C Course

 December 21, 2003

Toward the end of last school year, my Computer Science teacher asked the class if anyone would have been interested in a C Course. I submitted my interest in the topic. So, at the beginning of October, we started the C lessons and this past week we had the last lesson.

Previously, I only knew QBasic, so that is my term of comparison. I’ve found C to be way more elegant, probably due to the usage of curvy parenthesis instead of END, NEXT, and similar keywords to delimit code blocks within cycles and control structures.

The Code Book

 June 14, 2003

A few months ago, I got gifted The Code Book by Simon Singh.

The book is excellent. It starts from very ancient forms of encryption and moves to current and even future encryption systems.

I’ve personally read it in Italian, but I’ve found it very easy to read and understand.

The book analyzes how the various encryption systems work, their security level and how they got defeated.

I think it’s fascinating how many of the more recent systems got violated due to the humans involved in it. It seems like modern encryption systems are more secure than humans, so it’s easier to compromise the humans involved in the process than the system itself.

Debian Woody

 September 5, 2002

A couple of days ago, I found at the news shop a Linux magazine with the new Debian Woody CD!

When I tried to install it the first time, it did not work correctly, like Debian 2.2. Having looked more in-depth into this, I understood that the problem lay in the XFree86 configuration that did not work correctly on my setup. With many attempts and few changes, it does now work enough to make the system usable. 3D acceleration is still not available, but at least the 2D part works!

Mandrake

 January 7, 2002

Christmas holidays are coming to an end, but I’m very happy because - after many attempts - I was able to install Mandrake Linux 8.1 on my computer.

I’ve tried to install Debian 2.2 as well, but I’ve not been able to make XFree86 work properly with my video card, so all the graphical applications are not able to start. I would really like to successfully install Debian “minimal”, since I have the feeling that Mandrake is bloated. Rightly after the installation was completed, I already had tens of applications installed. I appreciate that this is helpful in same cases, but I would prefer to have a minimalistic Operating System installed and then add the stuff I want to use on top.

Linux

 October 19, 2001

Today, an ex-student was back at my school during a non-mandatory laboratory that occurs every Friday. He was speaking about what he does in high school he is attending. The topic was about the IT subjects and how they are handled in that specific high school.

After the lecture, the ex-student stuck around to speak with the professor since the ex-student was trying to convince the teacher to ditch Windows and its licenses to move to a different OS, which was better and free. The teacher was not very convinced on the idea since, even if there was an obvious economic advantage in the choice, the teacher believed that it was not easy to use and that it would not have taught the students to use Windows, which is what is required by today and tomorrow people. After the conversation with the teacher, I approached the ex-student to learn more about this unusual operating system.

First post

 November 4, 2000

I’ve thought multiple times to create a blog in the last few months but never did it. Now that moment arrived, and here it is! I’m not going to commit to a posting schedule, but I’ll try to update it frequently. I have a strong interest in Information Technology, so that will probably be the main topic of this blog.