Hacking the life

Arduino at Linux Day 2010

2010-10-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

At Linux Day 2010 I done a talk about open hardware and Arduino.
For me it is the first time in front of young people. I had some classes of ITI (Istituto tecnico industriale). I really haven't idea about how much they have understand :)

The slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/axaroth/open-hardware-arduino-un-prodotto-italiano

"PC banned until nine"?

2010-06-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

The original article

It is a ridiculous position: a computer is a very versatile tool, you can use it right or wrong. The same promoter Dr Aric Sigman asserts this concept, I guess if he really ask for a ban.

When I hear someone trying to forbid something always I wonder if there are hidden motivation. Why to ban PC when you can teach to use to the best?

The history teaches us: it seems the same happen when the Church banned some books. The motivations was different but the effects are the same: to hold people ignorant. As Church likes to do beginning from the childhood it is the best way to have success to remove critical capacity (there are many methods to crack the mind and to force unconscious behaviors, depriving is the simplest to use).

The case of PC is the same: you can learn a lot, learn to play tactical game, to use complex simulation enviroment, to use Internet (the best 'evil' tool) and to compare your opinion with others, to reason and how not to be cheated.

Seems that ban PC is not a good idea at all!

NiceSpammer

2010-05-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

At Pycon4 with Antonio Tirabasso we have presented the NiceSpammer.
The project starts as requests for our clients to send newsletters from Plone sites.

I done a wide research about the existent products, Python and not, and finally I found there are lot of interesting software but all have the authoring part, that we don't need.

So I try to minimize the developement using well know libraries and avoiding the DB backend component. The result is NiceSpammer, the newsletter is created from four files: a csv containing the emails, the configuration (from, subject, stats) and the html and text content.

In this way you can generate the newsletter by hand or integrating whatever web framework you like in a very simple way.

Pycon4 Talks

2010-05-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

At the Pycon4 (the italian Python conference) I done two talks.

The first one is about the ZODB, an object oriented data base. It is amazing how using this DB make your code simple and natural in respect of the equivalent using a RDBM.

The second one is on zope.buildout. It is a system to deploy Python applications. I use this one especially for the deployment of Zope/Plone applications, but I discovered very useful in any type of deployment.

You can find the slides here:
http://www.slideshare.net/axaroth/zodb
http://www.slideshare.net/axaroth/buildout
(They are in italian!)

And the code here:
the family tree with zodb
buildout example

The beginning

2010-05-25T01:16:00.000-07:00

Don't take the description to serious, there is not a dark side in software development... ok, I am joking, there are some dark spots but I like to develop software and I am blind to the ugly things that are in this field.

In this place I will gather all the interesting things I do and some less interesting. It is more for me than you, anyway enjoy the blog.