New Software Idea

Have you ever noticed that some songs belong both to an album and to a compilation (like if you have Let it be and The Blue Album, both by the Beatles)? Noticing this I thought that next-gen music management and playback programs should treat album info as a tag, so that you can tag a song with multiple album names. In this way you could be able to find songs searching in each and all of the albums in which they were published, just like if you had the real CDs.

Various updates

First of all I finished my school's newspaper, which is now available through the pirate version of my school's site I did (here).
I'm also working on the site itself. I just finished uploading all the photos I could get from my school's server to my Picasa account, and now I'm going to embed them all into the site. I'm now working on a major redesign of the photos section, which is going to show flash slide shows from Picasa, with links to the Picasa album itself (as the flash version doesn't work with mobile phones).
I received quite a lot of feedback and suggestions for the developing of the site.
Prof. Gandolfi suggested updating the About page (which I did) and to convert to html the teacher list, including a photo of each one. Some fellow students lamented about the navigation interface, which is too much labirintic. The Oltre la didattica section was then completely removed (it was proven that it didn't contain anything). I added direct links to the Chorus and Newspaper sections in the navigation bar.
It has been suggested to put on those animated/sliding menus, that let you see directly the sub-pages of each section. For avoiding the formatting problems they have I'm thinking about using a good old mouse-over.

On the server side I'm planning to set up customized 404 error pages.

I'm also planning a new movie, but I'm waiting for the new camera to arrive. In the meanwhile I'm collecting photos from my Munich trip (my photos are on the italian blog). I need them for a DVD project, in which I want to put all the photos from the various participants to the trip, along with the video made by my friend Gabriele.

Another DVD project on which I'm working is the one that my school has to produce for the Parmaincontra concourse. We must do a DVD containing both the text of oure historical research (on Guido Picelli) and the video of the show we made on the same subject (I play Mr. Picelli in the show). I'm studying what's the best way to have a disc which has both a data section (containing the text) and a video part (so that it can play on a normal DVD player). Suggestions are always appreciated.
Merry Christmas!

Australia 2: Cooktown to Cairns

Second episode of my travel report.

Autralia Travel Report 1

I'm finally posting the first episode of my report concerning my trip to Australia (July 2007). Second episode coming really soon (about five minutes).

AES Convention Recordings

Today I finally received the recordings of my papers, which I presented at the AES 123rd Convention in New York. I'll make a video of the presentation with the original audio from the convention (I even have a film of me answering the questions) and I'll post it to youtube (and here, with the new Share feature) and to my podcast. Keep tuned in.

Ubuntu

Last week I switched to Ubuntu, which is very simply wonderful. Installation is very easy and the GUI is exemplar. Furthermore its pre-installed (with version 7.10) compiz desktop enhancer gives it functions that allow it to dwarf Mac OS X.
The integrated NTFS support and Grub allow easy multi-booth setup (an ext2/ext3 driver for windows is very easy to find and is great).
In the past week I already persuaded two guys to pass to it (and they both liked it very much, altough one of them had problems caused by his lack of an internet connection) and I'm showing it to all my friends.
I particularly like the multi-workspace feature. This evening I found out a lot of keyboard shortcuts that enable nice tricks in compiz. You can find the keyboard shortcuts here. Not listed in the linked article are Super+alt+tab and ctrl+alt+tab, which both enable window flicking between windows from all the workspaces.

iPod Trick

I recently had a connection problem with my iPod: neither the Finder nor iTunes could "see" it. Of consequence it wasn't possible to restore it using iTunes.
I discovered that resetting the iPod and pressing center button + play/pause while the screen is black (before the apple logo appears) forces the iPod in Disk Mode. Now connecting the iPod to the Mac, it is instantly recognized, and can be easily restored.

New DNS for my site

The new DNS for my website (www.adrianofarina.it)is now active. I will soon also have a new email address: adriano@adrianofarina.it. I'm now updating all the links to my site from my blogs.

New York Trip and Wndows Live Gallery embedding

I have 2 great news: first of all I just came back from my trip to NY, where I presented 2 acoustics papers. More info on that tomorrow. Furthermore I just found out how to embed my windows live photo gallery in my website. I'll embed them all tomorrow. Final news: I bought the new 8GB iPod Nano (black). It is just amazing. I really got to buy a case for it, as I'm keeping it in an old sock now (a bit like the Apple sock, but not half as goodlooking). I realized that the videos I posted to my podcast up to now aren't iPod compatible. Next issues will be fully compatible.

Cycling enterprise

This Sunday I did my first ever bicycle trip outside Parma. I went to Campomoro with my new bicycle, covering a total distance of 74 kilometers. I thought it was going to be hard, but it actually wasn't. In the photo you can see me at arrival in Campomoro. A little trick if you want to do something like that is to walk for the last kilometer or so.

Podcast Update

Todat I gave my podcast a major facelift. First of all I upgraded to a new theme, which is very minimal and mac-like (I even left the 'Made on a Mac' button). I also included (through a bit of notepad work) a navigation bar, that allows visitors to reach directly the various secions of my home page. On the content side I translated all the descriptions and released two new episodes, one of which can also be viewed on youtube.
The next episode will be either my paper's slideshow (with voiceover) or the third part of my Australia Travel Report, whichever finish first.
Since I'm on the subject of my paper, a couple of days ago the AES convention organizing committe asked my for an extended bio in consideration of my age (that doesn't sound right: why a 16 year old guy should have more to say than a 26 year old one? after all the first one has had a much shorter life!).
It also seems that my father won't be able to come to New York with me, so that I'll have to present hi srticle too.
His article is on a Volterra kernel-based non-linear convolution algorytm.

Parallels Desktop

Today I set up Parralels Desktop on my mac. It solved completely mosto of my problems: now I can open any windows file with its original window application as if it was Mac OS X software! I can switch between Mac OS and Windows as easily as pressing Alt+Enter, and I can access the Mac Dashboard by pressing F12 even when I'm in Windows mode. And, best of all, I can use Office! By the way, today I put google search in the Romagnosi clone site. While writing this post I noticed that Blogger now supports videos, I'll upload one soon to try this new function. If the system employed has a good compatibility I coul use it to host my video gallery. I'll see about that. I also want to ask my (few) readers what they think of my idea of building an RPG based on the Open Source GDR-CD, which is available from gdr-online.com. View this post in RSS/ATOM mode in order to download the included movie (Polacchia1) and to sbscribe to the multimedia content of the blog in iTunes, as if it was a podcast.

New Site

I'm working on two new sites at the moment. First of all I'm doing a new version of my home page, which will link to all my blogs and include photo album and a video gallery with my movies (requires windows media player). The other site I'm doing is the one of the "Lo Spazio e i Mercanti" project, which is an history reasearch project my class made about Parma's medieval history and topography. Both of them are linked from my original home page.

AES Article update

I finished and uploaded my acoustics article, which can be found at this address. This article will be presented on Monday the eighth of October, at 9a.m. at the AES Convention in New York. For more info or questions write me.

AES article

I'm going to present an acoustics article at the upcoming AES conference in New York this October. The article is about mp3 players caused hearing damage. Abstract: http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/adriano/Files/rad69648.pdf

Australia

Tomorrow I'll start my one month trip to Australia. We're going first to Cairns, attending an acoustics convention there. After a week we'll go to Cooktown via the coastal dirt road using a 4WD car. Then we'll have one free week, that will be spent scuba diving (I'm going to take my second degree scuba diving license). The last week will be spent in Sidney, where I'll meet with two friends of mine.

Podcast

I just finished setting up a podcast, containing three songs made with Garageband by me and by Ugo Deth band. Up to now the song descriptions are in italian only, but'ill translate it soon.

Badminton and bicycle.

I started a badminton team with a friend from my school and we ordered the rackets today. Here in Parma only a handful of people are playing badminton, so we are probably going to win Saturday tournament. We don't have a team uniform yet.

Last Thursday my brother's bicycle has been stolen. He had lent it to me, for I had to go to the theater and i left it just outside the theater, with the frame locked to a nearby fence. When I exited the theatre I only found the padlock, the chain neatly cut in two.

Carnival

Yesterday one of my classmates held a carnival party. Of course we had to mask ourselves. I dressed like a sort of cowboy (actually I looked more like Indiana Jones). A photo of me is included. At the party there were four others guys dressed like cowboys, but I think that my costume was one of the more natural ones, because, apart from the hat, I was wearing exactly the same clothes I wear everyday.

Anyway, the party was good, until they decided to look House of Wax. It's quite a good splatter, but it still is a splatter, and splatters are always telling the same story: group of youngs finds psycho guy who kills them all except the protagonist, who kills the psycho in turn. Boring.

I'm happy I stayed home.

I'm really, really happy I'm not gone to ski. In fact my friends who went there had a strong argument with some of my schoolmates. That's how it happened: Friday morning my philosophy teacher noticed that lots of people where missing. She asked if there was an interrogation or test that day. One of us answered that there was a biology interrogation. Up to now, nothing strange. But that afternoon my friend Pater (that's his nickname) phoned the guys who where in the mountains and he told them that the girl who had told the teacher that there was a biology interrogation that day had instead told her that these guys had stayed home to avoid the interrogation. The guys who where gone to ski phoned this girl and insulted her, without giving her the possibility to reply.

No ski for me - Biology interrogation

My friend told me that departure time for going to ski was 5a.m. , so I decided to stay home. Anyway, tomorrow there will be the first biology interrogation of the second half of the year. It is about cellular respiration ad fermentation. I'm not particularly worried about it, but half of my schoolmates will not go to school in order to avoid it (actually they will be interrogated next week, but they think they'll be ready by then).

My video card is still having problems.

Skying and Aristophane

A friend of mine invited me to go skying with him (and a bunch of others guys) this weekend. I'd be very happy to go there, but my school organizes a trip to Milan to see Aristophanes's comedy "The Birds", which is wonderful, and which I probably won't be able to see another time. So I really don't know what to do. Any advice (given before Thursday) would be very welcome.

Big News

On the 24th of January I got my A1 motorbike driving license. This means I can finally use my trusty Fantic on the road!

Anyway, this summer I won't be able to use it very much, because I'll spend one month in Australia and one in Sudtirol.

This year my class will go in Sicily for five days in March. And I'm going to the York AES conference in April. It's going to be quite a busy year.

I even started to attend a scuba diving course, although I'm terribly out of practice (not sure it's said like this).

I'll post news more often than I did up to now.