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Or everybody is on Twitter and Facebook and don't care about them anymore?

An interesting article from ZDNet Australia about the UI of latest Linux distribution Ubuntu 9.04:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10226746-92.html

If all LeMai says is true, I cannot verify it myself, then finally Linux is truly becoming a "normal" user alternative and not something that requires a degreee in engineering to make sure it works on your PC.

But 2 "dark spots" for me in the article:

1. How LeMai can say that the implementation of Spaces is "erratic" without saying why, is out of my reach - I don't get it - I have used the multiple desktops of Linux and gave up after I realised that keeping a window on a desktop was not that straightforward and that visually you had no clue of what is on what desktop clearly as it is with Spaces, except a tiny icon on the taskbar. That Apple came late on implementing multiple desktop support - I fully agree though.
2. Moreover, the comment of Leopard running "sluggishly" on a G4 with 1GB RAM: clearly LeMai has never used Vista on a computer that runs XP "like a breeze" with 1GB - thank goodness they finally are fixing this with Windows 7 (I tried the beta on my old PC, with 700MB RAM and it works *really* good - read more on that here).

Apple is really hopeless sometimes - how can we tell them that they need to have a mid-range desktop as there are people out there who have a monitor, but would like a more expandable and more powerful machine than the mini? The iMac is not an option for me: I already have a monitor; the MacPro is not an option either, it is too expensive and offers way more than I need.

Another hopeless point - if you need a monitor and don't have a Mini Display port and don't have a MacPro or MacBook Pro, what is the offering of monitors from Apple today? Simply NONE. They used to have 20" and 24" Cinema Displays, now they only have the 24" LED backlit Cinema Display that works *only* with the new machines (no Mini Display Port to DVI adapter anyone?) or the older 30" Cinema Display that works *only* with MacPros or MacBook Pros or newer machines. Forget about wanting a 20", BTW. So if you have an "older" machine, you're out of luck and *need* to buy a non-Apple monitor.

Hello Apple?!?! am I supposed to go and buy a monitor from somebody else? do you really want me to do this?
It appears to be so.

Or maybe there are so few people who bought monitors from Apple in the past quarters that they have decided to drop the market altogether, offering very "niche" products like the 2 monitors mentioned above....

Hopeless.

I have read on friend and fellow photographer Bexxi's blog a new Five Things meme in which you tell someone else what you associate with them, and ask them to elaborate. So, here are the things she came up with for me.

1) An Italian in Munich – how the heck does that work?
So far so good.... There are many Italians living in Munich, a lot actually, doing all sorts of jobs (including Luca Toni!). There are pros (many) and cons (a few) living in Munich. Notably the very high quality of life compared to Italy vs. the long and cold winters/autumns and a general lack of empathy and connection with the locals (that is germans in general) - it is not impossible and usually you need them to have at least a beer in their stomach, but generically speaking it is much more difficult to get into somebody's life in Munich (and not just with germans sometimes) and feel a connection than, say, in Italy.
With the difference that usually once you are "in" it is very difficult to be "out" someone's life - a friend (Freund) in Germany is most of times forever. Otherwise you are always a Bekannte (an acuaintance), no matter what you do or say.

2) Florence
This is my "home" town, although I was not born there and lived only 8 years in this lovely, but abandoned to itself, town. That was during my university studies. My parents were born here, but due to the ob of my father, we have been living a bit all over the place in Italy and in England for about a year. It was also the place where my grandparents lived and I have been visiting regularly Florence, no matter where I was, all of my live. And where some, but not all, of my best friends live. I was born in Milan, but Florence plays a centra role in my life and it is very likely the place I will want to spend my retirement days - there is so much that connects me to this city.

3) Complaining about stuff
This is probably the worst trait of my character - and the biggest problem is that I don't even realise that I am complaining!!!
I am told that I can go on forever complaining about everything, people, places, facts, computers, music, books, you name it. I think this comes from me being very critical about myself and very detailed oriented. And then project this on everything else and being not very tolerant in situations where likely giving some slack would be better. This also results in me being "serious" when I shouldn't. I don't give usually too much slack to myself, and therefore I end up not giving it to others/other things, and end up complaining about it.
I am working on improving this dark spot and ask others/friends to tell me when I am doing it to stop, recognise that I am doing it and improve. There is always room for improvement, right?

4) candle-light setting on camera
This is related to a picture I took with a Point & Shoot camera I brought with me for casual phtographying during an excellent workshop called "Learning to see", by Chris Marquardt. Everybody was carrying their DSLRs and I was the only guy with a Canon S3 at the WS - it still has a lot of manual control but in comparison to a DSLR it lacks performance, picture quality and a couple of other things... I honestly felt at the beginning of the WS completely out of place. I thought, honestly, that I made a mistake joining. But everybody seemed to be cool about it and the purpose of the whole workshop, as Chris quickly explained, was learning to take good pictures, pics that mean and convey something by using what you have - even when using a throw-away camera or...a point and shoot camera!
I have learnt so much from the others and got the "virus of the DSLR" (I now own one ;)), but they also saw that I could take decent pics with more modest equipment and gifted me with many heartfelt compliments on what I shown them (we had each days a very honest pictures review session). Plus having a swiveling LCD screen and a 12x optical zoom in a tiny and light package, I could actually take pics you cannot easily take with a DSLR. You can see all the pics we took back then here (the first 6 pics were not taken during the WS).
So, back to the candle topic (sorry for the digression...), there I was during one of the dinners (the workshop was 5 days long) and took this pic using the "Candle Light mode" of the Casio Exilim that I took with me that evening. No DSLR has typically such modes, but the result was really good - it is currently one of the "most interesting" pics on my Flickr phootostream. I really like the pic and reminds of the very good times, the friendships I made during that workshop and all that I learned from Chris.
BTW: the camera has also the "food" mode, AKA Japanese-taking-pics-of-everything mode, "flower" "kids" "pets" modes and so on....

5) “non tutto il male viene per nuocere” (you quoted this at me once, and I liked it)
Literally translated the phrase sounds more or less, "not all bad comes to hurt" - this is one of the ways for me to try to see the glass half full - unfortunately it is usually half empty.
I don't remember when I mentioned it to Bexxi, but glad that she liked it! ;) It stikes me a bit that she associates me with this one.

Now these are the five things I associate with Bexxi (some are similar to the ones that our common friend Kavey wrote for her):
1) flowers and (wonderful) pictures of them
2) (her) self portraits
3) literature and university
4) this pic
5) A Welsh in Freiburg - how the heck does that work?!? ;)

How about yourselves out there? Post me and I will write 5 things that I associate with you and then you can write on your blog your comments on them.

.....but feeling 25!!!

Since 2 days Microsoft allows normal users to download and try the official Beta 1 of Windows 7. I had some time and enough bandwidth to download both 32 bit and 64 bit versions (2.5 and 3.2 GBs respectively) and try them with Parallels 4 on my MacBook (2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM).
Because the OS was tried on a virtual machine, absolute numbers are almost meaningless. Nevertheless comparisons can be made between the 32 and 64 bit version and XP (tested in the same way).

Most of the following impressions are valid for both versions of Windows 7. I never really tried Windows Vista, so I cannot comment with regards to it.

The Virtual machine under Parallels 4 (latest version that supports Windows 7, released last week), was configured for both tests with 1GB RAM, no Sound, 2 cores. The ISO files from which the installation was carried out (no DVD was used), was done over an external HDD (the ISO was on the external drive, while the virtual machine HDD on the MacBook).

My impressions/comments:
- the installer says that the system will have to "reboot several times" during installation - it actually did this twice (why?); in comparison Mac OS X and Linux (if nothing changed for the latter in the past 10 years) reboot only once, after installing all files
- the startup animation is pretty cool with glowing orbs that blend together forming a glowing colorful windows flag
- the installation took about 30 minutes (pretty good!)
- although the Beta 1 is fully functional until August, for some odd reason the user is required, though not immediately, to go through the Windows Product Activation - why?
- after installing Parallel Tools (which are not compiled for 64 bits), Windows 7 downloaded 1 update for the Windows Defender signatures and started (due to the Parallels Tools) the (Home) Network install procedure; after this I performed a disk defrag (which was completed on the 32 bit version with 5 passes!) and then performed a complete reboot to see it boot performance
- Windows 7 64 bits boots in Paralles 4 in 2 minutes (yes, that long), while the 32 bit version in 1'30"; XP in Parallels required 50"...
- after the boot, soon after the desktop has finished loading, the RAM usage was about 500MB for the 64 bit version, 360MB for the 32 bit version; in comparison my OS X 10.5.6 installation requires about 450MB and XP usually requires around 150MB...
- Windows Media Player and IE8 are still compiled in 32 bit
- Windows 7 has an increasing amount of eye candy, like a glowing start windows flag button (bottom left of the task bar - is this also in Vista) when the mouse hovers over it, or on active tasks the bottom of the task bar buttons follows the mouse by glowing slightly
- Windows 7 sports a cleaner look and the Sidebar is disabled by default; the desktop is mostly clean and uncluttered; the Control Panel though, when displaying all items is pretty confusing (the items are not grouped by type) while the category view is not enough detailed to get access to what is necessary (I personally find "System Preferences" of OS X cleaner and more effective); the Explorer views are also full of details in comparison to OS X - it takes time to get used to it and often I was asking myself if all that information was always really necessary (the answer is no, at lest for me)
- I tried to carry out the Windows Experience Index test, but after 3 mins of no response I gave up; BTW: why does the WEI rating go from 1.0 to 7.9? I mean, 7.9?? why not 8.0 or 10.0? is 7.9 some magical number or does it mean anything specific? why not a round number?
- a new thing that I noticed are "libraries" - libraries are a collection of items and folders in a common view without moving the single objects - that is, as far as I understood, libraries is another name for a collection of links to several folders and files in different locations (local and external/networked drives, for example); you can do that anytime in XP, Vista, OSX, etc - I didn't get it really the purpose of it.

I am curious to read in upcoming review about the performance of Widows 7 in comparison to XP and Vista when running natively on a Windows machine or a MacBook with Boot Camp (not sure whether Boot Camp can support Windows 7 - but I don't see why it shouldn't). As it is I cannot say that this new version will bring improved performance and reduced memory footprint in comparison to Vista. In comparison to XP, in the same test conditions, it clearly didn't, if not for RAM (understandibly) at least for performance.

In the meantime, I am waiting eagerly for Snow Leopard to be released. As it has happened already for the past 2 versions of OS X (Tiger 10.4 and Leopard 10.5) the performance and/or RAM consumption has improved on the same hardware each time compared to the previous version.

If you want to read a more thourough and in-depth review from a true expert, please follow this link to Paul Thurrot's excellent Supersite for Windows.

Once again on the net there are speculations that the Apple's Mac Mini is "dead" and about to be discontinued.This product has not been updated since 400+ days and some argue that it should get also an update in the design.
A few comments:

1. Apple does not offer a true "standard" desktop - either you buy an iMac with a screen you might not need, or you buy a Mac Pro that costs 2500+$
2. the design of the mini is actually so simple and elegant, there is not much to update, IMHO
3. mostly on the internet people talk about the mini as a media server to connect to a high-def TV, but most forget that there is the Apple TV, and that the mini is a true computer that can do *everything*. If you need to retouch a photo in Photoshop, the mini will do, the Apple TV not.

"It's alredy begun - iPhone 3G line starting in New York City"

And then don't wonder why there are wars, famine and poverty in the world.
Nature can stay - human kind can be razed off the face of Earth if an alien race comes...
And the poor infant!!!!!

Today I have noticed a small stenciled graffiti on a wall close to where I lived:
"8 hrs work
8 hrs play
8 hrs sleep"

8-8-8 split, sort of.