Category Archives: Computers and Internet

Bilingual Support

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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From today my blog supports more than a language, English and Italian.

The reason behind this addition is that I felt a bit uncomfortable writing only in English some posts that I would like to be read also in my language, to support the diffusion of technologies and ideas that I think about as important in the country were I live and work.

The preferred language can be choosen selecting it in the top right of the home page. I added the multilingual support to WordPress installing the qTranslate plugin, very well done even if it has some small defects.

So have a good reading!

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Ratings!

Posted on by Diego Caravana
5

Recently I noted that I do not have a lot of comments on my blog (around 60 on 120 posts from 2003) but anyway I would like to some more feedback, so I installed the very-well-done plugin WP-PostRatings: now even my lazier reader can rate any post or page with only one click! ;-)

Remember: in general, who writes does it because likes it (and likes also having some form of reward), but he/she cannot do better without your help so, if you like some post in some blog, please invest some minutes and do comment it!

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A Case of Architectural Refactoring

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Some weeks ago one of my customers decided that one of its biggest ASP​.NET web intranet projects needed a sort of architectural revision, mainly to support better its customers with built-in fault tolerance but also to unchain development of the various sub-projects through better separation between software modules.

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The analysis phase: time to grow up?

Posted on by James Kerr
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When small software companies get bigger they embark on what can be a bumpy ride of change. One of those changes will probably be to do with the way they tackle the analysis phase of the software development life-cycle (SDL). Just to be clear, when I say “analysis phase”, I mean the part before coding starts i.e. requirements elicitation, analysis and system specification.

Typically (although I am sure that there are plenty of shining examples where this is not the case) small software companies with a handful of developers, where the entire SDL for a project is covered by one or two developers, tend not to have a formalised analysis phase. Why is that?

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Clouds Evolve: Dealing with Infrastructure Complexity

Posted on by Diego Caravana
2

As expected, at least by me, Amazon EC2 is evolving in a more “concrete” platform good for web hosting; in fact, some time ago I received a mail from AWS announcing two new features: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones (you read for sure the news also on Slashdot: Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting, isn’t it?)

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Amazon EC2 will get persistent storage

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Only a small note to let you know that Amazon is hearing us and added a new feature to EC2: persistent storage.

As a subscriber of AWS services yesterday I received an email in which Amazon announces that we “will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance…”.

The mail ends saying that the new functionality “will be publicly available later this year” and offers a link to request to join the private beta program; I subscribed it and will let you now as soon as I’ll put my hands on it.

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More on the [Computing] Clouds

Posted on by Diego Caravana
4

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity, but I was not happy with simple web hosting offers, I wanted also complete control over my infrastructure to have the technical freedom that I could need and because, when I think about my customers’ data, I trust no one.

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Helping Improve Virtualmin

Posted on by Diego Caravana
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Only a small note to let you know that Virtualmin (from version 3.54) can be used for serious work when importing websites from Plesk backups: I tried the previous version with some web sites but it was too buggy, so I decided to help authors in debugging and testing it; I think that now Virtualmin can import the backups in a rather complete way.

BTW, Plesk is a good product, full of features, but I prefer Webmin/Virtualmin because they let me have full control of the server, instead of the way of Plesk that is too automatic in my opinion and offers less choices, impositions that I feel too strong (one for all: Plesk comes and works only with QMail).

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