NEW YORK - La News Corp., gigante delle comunicazioni che fa capo a Rupert Murdoch, potrebbe far pagare l'accesso alle notizie online a partire dalla metà del prossimo anno, ribadendo un'idea che lo stesso Murdoch aveva già annunciato lo scors0 8 maggio. Inoltre News Corp. potrebbe rompere l'alleanza con Amazon sul lettore digitale Kindle, se non si arriverà a una rinegoziazione degli accordi. Lo fa sapere Murdoch, il quale si è detto scontento delle relazioni tra Kindle e i lettori online dei suoi giornali, lasciando anche trapelare la possibilità di un accordo tra News Corp e Sony.

Prendiamo spunto da questa notizia e facciamo qualche riflessione.All’inizio del web, i giornali hanno tentato di creare siti web in parte gratuiti ed in parte a pagamento.

Zopa (acronimo di Zone of possible agreement)  è un network peer to peer di prestiti on line, gestito da Maurizio Sella  (cugino di quarto grado dell’ omonimo ex presidente dell’ Abi, per i dettagli consultate questo articolo del Corriere del 12 maggio 2008).

In data 10 luglio 2009 è stato notificato a Zopa il decreto del Ministero dell'Economia e delle Finanze che, su indicazione di Banca d'Italia, ha cancellato dall'elenco degli intermediari finanziari ex art. 106 la nostra società. Come conseguenza immediata ci vediamo costretti a sospendere la trattazione di nuovi prestiti e l'ingresso di nuovi Prestatori.

Un articolo del “Corriere della sera” del 25 luglio ci dà maggiori dettagli:

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.

WebDAV

This magic CSS code is able to change the orientation of the printed page:

@page port {size: portrait;}
@page land {size: landscape;}
.portrait {page: port;}
.landscape {page: land;}

For more information, take a look to the CSS Print Profile specification

I thinked it was not possible to define printing orientation via a simple CSS! A very nice discovery indeed…

T r u e C r y p t

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux

Main Features:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.

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.

Several years ago I had the need of keep in sync three computers.  After some questions on a java mailing list, a very smart guy suggested me Unison.

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). However, there are several points where it differs:[…]

YASnippet is a template system for emacs. It allows you to type a abbrevation and automatically expand the abbreviation into function templates.

Bundled language templates includes: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more.

Yasnippet system is inspired from TextMate’s template system. You can use a tool to import any TextMate template you have to YASnippet.

At Gioorgi.com we have used plenty of web frameworks.

Giovanni Giorgi used Seaside,  a lot of PHP frameworks, Java Struts, RubyOnRails, and Python Django.

We have started to look for Web2Py, a compact,  easy to learn  python web framework.

From the most notable feature, it runs also on Google App Engine. Written by an Italian University professor for teaching web development, spots a very clean design, and a robust security infrastructure. We  suggest it because installation (and upgrading) is a snap.

Let’s take a look to it…

Released on June 8, 2009  Jython 2.5RC4 is out!

We have followed Jython in the past months, and it seems promising looking at the jython newsletter.

PHing Is Not GNU make; it's a project build system based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Features include file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.

iMacros - Web Automation, Web Testing and Web Scraping

Record & replay all web surfing activities

Automatically fill out web forms from a database

Automate uploads, downloads, and data extraction

iMacros is the only solution that works with websites that use Flash, Flex, Java and Silverlight