Apple: mind control

Ok, now I’m pissed. Apple: think different? No more.

I’ve been using a Mac for 4 years now and I’m pretty pleased by the overall performance. The machines are pretty good, the OS mixes the best of the two worlds (*nix and Windows) with a nice added flavor. But what I discover these days is I’m not a Mac user. I will never be, nor I want to.
The first signs that something wrong was happening showed up when the IPhone was released. It was nice, futuristic, Apple scented. And with a horrible Bluetooth layer that was making it impossible to have it talking to other devices but IPhones and Mac.
“WTF” I said “… did they meet any technical limitations? Bluetooth generally sucks, but everybody managed to have it talking with almost everything”.
“Nah” a Mac user friend of mine said “It’s their decision”.
“Why’s that?” I asked, but the answer bothered me. “Well, they’re making their own business like that. If you want the device, you’ll eventually get into Apple’s world, totally”. Questioned about the fact this is ‘right or wrong’, that friend of mine said it’s “absolutely right”.
At first I didn’t actually realized what it was going on.

Last  year, I upgraded my camera to a professional one. The camera manufacturer was making two professional models, I picked the smaller one. Ah, I was using Aperture by the way (at that time 192€).
When I got back home with my first shoots I was all excited, but when I tried to import the pictures using Aperture I found out that Aperture wasn’t supporting the camera’s RAW format. “How strange” I thought, considering the Mac was easily able to read them. But not Aperture.
After a small search, I discovered that Aperture was actually able to import the bigger camera version RAWs, but not the smaller one.
“WTF, it’s the same format!” I thought and after a small search, I discovered that it was exactly the same format with a header field value that stated one model or the other.
I thought of a mistake and searched other people having the same issue. I found that many reported the same problem.
Some time later, Apple announced that there was a way to solve the problem: a paid upgrade to the new version of the software.
Mac users, again, stated this is absolutely alright, because “they have to make money somehow”.

I did not upgrade and used IPhoto for the first import operation (irony…).

Now, today I’m working on some important pictures challenging at least 5 other depressing bugs (1 blocker) that Apple states to be fixed in the new fantastic version of Aperture. And again, Mac users say this is “normal”.

What puzzles me is not only how the stand there stating “you buy the toy and then shut the fuck up” but how they actually managed to brainwash any goddamned Mac user on the planet. How come people working in the IT field I would generally consider intelligent and competent in this discipline, would end up saying “if you don’t pay, you don’t get the bugfixes, it’s normal”.

iMindControl.

Let me finish with the famous Apple 80s TV ad, the one against the IBM “evil empire”.

Who’s  the evil empire now?

Circles: It’s a PLUS!

I don’t need to hide the fact that I liked almost everything Google did. I’m not a “fan”, I just like the way they do things, technically accurate, simple in terms of user experience but wonderfully hi-tech.
So I looked forward this Google+ a lot  and managed to get an invitation to try it before it gets crowded.
As it happened for Twitter, except for the beautifully clean UI,  I didn’t quite get what the big deal was, until something in my head unlocked.

The circles are more than another paradigm to express Facebook friendships.
Of course they’re different because you can belong to more circles, creating feed groups. For instance, I have a “metalheads” circle where I put my friends who enjoy heavy metal and post videos and music streams just for them, without spamming around. So circles actually are circles of interest, increasing the quality of your feed. Some of them also belong to the “technocrats” circle where I post technology news. In an ideal world where everybody uses it this way, your feed would be always pertinent to your interests.

But it’s not “friendship”. Or is it?
Ironically, this paradigm expresses the concept of friendship much better than FB friendship.
Think of it: friends are, first of all, people you share interests with. Moreover, you can consider someone “friend” without the counterpart to do the same. You might want to share something with him/her, but he/she might not be interested in doing the same and at the same time, find your entries interesting and pertinent.
In FB Friendship, the relationship must be mutual. But in Google+ it doesn’t happen.

So belonging to a circle must not be “approved” by the counterpart, but ironically, the whole system allows a much greater privacy. In Facebook all friends have almost equal right to read your information (with some exceptions you can set in your privacy settings), on the contrary on Google+, you have a  smooth, powerful discriminant that is the reason you’re related to that person and this is a killer feature for other platforms.

What I hope is people will be able to quickly understand the best way to use it, increasing the quality of everyone’s experience in Google+.

Though I’m quite sure most people joined Google+ because there’s no FarmVille…

ERP – meeting halfway

In years in the ERP for small-medium companies field, I learnt the reasons for the lifecycle of an ERP product is a long road of tears and disasters. I’m not smarter than others (I often think so, but I’d be better not to tell everyone…) so it’s pretty obvious these reasons are clear to most experts.

Your company is like broccoli

This week has been all about seeking a new job (I’m done now, don’t worry).
It’s been  a very intense, interesting week and I learnt a new thing: that I’m naive when it comes to speak with company managers.
My phylosophy, when it comes to job interviews WAS “there’s no reason to lie each other”: I can/can’t do this, I would like to work for your company a little/a lot, I like you a little/a lot, I think you deserve this much/this little money. Naive.

Don’t look enthusiast about their company

Because if you do, they’ll think you have extremely good professional reasons to accept a low budget contract. And that’s what they’ll offer you. No matter the good feeling the manager has about you, it wants to SAVE money and employ a decent guy at the same time. Thinking of it, that’s ridiculously logical.

So here’s a new golden rule:

At job interviews, your facial expression must keep saying:
Your company is like Broccoli, healthy and good looking, but it smells like shit

Knowledge exterminates

I was home last evening, drinking my homebrewed beer and watching TV. Again a stupid TV show named “Mysteries” and again, tons of crap to watch in the name of love for my wife.
Guess what? AGAIN a disaster documentary about year 2012. Of course they suggest any kind of catastrophe, from meteorites to global warming, aliens, magnetic poles inversion, that kind of stuff. A classic topic for popcorn if so much people didn’t fear that year.

It’s not Wikipedia putting an entry about the end of the fifth era in the Maya calendar ( read ). That’s history and archeology. It’s scared people that DO scare me.
If you look around you’ll see thousands sites talking about the end, in the 2012 with a more or less mystic accent ( read here , or here ).
So everything’s gonna end, and just a few know about it. Not exactly.
Lots of people know -so they say-, but most of them hide it because they’re in the government gears, and the very few who speak freely, spread the word about the end.

It happened before -predicting the end- and this won’t be the last one, but this specific one is pretty curious and unique.
We’re in the technology and, most of all, communication era. We consider ourselves modern  and civilized men and women, still, superstition enters everyday in our lives, and since we’re not satisfied with the blurred aspects of magic and mystery, we try to give them a new dimension with science.

The Knights of Apocalypse left their seats to terrible asteroids and aliens, but the concept is still there: the prediction of the end.
With one big difference though. Asteroids and aliens are way more probable than man-eating demons.
Asteroids and magnetic pole inversions belong to the science domain, and as every scientific matter, they respect science rules.

How curious. Homo Sapiens Sapiens walked on the Earth for 100,000 years and never faced extinction because of asteroids and magnetic pole inversions, it’s astonishing to notice this will happen exactly now that we know how these science things work, and know how to spread this knowledge. 100,000 years on this planet and extinction happens now it’s just… 100 years we accurately know how all this work. So that we can wait for it…

Maybe we’re just to bored and coward to believe our lives will go on as they’re going now in the near future, and when the end will come, we won’t be ready.

My digital me

Today Sebastian Raducci, CEO at Datamind, during a coffee break looked up at me with a foxy face.
“Did you see the countdown?” he asked me. I wasn’t quite sure what he was referring to.
“On Facebook, the countdown” e covered my doubts.
“Oh yeah yeah, what is it about?” I asked, not really interested by the answer. What could it have been? A new Apple device?
“I canceled my Facebook account, and that was the countdown to end” he replied. That was shocking, and the most curious thing is that I didn’t expect news like that could be shocking at all. Now this was getting interesting.
Sebastian brought me through a long, accurate reasoning about privacy and daily battles I’ll try to synthesize in the following paragraphs.

The Internet as we know it

We -IT experts- use it multiple times in an hour. It’s the way we increase our knowledge, it’s where we seek for help when we have a problem we can’t figure out, it’s the Entertainment tool with capitol E, it’s the channel we use to keep in touch with friends living far away. It’s the internet, seen through our eyes.
Here in Italy, the internet is a frequent topic in the news. Of course, all the darkest, nastiest events regarding the internet deserve a headline. If I were to know nothing about the net, I’d never ever let my child use it, not even with my supervision. No way.
It looks like an imaginary country with evil people searching for our childrens’ young blood as residents. How can you blame parents?

We know better than others that the internet is much more than this. The Internet it is us greatly amplified. What’s ugly gets unglier, but what’s beautiful turns out to be even more gorgeous. You can’t lose the good part because you fear the bad part,  as much as living itself is a risk. You must vigilate.

And we that we clearly know what’s beautiful on the net, have the duty to let the people know.

Let me start: the Youtube Symphony Orchestra. A year ago, Youtube started a unique experiment: an online audition to form the first symphonic orchestra whose members where chosen through the internet. Over 3000 musician in 70 countries joined this project. 96 were chosen. 96 musicians made they dream come true a few days ago at the Carnegie Hall, NY.

Our software, your success

It’s a time of economic crisis, we all have at least heard about it. Some of us have even been hit by it, and even if we do a very expertised job, none of us is totally safe. It’s during times like this that numbers enter our lives so roughly, through newspapers and TV.
But let’s look at it from another perspective: our customers and our software.
Our customers -imagine if it’s not so- spend hundred thousands euro in raw materials, invest millions in innovation an gain -hopefully- more millions. Each investment, contact, advertising, b2b communication and accountancy are handled by our code.
So the title of this article doesn’t sound so stupid anymore. Our software, is part of their success. But also, our failure: their loss.

Each time our reporting library doesn’t print right, our business intelligence doesn’t look so intelligent, they lose money. From this point of view, our job is extremely valuable.
Our software does not do their business of course, but our automation systems built new ways of doing it, sped up long, expensive accountancy procedures, improved production lines. Targets grew because they became visible at the horizon.

Now see how our position is vital in the industrial ecosystem? I’m not talking about the software companies in all their complexity, I mean the software developer. His mistake might mean a huge, hidden accountancy hole in more than one company.

But, at least here, in Italy, we’re not much more than a metalworkers, with whom we share the same contract category. Our retribution is just like a waiter’s, the respect our bosses have about our ideas, inventions and artifacts is = null.

They’re playing with fire. Without us, not even traffic lights work anymore. You’ve been warned.

I’m very curious to know how things work around the World, so if you want to join this discussion, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Hello world!

It’s funny how the name of the test post WordPress automatically creates after registering has exactly the same title I’d have used for my first post: hello world.
It might be considered a stupid sentence, but it represents for most software developers, designers and enthusiasts, the beginning of a new adventure. It reminds us all when we build our first program. Its duty was to greet the World, and phylosophically, it’s not a so dumb thing to do.

Hello world, as every software developer, designer and enthusiast opens itself to the world. It knows that there’s a not null chance to find the answers it’s looking for somewhere in the net, because a nerdy guy that looks exactly like it wanted to share a little piece of knowledge. So it will do. So do I.

812bits, or better, 8 1/2 bits, or even better eight and a half bits. The name aims to history.
As most of you might know, Eight and Half is the name of a very famous Fellini’s movie (to proudly remember my italian roots). Moreover, eight are the bits in the byte, but when we do our part in sharing our knowledge, we gain the power to change the rules. We can split the bit.

Let’s do it

Now, poetry apart, I’d like to use this space to share some programming experiences. As I’m working on a very complex, heterogeneous project, some of the problems I face every day may be so unusual to become somehow interesting.
We’ll be mainly talking about Java, Eclipse development and C++, but I’ll try to keep the posts fluent and not necessarily complex, mixing everything with IT news, and, as the subtitle says, decent ugly (nerdy) humor.