NewInstance

Some time ago, I've answered to a job interview question which was sounding more or less like: «suppose you have 20 minutes to talk to an audience of junior developers about what have been the lessons you learned from your software development experience, and resume that in three points, about what a good developer shall [...]

Yesterday night I tried to connect the iPod to Linux. I tried some programs but none was working decently; but the good news is that you don't really need any special program "made for iPod" to do this. For the guys who do not know about iTunes and iPod/iPhone foolishnesses, the problem is that when [...]

Since the 24th of August a new beta of Skype is available. Some little look and feel changes, contact groups support, nothing really new, except for the native 64bit support. And I hope it will be more stable. Download it from here: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/ I updated it because the old 32bit version recently is very unstable [...]

This tutorial will guide you through installation of Apache, HTTPS, Subversion and Trac, in order to have an (almost) complete development environment for your team. This article is divided in following steps 1. Installing Subversion 2. Installing Apache 3. Configuring Apache with SSL 4. Configuring Subversion with Apache (and SSL) 5. Installing Trac You may [...]

Found this nice thread on StackOverflow: What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? A fun read. I'm trying hard to keep myself to post some snippet; fortunately I've not enough reputation on StackOverflow to post answers :)

Two Saturdays ago, I bought the Wireless Apple Mightymouse. Very nice looking, but I find it much harder to use than the MacBook's touchpad. Basically the problem is the acceleration, there's no way to set it up without external utility: usboverdrive, steermouse, about $20 each. While you can adjust mouse acceleration in any decent OS, [...]

Finally Tomboy is available on Mac! It's the best note taking application I've ever seen. Give it a try. Update: latest version: Mono 2.2 Tomboy 0.13.4

Locking is a technique used for concurrent manipulation of shared data. Locking is not only related to databases: for instance you use locking in Java to synchronize multithreaded access to shared objects residing in memory. Here I am not going to talk specifically about Java locking or database locking, but only how conceptually locking works [...]

I’ve successfully installed Microsoft Office XP on Linux using Wine. It works quite fine and it’s really fast. I got some problems with Macros in Excel, and in particular I was getting the error “Error accessing file. Network connection may have been lost” on every startup. But I found a way to avoid that annoying [...]

Sometime ago I wrote a watchdog against SSH login attacks. After that simple class, I started working – actually not much! – on a more flexible and configurable watchdog engine. But nothing came out so far. The codebase is short and quite good I think, and I was implementing that using TDD approach (only on [...]