Archive for the ‘My IT world’ Category

Apple…

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Hi,
in the last post I wrote about my MacBook Pro hardware problems, I have it back from the assistance.
My hard disk was substituted and they replaced the “logic” too (I suppose they means the entire motherboard with CPU). But the error reported by the Apple Hardware Test is already here, so they wrote me that it can be a fake… strange! (Someone can execute the test on own MBP 15″?)
BTW, I’ve reinstalled the OS, resized the partition and installed a fresh Kubuntu Edgy 6.10, the installation was gone without problem, specially if you follow this guide. All the essential work fine but I should spend some of my spare time to:
- configure the embedded ISight 1.3Mp webcam, I’ve tried to compile the module but for now I cannot have it working;
- configure AIGLX (for now I’m using the ATI official driver, and not the open driver);
- resolve a little issue with the audio, I can switch from mixer between speaker and headphones, but not automatically when I plug the headphones;
- test the suspend;

After the installation I’ve made a little comparison of the two OS when building my actual project with ant. Before the assistance, on MacOSX the time of the whole build was above 5 minutes. Now on Mac it take an average of 3’15″ and under Linux about 2’45″ with some excellent times of 2’30″ :D . It seems that the eclipse use is faster too. Obviously this times are completely arbitrary and they depends principally by the JVM, so It should be that only the Apple JVM is slower, and not the OS. I’m not an Apple fan, but I cannot believe that this is the real gap, so in the next days I will do more test, with and without the JVM.

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Apple assistance

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Hola,
after the last post, where I report a “little” problem with my MBP ethernet card, I try to install kubuntu on it, but without success; I discovered that I have other problems:

  • the HD had some bad blocks, resolved with some fsck pass in SingleUser mode;
  • the hardware-test executed from the Mac installation disk report me a strange error “4MOT/1/400000002: LEFT_UPPER – front”, looking for it on the web seems that the problem is the left core damaged due to the excessive heat;
  • I hope that the low performance of my notebook are caused by the core damage, so yesterday I bring it in assistance at Mac@Work; probably they will change the motherboard so I will wait for some weeks to have it back.

    When I will receive it surely I will retry to install Kubuntu, so I can make some test between Linux and MacOSX for building my actual project (about 6 min).

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    MBP trouble

    Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

    After some little problems with my MacBook Pro (like noise from hd and a terrible hot) yesterday and today I have some strange network shutdown, when it happends I can see

    AppleYukon: error - Uncorrectable PCI Express error

    in the console; the only thing that I can do is to restart the notebook, I’ve tried to restart only the services, but without success.
    Looking on the net I’ve not found anything and I don’t know if it is a software or hardware problem.

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    CocoonGT 2006

    Friday, October 6th, 2006

    CocoonGT2006

    I came back from the annual edition of Cocoon GetTogether in Amsterdam.
    Saturday 30 I left for Amsterdam, I wait Maurizio at the Schipol airport for go at home. Sunday we wake not so later, only at 11am :D , in the afternoon Gabriele was arrived in Amsterdam, so we wait for him and me e Gabriele are gone to our hostel; the night also Simone join with us. At the end of day we make arrangements for meet us before of conference.
    Monday and tuesday there was the hackaton days, I tried to resolve some bug and start the integration of Dojo widgets into Forms, the last day of conference there was some talks; a relevant applause go to

        Gianugo‘s talk about REST (I was involved in development of the site)
        Simone‘s talk about Cocoon Blueprint (hey guy, good idea)
        Andrew‘s talks (surely the funniest)
        Bertrand‘s talk about Solr (powerful and interesting)

    Yesterday I came back to Italy, after all the Holland experience was good; meet the cocoon guys is a pleasure, I’m displeased because my english is not so well, so I cannot be able to have a long discussion with them. But inside me the light of “hacking” was revamped and I hope to keep it alive.

    The photo of the event are published here.

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    Back from vacations…

    Monday, September 4th, 2006

    Yep, I came back to the office :(
    My vacations in the Rodi Island are ended, I’m very tired but very happy.
    Some news:
    - finally this morning Fastweb bring me the internet connection after 3 months of call to customer care.
    - I’m looking for partecipate to this Cocoon GetTogheter.
    - I hope to upload the vacation’s photo soon, we made also a video, but probably I’ll upload only some parts of it.

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    Selenium test without X server

    Friday, August 11th, 2006

    I’ve the need to execute some Selenium test on a server without the X server up. This test are managed by CruiseControl, so the are auto-executed in a batch mode.
    A browser instance is needed by Selenium, so I’ve two choice for execute it without X: use of the X Virtual Frame Buffer or use of the VNC. I’ve choosed the second!

    For doing this I need only of this some commands:

    a) vncserver :1 -geometry 1024×768 -depth 16
    This command start a server with a size of 1024×768 and 16bit for the color on display addressed by “:1″.
    If you want to use a particular windows manager edit the .vnc/xstartup file.

    2) execute ‘export DISPLAY=:1′ for using the correct display from CruiseControl

    3) start CruiseControl

    4) have fun!

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    15-inch MacBook Pro Battery Exchange Program

    Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

    After reading the Ugo’s post I’ve checked if my Mac is lucky and yes, it is!
    So I’ve just filled the form for the exchange request; if you have a MacBook Pro check if your battery is in affected stock.

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    Next-generation Desktop Environment

    Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

    Hola,
    surfing in the web I found this excellent and exciting video of a 3D desktop prototype. After many years of a poor bidimensional desktop, there is some attempts out of here: Sun’s Looking Glass Project, Xgl, the incoming Vista and other minor release.
    In the meanwhile the UI was improved, see the Win3.x => WinXP step or the better KDE/GNOME environments, but probably a sprint in this way was given from MacOSX.
    Only one question go through my mind: a really compless interface like that one in the video can be really usable?

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    Sourcesense go live!

    Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

    Yeah!
    Finally the Sourcesense site go online.

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    The silence is broken!

    Thursday, May 25th, 2006

    Yup, I know… in the last month ther’s no posts. I’ve some thing to write, but no time to do it.

    So, It’s time to force me to take this time.

    - 05 June, this is the date! From this day my life take a turn (good or not… boh!), I’ll live in Milano.
    - Luca has finally released Roma, an interesting framework with some nice ideas. I’m trying to write some test for the domain persistence, the work is done, but I must clear the code and contribute it… Damn! No time! BTW the comunity has started: some posts in the list, contributed docs in the wiki and so on, the start is not bad, wait for the release 1.0 ;) .
    - GWT (aka Google Web Toolkit): google has released this framework for quickly development of AJAX based web application. This has produced many noise in the web, a lot of people are not very enthusiasmed from this, and their tecnical reason are valid, obviously are points of view. IMHO GWT will not have a good future, at least not in this version.
    - in my actual project, I’m working with cocoon framework, it has a tons of nice features, but IMHO it suffers the age of the code. The developers are doing a good work to try to make it more “usuable”, and the imminent mavenized release (2.2… 2.3… ?) should be a first step in this way. However it’s not sufficient, we need a lighter framework, without any dependencies with the obsolete Avalon/Excalibur and I’d like to see all blocks with their separate lifecycle and the possibility to use they in different framework. All this was already discussed from developer’s comunity, many of their have different vision on this… I hope to see a new and cool version of cocoon early, begins to be hard to “sell” cocoon to other developers or customers ;) .

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