Mettetevelo nella zucca

Nell'aprile 2003 apro un conto e deposito 1000 euro. In tutti questi anni, non effettuo alcuna operazione con il conto...niente depositi, niente prelievi, niente trasferimenti, niente di niente di niente. Oggi mi è arrivato il prospetto semestrale al 30 giugno 2007. I miei soldi hanno raggiunto la ragguardevole somma di 1077,98 euro...

Disappointed

after 10 days I swapped the hard disk of my late 2006 iMac, this morning I got into another problem :/ What's up this time? BAD RAM!
Yeah...this morning I got up late, woke from sleep my mac, and after a few minutes it got a panic. I thought to myself: "wow, first panic!!!" since I never got one on this machine (I bought it in March). Rebooted the machine, and it kept chiming at 15 seconds interval...just a fews secs after it read the first boot blocks :/ Hmmm...immediately, I booted off the diagnostic software (thank god it booted)...and after a few secs: tadaaah...diags told me 4MEM/1/40000000 (0xbc8f8310, for the records)!!!!

Removing the module solved the problem. I tried to remove the "good" module, but in that case the machine didn't even get to the boot chime. I swapped the modules, same effect. I tried to put it back in place and...nada! So I only had to remove it forever and...wait until tomorrow, calling Apple Care and see if they'll take their badram back without requiring me to send over the machine.

Enough of confidentiality notice clutter

We are all "disturbed" by the most naive and fancy or just annoying "Confidentiality Notice", DISCLAIMERS, or whatever people/companies add to their email signatures. That's just pollution, since they won't add any good into email messaging but cluttering our everyday mailing life.

I think most of you already know well the problem so I won't go much in deep explaining this problem.

Well I have a proposal to solv..hmm...circumvent this problem: introduce an X-Disclaimer or X-ConfidentialityNotice header whose value would be an URL pointing to website into the message's From: domain.

For example, the new header would appear like this:

  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.xml

or more simply

  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.html

Now for the feature request: it would be a good thing if mail clients recongnized this header and had some GUI binding, so that somewhere in the message view appeared some sort of button or whatever pointing to (guess what) "Confidentiality Notice", that would retrieve the xml, parse and show it, or simply follow the hyperlink showing the clutter :-)

What would we need to implement this magic?

• In the account settings, add a text box to add the notice's URL
• Define and share a DTD in the case we would go for XML
• some "app logic" to parse XML, and check correspondence between From: domain and X-ConfidentialityNotice domain of the URL.
• In the message view window add a GUI element (text, smallicon, whatever) on the window border, or statusbar or near the subject, or werever you like. This element would fire up the hyperlink or open a dialog with properly parsed xml.

Having this or some sort of this thing implemented would give us some peace of mind and less clutter into our email.

Since I like this idea, I will be mailing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla guys to hear what they think.

That's my 5cents.

Vista, report to mothership when it works!!!

...well..I gave it a chance, 20 minutes ago I heard the Windows Vista welcome chime, activated and updated everything, so now I'm starting to learn.

Lesson number one - If everything goes okay, that's a problem: you should report it.

Yes, if Vista says there's a problem, don't be so sure the problem is really there...but, well yeah, maybe it knows it's a problem but it's not...or there's no problem, and that's the problem! ;-)

iMac 24" dissected

Two months after I bought my new baby (a Sep2006 24" 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo iMac), its hard disk temporarily died (the mac refused to boot). I recovered everything with some nifty tools and once again it died...well..after a surface scan it revealed bad blocks, and during usage I could hear the "classic" clicks (no S.M.A.R.T. warnings though). The drive is a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 .

Yeah, Apple offered me a free repair, but I should drive 200km to the closest authorized repair center, wait for diagnosis and repair and drive it back home. Add that to the fact this is summertime...

I didn't want risk to loose my mac for two months and spend 100 EUR for gasoline or express courier so I bought a Western Digital WD5000AAKS hard drive and replaced it myself.

Just in case somebody want to repeat it there are some pictures of the operation that lasted more or less 20minutes. Tools needed are basic: a T9 torx and a Philips screwdriver and some "glue" for temperature sensor.

iMac 24" dissected

Basiliska

...e' il nome del drink che ho inventato qualche giorno fa (o forse gia' esisteva?)...vabbe' comunque eccone la ricetta (che rilascio in licenza BSD) ;-)

La ricetta ufficiale e' la seguente:

- 87% di succo di pera
- 9% di latte parzialmente scremato
- 4% di Amaro Lucano

Prelevare dal frigorifero i tre ingredienti (tutti alla stessa temperatura quindi), versare il succo di pera, aggiungere il latte e poi aggiungere l'amaro lucano. Mescola il tutto ben bene...e degusta il tuo basiliska summer ;-)

[...it's the name of the drink i just invented (uhmm or maybe not?)...well anyway here's the recipe (released in BSD license) ;-)

Official recipe is:

- 87% pear juice
- 9% low fat milk
- 4% Amaro Lucano (great one, learn it at http://www.amarolucano.it/)

Grab the ingredients straight from the fridge (all at same temperature), pour the pear juice, add mink and finally Amaro Lucano. Blend it well..and enjoy your fresh Basiliska summer drink ;-) ]