7 My body mass increased to 154 pounds. Or the gravity
8 of earth increased just too fool me.
12 I've updated the license of PikiPlus to GPLv3, and I invite
13 you to do the same with your programs and with any programs
14 distributed under the GPLv2 with the "or later version" clause.
18 ==== Italian profanity ====
20 I just found out that "A Cappella" is how Italians say "in the style of the church".
21 It's used for music played by human voice instead of instruments. Yes, indeed.
22 Nobody could understand why I was grinning :-)
26 ==== Random Birthday Paradox ====
28 I'm writing you this from ChrisBalls's house. cjb for IRC friends.
29 Yesterday was his wife's birthday. And also the birthday of somebody
30 else too. That's where the title came from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox .
32 We're having a lot of fun and getting drunk very quickly. Someone
33 came with a box of Avocados with a picture of Avogardo saying:
34 "let's Party. arriba." It's the things like these that will make it
35 very sad for me to leave this nation.
37 Food is vegan, and incredibly tasty if you ask me. There are people
38 from the office as well as other nerds from other places. One guy
39 showed up with a tee saying: "shut the fuck up and write some
40 code!". We're listening to TheSoundOfSilence from Xyzzy's (*) mp3 player.
41 That's one of my favourite songs, but I thought it was from the Beatles :-)
43 (*) We'll call her Xyzzy 'cause she doesn't want her name to end up on
47 Xyzzy: remember...all is not as it appears to be and the best place to hide something is in plain sight
49 Bernie: hmmm... then I guess I'll hide at OLPC and the USCIS won't find me :-)
51 RandomBirthdayParty.jpg
52 RandomBirthdayPartyHouse.jpg
53 RandomBirthdayPartyTv.jpg
54 RandomBirthdayPartyHall.jpg
59 ==== Long time, no C++ ====
61 The title was inteded to be a joke on "long time, no see", because I've
62 not been updating the blog for some time.
64 But this reminds me that, yes, indeed I've not been doing any C++ for a few
65 months now. That's probably irrelevant to most of you... but this is my blog
66 and I get to decide what goes in. Except when *you* edit it. Damn WikiWikiWeb!
68 The reason we don't have any C++ in the OLPC is that, in the Linux world,
69 C++ never flied that much. The kernel hackers say it's not well suited
70 for kernel programming, and I partially agree. Of course, C++ can't be
71 used for glibc and POSIX system libraries. Even MicrosoftCompany uses C
74 This leaves us with three more layers to exclude: windowing server,
75 desktop and applications.
77 X11 is written in C for historical reasons. Since its internals mostly
78 deal with interfaces and specialization of interfaces, C++ would have
81 Gnome also uses C, for no good reason. KDE is older than Gnome and
82 was entirely written in C++, although I clearly remember g++ 2.7.2 being
83 quite a painful experience. The GObject crap in glib and GTK is expecially
84 ugly, hard to use and error prone due to lack of good OOP support in the
87 And applications? Well, applications in the OLPC are written in Python
88 anyway, like many higher level applications in regular Linux distros.
90 There's a few exceptions: Mozilla is written in C++ and eToys is written
91 in SmallTalk. I don't know about TamTam.
93 '''rasky:''' in fact, with the raise of scripting languages and fully-featured
94 platforms (like Java's), using C++ for doing almost *anything* is the wrong
95 choice. As you said, system programming wants C for several good reasons, and
96 almost anything else can be done in scripting language. I think one last thing
97 that C++ is still good today at is high-performance libraries (eg: math
98 libraries), where you don't want to use C and you need a lot of performance.
99 But C++ is feeling more and more like a dead horse...
101 '''marco:''' About writing kernels in C++:
102 http://okmij.org/ftp/cpp-digest/toy_OS.txt
106 ==== Under pressure ====
108 Miletstone B4 was expected to ship today. I don't care because my work
109 is for due for Trial2. But many of my colleagues were extremely
112 There is one last bug with some laptops not coming out of resume.
113 And it's still not fixed at 21:00. Kernel hackers are scraping
116 We had pizza together and, seeing so many tired faces, I casually asked:
117 "when do we close for summer?".
119 People look at me puzzled: "What do you mean exactly by ''close''?".
121 "Err... companies don't close for summer here in the States?".
123 They look at each other, trying to guess if it's some kind
124 of joke: "Why would companies ever ''close''? They're not schools."
126 I quickly added: "Oh, I'm asking because, you know, most
127 companies in Italy do close a few weeks for summer".
129 At this point everybody laughed like if companies closing
130 was an extremely funny idea.
132 This is one reason why we have a strong economy here: people
133 are extremely committed at work. Will I ever catch up? Hope so.
138 ==== Eutelia Voip ====
140 I have a new public phone number: {{055-3984187}}.
142 It's Eutelia's VOIP service, formerly Skypho. People told me
143 that the quality is good. All the previous phone numbers remain
146 I've also switched from Ekiga to a SIP client that doesn't
149 http://www.twinklephone.com/
151 Actually, the user interface is horrible. But if you close
152 your eyes, it works beautifully.
157 ==== Sleeping At The Office ====
159 We have a futon here. And it's quite comfortable. Sleeping
160 at the office has its pros and cons, hereby listed by Dillinger:
165 ==== Bender Down ====
167 There has been a longstanding outage of our wiki server since yesterday.
168 Today, my sister finally fixed the problem by rebooting both the modem
171 http://bender.codewiz.org/bender.jpg
173 I'm planning to move bender here one day, so I can properly maintain
174 it, but first I need to consolidate my visa position.
179 ==== More laptop news ====
181 Available here: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=News
183 Some links to videos in the end. There's not much about me, mostly because I've not done
184 much this week besides chasing bugs.
187 ==== Father and son private business ====
189 E' una settimana che non scrivi. Dove sei sparito? -- '''Babbo'''
191 Avevo problemi di ADSL piuttosto gravi su questo server... ora e' a posto, ma oggi ho da finire delle cose urgenti. Vedo di scrivere due righe nel w/e, scusate tanto -- '''bernie'''
197 Two days ago I went to the local pub for the HappyHour... the HungryHour actually.
198 And I ordered this tasty dish of Cheese Bacon Fries! Yummy yum!
200 http://gastrologica.com/cheesefries.jpg
202 Ok, it's a disgusting blob of pure fat. And the infamous Cheddar
203 cheese, also known as "solid cholesterol":
205 http://www.dann-online.com/HappyHour/lrg93.jpg
208 If you're looking for something healthy, you can always try a
209 salad. Just make sure you don't get a Caesar salad with its
210 ultra-fat dressing sauce:
212 http://www.kosherblog.net/media/caesar.jpg
214 You may also want to avoid hot dogs drowned in chili sauce:
216 http://onokinegrindz.typepad.com/ono_kine_grindz/images/WaffleDogwithChili-thumb.jpg
218 American pizza is edible and even good... But I recently discovered that
219 Pepperoni aren't vegetables, but a kind of hot salami:
221 http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/PTGPOD/409409~Close-up-of-Pepperoni-Pizza-Posters.jpg
224 And, finally, beware of food franchises pretending to be Italian.
227 http://www.emich.edu/dining/images/sbarro/sbarro.jpg
232 ==== Bernie is going to write something here soon ====