I totally agree with today's essay by Dave: State of the Union, which is quite remarkable considering that I don't live in the US.

The truth is that politics sucks in most of the world, that the US administration influences the world much more than any other... and that I'm a big West Wing fan too! It's by far my favourite show, while I was walking outside the White House last week in DC I kept exchanging in my mind between the real and the fictional presidents.

West Wing is inspiring because it describes politics as we would like it to be while we have a lot of reasons to hate what we see every day (and in Italy we are really touching the bottom).

The good news is they in Italy they have just began airing the 3rd season. I could easily grab the other seasons, but especially now that the show has been cancelled I want to taste every second of it, the longer it takes, the better. Meanwhile let's hope that the power of the long tail will find the way to get them to make new episodes.

Btw, what you see in the previous post is a Web 2.0 style image. In the 1.0 era I would have used a soft shadow, like the one in this picture.

But now soft shadows are old stuff, the web is moving forward, it's no time for soft shadows anymore, this weblog has just entered the new 2.0 era of cool reflections.

I wonder if I'll get on TechCrunch now ;-)

Anina's agency gave her an ultimatum: either quit working on her technology project or leave the agency.

It's yet another work vs. passion decision, and it's not an easy one considering that Anina has not been making any profit from her technology efforts yet, but she's a smart girl and I'm sure that she will choose wisely.

What is certain is that this is a bad move for the agency, they are going to get a lot of bad karma from the web and this is the type of thing that google will not forget anytime soon.

Okay, since it's not a secret anymore I can guess I can say that I went to Dulles to work on an AOL gig with Marc Canter. It great being involved in such a big project.

It has been a very interesting and exciting trip, I didn't have much time for sightseeing, but that wasn't the point and anyway I'll be back soon.

The overall impression I got from visiting the US after 5 years is pretty good, in a way better than I was expecting. The way people is nice, the huge size of everything, the thousand little things that are a little different from the way they are in Europe, all the different kinds of food you can have, the feeling of a booming economy, have all been refreshing.

The return trip has been a nightmare: everything went well until I got to Milano Malpensa airport. At that point I got stuck in one of the worst snow storm in history and it took more than 24 hours to get back to Trieste. I remembered why flying with Alitalia and via Malpensa is always a bad idea.

What usually happens is that a lot of my friends are attending conferences in the US and I'm stuck in Europe. This time a conference is happening almost next door in Munich, my friends are having fun... and I'm in the US. :-)

I made it, I'm back in the US. Too bad my baggage isn't.

:-(

Looks like Matt is starting a campaign to get rid of the capslock key which he has never used in the last 20 years.

I'm against this campaign: I use the capslock key quite frequently to change the cursor behavior in PhotoShop. I vote to keep the capslock key!

;-)

Technorati Tags: keyboards

Reading Lists are simple and powerful idea.

A possible side use of the feature could be to list feeds belonging to a person.

It's probably still a power user issue, but several of my friends are writing on more than one blog, have Flickr feeds and from time to time write on other sites as well. I would love being able to subscribe to an OPML reading list keeping track of everything a person writes wherever he writes it.

Technorati Tags: ReadingLists

We have a confused figtree in our garden.

It starts blooming too soon in Spring, by the time Summer comes it's figs are already too big but not ripe yet and they fall to the ground. At the end of Summer more figs start growing, but by Autumn, when all leaves fall, they stop, still very small. In wintertime we have this weird naked figtree exposing its indecent little green figs. At the end of Winter the little figs fall, and the story begins again.

I haven't eat a single ripe fig for the whole year.

Technorati Tags: Figtree

Next Saturday I'm going to fly to Washington DC for a few days of meetings.

It's my first time in DC and it's the first time I get back to the US after almost exactly five years. Last time I was there the bubble had not burst yet, September 11 was just a date and I didn't have a weblog.

PS: Vanderwal asks in the comments if I'm going to have a geek dinner. Well... I didn't know anybody was reading me in DC. I checked and according to Google Analytics there are 6 readers in the area. If anyone is interested I'd be happy to have a geek dinner :-)

Technorati Tags: WashingtonDC

Stowe Boyd has a new gig, a new blog, and is climbing Technorati again.

Technorati Tags: StoweBoyd

Dave: The problem with remote "managed" servers is that sometimes you can't get to them when you need to.

Local data is as important as local processing power, my point is about local long-term storage: while I do want to have a copy of everything here, I don't want to worry about it.

I think that the coolest feature of Radio is the fact that it automagically keeps a copy of every file I drop in the a local (www) folder on the server. It's a feature that a lot of users have have not even realized it's there and it's the main reason I keep using Radio: when I want to share a file I simply drop it in a folder. This can only be done by an application running on your computer.

But when it gets to blog data, Radio keeps the raw data in a local database and uploads on the server a rendered version of the page. If I loose my local database I will still have the rendered version but I won't be able to re-import it.

The solution is actually easy: move the rendering code back on the server and upload raw data instead of rendered pages.

Which I think is just what OPML does: it uploads an OPML file which is then rendered on the server. Theoretically I could rebuild a lost OPML install recovering data which has been uploaded on a safe server (but this takes us to synchronization-land, a place programmers usually tend to avoid ;-).

PS: also see what Cristian says about this.

Technorati Tags: DaveWiner, DesktopWebServers, OPML

In this post Dave writes about desktop web servers. I think that desktop web servers are a great idea. Actually web servers are great anywhere. Quite often we have solved complex integration problems simply inserting a little web server (quite often Radio UserLand) in the mix to collect, manage and relay. A little web server integrated to a scripting environment can do magic.

The challenge with distributed little web servers is where to store the data. I think that one of the main issues with Radio UserLand is that ultimately the user has to manage an ever growing database on his computer. While advanced users know how to deal with little problems, do backups and know that databases (and hard disks) tend to get corrupted, break or get lost, regular users don't and they often end up loosing their stuff.

What I would love to have today is a system where I can deal with the data I have to manage locally with all the advantages of running a local highly integrated application, but where all the real database management is done by a pro somewhere else, where it cannot get corrupted, broken or lost.

PS: more
 

Technorati Tags: DaveWiner, DesktopWebServers

One year ago today I had just ordered iLife 05. The new version of Garage Band was a true 2.0 and iPhoto promised to be faster and my photo archive had reached the breaking point.

iLife 06 is not as interesting as version 05 was imho: I'm not interested in all the podcasting features of Garage Band, iWeb might be interesting but I already have a blog, I will end up buying the package only to get a faster iPhoto since I'm stuck again with my photo archive.

This seems to be a pattern: every January I get a iPhoto update, for some months everything works fine, then I get to the point when nothing moves anymore and I need another update. I'm wondering if I'm really taking pictures faster than allowed by Moore's law or if there's some sneaky code which start degrading iPhoto's performances in September making it totally unusable by December.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iLife

I have been living quite happily without the need to buy new gadgets for a while, but I feel it's starting again. The old Macintosh Cube which is sitting on the top of my TV at home just doesn't cut it. It does manage all my music library decently and it also plays videos, but using it from the sofa is a major pain even I did find the way to install Front Row and I could probably figure out how to replace a remote control.

Then for Christmas I received a cool USB Digital TV receiver, but it's USB 2.0 only and it doesn't work with the old Cube. And I would also like to be able to record from my satellite receiver directly on hard disk.

So just let's say that I'm ready to buy this new Mac Mini TV that Apple should introduce in a few days.

Technorati Tags: Apple

Here we are, a brand new year already promising to be very interesting.

I'll try to post on this English side of my blog more frequently than I did last year, I plan to have interesting stuff to show and things to say this year.

Meanwhile, happy new year to everybody.