FCHouse

House Hunting

Posted by Carlo - 28/02/07 at 09:02:04 am

As you would have noticed, these days are quite busy. The posts number has fallen and my time here has been shrinked. These are delivery days with long working hours, followed by the house hunting we are attending. We are going to move in a month or so and we are looking for a suitable flat, or small house, ready to welcome us, a friend that will join us from Italy and our cats. Yes, they will finally join us too!

Of course the task is not so easy, not because there is a lack of houses or flats, but because our price range has a “not so high” cap, that means that all the “Amazing” houses we have seen until now are out of range. Some estate agents are helping us, but too many times they offered us something completely out of range (like 700 pounds monthly out of range…), so we are still looking for our next step. Long hours out, eyes always set of craigslist and the various estate agents and really a few minutes remaining.

At the same time I’m building some ideas that are sucking the weekends and the nights, so… pretty busy I must say!

PS: If you plan to live in London, try not to be scared by the house and rental prices! It’s London, you Love it or you Hate it!

My first London GeekDinner

Posted by Carlo - 22/02/07 at 10:02:18 am

These days are quite busy… After the Barcamp, during “deadline” weeks, yesterday I was at the Geek Dinner in London. The room was full of people geek (like me) and I was able to discuss various matters, OpenID, microformats and Semantic Web before all.

Special guests, yesterday, have been Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, from Citizen Agency. Chris is one of the mind behind the idea of Barcamps, just to briefly introduce him for those of you who doesn’t know him

The informal environment was really nice, even if the venue was not packed with food… I had the opportunity to meet a lot of nice people,  with whom I had great time.

Maybe for the first time in my life I have been to a dinner where everyone was talking (and thinking) the same way I am: geeks are geeks in London as well as they are in Italy!

I’ve met again Nicola Mattina, who is trying to make his idea to take off internet password management: PassPack. Give it a look, the idea seems to be really interesting!

The night ended around eleven and I finally got home! These wekks are quite tiring, and I have to admit that the updates to FCHouse are not enough… well I hope things will change (and deadlines will pass once for all).

Cheers!!

Barcamp London 2

Posted by Carlo - 17/02/07 at 03:02:37 pm

Well well,

finally we are here, in a BT Building at the London Barcamp 2. The start has been really great and we are following the first presentations…

I’ll keep you updated!

Happiness sometimes makes you cry.

Posted by Carlo - 09/02/07 at 12:02:04 pm

This morning I have received a webcard from my mother. She is in Italy, quite far from us, but always close to my heart.

When I opened the webcard my eyes start being filled by tears, because I remembered that when I was a child, I was always trying to write my own book with a very old typing machine, and my mother gave me a snoopy poster that was similar to the video inside this post, with the write:

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

Thanks Mum! I Love You!

Continue reading Happiness sometimes makes you cry….

Pen and Paper: smell your ideas!

Posted by Carlo - 09/02/07 at 10:02:56 am

In these days I’m having a lot of Ideas, some of them simple thoughts, other quite brilliant. I don’t usually think in such a way of my own thoughts (defining them brilliant or anything similar), but I have to admit that I am quite proud of myself for some things I have been able to understand and analyze, generating new thoughts that could affect my future.

In these days I’m used to transfer my thoughts not on my laptop, as I usually do, but on a small paper notebook, with the cheapest pen I could have found. With the music too high in my ears (Orson: “Bright Idea” and “No Tomorrow“  ) I write, I try to focalize every thought in order to understand the “missing link” that I’m looking for. It has already been nine months since my move here, and I have to admit that London is giving me a new life, stimulating my mind to create that “thing” I am focused in creating from long!

The paper, with its smell, with the ink on it (and on my fingers, too) is helping me to slow down my thoughts a little bit, just that bit that is helping me to understand what I have been missing for so long in this months, allowing me to see the “bigger picture” around what I am going to create!

Now the paths I can take have been cleared, and in the next days I’ll have to take some serious decisions in order to give birth to the ideas! And this also because writing on the paper has given me some time to reflect, concentrating on the pen and being able to see what was behind!!!

Well, I can see that this post is very cryptic, but it’s fine this way! I’m going to fulfill something I knew I was meant to fulfill, and I’m very focused on doing it.

Development planning and the two calendars: a methodology that works!

Posted by Carlo - 08/02/07 at 11:02:13 am

Yesterday I have finally completed a part of the development process I was involved in for the last four months. The complexity of the project was quite high, and the need to operate with a multithreading windows service is harder than the creation of web pages: there are no visual warnings for the errors and the debugging is more complex.

The deadline are coming closer, but I have been able to anticipate them, granting me the time for some deep testing, debugging and documentation: all the things that too many times are skipped for the lack of time. It is a good feeling to be ready to face every possible naughty bug without the pressure of having the deadline still on your neck, and the methodology that works best is the two-calendars one.

The two calendars methodology is very simple: when you get the requirements and you prepare the Analysis and Design, you should check carefully the times you think correct to deliver every single part of the system you are building; then you rethink everything adding the debug, testing and everything else you should think about. That is you internal calendar: the development deadline. Now you can think about a certain percentage of error in the calculation. The percentage depends on you, mainly, and the smaller the release cycles are (more delivery with small improvement in the system) the easier the time analysis will be. Normally I try to keep into consideration at least a 10% difference, that can rise for high risk issues.  This will be your external calendar, the one the customer will have to approve. Now, the external calendar defines the deadline for every release, while the internal one defines the development deadline. Every time you hit an internal deadline, you should adjust the other releases internal calendars accordingly (anticipating or postponing the starting time).

This methodology will allow you to have the time for some deep testing and debugging and  for the creation of a good documentation or, in the worst case, the time to cover the eventual faulty timing analysis.

Tight Deadlines: I want to make a note on something that is usually mentioned in the Job Specs…

“…you should be able to cope with thight deadlines…”

In my humble opinion, this string can contain tow different meanings: 15% of the time the market the company is involved in is very obsessive and have few time for the specifications, the remaining companies have some very deep problems with time analysis and development management. Big statement, isn’t it? Yes, it is indeed, but in my experience I have seen thatif you’re aimed to create something that will satisfy your customer, you will not try to budget half the required time you will need to create a quality software and you will not underestimate the importance of a deep Analysis and Design: if you do it, it means that the company has a big flaw!

Radio controlled alarm clock, Central European Time and snow!

Posted by Carlo - 08/02/07 at 09:02:56 am

This morning, for the first time since we’re living in London, my radio controlled alarm clock has decided that was time to catch the radio signal. Normally I would have been happy to have the clock with the correct time, unfortunately the model I own is the one I have been given in Italy…

I don’t know if the settings were not correct or if that specific model is able to connect only to the central european signal in Germany, the fact is that this morning I felt really tired when I woke up.

London was (and remains) under a good snowing, and the strange silence you can experience when the world became white covered, was quite unfamiliar. I didn’t noticed that my mobile phone didn’t ring with its own alarm. Only few minutes later, when Fabiana noted that it was quite dark outside, I realized what happened: it was 7:15 indeed, but linked on the CET, not the GMT! So, once dressed and ready to drink the coffee, it would have been useless to return to sleep for thirty minutes or so. It has been a good thing, however, mainly because the snow has caused a lot of delays on the railways and the tube, so being in the station a quarter of hour earlier than usual has been a ticket to get into central London on time.

So… Winter is here, again, and the weather forcast for today are for 10-15 centimeters of snow in a lot of areas near London. :D

Have a nice, snowy day! 

Are you sure you want Vista? Cancel or Allow?

Posted by Carlo - 07/02/07 at 09:02:43 am

When I installed Vista, months ago, with a public beta, I was quite shocked by the continuous questions like:

“Someone is trying to access the Control Panel! Cancel or Allow?” well, that “someone” was me, and after five minutes I had gone completely mental because of the continuous stupid questions. From this point of view I don’t like the new OS from Microsoft: this is not “advanced security”. Now I have to admit that I can laugh and play the fool because I’m using Mac OS X, and it is something I would suggest to everyone!

Frank has pointed me out to the new Apple Ad featuring Vista… It’s Sooooooo fun! Ps: On Frank site you will also find a schema for the Vista and OSX upgrade strategy, to be seen, absolutely!

Here’s the Video: Have a Nice Day!

The Web is Something New!

Posted by Carlo - 06/02/07 at 01:02:36 pm

Through some links I have been able to see this short, but great video! I think that this vision alone is able to express more than thousands of words can.

I think that the idea is really great, and that the only way of producing it is the Web 2.0 itself! :P

cyogen: another .Net Data Persistency Provider

Posted by Carlo - 03/02/07 at 02:02:04 pm

In the last months I have been involved in many projects, some on my job, some other personal. One of these is quite ready, after long test sessions, after many modification and improvement.

I have decided to call it “cryogen“, because it not only it resembles the cold, but it contains the part “gen” that can stand for Generation. Well, it’s just a name, what is more important is the way it works.

I’m currently working on the last details and, more important in this moment, the documentation. It is taking me some time, because I do not have a lot of free time and because I’m constantly fixing some small things in order to improve the functionalities and the speed.

cryogen is intended for .Net developers, especially C# ones, and will be soon released  in Open Source (LGPL) for everyone who is looking for an easy-to-manage data persistency provider.

In the next weeks, when the documentation will be finalized and the code fixed in its version 1.0 RC1 I will post some more information and links, meanwhile if anyone of you is interested in peeping at the code, documentation or whatever, just let me know and I will be more than happy to provide everything for you.

PS: I hope to be able to present it publicly at the London Barcamp 2: the deadline to complete everything is quite tight, but I think that the product has its own point of strength that should make this small library very useful for the .Net developers.

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Carlo Nicora is at home in London.