CodeClimber

On the 11 of November I had the pleasure to present at the Node.js Conference Italy the work I’ve been doing with Dominik and a bunch of other guys in the San Francisco area on the “brain” of the robotic submarine called OpenROV. On my way back from Brescia I stopped by at the first Italian Maker Faire, held in the big expo area of Milano Rho, where I wandered among stands full of flying drones, biped robots, 3D printers, FabLabs and electronics shops. Together with web development, the makers and open hardware movement is something I’m getting...

You may have noticed a bit of emptiness in this blog in the last few months: I’m not apologizing for not posting, just explaining what I’ve been doing in the past months (and probably doing in the next ones too). Web.NET European Conference Probably already obvious to the most loyal readers, I’m organizing with the help of Ugo Lattanzi the First European Web.NET Conference. It was a busy period and lots of stuff to do, but it was rewarding: we released a brand new website, we’ve got some great sponsors, and we are running the call for presentations...

In the last few months you have probably noticed a few posts about Windows Phone 7, about my experience using it and about some little problems I found using the web browser. The reason is that, together with Daniela, we were working on a news feed reader for Windows Phone 7, called FeedTso. Today I’m happy to announce that after a few months of coding nights, yesterday we released the first version of FeedTso on the Zune Marketplace. What is FeedTso? FeedTso is a news feed reader that works as Google Reader client. We call...

If you are reading this post it means that you are now reading my blog from the new server. Please let me know if you find it faster, slower, if you spot errors or something like that. That will be really appreciated. It has been ages since I last installed a new server, especially with so little resources: 30 Gb are great if it's just a shared hosting, but on VPS, 20 of these 30GB are used by the operating system itself. Now I also have to setup some kind of backup strategy to avoid loosing all my posts in case of...

If you are following me on twitter, you might have read that due to a series of circumstances, the hosting provider when I'm hosting all my sites and domains is shutting down this weekend. In the next days I'm going to migrate all my sites and domains to a new hosting and to avoid loosing comments, I'm going to disable them till my blog is up and running on the new server (in Subtext it means both that you will not be able to post and to read old comments... I guess I just found a bug). Also, since I have the...

One of the reasons for the failures of 2010 is over-commitment. Number one priority for 2011, will be: do not over-commit. Starting from my resolutions, so just 3 per 3 categories. Personal life XC-Skiing: at last for this winter, train, practice and try to take part in the Engadin Ski Marathon with Daniela and Davide Vosti. Climbing: go back climbing. Period. Be more constant with training...

It’s the beginning of the year again, and exactly as last year, on the 13th of January I’m reviewing the year that passed against the my 2010 resolutions, and see how it went. Who did 2010 go? Before starting the list I want to add a resolutions that I didn’t disclose with my 2010 resolutions: I wanted to move out of Italy in 2010. And since now I’m living in Belgium I think the biggest goal form 2010 was accomplished. But all the other resolutions where a bit shadowed by the big effort needed to accomplish this goal,...

After the first unboxing of my new Samsung Omnia 7 and reporting my comments on WP7 after a few weeks of using it, now I’m writing my wish list on what I’d want in the next updates for WP7. A full fledged Zune for Mac that can synchronize Apps, contacts from Mac’s Address Book A new, better browser that supports HTML5, and doesn’t look like a Windows Mobile 6.5 application. A unified mailbox that groups together all the mailbox I configured Data usage counter ...

Update: the first update has been already announced, adding copy & paste (and some other enhancements) Before Christmas I got my Samsung Omnia 7, and I played a bit with it during the week I spent skiing in Cogne. Let’s start directly from the conclusion: I really enjoyed using it, the overall UX is great, better than the iPhone, but there are still some details and bugs that need to be fixed, hopefully with the next updates coming in the next months (the first update is already announced). But I’m not planning to migrate from my iPhone...

This year has been an year of big changes for me (as you can also see from the photo above, which was taken in Bruxelles, where I relocated), but I'll come with the usual review of the year in a week or so. For the moment I just want to wish all my 3000 readers Merry Christmas and an Happy New Year greetings

This is the time of the year when people start looking back at the year that is about to end, and drawing conclusions. I will come to my “personal” considerations in a future post, reviewing my 2010 resolutions, but for the moment I want to share with you my top posts of 2010. The most popular post of 2010 1. Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die) – Unfortunately it didn’t help Lucene.net get a new set of contributors (at the time of writing they didn’t comply to the conditions set by the ASF...

A few days ago I finally got my Windows Phone 7 device: a Samsung Omnia 7. Here in Belgium there are just 3 devices at the moment (LG, HTC HD7 and Samsung Omnia) which all cost more or less the same price (530€ for the least expensive and 570€ for the most expensive) so I decided for the Samsung Omnia 7 mainly because of its Super AMOLED display. Unboxing the phone Here is the “unboxing” gallery:       The packaging is really well done, all cardboard, all recyclable, which is good....

UPDATE: Actually Yahoo is not really going to shut it down, just trying to sell it to another company, but all the warnings about hosting in the cloud are still valid. I just read that Yahoo is shutting down Delicious. Despite the fact that now I have to find another way to keep all my bookmarks online this raises another interest question: Do you trust the Cloud? Everyday there are services that are shut down, like it happened with Geocities and is probably going to happen with Google Wave, but when it happens with popular services the disappointment is even higher. Everybody is...

[UPDATE: There is a workaround] This morning, following the release of Chrome 6, I decided to upgrade to the latest version. But as soon as I tried going to Gmail I got the following error: SSL connection error. Unable to make a secure connection to the server. This may be a problem with the server, or it may be requiring a client authentication certificate that you don't have. Error 128 (net::ERR_SSL_UNSAFE_NEGOTIATION): The SSL renegotiation extension was missing from the secure handshake. For some sites, which are known to support the renegotiation...

As last year, before going on holiday I’m list some of the books that are in my reading list. It’s not entirely about .NET book, but will also cover other languages not related with .NET development at all, like Scala or Arduino. JavaScript and jQuery I think JavaScript is still the most unknown language among all the ones used to write web applications: mostly due to the fact that it lives in the limbo between developer and designer. JavaScript: The Good Parts It seems incredible, but I never read this “must have” book about the...

A few days ago, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger stated a blogging challenge: The 7 Link Challenge. Basically it’s about picking 7 posts that fit into 7 different “themes”. Without further ado, here they are. Sometimes I’ll break the rule and will link to 2 posts per category, but, after all, rules are made to be broken, aren’t they? My first Post – I wrote my first post in October 2006. It was titled Subtext Halloween. Actually this is a post I previously posted in my Italian blog, together a few others before launching the “new” blog...

My latest book, the What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Wrox Blox, is now available for purchase from the Wrox store at the cost of US $6.99. For those who are not familiar with them, Wrox Blox are short and concise ebooks that cover very specific topics. Ranging from 30 to 70-80 pages, they are a very good option in case you need to solve a specific problem, or learn a specific technology, but you don’t to buy a whole book only when you would read a chapter or two. And this ebook is exactly like that:...

If you follow me on twitter you might already have understood something: last week I gave my two months notice to my employer, Avanade Italy. I've been working with them since the end of 2007, and during the almost 2 years and half I learned a lot. Especially I added to my skills-set some competencies I never had the chance to practice working for a web agency and for a product company: the so called consulting skills. I also had the great opportunity to coach on the job some junior developer that just come out from university (or with little...

I know it’s already 13 days into the new year, but a year cannot start without the usual  retrospective on the year that just ended and with the resolutions for the year that is coming. Who did 2009 go Let’s start with evaluating how 2009 go and let’s see if it went as I hoped at the beginning of last year. I already did 2 intermediate checkpoints, one at the end of Q1 and one in mid Summer. Personal Resolutions: ...

The end of the year is approaching and it’s time for a recap on what happened during the last 12 months. As I did in 2008 I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC (around 40 posts) and few about jQuery (just 6 posts), but unlike last year where the most popular posts were about jQuery, this year it’s all ASP.NET MVC. Probably that’s because the technology is more mature than it was during 2008. The most popular posts of 2009 1. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know – This post goes through all the extensibility...

This 2009 has been in important year in my career, more on the community than in the real day-time work side of things, but I’ll come on this later. For now, I just want to send to my almost 2400 readers my best wishes for a Merry Christmas and an Happy New Year

As you might have read yesterday, this weekend I moved my blog from WebHost4Life to LinkedLabs, the hosting company managed by Ken Robertson, a Senior Software Developer at Tellingent. And if you are reading this post it means the DNS transition is complete. I decided to move away from WH4L not because I had performance problems or poor customer support (which IMHO is great), but because I needed to manage and host more websites (small ones), and this was not possible on WH4L without paying a yearly additional fee of 20$ per web application. I used to run these small sites...

On November 12nd, 2007 I started working in Avanade Italy. And today, November 12nd, 2009, it’s exactly two years I’m working here. One year ago I already wrote about my first year, and this second year didn’t change opinion about the company: it’s a great place to work, with both tech and soft skills training provided, with the CTO caring about technology (something that should happen everywhere but unfortunately never happened in my previous jobs) and with an overall family environment despite being a 400 persons company. Unfortunately, due to both the current economic situation and to...

Our book is out in the wild since almost a month, and many people out there already received their copies, some also wrote reviews of the book and even had parties to present the book, but I didn’t have the pleasure to hold in my hands a real copy of the book till this morning (yeah, I know, Italian post is very slow delivering parcels). And being my first book I’m very excited and pleased to see the real thing, and to see my face on the its cover. Tags: book,aspnetmvc

As you might have noticed if you followed my twitter stream, I spent the last two weeks in Hokkaido, doing some trekking and enjoying the onsen. But still 5 new posts appeared on my blog. This happened thanks to a feature of Subtext that allows posting in the future. Before leaving to Japan I was undecided about scheduling posts while I was on vacation for two weeks, but then I decided to try this experiment. But now I’m back and I wanted to ask you what you think of what I did: did you like the fact...

In order to promote our book on ASP.NET MVC and to spread some love for the library itself, for the Italian ALT.NET conference I printed 40 T-Shirts similar to the one that Chad Myers created on Zazzle last year. It was quite an interesting experience, as I didn’t know how many people would have been interested in buying such “marketing” t-shirts. And it turned out that quite a few developers wanted them, as you can notice from the people in the first rows of the room. I ran out of T-Shirts, but I’m thinking...

Finally, after 10 months, the XBox I won at the Italian MVP Open Days 08 has a monitor: a Dell 27” 2709W Widescreen monitor. Last December I tried plugging the Xbox in the Cinema Display with no success, and in his comment to the post, Jordan, an ex-colleague from the 9 months I worked in New Zealand, suggested I bought a standard monitor with all the connectors I needed: and he suggested a Dell 24” monitor. After 6 months I followed his suggestion, and I went a bit further, and I bought the bigger version, the...

At the beginning of this year I write a “New Year’s Resolutions” post, and I promised I would have kept you updated with the progress. I did it at the beginning of April (end of Q1 report) and now this is post is about the second quarter of 2009. Personal Resolutions Go back Climbing – This was probably the most successful part of Q2: if you followed my tweets, you might have noticed that I started climbing again: bouldering in Switzerland, 4 days...

I usually don’t do political posts here, but I think what is happening in Iran deserves it. It shows us that most of the Iranian people are totally different from what the media tell us. I’ve been following what’s happening over there with twitter, and I thought I’d show my support to the cause wearing green on blog. A lot of other sites are doing it (Reddit.com put a green t-shirt on his alien). If you have a blog you can help spread some love to the guys in Iran: just add a green background to you blog....

It is with an unquantifiable amount of pleasure that I can announce that we have just released a free public preview chapter of our Beginning ASP.NET MVC v1.0. The name of the chapter is “Chapter 9 – Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications”. It explains how to test controllers, how to use mocking to test interactions with the Http runtime, how to refactor an application to make it testable, and also shows some TDD in action. Also, when you read it, remember that the intended audience is developers that are new to ASP.NET MVC and most likely also...

I just learnt that I’ve be invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Looking forward to help with my feedbacks the ASP.NET team build a better web application framework on the .NET platform, especially in the area of ASP.NET MVC. If don’t know who they are, here is a quick “elevator speech”, taken from the site: “The ASPInsiders is a select group of international professionals who have demonstrated expertise in ASP.NET technologies and who provide valuable, early feedback on related...

If you remember, at the beginning of this year I wrote the usual “New Year’s Resolutions” post: Q1 just finished, so I thought it would have been nice to write a little update on how my resolutions are going. Personal Resolutions Go Back Climbing – This went even worse than the previous year: my wife broke a rib and despite the nice and cold winter no iceclimbing this winter. But we did a lot of Nordic Skiing. Let’s see if we can start...

It’s been a great trip, and landed yesterday in Seattle with snow on the ground, but a wonderful sun. And this morning it’s still sunny (that’s the view from my hotel room). Right now I’m the lounge at DigiPen, waiting for the second day of ALT.NET Conf to start. The opening evening was very very interesting, and Phil Haack already wrote a great commentary of it. I’m really impressed by the huge amount of smart people that are attending, and it’s also a great opportunity to meet people I’ve been interacting with only online....

Last Friday I headed to Microsoft Italy offices in Segrate (with my Vespa and under a pouring rain), for being interviewed by Pietro Brambati, Italian Developer Evangelist, about ASP.NET MVC. You can watch the video (in Italian) on Channel9. I want to thank Pietro and the Italian DPE team for the interview and for the nice tech chat we had during the day. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,interview,channel9

Year 2008 finished with a post about my best 5 posts of the year: year 2009 must start with the usual New Year’s resolutions. Personal Resolutions Go back climbing Last year, due to various personal problems, general bad weather and book writing I was not able to train and go the climbing gym as I used to. And I also didn’t go too much out in the mountains doing climbing. I hope I can train and go climbing more this year. Take part in one triathlon competition During last year I started going back to...

Less than a month ago I reviewed my 2 years of blogging and I listed my top 10 posts ever. Looking back at 2008, I noticed that I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC. But looking at the stats probably this is not yet a popular topic, since it’s too early in the product lifecycle: in fact the most popular post of the year is about jQuery. And since my figures are not that high, it’s enough to have a post on the homepage of non .NET social bookmarking site (like reddit) for one day, that the number of views...

Last October, at my first MVP Open Days, I won a XBox 360, but I was not able to use it since my only display is an Apple Cinema Display. The problem is that the XBox can send the signal out with HDMI, Composite, Component and VGA: unfortunately the Cinema Display only accepts DVI. I was busy with other things so I never looked for a way to solve the problem, as I thought that finding a converter would have been easy. And in fact it was: with 20€ I bought a media adapter that finally allowed me to connect the...

Last month Alvin Ashcraft sent me a email notifying that I was selected as MVB (Most Valuable Bloggers) by DZone. Actually I forgot to thank him when it happened so: “Thank you Alvin!”. And on the day of Christmas one of my posts about ASP.NET MVC has been resyndicated on the .NET Zone: How to Call Controllers in External Assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC Application. Actually it’s not exactly the same article I posted: all the code is displayed using SyntaxHighlighter, a javascript syntax highlighter. I was thinking about using it on my blog instead of the Insert...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Tonight it should have been my first night in Cogne, Val d'Aosta, a pretty small town in the Gran Paradiso national park. But unfortunately I’m still at home, in Milano. What is the reason? No, it’s not because of some last minute deadline at work, but because most of the valleys in that part of the Alps are isolated: more than 3 meter of snow accumulated over the last week, and now that the sun is shining and the temperature is raising, spontaneous avalanches are starting to fall down, also one the road that connects the main valley...

Last week it was exactly two years since my first post on this blog, and it’s time to draw some conclusions on these 2 years. First some numbers: 460 posts, 1056 comments, 350k page views, 225k unique visitors, almost 1000 RSS subscribers. But the numbers alone don’t say a lot: it’s better to see the charts with the trends of visitors and subscribers over the years as provided by Google Analytics and Feedburner (the spikes are related to some posts that got lots of view). During the last months, I averaged around 700 page views per day. Now same more charts....

Not all blog memes are about your youth or gadgets you like. The one started by Scott Watermasysk is also going to help to World: Bloggers Holiday Charity Challenge. It started as eBay challenge, but other made it into a more general money raising challenge. [...]James, he's decided to sweeten the deal by donating his portion of revenue of any blogger in The Lounge who does the same thing. That's pretty cool. So I’m doing the same: I’m going to donate my December revenue from The Lounge to Greenpeace NZ. The...

Yesterday I wrote about the book writing process, how it’s structured and I said I would have written about my experience doing so. First of all, I really liked the experience. But if you ask me if I’ll do it again, I’d probably say “no”, at least not now. The main challenge for us was to keep up with all the other writers team that started they effort on their ASP.NET MVC books earlier last spring (and some even last winter): we (Keyvan and I) started writing the book at the beginning of August and last weekend we...

As some of you might already know, in July I started writing a book for Wrox. It was a completely new experience for me, and I’ve to thank Keyvan and the guys at Wrox for helping me in understanding the book writing process. During these months I received lots of question on this process from people that never wrote a book, but also from people that wrote a book in Italy: all asking how it is to write a book and how much I’m paid for the book. So here I’m, writing a blog post to answer all...

Stay up till 3am to work on an ASP.NET MVC book and write some samples on alternative view engines Wake up at 7am and tumble out of bed Grab the Vespa and ride 20 minutes under a pouring rain Got to the swimming pool, and swim for 1000 meters Walk to the subway station (and leave the Vespa to your wife), still under the rain Go to work while listening how pragmatism and getting things...

Exactly one year ago I started working at Avanade: wow, time passed fast, way faster then the 10 months I worked for Calcium (7 of which in Wellington). And now that I think, it’s the my second longest job. Another funny coincidence is that the weekend before starting my job I was showing Milano to David Silverlight, and this weekend I showed Milano  (and other cool places around, including a flooded Lake Maggiore) to another of two guys I met in NZ through the “enlarged” .NET community, Nic Wise and his wife Leonie. But back to the main...

Lately I’ve been a bit busy writing a book on ASP.NET MVC and with some Microsoft events, so unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of remaining spare time to write the interesting posts I used to write before. But my mind never stop running, so sometimes an idea for a good post popped up in my mind. At first I thought I would have been able to remember them all, but soon I discovered I was keeping forgetting them, so I looked for a solution to this problem. And I found out a post that suggested (sorry, don’t remember which...

As every year on September 11th I’m getting one year older… and today I’m becoming 34. My 33rd year has been an exciting one from the professional stand point, and pretty good from the open-air ones as well. I started an exciting job in Avanade and I met great colleagues, I co-founded the UGIALT.NET community, I got excited by the ASP.NET MVC framework and started evangelizing it, I became a Mac addicted, I wrote a bunch of articles on ASP.NET MVC for DotNetSlackers, I started writing a book, again on ASP.NET MVC (it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon UK and...

I do rock climbing, mountain climbing, ice climbing, but this year I started another type of climbing: road climbing, that is, going up a mountain pass with a bicycle. And that's how I spent my summer ‘08 holidays: along the Sun Route.

If you are interested in the trip report, continue reading.

A non IT related topic for this hot and humid first day of August: electronic shifting system for road bikes. Electronics in every aspect of our life, and in all sporting equipments: now Shimano plans to release its new Dura-Ace Di2, which uses wires instead of steel cables. This should: …execute perfect shifts every time, thus "reducing mental overhead" The system is made by touch buttons to shift gear, positioned in the same place of standard push buttons, two derailleurs whose springs have been replaced by servo-motors, a battery...

Last year Google announced it would have released a version of Google in Maori and a few days ago, during the Maori language week, they released it. To visit the Maori version of Google there are two url. http://www.google.co.nz/intl/mi/ will take you to the Google NZ Aotearoa in the Maori language. http://www.google.com/intl/mi/ will take you to the international version of Google, in Maori. Kia Ora!! Technorati Tags: Google,Maori,Aotearoa

A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro. The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23’’ or one 30’’ Apple Cinema display. (via LinkedIn Blog) Before entering the consulting industry I always worked for software shops, where I had my own desk, my own desktop computer, my 20” displays, and so on… And working with a laptop and non personalizable desk is sub-optimal. This also means that you will never...

Last year I wrote a post on the steps needed to become a MCPD on the .NET framework version 2.0. Now that the new .NET 3.5 certification track is available I think I need to update it with the new information. MCPD Certifications As with the 2.0 track, the 3.5 has the same 3 certification types: MCPD Web Developer MCPD Windows Developer MCPD Enterprise Application Developer The difference with the 2.0 track is that, while the first 2 still require 3 exams, the Enterprise Application one now requires 6. Why 6 instead of...

I’m very sad to hear that a very big Italian ASP.NET portal went down, together with other “normal” e-commerce sites, because its hosting provider, a small hosting company managed by the Italian IIS MVP, closed without warning. Nobody knows what really happened: not paying the bills, the systems went down while the owner was on vacation and the advertised IT staff never existed. And of course the owner is not reachable by phone, email, fax, whatever It happened to me a few years ago, when the server that was hosting my sites broke the disk, and the owner of the company, a...

Last week Craig Shoemaker published the 50th show of this great Polymorphic Podcast: ASP.NET MVC Resources. Around 4:15 he says hello to me and thanks me for pointing him to some resources, and doing so he is the first English speaking person I know that pronounced my name and also also my surname right. I lived in a English speaking country for 8 months and it was frustrating to never hear my name pronounced correctly even after I put an audio file pronouncing it the Italian way (JB almost got it during my video interview), so it's great to hear someone who...

As you might have noticed, a few days ago I added to my sidebar an ad space. The reason for the ad is that I joined the Lounge, an advertisement network on the .NET space with quite a few famous bloggers. I'm not in the same with them, since I don't have the same audience and influence, but in another room, the .NET small publisher room, together with Subtext mate and new MVP Steve Harman, "ASP.NET MVC in Action" co-author and CodeCampServer key contributor Ben Scheirman and a few more. When James Avery says: Simone Chiaretta is one of the developers of...

After all those months where my main community related activity was writing articles, this weekend I decided to go back into coding: Subtext is approaching a new release soon, with tons of new features, so back on the project to make it happens I started having a look at CodeCampServer and already submitted a tiny little patch Processing: my wife and I are working at a video for an exhibition at the end of April... let's see if I we come out with some cool generative art ...

On today's online edition of The Globe And Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, in their selection of "RECOMMENDED LINKS: BETTER I.T. IN 10 CLICKS OR LESS", they included also my post about the 18 applications for Mac. Make Macs useful Last week's Macworld Conference & Expo showcased a lot of new Apple products, including its superlight and thin MacBook Air laptop computer. In most companies, however, IT departments stick to Windows-based machines, but Simone Chiaretta may be able to change that. MsMr. Chiaretta, an Italian .Net developer, recently published "18 (almost) free applications" for the Mac, which includes text editors, FTP...

A bit more than 2 weeks passed since my post with some considerations on the Mac applications available and I had a bit more time experimenting and reading some advices from other and I think I almost decided my toolbox of must-have applications, so here I'm sharing my list of apps Read More...

I've always been attracted by wine, especially by the kind of magic that is behind his production. By how a small change in the weather, a small change in how the vines are handled, small changes in the composition of the ground can lead to totally different wines. A few years ago I also started an OpenSource project to help vineyards and winemakers to better track these small changes and collect data to help them make better wine, I even collect a lot on information and gathered requirements, but unfortunately I had to stop working on it. And yesterday, to try and...

It's a sad news for all Kiwis and mountain climber worldwide: today Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest, died today at the age of 88. All the words of the World will not be enough to say something about this great man, that 55 years ago achieved a result that is still only a dream for many other men now: just that he will be missed To know more about this great mountaineer, explorer and philanthropist you can have a look at his article on wikipedia: Edmund Hillary.   Edmund Hillary, Everest

One of thing I'm doing these days is to try and keep all the 35.000 email I received and sent in the last 10 years. So I looked at how to move the contents of my pst files to the standard mbox mail format. Looking on the web I found a quite interesting explanation on the Microsoft KnowledgeBase: ENT2001: How to Use IMAP to Move Messages Between a PC and a Macintosh in Entourage, Outlook, or Outlook Express What the KB article says is that you just have to create an account on an IMAP mail server, configure both clients to get emails...

Already 10 days are gone in 2008 and I just realized I didn't have time to write a post looking back at what happened during last year: 15 days before the beginning of 2007 I quit the job for the company I worked for since 1998 in January I moved to Wellington, NZ, and started working for Calcium, a young and innovative software company in February I held my first presentation speaking in English at a Wellington UG meeting about NHibernate in March my old laptop started to slowly die in April I released the...

Here is a funny picture I just took off my digital camera: all my ice climbing tools, hanging drying with my clothes This is also a test of Ecto 3 beta: after my post of yesterday about my thoughts on the applications available on the Mac, I exchanged a few emails with Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of Ecto, and he was very nice, and immediately released a new build (b20) that fixed the problem with the categories not being downloaded (actually it was a problem in Subtext MetaWeblog API implementation, that is missing the method blogger.getUserInfo). He also pointed...

Last year I wished an Happy Christmas kiwi style, and this year it will be: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! I'll be going ice climbing for this Christmas Holidays, so... see you next year.

Yesterday evening, after work, I went to the Apple store in Milano to buy the 20" Cinema Display, the USB keyboard and the wireless mouse, and today, just before going to work, the TNT delivery man gave me the MacBook I ordered almost 2 weeks ago.   This evening will be unpacking and setup time!!! Technorati tags: Apple, MacBook, Cinema Display

A friend just made me notice that yesterday it was exactly one year from my first real post on Codeclimber. With all the excitement for tomorrow event and for the new Mac I missed this important day. I'm not going to do a detailed analysis of what happened during this year of blogging as the one I did in July, but I only want to share with you a few numbers. The number of subscribers to the RSS feed is steadily growing at the rate of 100 new subscribers every 2 months (actually a bit more than 2 months), and...

I spent some time in the last months playing around with various color schema and finally decided that the original port of the Vibrant Ink schema to VS is still the one that most appeal to my eyes. The one made by Rob Conery is a bit too little contrasted for me. So here is my VS2008 with the latest version of Vibrant Ink for VS2008 made by John "DLR" Lam. Here you can download it. Just remember that this vssetting file include also the other personalization of John, so just import the "Options>Environment>Fonts and...

He made the step and now he has his English only blog, hosted on the MyOpera community site: Lorenzo was the co-founder of the company I worked for before going to in New Zealand. I worked with him for around 5 years: I owe him a lot of my knowledge about web site design and general web development. He might not be a developer, but he is a geek, one of the best web designer I ever worked with, and his blog is full of interesting posts. And he even started blogging a few months before me, in Sept 2004....

Since many of you asked me about it, I thought I should write a short recap on my first week of work at Avanade. I'd like to be short, so I'll comment with just 2 words: impressed and overloaded. Having worked always in small and unstructured companies I was impressed on how many well established procedures there are, especially in the project management and project development area. After installing software on my laptop I went through a 3 days long virtual course on the project management and development: it my first time in a virtual class room, and I really liked it. Another...

After a long period in New Zealand and a few months working from home, today I started working in Italy again. I spent the last 3 "sabbatical" weeks doing almost nothing related to programming or IT in general: I went climbing, I took David Silverlight around Milano and took him climbing as well, and also started going on bicycle again after I had a bad injury ten years ago. Too early to give an opinion (today I just filled forms and installed my laptop), but it seems to be a nice place to work: I even found out that a...

As I already anticipated last week, I left Calcium, and after looking for some possible jobs I choose to join Avanade, which, if you don't already know, is a global IT consulting company specialized in solutions using Microsoft enterprise technology, jointly owned by Accenture and Microsoft. In the .NET world Avanade is famous because the first release of the Enterprise Library was based on the Avanade Connected Architecture for .NET (ACA.NET). I'm pretty excited to start this new professional adventure, since I never worked for a big company and also Avanade seems to be using all the latest Microsoft products and technologies...

One of the thing that excited me from last week videos about the ASP.NET MVC framework is the amazing color schema that both ScottHa and ScottGu had on their Visual Studio: I sent an email and Scott was soo kind to answer me back with the VS schema. Looking on the net I found that the color schema was "developed" by John "DLR" Lam, porting to Visual Studio the Vibrant Ink theme for TextMate. Later Rob "SubSonic" Conery tweaked it, changed the black to shade of gray, and replaced Consolas with Monaco. Since I'm, as Jeff "CodingHorror" Atwood, a fan...

I wanted to write my opinion about the ALT.net thing since a long time, but I really never find the time to sit down and organize my ideas into an organic post.The event that "triggered" this post is my friend Lorenzo asking my opinion about his blog post "There are architect and Architects" (it's in Italian but here is the link to the auto-translated version by Google). In his post Lorenzo, commenting on Sam's post about leaving CodeBetter and ALT.NET, adds some thoughts about something that usually the hard-core ALT.NET people don't get: imagine you have an Enterprise-level project,...

Today it was my last day of work for the company that hired me last year and brought me to Wellington: we tried to go on working together from overseas, but with 12 hours of timezone difference was too difficult for me to manage the team of developers and lead the development of the new applications. The "work from home" experience was great, but, in my 2 month experience with "that" kind of developers and with no overlapping working hours, is only good for development, not for managing people or projects, especially because you cannot make a phone call to...

Just a quick note as tribute to the great Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who died this morning at the age of 71. The World just lost one of the best singer ever. We will miss you. Here is a link to a video where Luciano sings Nessun Dorma, and here with Bono singing Miss Sarajevo. Technorati tags: Luciano Pavarotti

Thanks to Janky, I found out Simpsonizeme, a web app that analyze a picture, and makes a Simpson character based on it. Here is me if I lived in Springfield: Technorati tags: Simpson, Simpsonizeme

I just woke up after 12 hours of sleep. I landed yesterday I landed at Milano Malpensa at 11pm after almost 2 days of flights around the globe. London Heathrow is the most paranoid airport ever. I missed my connecting flight because it took me 1 one hour and half to go through the security check: they asked me to remove the shoes, the laptop, the external USB drive, they they though I was bringing a gel somewhere in the handbag and asked me empty the bag. They couldn't spot it only looking at the contents of the bag so scanned each item...

I'm here at the Melbourne airport, after 4 hours and 30 minutes of flight over the Tasman Sea. The Qantas zone of the airport has free WiFi connectivity, which is very good, compared to the 5£ per hour I paid at Heathrow coming in New Zealand 7 months ago. Now my connectivity is limited only by the short battery life of my old laptop: too bad I don't have the 6 hours battery life of a Mac yet. Anyway, looking at my feeds, I just found out a very good news: my friends from Mindscape just released the first official...

I was looking on my hosting's control panel to see if they allowed some configuration of the Expires Header or the ETags to improve my YSlow score and I found a new service that WH4L offers to user migrating to their hosting: they migrate the sites of the customers, files, DB, emails. Here is the cost of the service: I really love the last line: Zero Downtime Guaranteed! - PRICELESS. Technorati tags: WebHost4Life, WH4L

In the last 2 months Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood built the "ultimate developer rig". Probably you all are also readers of Scott's and Jeff's blog so I'm not going to repeat all the specs (here is the last Scott's post with a recap of all the steps of the decision and building process). Basically the CodingHorror-Hanselman PC is a Intel QuadCore 2.4Ghz (overclocked to 3Ghz), 4GB of RAM, GeForce 8800 with 768MB of RAM. And the cost for such a PC, monitors (3 of them), keyboard and mouse excluded, is US$ 1903. I don't know how much the same...

Tomorrow (or today if you are reading it on Friday 3rd August) is not really my last day at work, but it is the last day on my computer in Calcium office in Wellington, so I'll have to delete all private stuff, like cookies, passwords, emails, browser history, chat history and so on. Someone suggested just to format the disk, but unfortunately I cannot do it because it will be "recycled" by another developer, and I cannot force him to spend one day to install Vista, VS, VS SP1 and all the other tools. But Scott Hanselman is quitting his job...

A bit later then what I planned 6 months ago, today I just passed 70-536: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Application Development Foundation. I passed with 806 with a passing score of 700, but making a few calculation I didn't understand which would have been the maximum score since if 700 is 80% of the max (as in the practice tests), the max would have been 875. But 806 out of 875 means 92,114%, that means that I correctly answered 41,45 questions, which is impossible. Anyway, a good result since I seriously studied for the exam only one week of evenings. And I...

Since more than a few readers and community fellows (both Italian and Kiwi) send me emails and IMs asking what I am going to do next I think it's better to answer them all with a blog post. So here is the roadmap: Next Monday (6th August) I'm flying back to Italy to enjoy a bit of summer weather I'll be in Italy working from home on the project I just started here at Calcium (and since Daniela is working on a wonderful lake far from Milano, I'll stay in the house on the lake with her) ...

I just found (via swissmiss) one of the best advertisement I've seen in my life: a Swiss cow, doing Yoga in the campaign of the SwissMilk Consortium. And there are also other nice Yoga positions as desktops on the Swissmilk website. Thumb up for the marketing guys behind this campaign. Technorati tags: swissmilk, yoga, ad

I decided to learn Spanish Castellano, and looking for free resources on the Internet I found a very nice way to learn a new language: a podcast. I already listen to podcasts related to technology and .NET development, but I never thought to a podcast as a way to learn a language. So I subscribed to CoffeeBreakSpanish, hosted by a Scottish Spanish teacher. I only listened to the first 3 lessons, but seems to be well paced and also teaching things in a friendly and practical way. The lessons are only 15 minutes long, so I can listen to...

I just bought a new mouse: the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. And I'm really impressed by its precision, and the smoothness of the movements. Maybe a bit too small for everyday use, but is a good solution as portable mouse, since it comes also with a carrying case. But it is not only a Bluetooth optical mouse, is also a laser pointer, and a remote control that works both in "media mode" and in "presenter mode". In media mode you can play, pause, skip, control the volume of movies and songs, and in the presenter mode you can navigate through the...

Almost seven months ago I started this blog in English, a bit more than 6 months ago I landed in Wellington and a few days later I started working for Calcium. And furthermore, in a month (actually a little bit less) I'm going back to Milano to enjoy the end of northern hemisphere's summer and hopefully to do some good climbing. So it's time to draw a line and make some considerations about the past. First let's speak about the Wellington .NET user group My fellows in Italy knew that even before coming to NZ I was more for a decentralized user...

The best regatta of the last 15 years of America's Cup... Alinghi won, but New Zealand was very close, and probably lost only because of bad luck with the spinnaker ripped in race 3, and just one second of difference in race 7. See you again in 2 years in the Mediterranean Sea.

Might be the fact that I'll be going back to Milano in a little more than one month, or the fact that now here in Wellington the weather is a bit cold, windy and rainy and winter-ish, but I'm becoming a bit nostalgic and starting to miss my hometown Milano (ok, I already had that feeling when I code-named a release after the suburb I grew up in Milano) Today, looking on 02blog I found a very nice video made by Matteo G.P. Flora, a member of the UGIdotNET user group.The title of the video is: Why I love Milan. ...

Today I was installing the developer version of SQL Server 2005 on my laptop and when the wizard asked me for the SA password I entered: password. I got a message saying that the password wasn't complex enough for the SA account. So I entered: pass. And the wizard didn't complain. Is pass more complex then password? I don't think so. Technorati tags: SQL Server, password

Just found this very nice blog about Milano (in Italian): www.02blog.it (02 is the local phone prefix). One of the most impressive news I found is this: Milano is the 11th most expensive city in the World. Last year Milano was at the 13th position. The most expensive city is Moscow while the only city in the top 50 from Oceania is Sidney, 21st. The list of the top 50 is available on Mercer site: Top 50 most expensive cities in the World

Seems like Connected Ventures, the company behind Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker is taking the Friday's afternoon to the next level. Here is what they produced... Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

Even if took longer then expected (probably Telecom NZ uses hamsters or cats to move data), the upgrade is complete, and now CodeClimber is running on Subtext 1.9.5. The most important upgrades are: on the left you can see a tag cloud with the top 20 tags a full tag cloud with all the tags used in my posts Identicons and different background to identify more easily the comments written by the author of the blog (that is me): you can see both in action in the comments of my top post How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with...

Scott Hanselman started this "meme" a few days ago, then Nic jumped in, so why not joining and tell you my 4 life changing gadgets? They both agree on GPS, iPod and DVR being their life changing gadgets: I don't have a TV (nor a DVR), and only watch movies or a few TV series, and I use GPS only when going trekking or doing mountaineering, so I cannot say that a DVR and the GPS are among my life changing gadgets. Cellphone: a friend of mine in Italy wrote a post about why the cellphone changed his life...

Spoiler Warning: if you are into LOST and you didn't see episode 3x20 don't go on reading the post... Today Phil commit a change to Subtext with the following comment: > Log Message:> -----------> Added some notes in SubtextMembershipProvider for Jacob. Does this mean that the Subtext team is a member of the Dharma as well? Or maybe Phil  has a special connection with Jacob? Maybe I can ask him some questions about the Island

Just drive a few kilometers, go to the first beach (or ridge, or lake or river or whatever is a few kilometers from your home), sit down, relax and look at a beautiful view. Just make sure you didn't sit down next to a bunch of sea weeds, or you'll end up being bitten by the nasty sandflies

Wellington waterfront is so beautiful and relaxing that you cannot avoid spending most of your spare time wandering along the promenade that surround all the Lambton Harbour. So, when it's not raining or the wind is under 20 knots I spend my lunch break running from my office till the end of Oriental Parade and return. I think that running is the best way to spend your lunch break: you get fit, you eat less, you have a "real" break from your work stuff and you enjoy the warmest hours of the day outdoor. And now that the sunset is at 5pm, it's...

As usual a video is worth 1000 words... in that case, it's worth 1000000000 words   Technorati tags: vista, aero, ubuntu, beryl

Following David Silverlight's suggestion I just took the The Ultimate Star Wars Personality Test, and it turned out that I am:

My colleagues at work still don't pronounce my name correctly, Phil in the interview pronounced it better (and given the fact that I never told him how to pronounce it, that's good), but not quite right, Steve is also wondering how to pronounce it, and a lot of guys in the .NET community here in Wellington mispronounce it. So I decided to help everybody pronounce it properly: listen to me pronouncing my own name.

Nic, an active .NET blogger and developer is leaving Wellington, after his company decided to "to axe 40 jobs in capital" (no, this is not really true, as Nic himself explain). So he is going to Madison and then taking a sabbatical year (or 2 or 3 or 4 or forever). I'm a bit sad about that, since Nic is the one that hosted me in his house when I arrived in Wellington back in January, helped me discovering Wellington, helped me when I had problems with my laptop and had to reinstall it, and convinced me to move to a...

Yesterday it was the last of work here in Calcium for a colleague and friend of mine: Enrique, an Argentinean guy with Italian grandparents (from near Reggio Emilia). He is living in Wellington since 6 years, and working for that company since September 2006. I worked with him only for 4 months (actually, all the time I worked here) but I think we both learnt a lot for each other: he learnt a bit  of web application design and Ajax, while I learnt from him a bit of winform application design, an a lot about the Kiwi way of living and working...

Today I finally specified a license for my blog contents. Basically I've 2 types of licenses: Creative Commons Attribution License for my textual content, code snippets, pictures and downloadable files not containing source code new BSD license for downloadable files containing source code For a better explanation of my blog licensing terms, please refer to the CodeClimber Copyright and Licensing Policy. I also changed the copyright notice in the footer of each page: Copyright © 2006-2007 Simone Chiaretta This work is mainly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. To understand what "mainly" means read the full license and...

April 25th is ANZAC Day here in New Zealand, to commemorate the landing of the ANZAC corps during the Battle of Gallipoli, during the WWI. And it's public holiday in Italy, too. In Italy April 25th is the Liberation Day, to commemorate the Liberation of Milano from the Nazi army after a partisan insurrection. This day marks the end of the WWII in Italy. And is also a commemoration for the almost 400.000 Italians dead during the WWII (and also 700.000 during the WWI) Unfortunately we don't have a Liberation biscuits, but at least our commemorations are not held at dawn Technorati...

Finally my laptop is back working smoothly again... Everything started more than one month ago, when I noticed that my laptop was a lot slower then what it should be, and I found out that it was a problem with too much CPU time in kernel mode: this usually means a problem with the hardware. 10 days later, I decided to spend a night backing up all my data to the external drive and reinstalling everything. Unfortunately the reinstallation didn't solve the problem, the time spent in kernel mode was still too much, and the application were still very slow. Other 10...

From Apple Hot News: ... we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. ... And the reason for the delay is that: iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever...

Thanks to Igor for spending an hour on MSN helping me analyzing the reason of the poor performances of laptop. He told me about a thing I was not aware of: the S.M.A.R.T. attributes for an hard disk. These attributes are stored inside the disk controller and should contain information useful to predict failures. One of the most critical attribute is the "Reallocated Sectors Count": Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks this sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping and "reallocated" sectors are...

  Here I am blogging from my laptop again. Yesterday I formatted the disks and reinstalled XP and today, as soon I came back from work, I launched all the various updates, and while I'm writing this post the installation for Visual Studio 2005 is running. Unfortunately the reinstallation didn't fix the problem I had with too much CPU in kernel time. At this point I'm pretty sure it's an HW problem, probably the disk or the disk controller. I could buy a new 2.5" disk and hope it will fix the problem, but what if the problem lies somewhere else?...

Due to my recent problems with the laptop, I'm going to rebuild my laptop from scratch:delete the partitions, format the disk, reinstall XP, and then all the program I use (mainly Visual Studio, Office, Firefox and iTunes) I spent the last 4 hours exporting settings and copying data file to my external USB disk. I wish I had a well planned backup strategy as Scott Hanselman has, but I don't, so I dumped all my small 40Gb disk to my external drive just in case I need something I forgot to backup. See you when my laptop is up and running again......

Yesterday after work I was running on Oriental Parade, and I thinking about all the iThings my wife and I have. I've got a black iPod Nano 2Gb 1G, Daniela has a green iPod Nano 4Gb 2G, and we also have an old 20Gb iPod (4G), the wedding gift from my brother, with a custom engraving with the wedding date (22/01/2005). So we have 3 iPod. But an iPod is sad if it is left alone, so I have a lot of other iThing around my home: Lanyard Headphones for my Nano, so it hangs on my neck and wires...

Just found a Programmer Personality Test, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, should tell you which kind of programmer you are. So, I am a: Doer High level Solo programmer liBeral  

My old laptop is almost 4 years old, and in the last few months it is suffering a strange issue with CPU kernel time: the "red line" in task manager is always 0 to 15 points less then the real CPU usage (so if CPU is idle, the kernel time is around 5%, if total CPU usage is 70% then kernel time is 60% and so on). That means that most of the CPU is spent in kernel mode handling hardware management, dealing with drivers and other stuff. That is a pain because sometimes all the applications stop responding,...

Today is the first day in New Zealand without DTS, so now we will have sunset at 7pm instead of 8pm as we had yesterday. (Actually at 6.39pm) I was thinking about the changes made the USA and Canadian governments this year: why do we have to go back to the real time zone so early? Isn't it better to have more light in the evening for another month instead of having sunrise at 5am? Who cares about having sun at 5am since almost everybody is still sleeping at that hour of the day? I usually don't wake up before...

As I promised a few weeks ago, I just upgraded my CodeClimber skin to version 2 of Lightbox. To see the new features have a look at my post about picture of vacations and click on the images: the first one is a normal image (but you will notice the new image loading animation), while the second and the third are setup as gallery, so, clicking on the first (the Kilimanjaro one) you have to possibility to move to the other (Kalymnos one) always staying on the image popup. I'll write more on how to setup this on any Subtext blog in a...

Today is the launch day for my new blog: CookingPiyo. It's a blog about cooking, with recipes, wine reviews, restaurant reviews, cooking tips, and sport eating tips, between Milano and Wellington. My wife designed the skin, while I made a few customization to wordpress (made a few plugins). I decided to use WordPress instead of SubText because I wanted to test in first person how the user experience of that great blogging tool is, and maybe get some inspiration for the plugin API and the redesign of SubText admin interface. At the moment only Italian reading people will be...

Leonie (Nic 's wife) just gave me the excuse to post some holiday picture: today meme is "Vacation's pictures" (from Create a Connection!) 1) Post a photograph from a favorite vacation It's hard to tell about a favorite vacation, since all my last vacation with my wife Daniela have been great, so I'll post one from my last vacation, which was last week walking the Queen Charlotte Track. There are also a lot of other pictures from that short 4 days trek on my wife's flick account. 2) And locate one from a future vacation spot This is even harder to tell, since still not...

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for the first real trekking here in New Zealand: I'm going to walk the Queen Charlotte Track in the Marlborough Sounds. I'll be walking for 4 days inside nature, bush, on unspoiled beaches, and, hopefully, under a warm sun. The track is 71 km long, with the 3rd day being the longest (24km, 6 hours walk at easy pace) and the 2nd one being the shortest (11Km, 3hours). If you are interested to know more about that track the official track website have a nice track guide with maps, elevations, approximate times and so on......

The Italian government just released the new site to present Italy to the World: www.italia.it It was developed by IBM, at the cost of 45.000.000 euro (90.000.000 NZ$) of public money, and they took 3 years to build it. As someone said, the most expensive website ever built in the world. Being a public utility website it's amazing to see that it is not accessible (as WAI) but you need to download a few software and browse to specific sections of the site. Also, if you have a look at the code, you don't see DIVs, but just a lot of giant TABLEs. It's...

  Lost-mania @ Wellington: the second part of the third season just started in the USA...

I've an old HP iPAQ rx3715, it's cool, but now I want something that integrates with a mobile phone, too, so I don't have to bring around 2 devices. Since I am an iPod addict, the coolest thing I could buy is the iPhone, but it lacks the 3G connectivity, costs way too much and probably will arrive in NZ in 2008, or in Europe in October 2007. But finally Microsoft just released the new Windows Mobile 6 platform: no device available, yet. But I can wait a few months before buying one, and I think manufacturer will come out...

Longhorn, Leopard, Indigo, Poseidon, Gran Paradiso, Yukon, SharpFreedom, Supertanga, Revolution, Lightning, Lambrate, Orcas, Q98, Fiji, Pendolino, McKinley. What does all these names have in common? Apparently nothing... but they are all codenames for various kind of software. Apple codenames his OS releases with big cats names, Microsoft after places, Firefox with natural parks (next release, 3.0, will be named Gran Paradiso, my favorite Italian National Park), Subtext names are submarines names, Nic's company is naming its releases after cocktail names. Why is important to have codenames for software release? Decouple marketing name from the internal name When you start developing a new product you have to decide a name, the...

UPDATE: This is about .NET 2.0 Certification path. Here is the update about the new .NET 3.5 certification path. Today I was looking for an explanation of the new Microsoft Certification paths, but I was not able to find a brief one and I had to review all the pages on the Microsoft Learning site to have a comparison of them all. Here is what I found: There are 3 version of MCPD: MCPD Web Developer MCPD Windows Developer MCPD Enterprise Application Developer The first two certifications (web and windows) consist of 3 exams. Enterprise Application...

Andrew Butel, the CTO of my current company Calcium, has finally started his own blog: Business Savvy Software. The subtitle of the blog is "The crossover between business and software" and the focus of his blog will be software development seen with a business prospective. He already wrote some intersting posts about some truthes about software development, and what his development priorities are. And, of course, the blog is running on Subtext

Steve Harman decided to tag me for the latest meme around in the blogsphere. So here I'm telling you 5 things about me. I was tagged also on my italian blog community, so here I'm translating (more or less) the same 5 things: I turned on my first computer only in 1993, during my first exam at the university: I was studying Science of Composite Materials. It was love at first sight, I got the maximum mark and after a few year I decided to quit that course and switch to Computer Science. I raced Mountain...

After a long but pleasant trip around half globe, this afternoon (yes, now it's night in Wellington, which is 12 hours ahead of Italy) I finally landed in Wellington. I was told this is the first clear day since the beginning of the summer, but at 9pm it was cold, much more cold than I expected and compared to beginning July in Italy: we are now around 14°C. But the views are much better then the one I had at home in Milan. In order you see: the view from Nic's place in the afternoon ...

Yesterday I told you next time I have blogged, it would have been from Nic's house in Wellington... but now I'm blogging using a wifi hotspot in Heathrow airport in London, using the T-Mobile access point, at the cheap price of 5£ (7.5€ or 9 US$ or 14 NZ$) per one hour :-) Just a quick note about security checks: I had to remove from my hand baggage my laptop, my PDA, my iHome alarm clock to have them scanned separately from the bag, and also take off my shoes... ok, in England you are all paranoid about terrorism and so on... but... please......

This is the first day of 2007, and my last night for me in Italy Tomorrow morning I'll be leaving for Wellington, NZ, where I'll land in the afternoon of 4th Jan, after almost 30 hours in the sky. So, this is my last blog post from Italy. My next one will be using the wifi network of my kiwi friend Nic Wise (he is also an MS MVP) in Wellington. See you in 3 days!!!

In Italy it is still the day before Christams, but in New Zealand it's already Christmas. So, just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas!!!. I'll be spending a few days with parents and will be back blogging in a few days, before going ice-climbing in Cogne, and then, flying to Wellington on Jan 2nd. For people that are not from New Zealand the flower in the picture is Pohutukawa,  the New Zealand Christams tree

Testing out the cool new feature of Subtext (the MetaWeblog API’s newMediaObject method inside Windows Live Writer), I'm posting here the pictures of my departure from Esperia. Here is the C9 Guy ready to greet the mighty mountains that can be seen from my old office window.     And next my departure from the office, taking with my all my stuff inside the trolley my colleagues gave me as gift.  

If you are an Italian reader of my old blog, probably you already know about it: today is my last day of work in the company I worked since February 1998. Starting from tomorrow I'll be spending my time getting ready for the big step: moving to Wellington. I'm arriving "down-under" on Jan 4th, and start working there on Jan 8th. And what am I doing during my last day of work? Other the drinking sparkling wine, I mean . This morning I was the trainer for a small in house course about Community Server, and the personalization I developed for big community site...

Finally I made it: starting from today, December 11st, 2006, almost 2 years after my first blog post on my Italian blog, I've got an English blog, too... Why did I choose to have a blog written in English? Because I'm moving to Wellington, NZ in less than a month and I'm taking part in the global .NET community. Also, last April I saw this post from Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood about creating one's own personal brand, and since I'm a free climber I decided to go with CodeClimber: a good mix of the 2 things I like the most. If you want...