I changed theme

Perhaps you noticed. I changed the blog theme.

The bad news are that the SyntaxHighlight javascript plugin is not loaded anymore. As a consequence, old posts do not have syntax highlight. However, since it was getting on my nerves, I'm happy about it. If you feel that I should re-enable email me, place a comment here, send me a carrier pigeon or something like that.

The new theme seems to support stuff like mail/blog/tweet etc... which for some reason did not work with the other theme.

I'm not into graphically tweaking blogs (I think users plainly do not care), but I stumbled upon 5 different tech blogs with very same theme and colors in few days and decided that perhaps I could change the theme.

Using word to write...

Using word to write articles is a rather perverted art. E.g., why are the "regular expression" different from every other syntax I met and there are two different syntaxes depending whether you are using jolly characters or not?

Why is the bibliographic tools such a joke that almost everybody does it by hand (and, moreover, many conferences explicitly tell you to do it by hand? and the W2007 implementation is not compatible with W2003 – at least that is the opinion of W2007 on that matter)

And using images is a PITA. But that is a PITA with Latex as well. Last but not least, I have yet to understand why a PDF created with word for windows visualize bold characters (I'm following the IEEE template, so changing the font is not an option... besides, it's times new roman) with a *different* non-bold font when opened on the Mac. If it were not such a standard font I would have said it's a matter of not including the font.

Back in Black 2

Some things happened in the last two years. Two more Pycon Italia took place in Florence.
I completed a M.Sc. in Computer Science (in 2 years and 2 months, research dissertation included, which is something rare in my former). Two days after I graduated, I won a scholarship to attend a Ph.D. Course in Information Technology here in Parma, in the Dipartment of Computer Engineering.

This blog "re-edition" is kind of an experiment. Don't know if I have the time to write regularly here, nor if I like this platform. Essentially, I would have preferred a least web oriented platform (that is to say, writing posts offline). Blogspot should support this (I did import some of my old posts this way). Howerver, it seems that all of them can be imported. I don't really know why.

I also tried to write my own blog platform. Lack of motivation doomed this projects to failure. Moreover, I would need a rather costly high quality hosting which, by now, is an overkill as I can place massive amounts of data both on mobile me (public.me.com/enricofranchi) and on Dropbox.

I considered mobileme as a host, however, I would have limited choices on the platform (static HTML only). Rapidweaver/iWeb are not my cup of tea, either.

Thus, I chose an online blogging platform. As I already have lots of stuff with Google and I severly dislike Wordpress, I moved the whole thing here.

ICLP 08

Tomorrow I registered to the ICLP 08 conference.

I'm looking forward to go!

Servoy Hu? 2

Today, while checking my gmail account I read an ad about Servoy being an alternative to Ruby and Rails

Actually, I wanted to check out what was that. I thought about some crappy PHP framework that pretended to do what Rails just cloning its structure, but without Ruby power

In the homepage the first thing you learn about Servoy is that Ruby syntax is complex and that Rails has limited capabilities. Further analisys makes me think it's a Java based environment scripted in Javascript. Basically they are asserting that Javascript syntax is clearer than Ruby one (which is debatable) and that a RAD like thing built on Java is less limited than Rails. Note that Servoy is not Java: it is something built on Java (so I don't expect it to be as powerful as Java, or it would be as complex as well).I'm not against RAD or 'easy' environments. I just find ridiculous when they say that Rails is limited (that is false) and that a closed component system is more complete.

Moreover, I don't know anyone using this Servoy. I haven't read about it on tech magazines, my fellow developers haven't heard about it either. My opinion is that it's a small environment tool that uses Rails popularity (as a comparison) to convince people to pay them for something they could have done easier in Rails.

The same conclusions have been made by this blogger

Cazzeggio (Which file extension are you?)

Which File Extension are You?
You are .ogg Even though many people consider you cool and happening, a lot still find that you're a bit too weird to hang out with.