…just another hippy blog

Barcode
Originally uploaded by camera_rwanda.

Thank you mobile phone producers, for building wonderful mobile phones that can take pictures, play mp3 files, read out tolstoy’s war and peace in 42 seconds, do a shiatsu massage to your cat and take 2 minutes to display a menu or render a digit after you hit a 2 micron wide button on its keypad.

Thank you telcos like Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for increasing the fares in every possible way, after a nation-wide petition has made some smart polititian aware of Italy being the only Country world wide with recharge rates for rechargeable mobile phone cards.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for the service you are selling, which has become the worst a phone company might propose to its customers since Meucci (or whoever) being breast-fed by his mother.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for being no longer able to hire programmers who can make your system know when a call has been rejected and for sending me a nice SMS telling me that someone has been trying to call me one second ago.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA and friends, for making customers pay for a no-cost best-effort service like SMS. I’m really happy to see that someone paid for a text message to be delivered to me after 24 hours.
Thank you guys (*), I really wish you could end up in the middle of the desert with a 42 mega pixel Wind mobile phone.

And I really wish that you will only be able to receive two billion promotional text messages each minute making you aware that yes, signal reaches that desert.

And I really wish that after you have spent two hours figuring out how to make a call on that phone, you will find a nice female voice, telling you that Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA does not give a fuck about your phone call.

Amen.

(*) Read: CEOs and friends

Two suns in the sunset
Originally uploaded by crayzy_ray.

Stupid technology!! It took me about 5 minutes to find my Doors CD with “The end” on it!
I want a 5 billion peanutbutterbytes drive under-your-skin-chip edition for my next birthday so I can find a song when my mind just won’t stop thinking about it!

PS: is GQView the only photo viewer on Linux that pre-loads the previous and the next images in the current directory?
And why does digikam’s ShowPhoto have 2 million filters and *NO* way to rename a file except for opening the file properties dialog? Am I supposed to use The Gimp to rename my files?!?!?

Ratts!! Are those such brilliant features that nobody else thought about?!? Please, somebody tell me why so many great open source projects lack in the most stupid but important features! Pleeeeeeeeeease!!!

Talk (Alpha)
(by hippy.dream).

Warning: this is another i-fcinukg-htae-mciosrfot post

Btw. you already knew that our stupid little brain is capable of reading words with all but the first and the last letters misplaced, didn’t you?

Let’s be serious today. One of the worlds biggest corporations, with about 71,000 employees and 283.7 billion USD market capitalization in 2006 (source) cannot sell a piece of crap like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for about 799 USD (Professional edition, source Microsoft estimated retail price - March 21, 2005)!!

No, don’t worry, I did not buy that crap! I had a free student licence from my university.. and I suppose they didn’t get it for free.

VS .net might be one of the best IDE on Windows if you are going to develop in C++ or C#, but it can really drive me nuts!!

Something really bad happened this night and my debugger won’t run any more.

But here is the funny error message I get (in differently styled message boxes each time it crashes.. that’s so cool guys, thank you!):

A serious internal error occurred while processing this command.

I wonder what damn command it’s talking about. Maybe a “dir c:\”? A “format c:\”? Or a “please kill my pc it doesn’t want to suffer any more!”?
I only remember I was saving a file while VS was building my project. I’m such a fool! How could I dare…!! I know I did this hundreds of times, but.. VS has had enough of me now.

The debugger may be unstable now, […]

What debugger is it talking about now? The only debugger I have just crashed!! Oh, maybe this is another form of “unstable” process.

Well, I have no clue now. A full rebuild wouldn’t solve the problem. Ratts!!

Microsoft CEOs, no offence, but… you SUCK!!!!!!!!!

P.S.: This is the first post made using flickr’s cool blogging tools! Great feature guys! I just needed to add some categories and this p.s. because I forgot it.

A recent post published on ZDNet by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, “The world just isn’t ready for Linux”, has cought my attention.

The author states that there are “areas Linux could improve on in order to transform itself from an operating system into a desktop platform”: gaming, software support, stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert, hardware support.
Let me point the spotlight to the words “Linux could improve” and express my personal opinion.
Read more

I feel like I have to say some words in support of Wikipedia after reading a few “stories” on Slashdot.

Number One: Wikipedia and Plagiarism

Short extract (Spo22a writes):

“Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine.”

In short: 142 Wikipedia articles out of 12000 (that’s about 1,83%) were suspected of plagiarism (this means they contained information coming from some other source).
Number Two: Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed

Short extract (Daveydweeb writes):

“The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on ‘NPA personality theory’ was confirmed to be a hoax.”

In short: the article is about a not widely known personality theory invented by Anthony M. Benis. The suspect is that the article has been mainly written by Benis himself to promote his theory. The article has been proposed for deletion and a debate has been opened.

Number Three: Wikipedia Used To Spread Virus
Short extract (eldavojohn writes):

“The German Wikipedia has recently been used to launch a virus attack. Hackers posted a link to an all alleged fix for a new version of the blaster worm. Instead, it was a link to download malicious software.”

In short: some smart idiots (please don’t call them hackers unless you know the real meaning of this word) sent emails with a link to the fake fix in the hope that unsuspecting users would trust a Wikipedia link.

Read more