In the last seven months I have the need of sketching a bunch of interfaces, but I cannot find a valid tool. I was a Software Architect of a big huge project, busy also on other smaller projects as project manager.

I need a rapid way to sketch use cases, to pass them to a very young team.

Web interfaces are not easy to design, and we was in a very weird situation: the team was forced to use DAOs, with no O/R mapping tool. So I need also to map some interfaces to a database model, to help them building the model and the view classes

After some search, I ended up with MS Visio.

MS Visio is great, but too difficult to use, doing training is hard and so I must discourage its use. Worst, Visio costs a lot, and it is not included with the standard MS-Office Tools.

Visio offers only WinXP look&Feel, which is not the best for designing agnostic web interfaces.

Thank you to a friend of mine, I have the discovered the BalsamIQ Mockup project. Let’s see why it is a so good solution.

Read More

At Gioorgi.com, after working with a lot with software for over twenty years,  we have envisioned a clear idea about open source. This is the first article of a series tagged “opensource”: let’s start!

Richard Stallman Vision, based on GNU open source idea, is too radical from our point of view.

Stallman GNU License is based on a “copyleft” idea, which gives everyone the freedom to look at others’work, without taking credits for it. The license vision is very strict, so consulting is the natural option for an IT business based on GNU software, which is drived by Univestities, because of its basic freedom statement. Closed and paid software is still widely used, but open source is the key for the next revolution; let’see why.

Read More

Grazie al periodo natalizio, pieno di Regali, la redazione di Gioorgi.com è riuscita a guardare da vicino l’Apple iPhone 3G, chiamato anche “Melafonino”.

Così abbiamo iniziato a fare una serie di considerazioni sull’iPhone e abbiamo tratto delle conclusioni interessanti. In questo primo articolo inizieremo a parlare di iPod, per poi introdurre l’argomento iPhone in un secondo intervento.

Negli ultimi due anni e mezzo la Apple ha iniziato a trasformarsi da società venditrice di Personal Computer di fascia alta con una forte riconoscibilità, ad un a società che aspira a vendere apparecchiature avanzate di diverso tipo. Questo percorso è iniziato con l’iPod, ed è poi proseguito con l’iPhone. Si noti che questa strategia si è affinata nel tempo. Inizialmente l’iPod sembrava più un gadget per veicolare e rafforzare l’iTunes Music Store. L’avventura del negozio on line di musica era molto rischiosa: innanzitutto perché esistevano (ed esistono) già innumerevoli servizi similari, e poi perché il loro successo era risibile. Microsoft ha faticato non poco a entrare in questo mercato, e lo ha rafforzato con Zune solo dopo che l’esperienza della Apple era parsa convincente in quel di Redmond.

Read More

After my past experience with bad hosting provider, I am happy to say I have find a very good hosting service. If you need VPS hosting, Rimuhosting is a very good choice.

Read More

Slashdot reported an interactive map of the Linux  kernel:

Read More

As processors become faster and multiprocessor systems become cheaper, the need to take advantage of multithreading in order to achieve full hardware resource utilization only increases the importance of being able to incorporate concurrency in a wide variety of application categories.

In this article we are evaluting a new approach to the concurrency. In the last five years computers are becoming even more parallel. Intel is pushing multi-core achiteture also on commodity personal computers. Neverless the computing power is ofter not well used: one again, hardware is a step head of our day-by-day software development. Remember when the 80286 came into light. The 286 was able to provide a multi-programming architecture but without memory management protection. We had to wait 386 hardware to see software working on preemptive multi-tasking, because software cannot cope with unprotected memory. In one word, it costs too much to develop a operating system without the new features the 80386 bring to us. What about concurrent programming? Can we look similarities in the  concurrency field?

Read More

After reading an interesting article on Erlang  and Java interoperability, I have decided to dedicate my spare time to Erlang.

O’Reilly has just published a wonderful book on Erlang, so I decided to dive into it.

Read More

At Gioorgi.com we evaluted a internet file system common gateway for connecting network resources. We compared two solutions: a webdav file system and an ssh-fs file system. The solution should be viable via MacOSX and Linux, but also Windows support will be a plus.

Read More

One day, we have the need to create a fast cluster of linux machine, specialized and easy to segragate in different networks (for better security). We need web servers, integration servers (running java hudson), huge developer machines (running for instance eclispe) and so on.

It was not easy to find a good environment. This research lead us also to consider a very huge set of different and complex management software. In this series of article, we will show what we discovered.

Or final goal is to have a way to define a set of linux virutal machines, connect them and manage all using open source software. We also want tools easy to understand. We do not want super-optimized stuff, we have the “just it works well” approach.

We thinked about these types of virtual machine: super light LAMP servers, medim sized java tomcat servers (or udson servers), big database machines and super big development machines.

Read More

After working with unix for years, we noticed it is difficult to get a very uniform approach to unix management.

Read More