----- 
permalink: log-may-2009
filters_pre: 
- redcloth
title: Personal Log - May 2009
date: 2009-05-31 06:35:00 +02:00
tags: 
- personal_log
- programming
- wedding
type: article
toc: true
-----
Yet another extremely busy month, as you can see from the total absence of blog posts and lack of tweets even. Things are getting pretty hectic at work now I guess: less people, more work, more responsibility, same money. They call it ??contingency??; it's the latest trend in the Western World, didn't you know? I'm really not impressed. I can't complain though I guess: I still enjoy my job very much and I know it could be much worse, so it's just a matter of enduring until autumn -- or so they say.

h3. Star Trek Premiere

The month started with an event I'd been looking for for months: the _premiere_ of Star Trek XI, aka "Star Trek". It's not that J.J. Abrahms couldn't come up with a more original name (_Star Trek: Academy_ used to be the working title, at one point), he simply wanted to tell the world that this movie was a new beginning, an elaborate way to start from scratch, to reboot what was more than once dubbed _a dying franchise_.

The movie was enjoyable - daring and a bit flamboyant - but still enjoyable nonetheless. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, and although it was _not_ the usual Star Trek movie, I somehow liked Abrahms' bold revisitation of Roddenberry's universe. Take a bunch of unknowns (Chris Pine) or semi-unknowns (Zachary Quinto), then add some spicy British humor (Simon Pegg) and some old friend (Leonard Nimoy) and throw in an awful lot of XXI century special effects: what you get is not the usual, let's-all-rock-because-we're-hit traditional Star Trek, of course, it's an _alternate_ version of it.

That's precisely what the movie is meant to be: what Star Trek would have look like if it had been created in the XXI century. The timeline feels disrupted since the very first minute (nevermind the end!), with a Jim Kirk stealing his stepfather's car. Chris Pine is an ["alternate":http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/James_T._Kirk_(alternate_reality)] Kirk, quite different from the original one, but not that bad. Zachary Quinto, on the other hand, is a true revelation: he definitely is the new Spock, and he couldn't have been cast better. So is Simon Pegg as Scotty, but unfortunately he's not involved enough.

The baddies were a bit of a letdown. Nero is a bit too flat, and his ship is way too fancy, no matter where it comes from. Clearly some Hollywood junkie wanted a big, invulnerable dark ship to bring havoc in the galaxy, but that is NOT a Romulan ship, period. 

At any rate, I enjoyed the movie and I'm looking forward to the second one, which I hope it will be followed by many others. 

Unfortunately in Italy Star Trek is not worshiped in Italy as in it is the US, which is very unfortunate... Roxanne and I decided to play along and go to the cinema half-dressed-up, but our friends Elora and Michelle came with a full-blown Uhura uniform! The whole cinema kept staring at us. It was a bit freaky, but fun (check out the pics on Facebook -- if you can, that is, I won't post them here!).

h3. Wedding Planning

Just over a month to my wedding. Scared? You bet. Stressed out? Indeed. Roxanne and I managed to get most of the things organized in the end, luckily. In particular, this month:
* We went to the British Consulate in Milan, and applied to get Roxanne's legal documents.
* I bought and had the 7 vest sets delivered to Roxanne's brother's (Caspar) place, in London.
* I ended up buying 8 (buy three, get one free) morning suits from "Marks and Spencer":http://www.marksandspencer.com/gp/product/B000N65ELG?extid=pg_msf&247SEM, and had them delivered to Caspar's place. He'll be sending all the stuff over soon, hopefully.
* Roxanne got the dresses for the maids of honor, and apparently we have to collect them on monday.
* We sent all the invites we needed to send, but we're still waiting for confirmations. It looks like it won't be a big wedding, probably around to 60-70 people mark.
* We ordered the "bomboniere":http://weddings.about.com/cs/glossary/g/Bomboniere.htm, they should come through soon.
* Uncle John told us he had the music for the church and the reception sorted out.
* We got the rings!

We _still_ have to organize a few things, namely:
* Write and print the prayer books
* Book the flight for one of my ushers
* Get some fancy gifts for the bestman and the rest of the people involved in the ceremony
* Get married civilly here in Genoa
* Organize a party at our place for the people who can't come to the wedding
* Do something else I can't remember right now

Yes, we are still busy as hell. I'm looking forward to it all, but I'll definitely be much more relaxed when it's all over! 

h3. Home Internet: Epilogue?

I got broadband at home, finally, after five months. Let's do a quick recap:
# Last December I signed up to Libero Infostrada, and told them I wanted to disconnect from Telecom
# In January I actually got disconnected from Telecom, got a new phone line contract, but the Internet was never activated.
# I kept calling clueless operators on both ends pointlessly for 2-3 months.
# I got pissed off with Libero, so in April I signed up to Tele2, telling them to disconnect me from Libero. They told me it would take at least 4 weeks.
# Meanwhile, I signed up to 3g, and got an Internet USB key. At least I can go online, even if with a crappy UMTS connection.
# After a month, Telecom rings me asking if I want to come back to them, promising I'll have the Internet back on _soon enough_. Out of desperation, I accept and tell them to disconnect me from Tele2.

Just when I was about to write a long post cursing Telecom and their perverted schemes to force their customers to stay with them, I receive a call from Libero and they tell me that the Internet is now activated! Unbelievable. Now all I have to do is send letters to all the other ISPs (they don't do these things on the phone -- clueless operators, remember?) telling them I don't want anything to do with them anymore.

This is how broadband Internet works in Italy. Jealous?

h3. Nimrod

Last month I decided I would stop programming until after the wedding and so I did (at least at home). Nevertheless, I still keep strive to keep up-to-date with everything concerning technology and in particular programming. 

Out of all the tech news I came across throughout this month, the "Nimrod":http://force7.de/nimrod/ programming language definitely struck me the most. A German guy came up with a new language -- that's not a big news, new programming languages are born every week, if not every day. 

I believe Nimrod is different though. Basically, here's why:
* It's a mixture of Lisp, Python and C. It looks a bit like Python and it behaves like it (indentation matters), it allows the creation of macros, like in Lisp, and - this is what _really_ matters to me - it compiles to plain C (which can then be compiled using GCC or whatever).
* It is open source and can be used to produce commercially distributed executables.
* The "manual":http://force7.de/nimrod/manual.html is simple to read (but with a few rough edges), and the language looks simple to learn. 
* The language is not yet complete, but it's getting close to a 1.0 release. It works as advertised, nonetheless.
* It offers a comprehensive standard library, and a _huge_ amount of libraries and wrappers from everything from Windows API to GTK and Cairo.
* It is cross platform, the Windows version even comes with a one-click installer.
* It has garbage collection _and_ it supports manual memory management, if you need it.
* It's statically typed, with type inference
* It can generate standalone executables, with very little overhead (90KB for an hello world program).

A language like this has been my secret dream for a long time. I thought no one would ever come up like this. I am really looking forward to give it a proper try someday. What's wrong with it? For now, a few bits are missing (like native serialization), other than that someone pointed out the weird, rather extreme case insensitiveness of the language. Basically, case _and underscores_ are ignored to ??allow programmers to use their own programming conventions??. 
Personally I don't think this is that bad. After all, if you name your variables "a_thing" and "aThing" and you want them to mean different things, that's bad programming style anyway. Nevertheless, as far as I know it's the only language I know which offers such an extreme degree of flexibility in this sense. 

h3. Learning new things

This month I also found myself to be extremely eager to learn about new things. I'm still faithful to Ruby and all that, but I'm opening up to new possibility, for different things:
* I decided to start listening to slightly more technical podcasts, which are _not_related to tech news. In this way, I don't have the pressure of having to listen to them on a regular basis. Other than "FLOSS Weekly":http://twit.tv/FLOSS, which is probably the best show about Open Source Software out there, I'm going to try out "Software Engineering Radio":http://www.se-radio.net/ and "The Command Line":http://thecommandline.net/, both slightly more technical.
* Because I decided to put my personal programming projects on hold, I'm having all sort of new ideas about even _more_ projects I could start as soon as I can. No anticipations until after my wedding, of course.
* I'm using Vim all the time now, both at work and at home. I feel confident with it, but I feel I still have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to marks, registers, etc. And I'm not yet ready to write an article about it -- not the kind of article I'd like to write, anyway.
* I'd like to learn more about Javascript and JQuery. I played around with it and _loved it_, but I really never used it for anything serious yet. This, however, may change in the future.