L’informatica spesso si scontra con la risoluzione di problemi reali in un modo più simile alla fisica che non alla matematica. In matematica, l’aspetto astratto consente di rifuggere dalle pochezze della realtà. La fisica e l’informatica invece devono dare risposte concrete a problemi reali. Oltre a ciò l’aspetto ingegneristico della informatica la costringe a fare più spesso i conti con la pochezza delle risorse contingenti, cose che un fisico ogni tanto deve fare, spesso può evitare con i modelli astratti.

La gestione del calendario perpetuo è una di queste realtà complesse, almeno a giudicare da cosa successe ad un famoso foglio elettronico negli anni 80…

This weekend I enjoyed with NTT Hackathon. We developed a Microsoft Kinetic-powered store: you can see objects, consult a catalog via arm swipe, and order 3D prints via hand claps. 3D Printing was powered by OctoPrint after a bad experience with SkyForge. We hope SkyForge will be production-ready in a couple of software-iterations (their lack of a full WebService API is simple to fix).

Let it go, let it go! Can't hold it back any more. Let it go, let it go! Turn away and slam the door. ... Let it go, let it go. I am one with the wind and sky. Let it go, let it go. You'll never see me cry.

[bash] git fsck –full –unreachable [/bash]

See also Maintenance-and-Data-Recovery on the Git book

Web service interoperability is a nightmare. But it is easy to understand what is going on: just enable debugging! On Axis2, you can do it with the folowing java options…

[bash] -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.showdatetime=true -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.log.httpclient.wire=debug -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.log.org.apache.commons.httpclient=debug [/bash]

Ready to study the Erlang?

Take a look to http://howistart.org/posts/erlang/1 for understanding how erlang releases works (and how to deal with them).

Erlang Maps are the next big thing and this article from Joe Amstong introduce you to them.

For some lengthly tutorial take a look to this http://learnyousomeerlang.com/maps

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. Yale Professor Alan Perlis

In occasione dell’Elixir Conf siamo lieti di pubblicare una intervista con Francesco Cesarini.  Nel 2009 abbiamo già recensito "Erlang Programming A Concurrent Approach to Software Development" scritto a quattro mani con Simon Thompson. Ora siamo lieti di ospitare una intervista ad ampio respiro con una delle colonne portati di Erlang Solutions.

Bash scripting has evolved a lot in the last ten years.

I get used to relay on bash for all normal “data domination” tasks (like file system refactorings, database extraction and reporting and so on) and switching to python/ruby/perl when the complexity gets bigger. I didn’t imagine bash is even more powerful :) This article by Robert Muth so you new nice tricks: I  add here some other like mapfile and stress the most important one.

^{Update 2016} Last but not least,if you do now know about bash history, this link will teach you a huge set of tricks ^{Updated 2019} Bash Bible will further extend the topic.