looking for a tunnel

It's sad to see someone in real big trouble... and it's even worse when you can't think anything that could help. I saw the owner of an local small industry related to shoe production that was terribly afraid of current situation. China is biting big chews on market shares with prices that are just impossible to match; even if someone babbles that quality is not very good that would be anyway just a temporary mitigating factor: I can't think they're all stupid and will not be able to catch on if they're really behind. And even if now there's clearly a form of dumping (you can see here prices that are absolutely unreal even considering their tiny monthly salaries) IMO this is isn't the key issue because their "real" prices would be just as impossible to match even without the currency tricks that are apparently being played by their government.
Also I don't think that having laws for protecting our market is a viable option. To me all this means there's no light at the end of the tunnel for a shoemaker here ... ours shoemakers are all closing because this is the Right Thing for the world. Better looking for another tunnel... this one goes nowhere.

in medio stat virtus

I recently started playing chess also on www.gameknot.com and I normally play games with time limit of three days per move. I must say that I sort like this kind of chess variation because sometimes I really need a lot of thinking to find a reasonable move and may be I even need a rest before continuing analyzing the same position. Of course I didn't give up playing the other variation of chess I like a lot... bullet chess (i.e. one minute for the whole game with no increment) on ICC.

May be this is the one of the reasons for which I'm basically a chess no-one :-) if in medio stat virtus probably in extrema stand idiots like me ...

money isn't that important, probably

I've made a mistake complaining about yesterday; because (as often happens) today it was worse. What is the thing I hate most ? Re-installing windows (in any flavour) for people that are unable to do that but that are able to get the system trashed with viruses, useless bad-written software and you say what. It's true I get paid anyway ... but this sucks.
I wonder if the problem is that my hourly cost is too low ... I would say not, but apparently my boss values money less than I do.

reclassification

Ok ... it's official, today has been reclassified as a Monday

I got disturbed to implement urgent stupid fixes that there's no time to test, I've discovered that something I've to do and that is apparently trivial is indeed a rather hard problem (and that's not good for how you're seen by management) and last, but not least, of our five servers the newest one that is also the one less stressed decided to crash with data CRC errors on the hard disk so tomorrow morning will be devoted to re-installing the machine from scratch.

Sometimes I hate Mondays...

we're doomed

While looking for old HTML experiments I made to try to change a bit the template of this blog I stumpled in a document I dowloaded a few years ago from an italian university; they're the notes for computer programming courses for students of engineering.
Re-reading it I couldn't avoid to feel deep disgust for all the errors and uglyness of those notes; it would be funny if those notes were a joke and not the actual material used to destroy the minds of newcomers in the IT world.
I can only cry for the situation in which sits our fourth-world nation from an information technology point of view. We're going to die (from an information technology point of view), and we deserve it.

We're doomed.

there are many ways to skin a Python

I keep being undecided about what to use for writing Python extensions for those (few) parts where this very nice language happens to be too slow. I tried the handmade C way, C++ with sip, and now Pyrex.
For now seems to me that Pyrex should be the winner, but I've yet to give a try to boost::python that I was told is quite interesting (the scary part is that boost is huge and I'm using a compiler that's probably considered out ... VC++6).

to blog or not to blog ?

I saw this site because a friend of mines happens to use it. Lately I was thinking to reinvent my homepage (www.gripho.it) because it became obscenely outdated... so i was thininkg to dropping the double language (in favor of just english) and about a huge simplification (from a tree to a mere sequence). It seems that with blogger is even better... I'd need to just put content and everything else is already done in the form I was about to use.

Will I be able to keep on ? No way. It will probably last a month or so.
But let's give it a try :-)

Andrea "6502" Griffini