Blog restarted

First, an update. Since my last post I finished high school and moved to York, UK, where I study Electronics Engineering.

I recently stared rereading old posts, and realized that I had forgot a lot of stuff. Also, reading my old writings is extremely sobering, which I believe to be a good thing. I thus decided to restart this blog, along with my Italian one. Henceforth, I shall focus on cooking, cycling (as my motorbike is still back home) and a bit of travel reports. Furthermore, if I happen to do something that might be deemed technically interesting, like my old post about triple booting my Mac, I'll give a shot at writing it down.

In conclusion, a declaration of intent: this blog will be written mainly to exercise my writing, then to keep a record of what I do and lastly with the hope that it might be useful. Somehow. To somebody. Somewhere.

New Movies and Puppies

This summer I shot 2 movies, called The End and Torta al cioccolato (Chocolate Cake). They're now available on youtube, just follow the links.

I also have big news: my dog Penny is pregnant with 6 puppies!

Summer Holidays 2008

I got back from my holidays yesterday.
This summer I've been to Paris, where I presented my acoustics article (check youtube channel soon for a video of my presentation), to Valencia for a couple of days. I spent most of the remaining time in Campomoro, and the whole August in Folgarida.
I did lots of walks and biking in both places, with more walks having place in Folgarida due to the cooler weather.
I took relatively few pictures, but I shot two short films, which you can see on my youtube channel. I also tried downhill bicycling, which is real fun, especially considering that a modern downhill bicycle has much better suspension and brakes than my old motorbikes.

This allowed me to go much faster with little risk, leaving my brother and dad to bite dust behind me.

ASUS EEE GPRS connection - simple mode

How to configure a GPRS connection on your Asus EEE. Tried with various Motorola V360 phones connected with an USB cable in data mode.
A quicker and simpler way to achieve the same result as the previous post.
Just create a standard dial-up connection and try it. If it doesn't work,install wvdial.

sudo apt-get install wvdial

Then run wvdialconf and wvdial. They'll configure and try to run you connection. If the second one fails after getting the carrier, start the connection from the network settings and it will work.

Asus EEE connection

I just managed to set up once again the connection on my asus eee. As I had completely forgot how it was done, I'm going to store all the data here, for future reference.
The settings are for Wind, you probably have to change "internet.wind" with the APN of your provider.
1. Create a dialup connection profile for your mobile.

2. Edit /etc/ppp/peers/dialup1 so as to obtain this code:

#
# This file was generated by xandrosncs tools.
#
ipparam "dialup1"
name "pjkoij"
remotename "dialup1_XANDROS_NCS_REFERENCE"

connect "/opt/xandros/lib/libxandrosncs/bin/xandrosncs-pppconnect-chat dialup1"

noauth
hide-password
noipdefault
usepeerdns

modem /dev/ttyACM0
460800

/dev/ttyACM0

3. Edit /etc/chatscripts/dialup1 thus:

#
# This file was generated by xandrosncs tools.
#
ABORT VOICE
ABORT BUSY
ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
ABORT "NO DIAL TONE"
TIMEOUT 120
"" ATZ
OK ATV1E0
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet.wind"
OK ATD*99#
CONNECT \c

Triple Boot on my MacBook Pro

I finally managed to set up a triple boot system on my macbook pro. It would actually have been much easier if I knew that you must format your windows partition during the windows setup. If you don't, windows xp is not going to work (and don't use quick format nor convert to ntfs, they're not going to work). It is actually quite simple: you just create 2 partitions using disk utility, and yo format the windows one to fat32. You should ensure that neither your primary partition nor the partition you want to use with linux are htfs+ journaled. Linux cannot write to journaled file systems. After you made the partitions (you may need to use disk utility boot from your mac os x dvd, depending on your previous system configuration) you should install rEFIt: an open source boot loader for the EFI platform. rEFIt will detect any bootable device in your system at each startup. With rEFIt installed you can boot from the Ubuntu Live CD (or DVD) and install it. You need an external mouse to right click. During setup be careful about the keyboard layout: it tends to get it wrong on macs (you can change it at a later time, though). Install linux on the third partition (the first being EFI and the second being Mac). Windows needs to be on the last partition. You can try to install Grub directly on the correct partition (hd0,2) by changing the install location in the advanced pop-up window. However I didn't manage to boot ubuntu if I installed grub on the partition. If you let ubuntu install grub on the whole disk, windows will overwrite it during its own setup, requiring you to re-install grub on the correct partition. Once you completed the ubuntu setup check that it's bootable and install windows (remember about formatting the partition if installing xp). As you need to access both a windows and a linux (ext3) filesystem from your mac you can use ntfs for your windows drive, as you need to install MacFUSE on your Mac anyway in order to get access to ext3. Once Windows is setup you will find that rEFIt doesn't show linux as bootable anymore. To restore it you need to boot from Ubuntu Live CD, go to http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org/, download Super Disk Grub and install it on your third partition foolowing Herman's instructions (available on the linked web site). Note that while the instructions show ho to set up grub on a usb stick, you need to install it to your linux disk (it is the only ext3 one). I did try to boot from the memory stick, but an error pops-up and it doesn't boot.
After re-installing grbu everything should work fine (after, of course, you install all the drivers).
While ubuntu automatically reads and writes to other disks, you need MacFUSE for enabling other disks on Mac, and MacDrive and Ext2fs for enabling them on windows.

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!