I was only 10 and I had an internet connection yet, when Yahoo! firstly appeared on the web: 15 years ago it went online “just” as a search engine. Its logo was fucking horrible and red.
Looking at its timeline is quite like reading the story of my life on the net: now, it serves +600 mln. of users all around the world with amazing services like Delicious and Flickr. Oh, and its logo is violet purple and cool.
Everybody knows that the Yahoo!’s finance is critical: I fear that there won’t be other 15 years for it, if the situation doesn’t change soon. It wouldn’t be only an emotional problem: the Yahoo! Developer Network – although I’ve never talked about it – is a great resource for all of us.
So, please don’t let it die: the future of the web still needs Yahoo! — one of the main companies actually involved in web development.
Archive for the ‘Article’ Category
Happy 15th birthday, Yahoo!
Friday, March 5th, 2010HipHop for PHP, XHP and now MySQL: what’s next, Facebook?
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Almost a month ago I talked about HipHop for PHP, a Facebook solution to improve the PHP’s performances server-side: that isn’t “lonely”, because Facebook Developers launched XHP too.
I’ve never written anything about it, but XHP is a different markup for integrating XML in PHP — used by Facebook Lite and I think it’ll handle Facebook Zero ASAP.
Another branch of developers released a patch for MySQL 5.1 recently: Facebook Engineering is the official page of Facebook’s programmers. The patch itself is hosted on Launchpad.
I really can’t understand if I should be worried about: Facebook is changing the web in several ways, but this is different than before.
The Italian Magistracy is worse than China’s
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Most of us still call it “democracy”, while I don’t: today three Google employees have been condemned by an Italian court for what happened in 2006. It’s just the 1st degree of a trial that provides 3 and it usually takes more than four years to come to a decision.
I reduced the amount of posts daily published on this blog because I’m currently working on the backend, but I can’t ignore this: I’ll try to explain the situation in few words, hoping to be able to be clear enough.
A group of idiots students recorded a bullying act against a guy affected by the Down Syndrome and uploaded the video on YouTube: Google removed that immediately after the signaling — but it had appeared on local TV, yet.
If you’re asking yourselves, those baby-criminals (as we use to call them) wasn’t condemned at all: they just got a suspension from school, while the Magistracy processed Google for privacy violation and aggravated defamation.
Today the decision condemned David Drummond, George Reyes and Peter Fleischer — acquitting Arvind Desikan: they weren’t directly responsible of what happened, they didn’t know those guys, nor created and/or uploaded that video. But for Italy they’re still guilty.
As I said on Twitter, I’m really ashamed of being Italian. Google can’t understand why it had been processed, as long as it helped our police to identify those students (removing the indicted video): there will be an appeal soon, but I’m very sorry for that.
BuddyPress 1.2 is out: isn’t for all, nor for me
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
So, BuddyPress is finally ready to work on standard WordPress installations: the latest version fits both WordPress and WordPressµ 2.9.1+ (starting from version 3.0, WordPressµ will be integrated directly in the main core).
Some people could mind to install it immediately, but even if BuddyPress is fucking awesome it doesn’t help for personal blogs and small sites: it focuses communities.
I mean, if you just want to add social networks integration on your own blog – such as Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and/or Twitter logins – you don’t need BuddyPress at all.
I don’t like plugins much, but they’re better than BuddyPress for this purpose: of course, I prefer some additional lines of code to manually provide the same features.
Speaking about BuddyPress itself, Andy Peatling (the British creator of this platform I met last year in Milano) yet announced this availability at the Italian WordCamp in May.
Apart from these advices, BuddyPress is very useful for running community-based projects: I’ll suggest it for my university too, if only its ICT administrators aren’t so stupid.
Giorgio Chiellini is on Twitter: are Italian soccer players learning from NFL?
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
If you aren’t Italian, you can’t imagine what soccer is for us: Any Given Sunday
(quoting the title of a famous movie about football that you all may know) is like a war — and that’s not a metaphor.
In fact, Giorgio Chiellini himself is a Juventus FC player and I’m not “so” happy to speak about him: for those who doesn’t still know, I’m an AC Milan supporter.
BTW I’m convinced that it’s a great news to see him on Twitter: I knew this just some minutes ago and I hope that other players and teams could do the same soon.
In the US the NFL is a perfect example of how business should approach the microblogging’s platforms: for Italy, soccer is possibly more important than football there. So, this could be a great opportunity to spread a conscious way to use social networking in our country.
MeeGo: what will happen to Moblin?
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Index
So Nokia and Intel created a new project called MeeGo, merging both Maemo and Moblin: the idea itself is great, but I fear it could be managed wrongly.
There are lots of unknowns: I’m going to explain why this platform could create more problems than what could have been solved with it.
Some choices aren’t so obvious and didn’t convince me at all: I don’t like the use of RPM as package manager too, but this isn’t really a problem (and comes from the LSB).
BTW, problems start here: the official repository of the extension – formerly Red Hat Package Manager – is “out-to-date” and no longer maintained by its creator, who founded RPM5 — that doesn’t stand anything with Red Hat and isn’t yet implemented by default on common distributions, nor we could know if it will ever be.
Gtk+ (with Clutter) and Qt ↑
Yet another obscure point: Moblin is based on Gtk+ and Clutter, while Maemo on Qt. MeeGo – approximately available in April – will have both: of course, almost all the Linux users should have them installed together, but what about dependencies?
Notice that MeeGo is designer for mobile devices and home entertainment, so must be really small in bytes: I can’t see the advantage of having two libraries installed by default to get the UX working.
PulseAudio as default POSIX sound server ↑
Well, PulseAudio is great and I use it daily. But it means GNOME dependencies, although some KDE developers are working on its implementation with Phonon — also expected by Qt. Please, don’t add them both too on MeeGo.
It would be totally useless and heavy: MeeGo should be fast and light to fit mobile devices. Anyway, large amounts of dependencies are exactly what I don’t need on my netbook (I prefer Sugar there, right now).
Maemo: Nokia vs. community, who will win? ↑
I’ve never been a purist of free software, but Maemo got the same problems of RPM — with an aggravating: the standard version is currently maintained by the community – that seems to be working on MeeGo too – while the Nokia’s isn’t really “open”.
It’s quite the same between Apple and WebKit. To be sincere, I don’t know how patches are released… but I’m just considering that’s an hybrid solution, isn’t really bad by itself.
Actually, the biggest problem is in the translations: Moblin wasn’t ever fully localized and it’s now provided just in English. I hope that the main project – powered by The Linux Foundation – will be entirely delivered to the community and this issue could have been solved soon.
In the end, even if I have many doubts on its realization, this is the most convincing project for the future of Linux: KDE is awesome, GNOME should introduce lots of new features ASAP… but none of them is yet ready to compete with closed alternatives in the market.
WordPress.com censored an Italian post on advertising
Monday, February 15th, 2010
I really dislike what recently happened on WordPress.com: one of my friends got her blog (and its relative account) suspended for what she wrote about a John Ashfield’s advertising campaign.
Now, the blog has been republished without that post – still available from the Google’s cache, but I won’t link it here – and the account restored.
Preventing someone who could ask for it, the image on the left would have been copyrighted by the John Ashfield’s company for this year too (even if the campaign was started in 2008): you can find the same credit on the picture’s EXIF data.
This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.
The above message appears insted of Arianna’s blog until it came back online without the “indicted” article: it was written in Italian, but I assure that it didn’t contain any offenses. Just some critics on the John Golf’s ads.
If that was enough to censor an entire blog for a few hours and to get a post removed… Automattic should have encountered a unconceivable error.
I don’t care about John Ashfield internals: I presume that someone asked for it, but Automattic hadn’t any right to do so. Unless they wanted to preserve that company’s public imagine. Fail.
DKMS and Catalyst 10.1: still no ways for Linux 2.6.33
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Speaking about Catalyst 10.1 compilation I’ve just considered you’re using the default Ubuntu kernel: unfortunately, there’s nothing to do with the latest Vanilla.
This means that the driver won’t work yet on Lucid Lynx too, but it got a better open source alternative you might use.
The problem is caused by DKMS: the official driver’s module can’t be properly compiled – it ensures compatibility for Linux 2.6.32 only – and you can’t finish its installation.
Anyway, I found a better method to compile the kernel: you could install kernel-package from Ubuntu/Lucid instead of editing files. I don’t think it will be ever backported to Ubuntu 9.10.
The package itself is platform-independent and you should download it from the Ubuntu’s archive, choosing the closest mirror: it doesn’t need additional dependencies.
If anyone knows how to force the fglrx module to be compiled on kernels up to 2.6.33, please let me know too on comments: I’ll implement an alternate contact method very soon.
HootSuite: the best add-on, the worst bookmarklet
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
There are lots of ways to use Twitter, but I use just few of them: for many reasons I prefer the default web interface — anyway, that’s far from being enough for most people.
One of my favorites clients is web-based too: it’s HootSuite (that actually supports other social networks). Unfortunately, it could be very confusing if you don’t use some “tricks”.
Accessing it via its web site is maybe worse than using the Twitter’s: of course, there are several tools you’d find useful. BTW, you must pay attention to which applications you choose.
Speaking about browsers, the official bookmarklet – called HootSuite Hootlet – is IMHO a kind of crap: even loading it in the Firefox’s sidebar, it doesn’t provide a better interface.
It exceeds the standard sidebar width just with a single column — that isn’t enough to control your profile: users with lots of custom columns shouldn’t use it at all.
On the other hand, HootSuite got the best Firefox add-on I’ve ever tried for this purpose: like Posterous does with post.ly (I use those with Facebook), it features Ow.ly as default URL shrinker.
Although you could also access Ow.ly without registration, installing the add-on allows to share anything on Twitter by clicking the HootSuite’s icon next to the address bar: an alternate version for Chrome is available too.
HootSuite functionalities include multi-user accounts and much more, but this is what fits to me. Tweeting an URL can’t be easier — nor hosting and posting attachments.
Bing helped, but Facebook Search still sucks
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
With the latest Facebook’s redesign I found more lacks than improvements: the custom news filters weren’t restored yet and sometimes the entire News Feed disappears.
As you should know, Microsoft is one of the main Facebook’s investors: so Bing announced a stricter collaboration with the social network.
I really don’t know what will happen in the near future: Facebook Search still sucks — IMHO, more than ever since the 4th of February.
I hope that the new features will include Bing searches on Facebook and not just vice versa: I don’t fucking care about Windows Live integration.
Some search enhancements like statuses filtering are available yet: you can choose to split between public and/or friends only updates. Better than nothing.
Anyway, I really want custom filters back on the homepage: they made searches optional, so I didn’t need to turn mad with the Facebook Search’s lacks.
