Supporto bilingue

Da oggi il mio blog supporta più di una lingua, per la precisione l’Inglese e l’Italiano.

Il punto è che mi sono sentito un po’ a disagio scrivendo solo in Inglese alcuni articoli che vorrei fossero letti anche nella mia lingua, per supportare la diffusione delle tecnologie e delle idee che ritengo importanti anche nel Paese in cui vivo e lavoro.

La scelta della lingua avviene selezionandola nella home page in alto a destra. Ho aggiunto il supporto multilingua a WordPress installando il plugin qTranslate, molto ben fatto anche se con qualche piccolo difetto.

Buona lettura!

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Ratings!

Di recente ho notato che non ho molti commenti su questo blog (circa 60 su 120 post dal 2003) ma comunque mi piacerebbe moltissimo avere qualche riscontro in più, così ho installato il plugin WP-PostRatings (molto ben fatto): adesso anche il mio lettore più pigro potrà dare un giudizio a un post o una pagina con un solo click! ;-)

E ricorda: in generale, chi scrive lo fa per piacere (e gradirebbe avere qualche forma di riconoscimento), ma lei/lui non potranno migliorare senza il tuo aiuto quindi, se ti piace un post in un qualunque blog, per favore investi qualche minuto e commentalo!

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A Case of Architectural Refactoring

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?

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

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

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

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

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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