Iseo!

_DSC6683.jpg, originally uploaded by xela70.

Back from Italy! It was nice to be back in the old country, enjoying the weather, the food and the people.

Feeling purple...

It is the second week at my new job. So far I like it. The cafeteria is a definite improvement, and so it is the free coffee...
I also like the people and the problem. We shall see.

Last day at IBM

Well, May 11th was my last day of work at IBM Almaden, 8 years and one day exactly since I joined the company. Sad to go, but excited about my new job at Yahoo!
I meet so many extraordinary people at IBM and I will be always thankful for the great opportunity they gave me to work on so many exciting research projects. Goodbye Almaden.

Powerset party

Saturday night I was at the Powerset party in San Francisco, at the Frisson. Cool crowd and very interesting technology. They have a quite ambitious project of taking on the search problem using natural language processing. Given the team and the technology they might very well be able to pull it off.

O'Reilly Radar > lca: Andrae Muys on RDF

Cool, news about mulgara seems finally to be spreading. I have been playing around with mulgara and I must say that I have been very impressed by it. See:
O'Reilly Radar > lca: Andrae Muys on RDF

L'avvelenata, Guccini e Bertoncelli

Mi sono spesso chiesto chi fosse il Bertoncelli dell'Avvelenata di Guccini. Dopo un po' di ricerca ho trovato questo articolo

Rational Application Developer 7 on Kubuntu/ubuntu Edgy Eft

After struggling to install RAD7 on kubuntu (it fails at the installation of the websphere 6.1 runtime), a collegue of mine found this posting:

WebSphere Portal 6 on Ubuntu (continued) - Exception: null

So, if you are struggling to get RAD7 installed on your kubuntu/ubuntu machine here is the procedure:
1) make /bin/sh point at bash: cd /bin; sudo ln -sf bash sh
2) install RAD7
3) replace the shell in the scripts: sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/SDP70/runtimes/base_v61/bin/*.sh
4) replace the shell in the script for the profile management: sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/SDP70/runtimes/base_v61/bin/ProfileManagement/*.sh
5) enable write access to the profile, so that you can develop using your user account: sudo chmod -R a+w /opt/IBM/SDP70/runtimes/base_v61/profiles/AppSrv01
6) restore the original link: cd /bin; sudo ln -sf dash sh

and then enjoy RAD7 running under ubuntu!

An alternative to step 1-3, contribuited by Joshua Purcell (see comments to this post), is to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

Choose 'no' when it asks if you want to make sh symbolically link to dash. The same command can be used in place of step 6 if you ever want to switch back to dash.

Thanks Joshua!

PS: ubuntu and kubuntu are not officialy supported by IBM/Rational, so use at your own risk.

Green screen of death of the iSight

Lately my Core 2 Duo 20" iMac was having trouble with the embedded iSight camera: in Photo Booth was showing just a green screen.
I knew it was not an hardware problem because skype could use the camera without problems, but no joy with any of the apple apps: Photo Booth, iChat, iMovie. They all showed the green screen.
After searching on the Internet I found several suggestions pointing to resetting the SMC.
I tried that and, lo and behold, iSight works again! Woo Hoo!

Like Avedon

I like Avedon's style when it comes to portraits, so I tried a self portrait in his style. Here is it. My wife thinks that I look like a convict... go figure!

Welcome to the Cyberspace

Ok, I did it. Everybody is doing it, so I am starting my blog too!