Archive for the ‘Random Stuff’ Category

Vhgen 1.1

Here’s the latest update to my vhgen script for apache2 vhost templating.

Stacktrace and FB Garage

For those of you who understand Italian, Stacktrace has published one article of mine, regarding the planning of FB Garage Milano.

It was a fun event both to plan, execute and attend, I hope the article transmits the action that happened behind the lines.

Betrayed by Xerox

I seldom post complaints on my blog (maybe this is the first time), but I’ve never been treated so bad by a name company like Xerox.

Last year in Mikamai we needed a printer. I made my research on the net for a color laser printer and we ended up choosing Xerox, after all you can’t go wrong with Xerox, right? We were so wrong.

Our Xerox Phaser 6110MFP started malfunctioning almost immediately, getting paper jams every second page we printed. After a while it completely stopped working and we had to call tech support (Xerox Italy), and that’s where the pain started.

The first time they sent a technician quite soon, and he said he fixed the printer, then he went away. Obviously he didn’t do anything that really fixed it since after half a day it started malfunctioning again.

We called again the tech support and when the technician came again he said we had to buy a new printer, because we “used up” this one. I almost a year we printed less than 1000 pages. How’s that too much?

We kept calling tech support and the guy didn’t even come anymore. After calling support every day for a week he came again, and said the printer is no more covered by warranty and as long as it’s able to print one page it’s fine for him. He strongly suggested again to buy a new printer.

We followed his suggestions, and bought a Samsung printer, this time spending less than 15% of what we spent for the Xerox one.

I hope this post will go around the net, as a warning to customers. Don’t buy Xerox.

This is an English rewrite of an Italian article posted on the Mikamai blog: “problemi con stampanti xerox

Update: Xerox contacted us and solved the problem.

GiovanniStyle, high readability for your Terminal.app

Soon after Leopard came out I read an article on Slashdot about color contrast. There was a comment that struck me that explained how there were two types of contrast and that you had to maximize both the achieve maximum readabilty. That comment suggested light yellow on dark blue as the best color scheme for terminals.

I made some experimentations with Terminal.app and was pleasantly surprised the commenter was right. I added Consolas to the mix to get the best possible Terminal experience.

After a while my friends and coworkers started to notice my terminal and kept asking me for my .terminal file. Soon after that even customers started asking for it, so I did what the cool guys do and put it on GitHub.

You can find it here: http://github.com/intinig/giovanni_style/tree/master

Let me know what you think :)

Update: here’s a screenshot of the default style and GiovanniStyle side by side. It doesn’t do it any justice, so please try it and remember you have to have Consolas installed.
Default and GiovanniStyle side by side

How I worked with thirty amazing people and lived to tell: Stacktrace

I’ve had the pleasure of working with thirty brilliant techies for the launch of Stacktrace, an Italian website about technology in its various forms.

Stacktrace was and idea of Antonio Cangiano. He felt that Italy missed an authoritative and original technology reference, and contacted about thirty of the best Italy has to offer, people I am very proud I could work with, to prepare the lightning quick launch of a wonderful site, full of original, well written and interesting content.

If you can understand Italian, even a bit of it, I strongly suggest you check Stacktrace. You’ll be glad you did.

The Chuck Norris Ruby Class

Yesterday morning I didn’t feel like doing any real work, so I coded a Chuck Norris Ruby Class. Please feel free to edit the wiki and add features/bugfixes to it :)

Projects

Here’s a summary of the open source projects I’ve been working on lately:

Hack Day Badge

As you probably know I’m going to the Hack Day in June. That means I’m entitled to use one of these badges.

Go me! :)