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New Year’s Day in spring

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Here are some photos I took this afternoon in Donnalucata, after 5 days off I took for Epiphany, taking advantage of the holiday being on thursday Jan 7 and adding two days on Jan 5 and 8:

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The last three days we’ve had full sun and a temperature around 20C° during the morning… while in other places around Italy it was snowing and people were fighting with ice! It’s not anything new anyway, generally weather in this corner of Sicily is almost always mild, and we are used to consider temperature around 8-10C° as “cold“, since during most part of winter it keeps around 12-15C°, especially on the coast.

Previous Christmas’ weekend has not been very cold too. I take the chance to say something about local Christmas’ tradition:

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In Ragusa’s province the Christmas’ Eve dinner mainly consists of scacce. But in Scicli and Donnalucata’s area at Christmas those scacce take a different name and become pastizzi. Pastizzi are a sort of quiches, and they are baked in round baking pans, without the typical focaccia shape. They have no relationship with maltese pastizzi, of which I have recently discovered. There are many kinds of pastizzi with different stuffing, and again the tradition says to bake them all, so that each guest can taste many slices of the various kinds. The most popular ones are those with broccoli, with ricotta spinach and raisins, with meat and topinambur, with dogfish and spaghetti, with eggplant onions and tomato, and so on.

The existence of many variants of pastizzi and the habit to bake them all every time has given origin to many ironic family jokes on leftovers in the past, since they lasted for weeks and weeks and became a sort of family food torture between relatives. Nowadays generally families bake only few kinds of them, only those that are likely to be eaten in a short time without compromising appetite for following days’ meals. Furtherly, in the past they were the only holiday food on eves, while now many other typical dishes have entered sicilian holiday habits, dishes from other regions of Italy that are commonly considered holiday food, like cotechino with lentils, panettone and pandoro, chocolate turron (here the traditional turron is made of almonds or sesame, and it’s called cubaita or giuggiulena).

there are things worse in life

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I was wasting my time
Trying to fall in love
Disappointment came to me and
Booted me and bruised and hurt me

But that’s how people grow up
That’s how people grow up

I was wasting my time
Looking for love
Someone must look at me and
See their sunlit dream
I was wasting my time
Praying for love
For a love that never comes
From someone who does not exist

And that’s how people grow up
That’s how people grow up

Let me live
Before I die
Not me
Not I

I was wasting my life
Always thinking about myself
Someone on their deathbed said
There are other sorrows too

I was driving my car
I crashed and broke my spine
So yes there are things worse in life than
Never being someone’s sweetie

That’s how people grow up
That’s how people grow up

That’s how people grow up
That’s how people grow up

As for me I’m okay
For now anyway

My own cloud

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Keeping faith to my previous words on cloud computing, I’ve decided to work on my own installation of ownCloud.

ownCloud is a service developed by the KDE team which aims to realize a personal storing and sharing platform for files and information.

In simple terms, and using words now commonly spread in the world of web 2.0, it is a personal Dropbox system managed and installed on our own systems, using our own ip addresses and our own disk space.

It’s actually a webDAV service with some bells and whistles, including a small PHP management and configuration portal. WebDAV is not new, it’s been out for years, but recentlly it’s gathering popularity due to its usage in all modern shared disk space services.

Requirements are really minimal: you need a Linux distribution with Apache, PHP, mySQL or SQLite for backend, and some disk space. I’ve assigned to it the same virtual machine I’m using for monitoring, and I’ve added a virtual disk within vSphere’s datastore.

Actually it’s still missing something to be a full Dropbox replacement: a local sync client, allowing to keep a local folder in continuous synchronization with the service, and allowing to copy the content on several installations. A client is on the works but it’s still not ready.

Currently it’s possible to use ownCloud through webDAV on all devices supporting it, and it can be “mounted” on KDE’s Dolphin, adding a new network folder.

For the adventurous LoneStar Network users who are willing to test it, you can to have an account. As soon as there will be userfriendly clients ready for use on Linux/Mac/Windows I will publish proper instructions, and the service will become part of LoneStar Network’s offering for its users.

is OpenSource forgetting Linux?

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I happen to notice more and more opensource projects, even big ones, presenting their products with screenshots taken on Windows or Mac OS X. Have you noticed this too?

Not only the presentation, but often features and innovations are primarily developed on Windows/Mac ports of the product, and secondarily brought to the Linux version (if ever).

I recall Firefox. It’s widely obvious that all Firefox’s development happens mainly on the Windows version, then on Mac version, and at last on Linux version. Just browsing the website is enough to see a quantity of images taken on Windows or Mac.

I have my reservations about this, also because I think things are on the opposite side, meaning that I find desktop aestetics on Linux – especially with KDE4 – are so widely superior to those on Windows and Mac that it’s not even worth comparing them. And I’m saying this being also a Windows7 user, and being surrounded by many Mac users (sic!).

Some months ago rumored news came out on music player Songbird, an Opensource project of fame that’s been born on Linux – dropping Linux support to focus only on Windows and Mac environments, and giving the reason of it in the fact that most of developers and users mainly use these environments.

I’m not saying there’s a lack of applications or a developers’ departure syndrome on Linux, because there’s an obvious amont of software, forks, different implementations, etc., but still it all seems quite strange to me.

I consider it “natural” for an OpenSource project having its main focus on Linux, or *BSD – even if this means a whole different kind of licenses. Versions on Mac and Windows are ok but they shouls always come second!

Everybody seems to have forgotten when, only ten years ago, we were predicting the success of Linux as main desktop environment, and they all seem setted on a pacific coexistence playing the token role, having Windows and Mac as protagonists.

Burn

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You lie in the snow, cold but not dead
stare into the sun, long since its last heat

feel the freeze burn skin
salt your open wounds
a burning desire clears your eyes
a willful air fills your lungs

you choke your first breath of wildfire and ocean’s depth
climb out of your hole, see your spirit take form

this world of cold stone gives nothing in return
to those who sleep while the restless burn
there are the few driven to flame
most are content to drown in the wake of dreams

the trail lies overground
across the years fade out of light
ever growing dim to an age in the dark
grasp from your soul, don’t let it steal your eyes

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .