pietro polsinelli's blog

Last post here - starting a new blog

2009-01-07T22:25:00.001+01:00

I will from now on blog on http://polsinelli.wordpress.com. See you there!

Work management and the big brother feeling

2008-12-26T16:05:00.007+01:00

I just watched again Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", an old love of mine. It makes me think about the application we produce, which can be perversely seen as a mean for worker control. Perversely? Well, if you are so silly to think that people working should be "controlled", instead of motivated, you have a problem. Surely you shouldn't be in management; maybe read "Peopleware", maybe go do some public service.

The problem and the opportunities start in managing one own time and aims (projects), not other people's. That's why contemporary project management is more related to personal productivity than to say, Pert charts. It's as if management should come as a sum and elaboration of infos voluntarily provided by different and scattered sources. Until not long ago, there was no source from where to get information, so the application had to provide a space to fill. Now we have somehow to make it fill by itself.

And the need for a group tool for managing shared work is ever increasing, as work get more and more complex...

How people select project management software

2008-12-21T14:21:00.009+01:00

The term “project management” in time has acquired a more and more wide and hence vague sense. Once this term would be resolved in a methodology, today its meaning has merged with “groupware” and “personal productivity software”. It is noticeable that there has been a collective and quite uniform move, so that methodologies, needs and software have been evolving towards a common new idea.

So most people classifiable as searching for "project management software" actually search a web based application that will help them manage and share what their group has to do at work. So if for example one searches for “project management software” on Wikipedia, gets a long list, and there are several applications that may be said to meet the problems evoked above. Then, which one among the possible ones should one choose? Well, I’m not going to get here into details of which to pick, it often depends on what you need. But in my by now considerable experience in the field, there are two ways of selecting software: those that try it, and those that don’t. Yes. It’s not a typo: there are many companies that want to select software without trying it. It works this way: in a badly managed large company, often a public service, some high ranking manager decides that the company needs a project management software. They put together user requirements, which by itself would be a good thing, only these requirements come from people without any experience in motivating people to use software, such as groupware, where there isn’t the prescription which leads people to use say an accounting tool. So they throw in restrictive and cumbersome features that no real group of people will ever adopt, but that makes them look responsible to even higher officials.
Notice that they also presume (wrongly) that having a local domain knowledge of the problem implies that they know the best way to get help in managing it from the software.
They have the habit of getting all software made custom for them, even when there are perfectly viable (and much better made) low cost and shrink-wrapped solutions for their problem.
Now that they have the specifics, they should go on and try a list of software solutions. But here too they have very bad habits: they are used to buying software not because they really need it, but because someone goes there and convinces them that they need it. So they ask some IBM-like shiny shoed fellow which visits them periodically whether he/she has some solution of the sort, and of course the fellow says yes, and demos an incredibly old and complex system which is actually a fake web façade of an outdated project management system, which does almost nothing, is unusable, and most importantly is sold ridiculously overpriced, because it has to pay the Porsche and the continuous trips to the customer of the fellow. They would go for that, but.. they have the corporation standards, that “no software should be bought without evaluating alternatives”. That you need an internal regulation to state what is dictated by very basic common sense, testifies the esteem of the company for the intellectual quality of its managers :-D

So, an alternative, how does one go for that.. that other ridiculously overpriced solutions salesman is not coming this week, oh dear. Let’s check the internet.

They find the list on Wikipedia. Of course they don’t try the software listed, that would mean working, and worse of all, taking some responsibilities for the choice. So they just send a badly written Request For Information (these people love acronyms), attaching the file with their absurd specifics, and pretend to be called (they still use the phone a lot).
Now I enter the picture: because up to very very little ago, we were so stupid to call back them, resulting in a huge waste of time (on our part); for their part, they got from us a detailed answer to the RFI, satisfying the company standards, and of course they always go for the local ridiculously overpriced local provider, so they can minimize responsibilities; they didn’t know what they were talking all along, and fundamentally don’t care.

The same story happens when organizations pay another one to do the software selection for them, just with even lower quality in the process: they carefully avoid really trying the software, they just want signed declarations of features present from software houses, so that they bear no responsibilities and can close the job quickly.

This can happen in any organization, and is not necessary linked to large size; and in fact, the opposite happens at times: I provide a positive example that I observed amused recently. A bank was looking for a project management web solution, and the directors involved were putting together more and specifics and system integration requirements. But the single director who was responsible for starting the adoption, simply ignored the requirements: chose the software that looked better to him, that cost almost nothing, and simply started using it in his small group. People started seeing how effective it was, and more and more people joined in, also those of the groups that were still meditating on the specifics and integrations; the solution, without any custom development is today used by 80 people every day, and the total cost would not pay a wheel of the Porsche of the shiny shoed fellow above.

Back to the question of whether software gets tried in evaluation, there are even “software houses” that think that in opacity there is an opportunity. When you are evaluating a software though its web site and you find it hard to get to the demo and/or the price, and that they try to get in contact with you first, they try to call you back, just consider for a moment what is happening and why: isn’t it very likely that the quality of the software is not sufficient to expose it and its price? And who is going to cover the (huge) overprice of having professional salesman calling you back? Those that end in the trap, of course.

Attribution: picture taken here.

Il "senatore" Giulio Camber

2008-11-05T20:46:00.001+01:00

http://www.spreconi.it/2008/11/il-senatore-con.html

A wise man: Philip Roth

2008-08-23T18:51:00.000+02:00

Come parla!!!

2008-06-30T23:09:00.003+02:00

Oggi ho purtroppo sentito un'intervista a Fahre a una supposta scrittrice, tale Pulsatilla. Spero che incontri presto Moretti.

Book exchange party

2008-05-04T21:46:00.002+02:00

Italy's political trap: distributive justice

2008-04-25T18:01:00.002+02:00

Last elections in Italy have finally decreed the selection of two main parties that share the liberal view of economy, which is simply a recognition of the world’s dynamics in the last n centuries.
Now if someone is a firm believer in redistributive justice, like myself, can only vote the Democratic Party at the moment. The main instrument of distributive justice is the state. So to believe in distributive justice, you have to agree to a high and progressive taxation level, and in particular to high inheritance taxes. Fine. Then the state will provide wealth redistribution, in particular ensuring universal access to health, housing and education. Fine.
Now in contemporary Italy the problems start here: in every single occasion of contact with the state, you realize the irresponsibility and incredible inefficiency with which the state “workers” operate, and this be it local, regional or central government. And if, like myself, you get in contact with the state not only as citizen, but as supplier of solutions (software), you become aware that it is much worse than the common citizen realizes: the waste of money is a habit, and nobody cares. Works that 3 people could do well, are done badly by 10. Managers have no power, thanks to state unions, and hence are either corrupted or absent. Unions have abused their privileges to the point that even when a worker commits crimes against the state, it is impossible to get it fired.
Only if belief in redistributive justice has been implanted in your mind in early childhood (like in my case), your belief can survive in this context. And the first aim of anyone who wants to enhance redistributive justice in Italy should be to work on the state and make it effective. This is something that in the last 15 years the left party when in power has not done, and it is a big mistake.
What is “funny” is that if instead you don’t believe in redistributive justice, you should give your vote to Berlusconi’s private party: but as he has shown, his government just sticks to power, and cultivates it; the huge reforms of which the Italian state should be subject to, to become slim and effective are not even planned by his coalition. The little that has been done, has been done by his opposers!
What should be understood, is that Berlusconi is not a capable entrepreneur: he made his economic success through politically enforced trust (in private TV’s, through his old time friend Craxi, another scary individual), establishing a monopoly, and also taking obscurely founded construction and editorial initiatives (corrupting judges along the way). He highly resembles in style and story the Soviet communist bureaucrats put in charge of monopolistic companies just after the Soviet collapse, which fits perfectly with his Putin friendship (they also share the same respect for democracy). He is an incompetent clown, not an effective manager.

Hard times for Italy…

Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

2008-04-08T22:44:00.003+02:00

I had no idea that this fellow was so uniquely talented.

Amélie Nothomb - two books

2008-03-22T13:04:00.005+01:00

Two more nice books you should read:

Stupeur et tremblements
Ni d’Ève, ni d’Adam

by this Belgian delicate woman writer. In the first book she portraits corporate life in Japan, a sort of hell on earth, inhabited by racist idiots with neurotic sweat-horror; how can anyone bear such worklife escapes comprehension. Japanese workers, escape to Europe!

The second shows a completely different side, where her life is reflected and empowered through the tenderness of her Japanese boyfriend, and the side of Japan which we (priviledged enough to not work there) are used to enjoy comes in light again.

L'élégance du hérisson

2008-03-08T15:24:00.003+01:00

Muriel Barbery (what a splendid blog): she isn’t a literary genius, like say, Georges Simenon. The story, the characters are not very original. Even her philosophical analysis can be discussed, see her ideas on Husserl. But for that mystery that is literature, the book is a masterpiece.

This said, dear Mrs. Barbery, why? Why did you have to put me in such a pain? Couldn’t you just have a happy ending, like everyone else? Damn it, damn it!

Ok, now I have to go downtown to scan libraries for other books of yours… .

Hunt for Red October

2008-03-08T15:00:00.004+01:00

Filtered of its US Navy promotional sides, the character of Captain Ramiusis (Sean Connery) is immense.

I bet nobody remembered at the end of the movie that the captain killed an innocent man with his bare hands…

Nightmares of a merciful god

2008-01-03T22:34:00.000+01:00

I told Groucho about Auschwitz
and took pleasure seeing him cry

I carved out the evil parts of a man’ soul
and watched him live in torture

And the day of justice came
every generous act
was demonstrated as a motion of pride
every evil act
was shown to be deserved

I got my police uniform
with boots too tight
and everyone lived in pain since

Nice books and movies read and seen recently

2007-12-27T20:25:00.001+01:00

So I end this year blogging about some gems I've met recently (best on top):

Books
Georges Simenon "L'homme qui regardait passer les trains"
Ian McEwan "Chesil beach"
Mo Yan "Sorgo rosso"
Toffolo "Pasolini" (graphic novel)
Marjane Satrapi "Persepolis" (graphic novel)
Amitav Gosh "The Glass palace"
Alberto Moravia "Gli indifferenti"
Giles Foden "The last king of Scotland" (the movie is not up to the book)
Vari "Sbirri"

Movies
Pasolini "Teorema"
Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava "Ratatouille"

France, sad perspectives

2007-08-27T22:57:00.000+02:00

Why? Why, if Sarkozy is such a shrewd politician, as Italian journalists keep repeating, without giving any substance to the claim, why should he wish to be so strongly linked to such a loser?

The suspicion that there is a hidden but real vein of folly in him (which in France you may not even hint, but before the elections was well considered in the foreign free press) gets stronger in time.

Sad times for France...

Passeggiata

2007-08-08T23:02:00.000+02:00

Protesti non cammini
indietro e non ti muovi
infin cedo, padre sempre vinto
dalle note forze silenti
ma non trovo nel tuo sguardo
perso
l’ostinazione attesa
del pesto-i-piedi

Meeting the sea

2007-08-08T22:59:00.000+02:00

You dance, my little red wild,
celebrate your yearly meeting
with longed salty waters
with sand with which you mix
hands feet lips
dance in circles
body unbalanced
untaught, untelling,
needing nothing but your laughter.

Carver remains

2007-07-14T17:52:00.000+02:00

I've recently read Raymond Carver's "Boxes". There is nothing remarkable in the short story; almost nothing happens. So why it is so touching? Because Carver is in it. We feel him, feel his frustration. Nothing more is needed.

Montale - La bufera

2007-06-16T19:39:00.000+02:00

"... nel guscio delle tue palpebre ..."

Cinque parole in sequenza, tra le (finite) combinazioni possibili. Chi può tanto in così poco?

Normandie

2007-05-12T12:12:00.000+02:00

We'll be going to Argentan in Normandie at the end of this month. That's because my sister Valeria is getting married with Gui. Atually, they first make a party, and then they'll get married (it's a creative pair on averything).

So I've been looking for a good guide to the region; well, couldn't find one. What i mean by a guide is more or less a "poetic introduction to the region", of the sort of this guide to Venice. There are uncountably many guides, all made of meaningless sequences of names and numbers. What's the points of those?

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: again Murakami

2007-05-12T12:08:00.000+02:00

Ok, Murakami and Japan again. Total identification in the book, again. He is a genious.

"...frequently meandering, occasionally baffling, repetitive or overwritten; but for sheer scale and mental muscle, it may be regarded as a masterpiece."

"... This is the kind of writer Mr. Murakami is: a writer with a sense for the simple and the surreal, and one with a gift for putting these two things together."

Maybe you have enough of Japan now?

Japanese contemporary culture

2007-04-09T22:06:00.000+02:00

Well, as I did two post concerning my relation with Japanese contemporary culture, I must add two very important components: Shintaido, which recalls me of Murakami, through the feeble link of enlightening reality's nature by making you work on its fantastic part, and Miyazaki, who again, has this particular way of showing the unreal in the real. Yes, that's the link! I never got it so clear.

Kafka on the Shore

2007-04-07T21:33:00.000+02:00

Reading Murakami's books for me is an involving experience; and he seems even to get better in time. Superficially, one may say that M. depicts a "dreamlike" world; but actually he depicts our everyday experience in very realistic terms: dreams, regrets, hopes, all "fictional", non naturalistic entities, texture our life. The most real parts of our lifes, are those that deeply involve us emotionally, and they may not have the tone of a naturalistic experience.

Murakami is also uniquely economical in his writings, nothing is ever too much.

Several stories into one, two intruguing main characters, a stimulating background... . A masterpiece.

Amazing Sushi

2007-03-31T17:53:00.000+02:00

In my recent visit in San Francisco, I had one particularly beautiful evening (on March 22nd), led by Ito Sensei: he brought Roberto, myself, Jim and Jim's cousin to a delightful restaurant:

Kiss Sea Food Japanese Restaurant
1700 Laguna St
San Francisco, CA 94115, USA
(415) 474-2866

where Mr. Naka-san is the sole chef and owner of this tiny, beautiful, high quality establishment. With just himself and one waitress serving, he prepared delicious Sushi and variations, in harmony with the pottery and the general environment.

I was one of those rare evenings, where everything just seems beautiful. On top of that, we had just won the Jolt Productivity Award the day before, so we were radiant. So thank you all!

I had met Jim and his brother Lee a few months ago, when together with Laura we had a very nice evening too, at the Teatro del Sale restaurant, in Florence.

Wisława Szymborska

2007-03-14T18:01:00.000+01:00

Discovery

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

I can't talk about her: onto such deepness of lively tenderness, what could I say? Just read read read her.

Venture capital and Italian banks

2007-02-04T20:59:00.000+01:00

Open Lab has been a flourishing small company since 2001. We are now starting to get internationally renown, I believe in the last six months. Now, in these five years of activity, how many proposals have we received from Italian banks or investment societies to invest in our activities or projects? Guess, guess?

Yes, zero, none, nada, nessuna. How many time did in the last six months did U.S. venture capital societies contact us for the same purpose? Twice. I mean, it's a long way from the US simply to get to know that we exist.

Why Italian capitalism is so indifferent? Well', it's simply explained: Italian banks live by stealing, istead of being good in investing. Just yesterday, Mario Draghi reminded us that the averge yearly cost of a bank account in Italy is 90 Euro, while the average European Union cost is 15 Euro.

Playing Pinocchio

2007-01-06T12:33:00.000+01:00

At my daughter nursery school, I played Pinocchio at their Christmas play. The care with which the play was organized and set up, was quite amazing.

Thanks to Ernesto Iadanza, Enrica, Serenella for the pictures.

With the fox and the cat.

Here we are with Lucignolo (Andrea) .

With the cricket.

These are the teachers of the Maghe Magò, who set this up.

Kiddin'

2006-11-28T21:51:00.000+01:00

Here with Roberto we are "testing" Teamwork's t-shirts.

Heights of Corsica

2006-09-24T16:01:00.000+02:00

This summer we had a nice holiday in Corsica, during which Massimo Iacolare brought us to amazing heights. You can see the great climbers at incredible heights..

But the truth is...

We're a few meters from the ground!

If you want to go to the sea side in the Mediterranean, just go to Corsica: it's the less crowded place you will find.

Custom development vs. schrinkwrapped software

2006-09-03T14:28:00.000+02:00

The basic difference is: who is having fun? In the case of the custom solution, the customer pays you, and its him having fun. In the schrinkwrapped case, the customer pays you, and its you having fun!

Silly pictures

2006-09-01T22:10:00.000+02:00

While preparing the material for JAOO, as I had to send a picture, with Roberto we had fun like really small children.

Holiday in Berlin

2006-09-01T21:55:00.000+02:00

With Maia and Laura, we had a beautiful holiday in Berlin, staying at the Wall Street Hotel

Of the several beautiful complexes brand new everywhere, the most harmonic we've visited is The Nordic Embassy Complex; it encompasses the embassies of the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway

and Sweden.

We are serious guys

2006-04-07T18:27:00.000+02:00

Our (best) customer asked us to build a search engine. This was our first reaction; the only problem is a faint paint smell.. :-D

Actually we'll try to do something with Lucene..

Seminar on persistence

2006-03-22T10:34:00.000+01:00

I just gave another seminar on java, persistence and development in the Florence University Software Engineering department.

A power point outline is here

Some references:
Joshua Bloch, Effective java, Sun Microsystem - Addison Wesley, 2001
Gavin King, Christian Bauer, Hibernate in Action: Practical Object/Relational Mapping, Manning, 2004
Hibernate http://www.hibernate.org
Jbpm http://www.jbpm.org
Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams Publishing, 2004
Joel Spolsky, User Interface Design for Programmers, Apress, 2001

Laïcité

2006-02-12T15:09:00.000+01:00

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Thomas Jefferson

Wittgenstein and determinism

2006-02-10T17:37:00.000+01:00

It was at least ten years that I didn't read anything by Wittgenstein. A casual reading of an abstract on determinism, made me recall the power of stimulating radical thoughts of this great thinker. What contrast to today's poor talk, like Searle's or Putnam's.

He describes the contrast between the belief in free will and finding the biological causes that caused the body of an assassin to strike. You can state this as the problem of prediction and choice: if what's going to happen is totally determined, it wil be hard to believe that there is a choice. Given the body state, he could not but strike. A totally deterministic view of physical events is practically unfeasible, as it is now well known. But this is not an answer to the incompatibility of free will and a deterministic model at a macro level.

To me it's just funny to believe that human dehaviour is phisically or biologically determined; it is a way of putting the cart (our theories) before the horse (our minds). I would start by treating the deterministic/macro scientific view as the best available approximation, actually the only honestly believable approximation, in the context of a phenomenologically betrayed life; my time and mental energy are so far for these problems, but at times I wish I could start thinking seriously about this.

The abstract is from "Wittgenstein's Lectures on Freedom of the Will".

(I rather put Klimt' painting of Ludvig' sister than his photos for clear aesthetical reasons.)

Discovery vs. classify

2006-01-23T10:40:00.000+01:00

I'm reading "The Google Story"; the book is sort of ok, as the details of many events are interesting by themselves, but the author has little critical sense and is clearly too much fascinated by the Google guys.

Google's contrast to Yahoo-like kind of search made me think about our project management solution, which is more on the Yahoo style (classify by hand what's there) instead of automatic project information recovery. But we can do something on this line, you may find a "Project discovery" function in Teamwork 3.

Viva Zapatero, e poi piangi

2006-01-21T10:54:00.000+01:00

(This post is in Italian as it deals with features of the Italian "democratic" system of which I am so ashamed I prefer not to let them be known too much).

E' terribile. Dopo aver visto lo show di Grillo, la sua approssimazione lascia uno spazio minimo di auto consolazione, un spazio per dirsi che sono visioni parziali, la realtà è più complessa e non così unilaterale.

Ma ieri ho visto "Viva Zapatero", e spazio non c'è. Guzzanti ragiona con la linearità di un Leibniz. Ha semplicemente e totalmente ragione. L'Italia è un paese in cui alla violazione dei principi democratici non si reagisce più di tanto.

E poi i disgustosi Petruccioli, Annunziata .. .

Che tristezza infinita.

Il costo dei DS

2006-01-15T12:21:00.000+01:00

(This post is in Italian as it deals with features of the Italian political system of which I am so ashamed I prefer not to let them be known too much).

Sto leggendo un libro necessario, "I costi della politica" del senatore Salvi dei DS. Intorno a questi problemi, in questi giorni si sta delineando in Parlamento l'attuazione della legge della riduzione del 10% dei mega stipendi dei mega dirigenti statali, tra cui i nostri cari deputati e senatori, di cui dobbiamo purtroppo essere grati a Tremonti. Ma appoggiandosi ad un cavillo, i senatori si sono auto-esclusi: per loro, niente riduzione, e in particolare, niente riduzione della spropositata pensione a cui accedono con un contributo ridicolo.

Chi avrà appoggiato questa scandalosa decisione, che avrebbe dovuto essere la prima di una serie di provvedimenti che riducano i vergognosi costi della politica ? Penserete subito a For.. Ita.. (non li cito perchè mi fa senso digitarne il nome) e accoliti, che non avendo idea della differenze tra affari personali e politica, non possono vedere il senso di tali provvedimenti. Illusi!

Si tratta di Stefano Passigli, "senatore" toscano dei DS.

Non ho più parolacce.

Two days in Genoa

2006-01-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

On the 27th and 28th of December we've been to genoa with Sofia, Caterina and Massimo Iacolare ("we" its Maia, Laura and myself). Two really beautiful days in this splendid town. The visit in Palazzo Rosso was delightful, in particular the renewed 30's style apartment and climbing to the top of the roof.

Corporation migrating to Java

2006-01-12T22:41:00.000+01:00

For almost a year we have helped one of our customers, a pharmaceutical corporation, in migrating progressively from Microsoft ASP, components and SQL Server to Java, Tomcat and Oracle. It a long, daunting task, but we are making it. Our hyper-productive framework (for Java standards) helps a lot, and they have a competent internal IT team. This was for the Italian branch; next week I'll meet the French guys, and try to convince them too. At the same time our custom projects section seems to be growing exponentially, it seems we will even have General Electric as customer, we will partecipate to an European Community materials catalogue project, the university of Florence is calling me for seminars, we have two new developers to train.. AND we have to get Teamwork to the final. Will we make it ?

jBlooming on TheServerSide

2005-12-29T19:34:00.000+01:00

We came out with jBlooming, and were on the home of TSS for a few days. We got no really interesting post: either from behaviourally disturbed guys, or post based on theory and little real experience. The weakness of alternatives shows how little attention productivity has in the Java theorical universe. Anyway, it was good to go public.

Comparing Teamwork and Basecamp

2005-11-23T22:13:00.001+01:00

While checking the new language Ruby, I stepped on Basecamp, a web based "project management software", which is actually bundled with a hosting service, at http://www.basecamphq.com . Some things I found interesting, so I took some notes:

Pro of Basecamp:
- simpler interface
- no setup
- centered on the owner conpany
- no security

Pro of Teamwork
- setups on your intranet (think of all data prvacy issues of usin a software on another company server)
- not centered on the owner's company :-) : you can model more complex situations
- can handle large amounts of data, has powerful filters
- can model project trees
- can model complex security requirements

The field on which Teamwork 3 is really hard to beat, is system integration:

- seamlessly integrates your server and database structure
- it's compatble with almost all possible corporation standards and certifications
- a beginner java developer can build powerful extensions with

custom fields and layout
custom workflow module

Actually, you can't really manage work with Basecamp, as the reference model is too simplistic. But there are some ideas which we should pick up:

- ease of use and the amount of help effort, integrated examples
- special role of the main company
- put on any object the "send by mail" button

Teamwork 3 and Jbpm 3

2005-11-11T20:51:00.000+01:00

We did it! We managed to integrate JBoss'Jbpm workflow engine in Teamwork 3 alpha. This is a technological integration, in the sense that we have integrated the Hibernate layer, and built a basic backoffice. For the moment the user will see nothing of this, but it will make building powerful workflow management modules very easy.

By the way, Jbpm 3 really rocks as a workflow engine.

Teamwork 3 alpha - last minute features

2005-10-24T20:15:00.000+02:00

Early access members have reached 223 today. This is almost unbelievable :-) .

Last minute features that made it into alpha:

- we realized a long standing technical idea of unifying file-system based file storage, and FTP and other protocols based storages. Hence in three alpha there is already a file-storage management far superior to that of version two; much faster too

- first features of multi protocol messaging have appeared

- "my tasks" and assignment priority management are there; in general there is more on data analysis and reporting than there was in version two

- the setup procedure is made of two steps instead of six, and more feedback on eventual errors is given

- no ip detection, obfuscation, extensions to jdk are necessary for our very simple licensing schema (all this was there in version two)

- wa are also preparing an expanded overview, and an install guide

First screenshots of version 3

2005-09-29T19:19:00.000+02:00

These are two preview screenshots of Gantt and dependencies graphs from version 3:

This is a Gantt; this is zoomable, and is also a viewport. All this in pure HTML and Ajax; it is NOT a gif !

This is a dependency graph. Notice also the joystick on the right. These are incredible feats of Roberto Bicchierai.

He he he...

Teamwork 3 alpha

2005-09-06T22:16:00.000+02:00

We launched last week the new site and Teamwork 3 alpha early access program; our hidden goal was to have 80 subscriptions by September 15, and we already reached 81 today (Sept. 6, 2005) :-) .

Teamwork 3 is coming out beautiful beyond expectations. The ease of construction, the ergonomic features, the x-y layouts used in HTML for the graphs.. just great.

A lot of work still to be done; we'll keep adding features to the alpha, at least while the subscribers don't get too impatient. Right now we are building a wizards framework, a dinamic help and the setup procedures.

Moreover we put a demo of 2 on line. Some Japanese (probably ?) user set up a task structure as attached; what does it mean ? :-)

Electronic Arts

2005-09-03T17:50:00.000+02:00

Just read the "ea_spouse" chapter in Joel's "Best in Software Writings". Well, just never ever give a penny to Electronic Arts.

But again, what a desolated way of living, a company that structurally exploits the programmers just for the sake of it.. . Their site sadly hides this behind an ugly "A.C.T.I.O.N" acronym, which actually means: we will exploit you.

In our software house, we put work quality conditions as the very first value; this definitely needs blogging, too.

"Bin-jip" movie by Ki-duk Kim

2005-09-02T22:13:00.000+02:00

So crude and delicate, maybe 20 phrases in the whole movie.. beautiful.

Thin layer of sense

2005-08-28T17:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we went to San Gimignano to its modern art museum; they were showing a video by Shirin Neshat, an Iranian lady artist living in new York. The music is Philip Glass'; it's hard to tell what the video it's about, but in me it evoked how complex is the world of sense in which we live, unconsciously..

A civilized corner of Italy

2005-08-22T21:16:00.000+02:00

I've been to Siena Sunday to see the exposition on Pratt (an old time passion of mine),
http://www.fondazionemps.it/hugopratt/index.html
and surprisingly the town was really pleasant to visit. The exposition is in the context of a wonderful restoration, too. Italy seems an almost civilized place from Siena.

Teamwork progress

2005-07-22T21:28:00.000+02:00

We have been working a lot on Teamwork 3: the user stories, functional specifications and the core code have now reached substantial dimension. What's nice is that in migrating from 2 to 3, almost no data should be lost.

In the meantime, a few more Teamwork 2 releases, among which a nice contribution from the community, the dutch internationalization; I did a remote desktop installation in Malaysia, nice feeling.

In the last few days, Teamwork has been installed by Nasa, General Electric, World Bank.

Work management culture and techniques

2005-07-19T22:40:00.000+02:00

Following a suggestion from Teamwork's forum, I read "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement" of Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Its been a revealing read, very stimulating.

I still have to "map" many concepts from hardware to software production, which I hope to do in the next few days. Moreover I'm wondering how to enrich Teamwork with tools for a manager with such goals in mind. It's a must feature, maybe one of the weakest points of version 2.

Simpler equals in java

2005-07-13T10:56:00.000+02:00

A simply great and practical idea, just those that make me happy: introduce

a equals b

in java syntax:

http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=327&start=0&tstart=0

JBlooming interoperability

2005-07-12T12:48:00.000+02:00

In these days we worked on JBlooming interoperability: in particular, make it compatible with different id policies. Up to now, it assumed that objects had integer ids, using native id database generation. Now objects can have any Serializable as id, and can be hand, code, or db provided.
Hence reverse engineering operations are much easier. :-)

Java/IT culture

2005-06-30T22:30:00.000+02:00

Recently I think I've extended my Java (actually, IT) culture with some good books, this time not directly dealing with java:

Joel on Software
User Interface Design for Programmers

these are beautiful books on software real methodology

Calendrical Calculations

this one I actually bought for my collegues Roberto and Ilaria, who did a great job on developing JBlooming scheduler and calendar module.

The JBlooming mystery

2005-06-30T20:56:00.000+02:00

Now, there is a little mistery concerning JBlooming: it is an open source (LGPL) framework with which the Java developer can save hundreds of developers hours and produce really beautiful, ergonomic web applications. Yet we receive no feedback on it; the other Sourceforge project, Teamwork, has an incredible amount of activity, also on the development side. But for a developer, JBlooming can help much more then Teamwork. Strange.

Good and evil in software

2005-06-30T20:13:00.000+02:00

As a sort of game, with my friends we started dividing the IT universe in good and evil:

GENERAL LAWS
The rule of the software universe should be: get a lot with little effort.
Things of a sort will pair with things of the same sort.

GOOD
Hibernate, strong typing, intellij, dhtml, jtds and sql server, lucene, abstract support classes, sql, google, caucho resin, the relational model.

IN BETWEEN
Internet explorer, microsoft, firefox.

BAD
Model-view-controller, oracle, bea, xml, ant, ejb, all apache projects, jdeveloper, mysql (apart from utf-8), role-based security, java "final" keywork, java interfaces (causing the evil cast need), custom code, custom projects, lonely programmers, o-o considerations for persistence.

Of course this is quite rough, but it gives an idea on where we stand :-) .

Clean

2005-06-29T22:10:00.000+02:00

"Clean" is a movie I saw recently, which I loved. Some users comments

Actually the plot is nothing special; but its the ingredients that make it such a charm: the actors, the scenes, the soundtrack (even Maggie Cheung sings beautiful songs).
In some way its a perspective on life, and its sad and beautiful. I don't even know if I can suggest it, as I fear that its fits wery well me, but maybe not others. Its funny that what is there presented as today "indie" music, sounds quite similar to Velvet Underground' 60s music; anyway, its beautiful.

European constitution

2005-06-28T23:03:00.000+02:00

From a friend from the east:
"Just out of curiosity, i was just reading bout the Euro Constitution and wonder why so many nation against changing it. I mean, some countries voted a no and i gather that there is huge chaos. Local papers didnt explain the purpose for the constitution and the rationale for against. Can you tell me what u think bout it?"

Well, what I think is that the vote against was a colossal mistake. The "constitution" is actually a minimal set of rules, which would have facilitated integration and development. But actually europeans are angry against "europe" because they are angry for the Euro. You see, the advent of Euro forced governments to adopt a realistic finantial policy, instead of leveraging debt and inflation. People just can't count, they believe that the cause was the Euro, and are ignoring the fact that they have now access to loans with incredibly low rates, a finantial stability which before Euro was impossible, and many other advantages. The only hope is time.

Oracle sequences on Hibernate

2005-06-28T22:56:00.000+02:00

I've published a new page on Hibernate wiki:

Custom sequences

Teamwork 2 and 3 going on, and Jblooming on line

2005-06-25T23:00:00.000+02:00

We made it for a new release of Teamwork 2: 2.2.18. A lot of new features, can be seen at www.twproject.net
I tried to collect most of the forum's feedback and do what was possible.

Teamwork 3 is proceeding; we improved the general schema, and are developing the resources section. We will soon publish new specifics.
But what is really great is that Jblooming, the first ever productive java framework ( :-) ) is on line with a tutorial, at
www.jblooming.org

Productivity in software

2005-06-21T22:55:00.000+02:00

As I will have to give two more seminars on software production in the engineering department, I would like to refine my previous notes on software productivity. Now, which are the principles guiding my development ?

Well, the first and actually the only one is quality of the result. This is strictly linked to careful and continuous modeling of the matter at hand. Tools here are a mixture of intuition, practical sense, experience, some formal knowledge, a lot of technical knowledge, and a good object oriented modeling capability. So I assume that modeling is sacred, and most of the energy should be towards this.

By quality I mean a complex notion, which is not quality just from the developer' point of view (which includes the designers'), but also quality from the systemists and customers points of view. And by reactions I don't just mean immediate reaction, but real and satisfied usage of the software for many years. Now from such high ideal may consequences follow, of which at the moment only a few come to mind:

- concentrate on the business model, which may generate an architecture, not on the architecture first
- know the best tools which relive you from syntacticalities
- never write the same concept formlization twice in code
- always use strong typing

Now from these general consideration technical choices follow too. [to be continued]

Silly ideas on Java

2005-06-16T22:54:00.000+02:00

Even if its pure bile, I couldn't agree more:
http://www.jroller.com/page/fate/20050614#java6_delightful_new_features
on more or less the same line, in these days I'm trying to turn the intellij team to a sensible solution to the weird idea of compulsory html validation in intellij. some poster on the eap forum are so foolish to propose that html validation (like forgetting an alt on an img) should be at the same level of importance as the java validity of the resulting servlet, i.e. whether the jsp compiles or not. actually, one says that html validity is MORE important:
http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jsp?forum=22&thread=145269&tstart=0&trange=30

History of Open Lab, part III: people comes and goes

2005-06-12T22:52:00.000+02:00

The first person to "go" was "Nino", the shadow former partner of Matteo Bicocchi and his Prospero's books. In fact he never showed in the office, and we got him out of Open Lab with great relief.

In 2003 we started having enough projects in order to consider getting more people to work with us. Moreover the internal task distribution was going really smoothly, and we had managed to finish quite a number of projects. In particular in the end of 2002, Roberto Bicchierai of Rem Software and myself started working together on Teamwork 2, which was to turn from asp to java, and on a Vodaphone web application, which we finished quite successfully. This came to us hrough my friend Felice Carraro of Dada; after that we produced a synchronizing aplication for scientific museums. Hence I presented Open lab to programming students, we started some job interviews, and took two stageurs, one for development and one for promotion; one of these remained (the programming gui; the "commercial" girl was just hopeless), Matteo Rossi, and is to today our best worker.
Teamwork 2 started as a three person project, but fortunately it turned into a two people one, and hence did not follow the unfortunate adventures of Openvista, a society that Rem Software did with "Sesa Group", which lasted a few months; hence Rem hired several people, among which Ameliè Ngantcha, who is going to return to our tale. Others came and went, without getting to shape a stable group.
The graphics department started occasional collaborations with Tommaso Pecchioli.

History of Open Lab, part II -development

2005-06-10T22:52:00.000+02:00

From the very start, I organized development around a single build. This way you enforce brief development cycles, constantly refining build process. This line has been essentially preserved up to today, even if company's expansion and project acquisition have endangered and at times compromized this strategy. Now (2005) there is a team of 13 internal developers following my builds, plus a customer using my builds as API. As soon as jblooming is really out, this could get a really large group.

In fact Open Lab has around 100 releaed coomercial software projects, which are in reality all versions of the same application.

This is a great advantage if your aim is developing very few software products; it can be disastrous if your aim is to release custom solutions.

As for what "the" build is made of, this has changed quite in time; we moved from
(2001-2002) asp+access+html, to asp+access+dll, to asp+flash, or asp+flash+xml,
(2003-2004) to java classes + db4o+jsp, to to java classes + hand made o/r mapping+ pet store framework, to java classes + jdo + a simplified pet store ...

Today (2005) wa have our own complete and stable framework, jblooming, whose core is based on hibernate and an original idea of object-oriented/jsp/html combination which makes incredibly powerful display components.

History of Open Lab, part I - trial and error

2005-06-10T21:30:00.000+02:00

Open lab was founded in January 2001 in Florence by four partners:
Caterina Feroci, Laura Mirri, Matteo Bicocchi and myself.

We all voluntarily dropped our previous jobs as they didn't seem to have any sense or direction. Our main am was to build beautiful web applications; we still do web applications, I don't know if they are any more that beautiful. They surely are quite practical.
It was great fun just to set up the company; we did most of the interior decoration of our office (in Via Venezia, in Florence center town) by ourselves, and everybody liked it; we did a great opening party, with live music in the office.

Matteo and myself started working together in 2000, when I was employed in another software house; we had fun, and that gave us the idea to start a new company. We had some potential customers, but when we started really setting up the company, we had so much to do, and we were so uncertain about the technology, that we kept telling our potential customers that we would meet later, and later, and later... . When we belived to be ready to start our bigger contract at the time (it was only 11.000 of today's Euros, but for us it was big money), we were months late; so we went to the customer in panic. But to our surprise, they were happy to see us, and not at all angry for our delay; they are happy customers of ours to this day.

In the first two years, the company tried to apply the internal design and development skills in many fields, and in most of them we didn't succeed. We tried internal design, shop design, palace surface decorations; we even tried to put up a company for Beer production! As developers, we tried to produce and sell promotional flash games, in particular a race game to Continental, but it didn't work out; this was unfortunate, as we had a starting agreement with Unit9, a London based company that produces beautiful promotional games.
But stil one of the constant focus was the idea of producing a good web based team management solution: this way teamwork 1 was released. Almost nobody knew that it existed, but it was pretty (we sold 1).

Anyway, we had a vision, and everything else follows from that.

"A dog's got personality: and personality goes a long way" - Pulp Fiction.

Scheduler

2005-06-09T21:30:00.000+02:00

I've almost finished the blooming (www.jblooming.org) implementation of a scheduling engine. It resulted very powerful, using jdk5 multithreading, and a planning api more powerful then the usual java cron calendar implementation. Last but not least, we've built a "xy layout" set of components for the calendar visualizations, which is totally zoomable. See it soon in next Jblooming release!

Europe

2005-06-03T21:28:00.000+02:00

The French voted against the least possible European draft of a Constitution :-(. It's hard to believe that a country with such an internationalist, universal intellectual tradition could be so small minded.
In french there is a good word for such behaviour: minable.

After that, the silliest party on earth, the italian Lega, is now proposing a anti Euro referendum. Is so hard to accept that things are really getting worse; in fact its almost against human nature.

Sources of belief

2005-06-03T21:22:00.000+02:00

Does anyone really believe that earth is going around the sun ? I doubt it. I don't doubt that if we could follow all the reasoning and experiments of classical astronomy, we would say "earth is going around the sun". but believing it, making it an integral part of our everyday life, seems quite impossible to me; and fortunately so, as it is exactly this layer of beliefs that makes us confident enough in experiments so that we may say "earth is going around the sun".

Open source adventure

2005-03-04T21:04:00.000+01:00

So its two months since we went open source with teamwork at http://www.twproject.com. A lot of downloads, questions, feedback, and pats on the shoulders; not sold any service or customization, but we still hope. Well, we'll see.

Who am I

2005-01-01T15:21:00.000+01:00

I've written a while a go a short self introduction, which I copy here in order to present myself a bit.
Job: I am currently a software architect in Open Lab, a software house in Florence, Italy. I am also a founder of the company, that started in January 2001, and member of its board.
In the company my main tasks are:
- keep the development team informed on state of research
- lead the java development team
- develop in java and .net
- help the newly recruited developers gain the necessary skills
For getting software development references, I have been at least architect in all the java software productions of Open Lab.
Studies: I have prevously studied mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics in the universities of Florence (where I graduated in philosophy in 1994 with a thesis on Algorithms and meaning analysis), Gent (Belgium), Carnegie Mellon, Paris VII with philosophical foundational motivations.
Research: My current research areas include productive object oriented development, team integration software, models for object oriented programming. On these topics I am exchanging ideas with Alberto Peruzzi and Enrico Vicario of the University of Florence among others.

I am studying piano, too. I have a beautiful 6 months daughter , Maia.