with a rough translation, “You can recognize a good day from the morning”.

Yesterday I reserved a seat on the train to Florence (from Milan) at 9:00 AM instead of the common 8AM because there were no seats. The train arrived with about 5 minutes of delay.
When we were half way to Bologna we already had about 15 minutes of delay AND we were advised that because of a failure we would stop for a few minutes.
When we arrived in Bologna we were 30 minutes late.

While on the way to Florence the train slowed down rapidly and stopped in the middle of a bridge HIGH on a little river. It wasn’t nice to be there, in the middle of nothing and 50-60 feet from the Earth.

We arrived in Florence with 55 minutes of delay and while in line to get a cab I remembered that these days there’s Pitti in Florence. Of course I forgot to reserve my hotel room. As soon as I got at the office I called the hotel and NO ROOMS were available. Thanks to Cinzia of our offices in Milan I found another room, now I feel better!!

All I need to do now is change my reservation for tomorrow (Florence to Milan) because I did it wrong yesterday! OH What a day!
Where is my mind?

This weekend has been less relaxing than commonly. Moving to the new apartment is reaching the end, but while in the beginning we could move things we did not need immediately, now we are at the step of “moving everything”, this means the TV, the furniture that we are moving and all the rest.

My brother kindly helped us (also with a small truck) and while on Saturday we finished mounting the IKEA furniture, on Sunday we moved the “heavy stuff”.

On sunday we watched the F1 grand prix (something happened?) on a 6 inches TV attached to the VCR and the hifi because the TV was moved. It was funny, the sound was like being at the circuit, but the TV was really TINY!