Entering the digital (SLR) era

My friend mooch (if he is reading) will be happy to know that after 2 years of "I'll buy it..." I bought my first DSLR camera: a Canon EOS 450D. Long expected purchase, that finally allows me to make some "real" photo (not that crappy stuff I was making before).
Just unpacked and studied all the instructions, here's one of the first shots:

 

TG1, la voce dell'innocenza...

chapeau..

Guzzanti - Berlusconi: spettacolo

Dio quanto m'e' mancata sta donna in televisione...

SubDownlader: stop searching for subtitles

Bored of searching for a subtitle over the internet? I came across this very interesting project: Subdownloader. It's a python + QT program that allows you to scan your movies and search automatically for the right subtitle in any language you want from opensubtitles.org.

It's fast, it's available for linux and windows, it's open source and it works really well, and most important it finds always the right subtitle.

Click on the link above and try it yourself ;)

I want to know them!

3 Finns won the Gold Medal in the culinary olimpics 2008 held in Germany this year. Yle report the news without saying anything about Berlusconi, but knowing Finns they did this just to prove that what Berlusconi said some time ago was not true. :D this heck of Finns!

The menu was:

Starter: salmon, lobster and a spinach puréé as a starter.
Main meal: Veal fillet, veal shoulder and sweetbread sausages.
Dessert: strawberry-chocolate mousse and orange-yogurt cake.

(okay but what about pasta? :D :D)

Now the question is where these 3 guys/girls have been hiding all this time... maybe I wasn't rich enough to enjoy their delicacies ... :(

I will try to know them, I have to!

Where maemo is coming from...

Image by teoruiz via FlickrI will try to tell the story as my friend mooch told me quite some time ago.

It was the beginning of the internet tablets, it was so beginning that the tablets were just called "devices" and that the 770 was only a prototype. I wasn't there yet but mooch told me he was and he just received his brand new shiny desktop to start doing something.

In the search for a new name for his machine he fired up the good old 'pwgen' utility. Strange and incomprehensible names started to come up on the screen. One of those wasn't really maemo but it was really close to be (pwgen default is to give you 8 chars strings). He extrapolated somehow maemo from the 8 chars displaying on the screen and he dig up in the internet finding out that maemo didn't really mean that much besides something in a dialect on the other part of the world and he decided to choose that as the name of his desktop.

At that time he was the IT guy in the organization and he started to use his desktop to collect packages that developers were sending him over e-mail, ftp... (yeah it was really the beginning).

In few months his desktop was clogged with packages and he couldn't use it anymore as his desktop but it became quite useful as central repository for the developers.

He had to grow it with more disk space and move to another 2x CPU box. When services and needs grew way too much for the little power provided by 2GB and 2x PIII 700MHz, he ordered a new machine that became THE Server.

Someday after some other months somebody came into the room and asked him if Nokia could use that name to register a domain to publish some sdk. Without second thoughts he told "Of course".

Well that was the beginning of maemo.org .

Kudos to mooch ;)

Recovering from Maemo Summit 08

So finally I get few minutes to write about Maemo Summit 08. Hopefully (if the crawler hits my blog) this should be my first post aggregated with planet.maemo.org. So hello maemons.

At the beginning I wasn't so sure that I would have benefited by going to the summit and I was a bit sceptical about it. Well after that (and after one week passed to recover from it) I have to say: it was great!
First time I met a lot of people and had a chance to really talk to them (email, though useful, doesn't give you everything of a person). First time I had a chance to speak for more than the time allocated for the meeting with some nokians.
Overall there was this sensation of community that as an insider you don't feel everyday. Actually you never feel so much you're busy with your job.

I really have to thank (again) Quim and Peter that organized the summit. And I also have to thank the whole community. If you didn't get it we, as nokians, need you as much as you need us. Coming back to Finland after the summit I was refreshed and energized (even though I was damn tired) and I felt I was sharing this state of mind with a lot of others in the plane (at least the tiredness :D ).

Greetings to Niels, murrayc, kersten and the other of the openismus crew (great party!). To the Collabora guys and to the rest that I didn't mention here. See you at the next summit.

BIG thanks to the community to support us and to give us more energy to continue on this path.