Software Freedom Day 2008

October 1, 2008 at 18:01 · Filed under events

On Semptember the 20th, in Perugia, I had the occasion to do a speech about Python. The presentation was part of the Software Freedom Day program; the event was organised by the people of Free Software User Group Italy.

The speech was just an introduction to Python targeted to technical high school students and professors; in fact, the audience was mostly made of students of high schools that adheres to the OSSPG project. OSSPG is a project targeted to spread the adoption of open source software on Perugia’s province schools that so far counts three high schools among its members. My goal was to convince the audience that Python is a very useful programming language and very good for teaching the art of programming; to do so, I’ve first shown some Python’s base characteristics (forced intendation, dynamic typing, imperative/functional/object-oriented programming support, great standard library), then I focused on the adoption of Python by several big players in the software industry (one for all: Google).

Me, talking about Python

Me, talking about Python

During the day there were also three other speeches:

  • Alexjan Carraturo did a (due) introduction about the free software concept and the realities behind it;
  • Domenico Margiotta presented a set of free software applications that can be used on every day activities (web browsing, music listening etc…) in stead of proprietary ones;
  • Francesco Crippa, our special guest from Lodi (near Milan), Fedora Ambassador, did a nice summary of Linux’s history through its main distributions with a special focus on Red Hat and the Fedora project.

I’d like to underline the fact that Francesco did a travel of about 500km to attend the speech! Very nice of him, he’s definitely a cool guy.

Francesco and Alex

Francesco and Alex

After the presentation we did the usual FSUG Italy lunch at the Chinese restaurant; by now it’s a tradition!

Eating Chinese!

Eating Chinese!

In the afternoon there was a meeting between us who did the speeches and some professors; it was a very interesting discussion because they presented very clearly their difficulties and opinions about the adoption of free software in their school, both as infrastructure and as teaching tool. More to come about this. ;-)

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MOCA 2008

September 3, 2008 at 20:22 · Filed under events, travels

From August the 21st to August the 24th I’ve been at the Metro Olografix Camp (codename: MOCA), in Pescara. Metro Olografix is a no-profit association that promotes free access to computer related knowledge; the camp itself was a north European style hacking camp, with people from all around Italy and some from other countries too. I went there with a group of people from Free Software User Group Italy:

FSUG Italy at MOCA (I'm on the right)

The experience was really amazing: I’ve never seen so many hackers, crackers, whatever… together in the so-called real life! Special guest was the famous John Draper, in art Captain Crunch:

Captain Crunch!

Captain Crunch!

During the camp there were also talks about several topics, mostly computer security related. I especially enjoyed those about cryptography, secure data erasing and implementing a secure platform based on Gentoo Linux (the Lollobox); I really enjoyed also the “historical” talks: Captain Crunch’s one was full of funny anecdotes and Raul Chiesa, together with Alessandro Fossato, made a lovely travel across the Italian hacking and phreaking’s scene between the ’80s and the ’90s.

I also managed to do a talk myself, about disk encryption with Loop-AES. It was really cool… I love to talk in speeches like this and the people listening helped a lot: they were awake and even attentive all the time!

Me, during my speech

Me, during my speech

We also found the time to revel at the beach! The sea of Pescara is not very good because of the seaport nearby but few kilometers away the water was clean enough to swim into. Computers, camping and beach… Definitely a great combination!

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Marmore’s Falls

August 16, 2008 at 17:23 · Filed under travels

August the 15th is an important holiday in Italy. It has at least Roman origins and its name, Ferragosto, is a derivation of the Latin Ferie Augustæ (holidays of emperor August). Later the Catholic Church decided to remember with this holiday the Assumption of Mary.

As usually me and some friends did a little trip. Little, because we just couldn’t organize ourselves and we decided to leave quite late in the morning! Because of this situation we decided to go in a place nearby our town. Luckly we happen to live in a lovely region of Italy, Umbria, which is full of both natural and human made beauties for everyone to admire. Few kilometers away from our town there is something that somehow belongs to both categories: Marmore’s Falls.

Thanks to their 165m of height, these waterfalls are the highest of Europe. Also, they are the highest man made waterfalls in the world. Their costruction was ordered in 271 BC by the Roman consul Curius Dentatus to deal with a wetland nearby. Today’s look is the result of modifications that have been done in later times:

In our visit we followed some of the paths prepared for the tourists, starting from the panoramic viewpoint on the top of the waterfall; from there you can see the valley and the hills all around, a great landscape.

The top of the waterfalls

The waterfall's top

Landscape from the waterfall's top

While going down, we especially appreciated a viewpoint near the main water mass: the Lover’s Balcony, called this way only because people that are crazy or in love (assuming that there’s some difference between the two ) would go through it; in fact, the price to pay to get so near to the waterfall is some heavy rain all around! All considering it wasn’t bad at all, given the hot weather.

On the bottom there are other paths and an area called Byron square: from those places you can get a wonderful view of the entire waterfall, a scenographical show of rare beauty.

Byron Square

Byron Square

A view from the bottom

View from the bottom

If you happen to be in Umbria, near the city of Terni, I really advice you to take a day to visit Marmore’s Falls, you won’t regret it!

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Welcome to my Weblog

August 11, 2008 at 10:32 · Filed under Uncategorized

Welcome to my blog! For the sake of clarity, in this entry I will explain why I have chosen to create this blog.

Briefly: to help me being a better reader and writer, among other things.

Obviously maintaining a blog helps exercising writing skills. I have chosen English because I have less occasions to use it than Italian, my native language. I chat or write emails in English quite often, but using it for a blog is much more challenging because it will be potentially readable by a lot of people (scripta manent ;-) ). Since this is an exercise in writing, please feel free and most welcome to correct me, even in a “grammar nazi” way; really, I will appreciate that. This will also be a good exercise in modesty because I tend to be real picky myself about written Italian!

This blog will also help me being a better reader. I read practically every day, both English and Italian texts; mostly I read articles related to computing science that I find on the Internet or texts that I must study for university. While I often read just for fun and pleasure, there is a lot that deserves attention and deeper thought in those readings. From my study experience I have found that summarizing important concepts that I have read by writing them down is the better way to fix them in my memory. So, part of the content of this blog will be considerations on other people’s work that I find interesting.

I probably will write about topics that I am working on, mostly university projects. I hope that doing this will give me a better insight on such topics.

Maybe I will also write down some ideas or inspirations that will occur to me from time to time, maybe I will cover other topics too rather than computing science alone; time will tell.

Phew! There goes the ritual first post. :-)

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