Only for the Italians...

Any Italian should sign for this petition online.

Ripe it

A couple of weeks ago I attended to a summer school where one of the teachers was Bart Preneel; he's sooo cool. He gave some classes about how to formally proof crypto algorithms. The classes were interesting, but when I look at his home page I found out a couple of things about him which really impressed me.

He's one of the creator of RIPEMD-160. He says that RIPE-MD should be preferred to SHA-1 because of the way it was developed. In fact it happens that RIPE-MD was developed by a framework of European cryptographers and the whole process was public, while RSA was secretly developed by an American private company.

Well, I have to admit that I completely agree with him, so I propose to use RIPE-MD instead of SHA-1.

Search the reader

Finally it is possible to search text in the feeds of Google Reader. It was one of its major lacks.

Experimenting with Trousers and the TPM

A couple of weeks ago I experimented a little bit with Trousers. For those who don't know, Trousers is an open source TSS... basically it is the software stack that you should use to pilot a TPM.

TSS (thus also Trousers) is based on the concept of Context and Objects.

A Context is similar to a session: usually one can create a Context, then he refers to the Context and when he finishes what he has to do, he destroys the Context.

Context deals with Objects that holds all the information needed by the TSS to interact with the TPM. Objects may be assigned with Flags that specify the type of the Object, its parameters and whatever is necessary.

Typically when a programs uses a TSS it should perform this operations:

• Create a Context
• Connect the Context to a TSS; the TSS may be local or remote
• Create the Objects needed
• Assign flags to the Objects
• Call the functions needed to perform the operations
• Destroy the Objects and close the Context

Ain't it easy? In the next posts I will give some examples and deal with some of the problems involved with Trousers.

Miro

Democrayplayer changed its name in Miro, which is better, I think. Democracy sounded too much like some politically-aligned stuff. I've nothing against polically-aligned stuffs, but just it's not the purpose of a free video player.

I tried it and I've got to say that it has improved, a little. Now the video plays and the audio plays as well. I remember that I tested it when it was still called democracy and I was able either to see video or to hear the audio, but not at the same time.

I feel the home page is getting cleaner, but it still is far from perfection. I notice that Miro's team choose the vertical alignment for the small previews of the "Popular", "Category" and "Just added" feeds.
I would prefer the horizontal alignment, just as iTunes does. And I would also change the "Just added" into a "Random feeds".

Moreover, the homepage continues below the previews. This part is useless because it's not visible and the user has to scroll down and because it contains no information that can not be reached other way.
For example you can reach the categories from the top bar
and just beneath the top bar there's a link for submitting channels.The only other information present in the lower part of the page are the Recent News, which can be added as a clip just as gmail does

I would also change the Video Search page: I would make it more web 2.0. The user should not be asked to choose where he/she wants to search in. If no option is given, Miro should search in any provider it knows and display information grouped by provider or by popularity or by resolution or by any other criteria suitable. If the user wants to refine the search, he/she can decide if he/she wants to search only in youtube, or google video, or whatever he/she likes.

Clearly it would be interesting to have some video-neighborhood features à-la-last.fm, for instance.

Lovely idea

I like this idea...

Shapes on Google maps

Google is taking seriously the mission of bringing web apps to the highest level. They just added the possibility to draw shapes on their maps directly from the browser.
I don't know how this could be useful, but it's so cool. You can do things like this:

Nice idea on icons

Wow, a nice new idea on icons introduced by kde 4.0. Take a look at this screencast.

I hope that kde guys will keep innovating with ideas like this.

To Flash or not to Flash?

I've never loved Flash too much. It's a proprietary technology, the player is not available on any platform and it's closed source, it's heavier than plain HTML, it doesn't inter-operate too much with the rest of the system (just think about the cut and paste from Flash...).

In the last weeks, however, I changed a little bit my position especially on one aspect of the web: the video and audio streaming. It is true that Flash is proprietary, but if Adobe provides the player, it just works.

To the opposite, I often have many problems with the proliferation of the audio/video codec. It's a real pain to deal with dozens of codecs: you never know if you have the right one, if you're breaking any patent or if your browser's plugin will support the movie or not.

I really don't understand why Adobe doesn't release the code of the player. It would help a lot the diffusion of Flash and they would have a better product with lesser efforts. I hope this will happens soon.

Xen and the art of making cars

Virtualization. It's the buzz word today. Everybody wants to virtualize, even if they don't know what does that mean. Few days ago Novell announced that BMW group will use SuSE and Xen to consolidate servers and save money.

Ok, I fully agree that you may want to consolidate for many reasons:

• Servers are usually underutilized
• Single point of management
• Live migration
• Saving space in the racks
• Saving money

but I can't agree with this sentence:

The BMW Group is taking advantage of what the market is just discovering, that Xen open source virtualization software fully integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a viable alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions, providing high performance at a lower cost

said by Roger Levy, vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell: the main reason why you want to have an open source virtualization engine is that you simply can't trust enough proprietary solutions to run your servers. It's a matter of trustworthiness and freedom, not a matter of money.

VIew as slideshow

Google made it: now if you receive a powerpoint presentation in gmail, you can see it online without downloading... without even having powerpoint. I'm looking forward to see their web app for creating presentations.

Unfortunately right now there is no support to open document format. I hope to see it sully implemented as soon as possible.

Firefox and Google are closer than before

Firefox Gran Paradiso RC5 is out; the next version of FF will natively support Google's Gears and will share with Google an address blacklist in order to protect user from accessing to sites that host malicious code.

From one point of view, these are good news: Gears is a wonderful technology and protecting the user is always good, but preventing the user from accessing some sites basing on Google's suggestions, is somehow dangerous.

Moreover, gears will make Google even more pervasive in our computers and I'm not sure at all this is good.
It's true that gear is free software and anyone can use it, but until now, only a single application (by Google, btw) uses it, so I think that it is a little too early to support this technology natively.
On the other hand, always being on the edge is what makes you win.

I'm much more concerned about the blacklist. At least I hope that this will be a very visible feature, as the pop-up blocking one, so that the user can clearly see what's going on and can freely decide to visit a site even if it is on the blacklist

Apple will use ZFS in Leopard

Apple keeps on the way of innovation. I just read that they will use ZFS as primary files ystem in the next version of OsX. This is an interesting news because ZFS is a very interesting file system.

Unfortunately free software community won't have any support to ZFS because of the license incompatibility between GPL and CDDL. PIty, it has nice features.

One of the most interesting one is the native support to snapshots. This helps creating wonderful backup strategies as those implemented in project such Time Machine.

I hope that ext4 will integrate the work made in ext3cow project.

ODF bills have failed right now

As reported here, almost all the attempts to mandate the use of ODF in public administrations in the U.S. have failed. Only Massachusetts and (very partially) Minnesota require the use of open format.

Despite the pressure of IBM and the ODF Alliance, all the bills have been rejected. It's a pity. In Europe, it seems a little better: France, Norway, Belgium and Denmark, national governments are planning to switch to open formats.

I think that the existence of closed formats is what really stops many from using free software. The concept is easy enough, even for politicians: do whatever you want with your computer, but let me do what I want with mine. Without free formats this is not possible.

Next time you receive some MS word attachments in your mail, send it back to whom sent to you asking for a free document :-).

I wonder why...

... if Microsoft can do something like this or this, sells things like this.

Apple uses LED displays... what's missing now?

Yesterday Apple upgraded the macbook pro series. The upgrade concerns the amount of memory, the processors and the display.

In my opinion the display is the most interesting upgrade.

The amount of memory is not interesting at all: it's just marketing and common upgrading; there's no innovation in adding some memory.

The processor is the new Santa Rosa by Intel. Nice, but not a revolution as it was the Centrino technology.

The new display is very nice. A new technology that has lots of advantages: it saves power, it is more eco-compatible, it is brighter, faster and more uniform illumination. I really think that LED is the next-generation for displays.

So, nice work, but what's still missing?

• Flash-memory based hard disks. Hard disks are the weakest link of the chain. They are slow, it's easy to break them if you are moving, they use lot of power. If we replace common hard disks with flash-memories, we can overcome all this problems and I suspect that suspend/resume and hibernation would be even more powerful
• Loooonnnngggeeer battery-life. Laptops are fine as they are. They are enough powerful, but the battery doesn't last enough. I know it's a very hard problem to solve, but in order to have a very nomadic computing we need to improve the battery life dramatically. We may also think to implement some energy scavenging ideas into our device.
  
• Connections. We need to be as connected as possible. Using any medium. Like wired networks, wi-fi networks, mobile phones, wi-max, whatever. And everything should work seamlessly with the highest transparency for the user. Ideally the user should not be aware that the network medium changes and it should continue to work. All the dirty work must be delegated to the system.
• Be eco-compatible. Use recycled and recyclable materials.
• Open standards. For anything. For example, the docking station should be standard, so that one can plug any laptop in any docking station.
  

EyeOs

EyeOs 1.0 has been released. For those who don't know EyeOs is a web-based operating system. I tried it quite often in the last months and I've to say that it's not bad. Not at all.

The look and feel is nice, clean and simple. It doesn't have many applications right now, but it seems more a prototype than a finished product. Unfortunately the built-in web browser doesn't support any webapp right now. It doesn't matter too much: in order to use EyeOs, you must have a browser (say Firefox), and you can use the same browser to use the webapps you like. I know it's not too nice to have a whole operating system that can manage windows and using something external to manage your browser.

For the future, I'd like to see some support to AJAX built into the EyeOs browser.

It seems to me that in Italy, site's accessibility is not the goal

Yesterday I saw an adv on the national tv, here in Italia. They were advertising their new web site, so this morning I checked out the new site. It's awful. From the point of view of accessibility is awful. After the horrible experiment of italia.it, I hoped that they had learned their lesson, but I was wrong.

1. First of all it opens a pop-up with ads. It is quite unfair, because Italian people pays for the national tv, so I would expect at least no ads pop-up.
2. Second it uses massively flash technologies. I don't think flash is the most usable technology for many reasons: it is not free, it is not available anywhere, it is not designed for d-people, you can hardly cut and paste from flash stuffs, ...
   I agree that sometimes flash can be used to bring some interactiveness that is not available through standard html or javascript, but in this site it is only used for a menu with highlighted entries. This is unacceptable!
3. Neither the html parts are standard. Check out this...
4. They use real media for their streaming.

It's a pity because they are losing a chance to build a nice project. If I were them, I would have taken different decisions:

1. Use free codecs for streaming
2. Use only plain html: you can do wonderful sites with html and css, if you are able.
3. Use podcasts, and use them well. One single podcast for each single program.
4. Use youtube, google video, democracyplayer and whatever to distribute your contents.
5. License everything as CC
   

2010 according to Apple... in 1988

In 1988 Apple released this video showing their vision on the future.

Well, they were quite , don't you think?

I'd like to know their vision about 2030, now.

Democracy player

After some time I tried again DemocracyPlayer... and I've to say that it didn't change a lot. Especially on the side of the contents.

The player itself is not bad. It has nice ideas, nice features, nice technology, but it lacks the contents. Democracy is a great software that broadcasts youtube like contents. Which is not enough to be the next-generation TV.

Here is some suggestions.

• Make it possible to stream on demand a content. Now you can only download as a podcast and then watch it. Streaming would be a wonderful feature to have.
• Find contents providers. We desperately need to show that it is possible to provide contents with a great open-source multi-platform tool.
• Integrate it better with the desktop environment, the web browser and with other media sources (for example youtube).
• Think about cooperation with some CC-licensed (for example Jamendo) music in order to open a music section on Democracy.
  

I really think that democracy could become an open iTunes if properly developed.

Green my apple closes

Greenpeace closed Green my apple because, they says, they achieved the results they wanted.

I doubt a little about because Greenpeace only has an open letter by Steve Jobs where he says that Apple will improve the efforts for the environment. I'm not sure it's enough: I recently attended to a talk by Katherine Richardson about the climate change and she's been very very scaring.

I think we should rethink computer science in terms of power consumption and pollution reduction. Use power saving and think twice before changing your computer, guys!

Apple tags un-DRMed contents

Apple is now selling contents without DRM, but tagged with the user name [1].

This should prevent somehow the sharing of the content without affecting user's freedom.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/30/tuaw-tip-dont-torrent-that-song/

Google gears

Google is now using gears with its rss reader. Google gears extends the browser allowing to use the web applications offline. Which is wonderful. At the moment only Google Reader supports the offline mode and Google Gears is only available for Firefox and IE, but I hope that in the future more applications and browsers will be supported.

When you go offline, that happens is that Gears download what it supposes you need to use the web app offline. Then, the data it has downloaded are available. If anything was modified, Gears should automatically synchronize with the web app.

No configuration is needed (even if it would had been nice to have something to tune).

As a first step, it's not bad, but in order to make the web apps as usable as the regular web apps, something more is needed:

1. Support to any application
2. Complete control on what is download and how
3. Some more transparency. At the moment I have to decide if I want to go offline or not. It would be wonderful if Gears automatically went somehow offline and automatically synced, so that a down of the network would not affect my surfing.
   

Few ideas for IMs

Since I started using Ubuntu, I switched to Gnome, so I had also to switch to pidgin.

After some 6 months of use, I have few comments and ideas about how an IM should be.

1. It should be possible to group different users into a meta user. This is actually already possible and allows to group together the same buddy when he or she uses different protocols.
2. It should be possible to specify details for each user. For instance, it should be possible to specify a preferred language for the (meta) user, and the IM should automatically set the spell checker according to the language
3. If some details are specified for a meta user, the users that belongs to the meta user, should inherit the details. It should be possible to redefine any inherited details
4. It should be possible to tag users in order to have a more fine-grain classification than the group-based one.

I hope to see some of these features in the next versions of pidgin and kopete.

Daemons... from the hell...

Today I discovered the music player daemon project. This is a wonderful idea I totally agree with. Splitting all the services into client/server architecture would bring to some very good results.

First of all, different clients could share same data with great effects on migration from one client to another.

Second, unifying the efforts on the server side, we could achieve better products sooner.

Third: interoperability. Among different desktop environments. The daemon should run at a lower level than DE (when possible), so that it could be possible to change DE without losing personal settings.

I can think at least to two different fields that would take some advantages from a client/server architecture:

• Instant Messaging: if we had only a server that provides access to different protocols (jabber, msn, skype, irc, etc.), it would be nice. Especially because every client would take advantage of any progress made on the server. I'm not the only one that thinks that this approach would be useful. These people agree with me ;-).
• Music and sound players: having the same server means having the same music library, the same settings, the same playing quality, etc.
  

Last Jamendo

Jamendo is a very nice site. You can upload your music and give it away with a nice Creative Commons license.

This help artists to share and distribute their music and users to access free music without fearing the revenge of the majors.

The only problem is that Jamendo lacks a suggestion service and finding in more than 25000 (yeah, 25 thousands) songs the right one for you may be hard.

What would be very very nice is having a service like Last.fm that only suggests free (for instance CC) music. Imagine, you listen to your old non-free playlist and after a while your music player begins to populate your library with free music... a dream come true.

OpenOffice, open delusion

I had to. I really didn't want, but I had to use Ms PowerPoint. And I must admit that it doesn't sucks that much. At least no more that OO.o Impress. Or, rather, I've got to say that OO.o is even worse. Much worse.

The group I work for has a default template for presentation. It is soooo ugly. You can't even imagine how ugly it is. So I decided that it would be worth to restyle it a bit.

I wanted to create a double template to be used with OO.o and with MS Office (my boss wants MS, sigh), but it has not been possible. OO.o
Impress lacks of a decent support to Master slides: with MS PP you can at least define many different Master slides (say title slide and regular slide) and apply them to different slides. With OO.o this is not possible: you can define many different Masters, but they are unaware if they are to be used as title or regular slide or whatever. And you simply can't erase any of the default element of the master slide. Basically, you have to hide the mandatory elements (title and body). This is simply how it should not work.

To me it should be more or less like the following:
1. you can create any number of master slide.
2. a master slide can contain any number of elements and you can set any element as input element (let's say that you decide that that text element is the element that will hold the title in the slides, you just set it as a fillable text element and everything works)
3. when you create a new slide, you can base it on a master slide you created before or one among those provided with Impress.

Full stop. Nothing more and nothing less.

What GMail needs

I use GMail since quite long time right now. I think it's almost perfect. It's the only comfortable-to-use webmail.

It groups mails into conversation and thanks to tags it's easy following discussion with people, even easier than using a standard mail application. Much easier.

Frankly I don't know why other mail applications haven't yet introduced the concept of conversation... after all it's not *that* different from the concept of thread.

In order to be almost perfect, GMail should give the user the possibility of ignore a conversation.

I follow a number of mailing lists. Some of them are technical, some others are more political. As in every mailing list, sometimes there are flames.
I rarely am interested in flames, so I'd like to tell GMail I don't want to read a particular conversation anymore.

It become quite annoying when a not-desired conversation keeps poping in your inbox just because someone else just flamed again.