Vortexmind: free your mind Blog

Come avevo preannunciato, da quasi un mese mi stavo moralmente e mentalmente preparando per una complessa operazione ad alto coefficiente di nerdismo: la sostituzione della batteria e della memoria del mio iPod MINI. Dopo svariate peripezie su ebay per ottenere i pezzi richiesti, oggi è finalmente arrivata (tramite trasporti cammellati, a giudicare dai tempi) la batteria ammerigana. In realtà questo è proprio il componente di cui mi fido di meno: trattasi infatti di batteria cinese non bene identificata, composta probabilmente con organi umani e Baozi al cartone immersi in una soluzione alcalina di liquore di riso, in grado di erogare nominalmente 900 mAh alla tensione richiesta di 3.7V. In realtà sarà già tanto se reggerà per un album intero ma vabbè. Read it all..

Just a quick tips for all folks out there that are getting mad on this

Problem: if you are trying to install JINI in Gentoo Linux, after you downloaded the installer starter kit you may start it and find errors like this:

grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This seems to happen if you have compiled your glibc libraries with nptl and nptlonly USE flags. You will be unable to install JINI (and I have read that this problem could happen to other java installers. But there is an easy solution for this! Read it all..

Sono fermamente convinto che una seria politica ambientale debba partire dal basso, cioè dai cittadini. E’vero che servono anche regolazioni governative globali (come il protocollo di Kyoto, ad esempio), ma penso sia chiaro che i comportamenti di massa influiscano pesantemente sul cosiddetto footprint che lasciamo sul nostro pianeta. In questo articolo voglio raccogliere informazioni utili per gestire al meglio le risorse casalinghe, uno dei primi luoghi in cui risparmiare è conveniente non solo da un punto di vista ambientale, ma anche da un punto di vista economico. Read it all..

Since I’m getting back on programming, I’m currently re-skilling myself on this duty. Having not programmed Java in a while, I’ve found myself on trouble on this simple topic: Java concurrency and threads. I will insert on the blog some “quick tutorials” about various subjects. I’ve found that programmers sometimes need a fast solution on a given problem. They could surely get it by looking at the API’s and so on, but it costs valuable time. So I will go straight to the problem.

• Problem: I need to do a fixed job on some data in a parallel fashion.
• Solution: using a multi-threaded model, I have two classes Controller and Worker. Worker is essentially a thread that does the fixed job and reports the data to the Controller
• Main issues: is it better to “extends Thread” or to” implements Runnable“? How to accessing shared variables concurrently and avoid race conditions? How to pass data from Worker to Controller?

Read it all..

As seen on LevySoft (it) I’m reccomending you the following SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools for webmaster, which can help you improving your website design, compliance to standards, ranking in search engines and overall user experience:

• Silktide: want to get a score like the one I’ve displayed above. On Silktide you can run an online test to check out how good your website is (Marketing, Design, Experience,Accessibility and Visitor Rating if any). You get a score, then the analysis goes “in depth” to check out specific flaws in your design (speed, popularity, standards, interactivity, features). I found it very useful to improve my website
• Multiple Datacenter Pagerank Tool: since there are many replicated Google datacenters around the net, this tool helps you to check if you pagerank is up-to-date in every datacenter. With a single query, you will known the status of your Pagerank on each server
• WebXACT: this tool let you check single pages to discover flaws about quality, accessibility and privacy issues.
• BidTool: are you interested in knowing what terms pay out more in advertising? Check out your keywords with this tool.
• Keyword Selector Tool: not sure about the bidding term? You can see how many times that term and related one has been requested during last month.
• SeoMoz Tools: there are many “coming soon” tools here, and they need you to register and provide Google API key to use, but it’s very interesting. Just check thier available service Keyword Difficulty Tool. As they say: “Used to analyze the competitive landscape of a particular search term or phrase, this tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at google and Yahoo.“. Nice, huh?
• Google Adwords Sandbox: this service is intended for adwords publishers, but who says that you can’t use it too to improve your ranking?
• Google Sitemaps: this Google feature is not a new, but still many don’t know about it. Sitemaps add an XML based description of your website to instruct search engines (Google and Sitemap-compliant ones) how to index your website. It’s a sort of powerful robots.txt file. I can say that using Sitemaps on this site slightly improved my SEO ratings and SE indexing responsiveness to new content. If you use CMS software (like wordpress), there are many plugins that automatically create the Sitemap for you, so all you must do is really little work to add this to your site!

Well, I hope these tools will help you developing a better webpage. If you know more of them, just drop a line in the comments and I’ll add them to the list!

Due to high demand, I’m going to write a straightforward mod_rewrite guide to group together the solutions to the most common problems. Again, this article is NOT a detailed guide about mod_rewrite: if you need such a thing, you should go to Apache’s website which brings a complete document about this issue. I will update this tutorial when I get new info about this “Apache 2 swiss army knife”. But first, let’s just introduce the topic by seeing what mod_rewrite is… Read it all..

In this tutorial we are going to improve our website by tweaking out the .htaccess file. Why I wrote this article? Because on the net I have found many articles about this little beast, but every one of them dealt with a specific issue and not look at the overall usage of these files, or they are just too big when you need to do a thing in little time. So I’m trying to collect all the useful bits of data in a monolithic but slim tutorial, which will be updated as I collect more information. But first, let’s see what .htaccess file is… Read it all..

In principio c’era l’HTML. Poi sono arrivati i Cascading Style Sheets e si è imposto il paradigma che impone di “separare lo stile dalla struttura del documento“. Ora, con la salda affermazione dell’XML, si stanno cominciando a diffondere anche i principi del cosiddetto web semantico (Semantic Web in inglese). Ora, andando oltre alla semplice descrizione strutturale e stilistica di una pagina, si cerca di rendere esplicito anche il “significato” dei dati presenti nella pagina (permettendo quindi anche alla macchina di “rendersi conto” del significato di quello che sta presentando, con ovvi vantaggi rispetto alle interazioni possibili con la pagina stessa). In questo articolo cercherò di fare una rapida panoramica dello “stato dell’arte attuale” per quanto riguarda il Web Semantico. Read it all..