May 10 2008
It just needs a company that can market it as such. I was reading about the new version of Asus EeePC and this sentence hit me:
“the Linux version is suited to users who desire an icon-driven and easy point-and-click interface – well suited for children or users with limited computer experience”
May 09 2008
I’m going to Shangai next month for the “Doing Business In” class in my MBA course. It’s going to be my first full immersion in Asia and I’m very happy. I’ll be spending some more days of vacation after the classes at Shangai’s Tongji Business School.
The Chinese consulate wants the confirmation of the hotel booking on official paper of the hotel (the printed email is not enough), so this morning I had to call China. Spelling my name on the phone was my first cultural experience. With “westerners” I end up using the NATO phonetic alphabet, with 100% success rate so far. Unfortunately the lady on the phone, who spoke very good English, didn’t know NATO phonetics (doh! why was this a surprise?) and the Fs were quite difficult for her to grasp. It’s going to be a very fun trip.
May 08 2008
Aderisco con piacere alla campagna per donare il 5 per mille a favore della ONLUS Progetto Linguistico Italiano OpenOffice.org
Codice Fiscale: 90113350327
May 07 2008
I’ve read many comments about the publication of income tax reports by Italian government, the last act of past government. I don’t know if giving my income statement to my neighbors (and to the rest of the world) is good or bad. What really made me angry was the justification by former minister, Visco. He said “it’s a matter of transparency”. Right, this country needs transparency but why is it always the citizens that have to be transparent while the government can be opaque? Where are the 10 millions? How come nobody can know why italia.it costed so much? Or, saying it with the WSJ: why does the state need to consume 48% of the country’s GDP?
Italians are not used to be transparent, the national culture is of suspect and jealousy. If you want to change that you need to educate and, most importantly, give examples. You can’t imagine that simply passing a law and pushing it down the citizens’ throat will do anything but make everybody angry. That’s bad management, awful, more than an issue of privacy. Cultural changes need strong leadership, a clear path to follow and examples. Do you still wonder why past government lasted only 2 years and its parties were wiped out of the Parliament at last elections?
May 02 2008
As Funambol community manager, one of my duties is to know such community. It sounds simple, but since lots of software is involved to gather this knowledge things get less simple. I need to dive into apache logs and I decided to use my good old friend Postgresql. If I could, I would put everything in a database 
The problem is that I also need to rapidly prototype reports to transform data into information for the board. To start navigating the data, I first followed this nice tutorial to load apache logs in PostgreSQL. Connecting the database to NeoOffice was more difficult, mainly because there is no native PostgreSQL driver in NeoOffice and PSQL JDBC page is confusing. Anyway, after trial and error, I found out that on Leopard OS X 10.5 you need JDBC3 for your PSQL version 8.3 (I used the dmg packages). To install the driver I followed the instructions provided here. Now I can start diving in the logs and prepare some reports. The board will be happy soon and I’m glad I’m on my way to better knowledge of this community too.
May 01 2008
Apr 28 2008
Apr 24 2008
Apr 22 2008
Lots of talking about Microsoft lately. As I expected, Ray Ozzie’s public appearances are increasing with declarations of love for the magic word interoperability and with a new, more open, attitude. I believe it’s true that “Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source,” as Ozzie said.
Roberto wrote a long post about Microsoft Open Source strategy. Having talked to him long enough, I know he sees the big potential for new Open Source firms to prosper on Microsoft ecosystem. I suspect he is right, given the fact that the *nix competitors have lost 15 years of evolution fighting each other instead of building a common (superior) platform. Only with GNU/Linux such common platform arrived, but it probably came a day late and a dollar short.
Contrary to Roberto, I think that Microsoft change is not sufficient yet for Free Software advocates like me to merrily lift the precautions. I can still hear Ballmer shouting threats and see him trying to twist the arms of the EU Commission (as Carlo remembers very well). I’m not confident yet that these moves represent a new strategy and they’re not merely tactics to penetrate the FLOSS market and break it from the inside (patent lawsuit?). If I were a developer I wouldn’t trust any promise not to sue by Microsoft, even if that promise uses the same (murky) words of IBM’s promises. I don’t care: Microsoft track records on Free Software is bad, bad, bad and worse. Microsoft must do better than IBM, it must be perfect (they can, if they want to).
Apr 17 2008
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://maffulli.net/wp-content/uploads/getbutton.png){kind=small}
me twitting