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title: "Personal Log - May 2009"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1243744500
tags: "personal_log|programming|wedding"
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<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 &#8212; 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
	&#8220;Star Trek&#8221;. 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 &#8211; daring and a bit flamboyant &#8211; 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&#8230;
	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 &#8212; 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&amp;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 &#8212; 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 &#8212; 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 &#8211; this is what <em>really</em> matters to me &#8211;
		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 &#8220;a_thing&#8221; and
	&#8220;aThing&#8221; 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 &#8212; 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>