contents/articles/log-may-2009.html
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----- title: "Personal Log - May 2009" content-type: article timestamp: 1243744500 tags: "personal_log|programming|wedding" ----- <p>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 <cite>contingency</cite>; 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.</p> <h3>Star Trek Premiere</h3> <p>The month started with an event I’d been looking for for months: the <em>premiere</em> of Star Trek XI, aka “Star Trek”. It’s not that J.J. Abrahms couldn’t come up with a more original name (<em>Star Trek: Academy</em> 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 <em>a dying franchise</em>.</p> <p>The movie was enjoyable – daring and a bit flamboyant – but still enjoyable nonetheless. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, and although it was <em>not</em> 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 <span class="caps">XXI</span> 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 <em>alternate</em> version of it.</p> <p>That’s precisely what the movie is meant to be: what Star Trek would have look like if it had been created in the <span class="caps">XXI</span> 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 <a href="http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/James_T._Kirk_(alternate_reality)">alternate</a> 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.</p> <p>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 <span class="caps">NOT</span> a Romulan ship, period.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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!).</p> <h3>Wedding Planning</h3> <p>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:</p> <ul> <li>We went to the British Consulate in Milan, and applied to get Roxanne’s legal documents.</li> <li>I bought and had the 7 vest sets delivered to Roxanne’s brother’s (Caspar) place, in London.</li> <li>I ended up buying 8 (buy three, get one free) morning suits from <a href="http://www.marksandspencer.com/gp/product/B000N65ELG?extid=pg_msf&247SEM">Marks and Spencer</a>, and had them delivered to Caspar’s place. He’ll be sending all the stuff over soon, hopefully.</li> <li>Roxanne got the dresses for the maids of honor, and apparently we have to collect them on monday.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>We ordered the <a href="http://weddings.about.com/cs/glossary/g/Bomboniere.htm">bomboniere</a>, they should come through soon.</li> <li>Uncle John told us he had the music for the church and the reception sorted out.</li> <li>We got the rings!</li> </ul> <p>We <em>still</em> have to organize a few things, namely:</p> <ul> <li>Write and print the prayer books</li> <li>Book the flight for one of my ushers</li> <li>Get some fancy gifts for the bestman and the rest of the people involved in the ceremony</li> <li>Get married civilly here in Genoa</li> <li>Organize a party at our place for the people who can’t come to the wedding</li> <li>Do something else I can’t remember right now</li> </ul> <p>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!</p> <h3>Home Internet: Epilogue?</h3> <p>I got broadband at home, finally, after five months. Let’s do a quick recap:</p> <ol> <li>Last December I signed up to Libero Infostrada, and told them I wanted to disconnect from Telecom</li> <li>In January I actually got disconnected from Telecom, got a new phone line contract, but the Internet was never activated.</li> <li>I kept calling clueless operators on both ends pointlessly for 2-3 months.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Meanwhile, I signed up to 3g, and got an Internet <span class="caps">USB</span> key. At least I can go online, even if with a crappy <span class="caps">UMTS</span> connection.</li> <li>After a month, Telecom rings me asking if I want to come back to them, promising I’ll have the Internet back on <em>soon enough</em>. Out of desperation, I accept and tell them to disconnect me from Tele2.</li> </ol> <p>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.</p> <p>This is how broadband Internet works in Italy. Jealous?</p> <h3>Nimrod</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>Out of all the tech news I came across throughout this month, the <a href="http://force7.de/nimrod/">Nimrod</a> 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.</p> <p>I believe Nimrod is different though. Basically, here’s why:</p> <ul> <li>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 <em>really</em> matters to me – it compiles to plain C (which can then be compiled using <span class="caps">GCC</span> or whatever).</li> <li>It is open source and can be used to produce commercially distributed executables.</li> <li>The <a href="http://force7.de/nimrod/manual.html">manual</a> is simple to read (but with a few rough edges), and the language looks simple to learn.</li> <li>The language is not yet complete, but it’s getting close to a 1.0 release. It works as advertised, nonetheless.</li> <li>It offers a comprehensive standard library, and a <em>huge</em> amount of libraries and wrappers from everything from Windows <span class="caps">API</span> to <span class="caps">GTK</span> and Cairo.</li> <li>It is cross platform, the Windows version even comes with a one-click installer.</li> <li>It has garbage collection <em>and</em> it supports manual memory management, if you need it.</li> <li>It’s statically typed, with type inference</li> <li>It can generate standalone executables, with very little overhead (90KB for an hello world program).</li> </ul> <p>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 <em>and underscores</em> are ignored to <cite>allow programmers to use their own programming conventions</cite>. <br /> 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.</p> <h3>Learning new things</h3> <p>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:</p> <ul> <li>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 <a href="http://twit.tv/FLOSS"><span class="caps">FLOSS</span> Weekly</a>, which is probably the best show about Open Source Software out there, I’m going to try out <a href="http://www.se-radio.net/">Software Engineering Radio</a> and <a href="http://thecommandline.net/">The Command Line</a>, both slightly more technical.</li> <li>Because I decided to put my personal programming projects on hold, I’m having all sort of new ideas about even <em>more</em> projects I could start as soon as I can. No anticipations until after my wedding, of course.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>I’d like to learn more about Javascript and JQuery. I played around with it and <em>loved it</em>, but I really never used it for anything serious yet. This, however, may change in the future.</li> </ul> |