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contents/articles/log-feb-2009.html

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-----
title: "Personal Log - February 2009"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1235736540
tags: "personal_log|ruby"
-----
<p>This has been a rather busy month, hence the lack of general Internet activity. I really wanted to post some more articles to my site, but for one reason or another I had to procrastinate more and more, and here we are at the end of the month again.</p>
<h3>Recession time!</h3>
<p>I&#8217;ve always considered the current economic downturn as something happening <em>somewhere else</em>: <span class="caps">USA</span>, England, Ireland&#8230; but not in Italy, really: our country never boomed, we don&#8217;t go mental with loans and mortgages (or at least we didn&#8217;t use to), so there&#8217;s no real reason for a full-on recession period.</p>
<p>It turns out I was wrong. Other than the fact that our industries are more or less non-existant or already in debt, I didn&#8217;t consider that:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Italians tend to panic a lot.</li>
	<li>We have an awful lot of foreign business going on, a lot of multi-national companies opened up through the years lured by cheap workers and acceptable craftmanship.</li>
	<li>Our government already <del>wastes</del> invests a lot of money regularly, every year, to fuel a colossal, <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nepotistic">nepotistic</a>, pointless bureaucratic machine they insist on calling &#8220;State&#8221;.</li>
</ul>
<p>Result: the recession is starting to hit properly over here too. People are saving money, they don&#8217;t go out buying pointless crap, they are scared to ask for a raise at work&#8230; the usual. I work for a foreign company which has been, as were most, forced to save some money to compensate some not-so-good First Quarter&#8217;s revenues. This means less unnecessary expenses, less training, less travelling and less outsourcing, which didn&#8217;t help improving the daily work experiece. Personally, I&#8217;m not that affected by all this, nevertheless it made me bless the day my fiancée persuaded me to stop uni after my Bachelor&#8217;s Degree to get a very rewarding, not-so-stressful job.</p>
<h3>No &#8217;Net @ Home</h3>
<p>The most annoying thing of the month was (and still is) the lack of Internet access at our house. Let&#8217;s do a quick recap:</p>
<ol>
	<li>After spending one year with Telecom Italia, Roxanne and I decided to change provider to save a bit of money and get more speed.</li>
	<li>On <em>December 24th</em> we requested a contract with <a href="http://www.wind.it">Wind</a>, after they assured that we&#8217;d have the Internet back on in <em>just a few days, tops</em>.</li>
	<li>On <em>January 5th</em> Telecom disconnected us.</li>
	<li>On <em>January 12th</em> Wind sent me a mail telling me that there was going to be a <em>15-day delay</em> in the activation &mdash; well, at least they told us so! We waited.</li>
	<li>On <em>February 2nd</em> I call Wind Customer Care hassling them to get a move on &mdash; just some minor delays, <em>it will only take a few days, tops</em>. We waited.</li>
</ol>
<p>Our new Internet line has been <em>in the process of being activated</em> ever since January 5th. Why? Because being a customer sucks, in Italy, and you can&#8217;t do much about it.<br />
Let me quote one of the 13 phone calls I made:</p>
<ul>
	<li>&#8230; 5 minutes on hold, stupid music in the background &#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Good Evening Sir, I&#8217;m <random name>, how can I help you?</li>
	<li>[Me]: Hello, I&#8217;m enquiring about the status of my Internet connection: I&#8217;ve been disconnected since the 5th of January&#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Phone Number please?</li>
	<li>[Me]: *** ******</li>
	<li>&#8230; 2 minutes on old &#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Name plase?</li>
	<li>[Me]: Fabio Cevasco</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Let me check&#8230;</li>
	<li>&#8230; 6 minutes on hold, stupid music in the background &#8230;</li>
	<li>[Me]: Any luck?</li>
	<li>[Operator]: One moment please&#8230;</li>
	<li>&#8230; 2 minutes on hold, stupid music in the background &#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Sir, it says here that you are <em>in the process of being activated</em></li>
	<li>[Me]: (you stupid idiot, I can check that on the Net in less than a minute) Yes, I know what, but why, exactly? It has been over a month&#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Let me check&#8230;</li>
	<li>&#8230; 3 minutes on hold, stupid music in the background &#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: There are some technical difficulties.</li>
	<li>[Me]: What kind of technical difficulties?</li>
	<li>[Operator]: I&#8230; I don&#8217;t think you can understand Sir, it&#8217;s technical&#8230;</li>
	<li>[Me]: (!!!) I have a degree in IT Engineering, so yes, I think I can understand enough.</li>
	<li>[Operator]: &#8230;well, there&#8217;s nothing I can do&#8230; it says we&#8217;re in the process of connecting you, it should be just&#8230;</li>
	<li>[Me]: &#8230;a matter of a couple of days, yes, I know: it has been over a month though!</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Sir, really, I can&#8217;t really do much about it, you&#8217;ll just have to wait</li>
	<li>[Me]: Can you let me speak with the Technical Department?</li>
	<li>[Operator]: No, sir, I can&#8217;t: you see, your <span class="caps">ADSL</span> line is not yet activated, they can&#8217;t do anything about it.</li>
	<li>[Me]: Excuse me, but I&#8217;d like to know what the problem is, and how long it will take to activate the line.</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Sorry sir, we don&#8217;t have this information, and we can&#8217;t commit to a specific date.</li>
	<li>[Me]: (!!!) May I speak to someone who knows this? May I speak to your superior?</li>
	<li>[Operator] No, you can&#8217;t speak to my superior. You&#8217;ll just have to wait, I&#8217;m sorry.</li>
	<li>[Me]: Well, it has been over a month, and I don&#8217;t know if you realize that you were supposed to connect me in just a few days and&#8230;</li>
	<li>[Operator]: Thank you for calling sir, have a good day.</li>
</ul>
<p>That barely conveys the frustration I felt and I&#8217;m still feeling now. I can&#8217;t even sue them: I could get 100 Euro at most after spending at least a couple of thousands in lawyer. So much for the land of sunshine huh?</p>
<h3>Programming in Ruby, again</h3>
<p>Some of you may be pleased to know I&#8217;m back coding in Ruby after slacking for months. It&#8217;s just the time of the year, I guess. <br />
I&#8217;m also evangelizing the language quite a bit at work: after I wrote a few scripts on demand, I slowly lured one of my colleagues to Vim, the Texile markup and then finally the Ruby language. He&#8217;s going through the <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/articles/hlrb-review">Humble Little Ruby Book</a> and he&#8217;s loving it, so far. He&#8217;ll hopefully be fully assimilated in a few weeks at most, and after that there will be no going back!</p>
<p>This inspired me to start a full rewrite of <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/tags/redbook/">RedBook</a>, my little Ruby daily logger. It will feature a SQLite backend and Merb&#8217;s Datamapper to take care of the dirty work.<br />
Unfortunately, even if the new sources are already available on <a href="http://github.com/h3rald/redbook/tree/master">GitHub</a>, it will take me approximately a few more weeks to complete all the plugins and more to finish the RDoc documentation and &mdash; hopefully &mdash; a fully-fledged user manual. It&#8217;s <strong>the</strong> pet project, after all&#8230;</p>
<p>On the other hand, it will take me considerably less time (a few days?) to release the next version of my <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/tags/rawline">RawLine</a> library, featuring:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Ruby 1.9 support</li>
	<li>A handy little function for filename completion</li>
	<li>Readline emulation, i.e. just <code>include Rawline</code> and use it as if it was <span class="caps">GNU</span> Readline</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course this doesn&#8217;t mean RawLine is a complete, 100% Ruby port of the <span class="caps">GNU</span> Readline library, but it is definitely more Ruby-ish, more cross platform (try using Readline with Ruby on Windows&#8230;), and usable enough for most of the normal things, like:</p>
<ul>
	<li>tab completion</li>
	<li>line editing (but no vi or emacs mode yet, sorry)</li>
	<li>history</li>
	<li>quick and easy key bindings</li>
</ul>
<p>Once this comes out, I&#8217;ll be implementing features on-demand, as <span class="caps">GNU</span> Readline is huge and offers way too many things anyone would ever need. Patches and contributions are of course more than welcome, though.</p>
<p>For all my open source Ruby projects, after <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/articles/where-does-your-ruby-code-live">pondering the alternatives</a>, I decided to go with the following setup:</p>
<ul>
	<li>My own site for the home pages of the projects</li>
	<li>RubyForge for gem support and for RDoc documentation</li>
	<li>GitHub as source code repository</li>
	<li>LightHouse for issue tracking</li>
</ul>
<p>I hope it works out&#8230;</p>