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• Bookshelf

  [warning: you won't find any useful identity related info in this post]   I recently moved to a new apartment, and while unboxing the books I had to decide on a criteria for shelving them in our wonderful black billy . Hierarchies sucks, because they force you to choose a single criteria for slicing your data: but with physical objects, it's hard to use tagging :-) I decided to dedicate one shelf to the books that had the most influence on my past & recent development: and I'm going to spend some of this Saturday night writing it down here. I excluded all the classics from school time, you won't find " The Prince " or " The Divine Comedy " in this list but that doesn't mean that I didn't metabolize them; the same goes for pure-entertainment novels & poets, no Hyperion or Montale here; the same goes for scholastic programming, no Knuth , Sliberschatz or Code Complete ; or for the books that I have but I didn't find the time to read yet, like The Long Tail (bought from Anderson himself when he came to present it @ campus) or  " Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman "; we have to draw a line somewhere :-)   Godel Escher Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Simply fantastic. Should be mandatory reading for orientation courses pre-computer science. I didn't really understand recursion until I read GEB; the godelization is one of the most useful concepts ever; messages/codes/meaning, 'nuff said. The Mind's I - Hofstadter & Dennett A great book. Read More... Posted Sunday, September 14, 2008 6:06 AM from Vibro.NET | 1 Comments Filed under: Personal, Useless

• How did you get started in software development?

  [I suggest my usual readers to skip this post altogether, you won't find anything useful here :-)] Romeo tagged me with this "How did you get started in software development?" quest. I was already feeling guilty, because given how swamped I am I knew I was not going to have time to reply to the tag: OTOH right now my main PC is unusable, since I am repaving a new HD on it, hence while the network install goes I can write this up. How old were you when you started programming? A quale età hai cominciato a programmare? I was 12. One Christmas parents & siblings joined forces and got me a Commodore16 : it was just *fantastic*. How did you get started in programming? Come hai cominciato a programmare? With the reference manual of the basic 3.5. What was your first language? Qual’è stato il tuo primo linguaggio di programmazione? Basic, the one that came with the Commodore16. What was the first real program you wrote? Qual’è stato il primo programma vero che hai scritto? Hard to define "real" here. I would say that the first program I have wrote for a purpose different than pure enjoyment was a control routine for a Siemens PLC. It was for a shop class, we had those PLC working in AWL-step5. Not very structured, but hey... certainly software! What languages have you used since you started programming? Quali linguaggi hai usato da quando hai cominciato a programmare? Ah, hard to remember them all. Already mentioned Basic and AWL-Step5. At the University it was mainly Pascal, C and Read More... Posted Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:32 PM from Vibro.NET | 1 Comments Filed under: Personal, Useless

• 5 years of blogging

  2:35AM. I landed few hours ago in Seattle, back from a successful week in Kuala Lumpur & Singapore , and of course I am totally jetlagged and I can't sleep at all. Hence I'll kill some time writing the customarily post I do every April for this feed's birthday (former installments: 2004 , 2005 , 2006 , 2007 ). Five years is quite a long time in the IT timescale. It always amazes me to see the readership stats: given the specificity of the topics I write about, coupled with my regrettable tendency to tangents & severe verbal incontinence, one would never expect a yearly total of views well in the six digits and yet.. thanks everybody for your attention & patience :-) Here there's a selection of some of the most popular's posts since last April. Considering that in the past year I've also worked on the book and spoke at many events, besides the usual customer engagements, I am surprised I managed to write almost 100 entries. Some musings The Tao of Claims The Tao of Authentication series ( I , II & III ) The Authorization Continuum Omnidirectional Identities On R-STS On ProofTokens On DisplayTokens Cloud Computing & Identity Some samples & tutorials Sample usage of CardSpace & WF's new Send/Receive WCF activities Sample usage of CardSpace & WCF's new REST style services Sample usage of CardSpace & Excel Sample usage of CardSpace on non-HTTPS websites Sample usage of managed cards for accessing a biztalk.net RP The Teched EMEA STS demo series ( Read More... Posted Sunday, April 27, 2008 6:31 AM from Vibro.NET | 1 Comments Filed under: Personal, Useless

• My new Fujitsu U810

  [warning: this post does not feature any identity related content, and it's probably useless] I feel for the UMPCs an unhealthy (walletwise) attraction, since the very moment they came out. In fact, if you dig in the early years of this blog you'll see I am a gadget freak: I am still proudly going around with my JasJar , even if it means having a fanny pack around my waist for the delight of my mocking colleagues (one day I'll give them proper grief about all the fashion mistakes they make according to Italian tastes, but that's another story :-)). During the black Friday I went, like many fellow geeks, in the annual pilgrimage to Fry's . Here, among unbelievably long lines and empty shelves, I saw the U810 : an exquisitely small convertible laptop, small enough to literally fit in the pockets of my jacket but with a keyboard big enough to support the parody of 3-fingers touchtyping I do. I have already seen it on engadget , but having it right there, with all the Vista icons so tiny in the 5.6" 1024x600 WSGA Crystal View... that day the line was too long, but the day after i just had to go buy it :) And here it is, shown together with my wife's 30" monitor: Tiny,eh? As soon as I got home I flattened the sad, sad Vista Basic that was on by default, for a more proper Vista Ultimate: promptly followed by Visual Studio 2008, Office, ArtRage , Live Writer , ZoomIt (especially zoomit, this thing is minuscule) Messenger, Paint.NET ... you get the picture. Below there's a screenshot Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2007 1:08 AM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Personal, Useless, Gadgets