A free school revolution idea

Back in 2003, with CreaLabs we started the e-Socrates project, creating the first Italian portal promoting the free e-learning philosophy, because we truly believe that knowledge must be free.
Some days ago Simone Brunozzi told me about an idea he was working on, a community made by students and teachers, together creating documentation that would be [...]

Compiz shouldn’t be enabled by default on Ubuntu

Enabling compiz by default is one of the goals of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) release, but following a thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list it seems that the final decision was not taken yet.
I agree with all the points of view, compiz has some major problems and dependencies.
Just an overview on the main graphic [...]

DRM keeps dying, Universal to sell DRM-free music

with the help of Google, creating a company named gBox. This will only be a time-limited experiment to check the market but it’s always a good thing.
Original news on Digg and Last100.

Technology that can save lives: a new insulin pump

This post is OT in my blog but I think this news on TechCrunch needs attention, because technology should always be created keeping “life” in mind, any form of life.

Another PHP UTF-8 problem: htmlentities, htmlspecialchars and html_entity_decode

htmlentities, htmlspecialchars and html_entity_decode have 3 parameters:

string to be converted
quote_style
charset

but charset default is ISO-8859-1 and there’s no way to change that default, what happens if you’re porting 1,000,000 lines of code from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8? you’ve to wrap those functions or patch every call passing all the 3 params. All these 2 solutions are [...]

New P4A development snapshot, 2.1.4

In the latest days I took a deep breath and went on finishing some pending tasks on P4A devel snapshot, they were waiting since too long… I was thinking about releasing the 2.1.4 as 2.2.0 but… better wait till the end of summer.
The main part of the work was finishing porting the P4A_DB_Navigator drag&drop [...]

UCK 2.0.0 beta2 is out

I took a few minutes to release the new beta, there were some interesting changes that need to be tested by users so here you have
Changes since beta1:
* GUI:
* The question about which desktop environment will be used to manually
customize the ISO was removed, this is now autodetected by the backend
* Fix [...]