LittleCamels.com

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Tim Peters, “The Zen of Python”

I finally managed to create (for the envy of Mau, mainly) a new photogallery fully integrated in the blog, and also new pictures have been added.

Information for nerds: I have integrated Gallery2 in Wordpress using the WPG2 plugin, struggling a bit to make it work as I wanted (Gallery is really good and customizable, that is, bloody difficult to configure).

Have a look at the Littlecamels’ photogallery.

Almost a year ago I was talking about free software, that is, how to be legal with your computer application licences and still not to pay anything.

So I decided to write a separate page about the free software I use in my laptop, because I know I’ll need that list to reinstall all of them the next time I break my hard disk.

Sunday evening I was listening to a radio programme in Podcast with my laptop. At a certain point it froze. Nothing working. Hard shut down and straight to bed. The next day the horrible truth: starting the computer, black screen and just few lines:

Windows cannot be started: missing file
in C:\windows\system32

I got it straight away: the hard disc was gone.

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Need to run a WRT54GL wireless router in client mode? I'm so happy I made it myself work, that I decided to write down the steps, since it isn't that easy after all.

N.B.: I'm just writing here the exact steps I have done to make the WRT54GL work in client mode, that is, making it capable to connect a wireless network and give access to internet to the computers cabled to it. For a more detailed description of the process (in case the procedure below doesn't work for you), please refer to the OpenWRT manual (especially installing OpenWRT on WRT54GL and how to run in client mode) and to the OpenWRT forum.

The firmware version I'm using is White Russian (RC6), Kernel Version Linux version 2.4.30. It should, however, work also with newer versions.

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Computing post, engineer's style

Question: I use an e-mail program to read my e-mail and I'm pissed off of getting every half an hour the announcement "you've got mail!" just to see that it is a spam message. Is there a way not to see these spam messages at all?

Answer: Yes, there is. At least for two e-mail readers, SeaMonkey and Thinderbird.

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Long time since the last nerdy post.

Here below follows a list of useful programs that I have installed and actively use on my computer. Most of them are open source, so this could be useful for those who don't want to buy software, you'll realise that nowadays it is possible to do almost everything with open source or freeware programs.

All these programs are available for MS Windows. About the availability for other operating systems, please check their own websites.

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I've got addicted to Wikipedia. I try to control it, but it's so fascinating.

Wikipedia is a  free encyclopedia. Free has a double meaning:

• it costs nothing (it's on the internet, and can be freely read)
• anybody can freely change its content, or add new items.

If the first point is quite clear, the second one needs some explanation. Yes, anybody can change any single comma of any item of the encyclopedia. How? On the top of any page (even on the main page) there is an "edit this page" link. Click on it and start adding whatever you want to add.

But. But what if I delete a portion of text, or even a whole page? What if I just add some crap?

Yes, any of this is possible. But remember: you are not the only one working on Wikipedia. There is a lot of people working all the time there. And any change is tracked. It won't take a long time that someone will notice the changes you've made, and will process it. If you add some crap, there will also be some automatic bots which will identify it, and rollback the page to its previous version.

However, as an encyclopedia, you might not be enterested in adding anything, but just reading it. Well, it's for free. Just try not to get too addicted.

I am mainly working on the Italian Wikipedia translating pages about Finland. If you're interested, you can have a look at the Italian Portal about Finland. If you don't speak italian, you might like to have a look at the English version of it. Wikipedia is almost in any language!

I gave up. Few weeks after my complaint about the Firefox affaire, I decided to switch from the Mozilla suite to Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (mail, news and feed reader, version 1.0 just released). It seems the Mozilla suite will be released in 1.8 alpha versions for still a long time, before they will eventually decide to switch the whole SeaMonkey project to be Firefox and Thunderbird based and release Mozilla 2.0.
And what about the Mozilla Suite roadmap? No information about the future releases.
However, I still think that this is a temporary solution for me. On one side I have to recognise that Firefox and Thunderbird are definitely better (more developed) than Mozilla, but still, they are two different programs and I’m not used to it. Maybe my problems sound silly, but since the browser and the mail reader are the programs I use the most, it’s a big (and annoying) change. Just the shortcuts as an example:

Update: Just found a presentation directly from the Mozilla Developer Day 2004 called Mozilla 2.0: Roadmap and Directions. Well, the presentation doesn’t work… and it’s also with frames…

Long time, no post.
Why? Because It’s been a hard day’s night, And I’ve been working like a dog. And now it’s done.
As mentioned some time ago, I got involved in the business of Pivot and I started to port the IcyBlue templates for it. I have now a sort of stable beta release that gives you the chance to create a weblog using the templates that have been used for my weblog as well.
The template is also available from the Pivot Styles web site.
Have a nice weblogging then!

IcyBlue template for Pivot

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