Trenta anni dopo, il videogioco creato da Douglas Adams dalla sua "Guida galattica per autostoppisti" è online sul sito della Bbc. Ed è uno spettacolo, in tutti i sensi

Money quote: "Safari will now only keep settings in local storage for seven days, so if you save a game and come back a week later, it'll be gone. We're working on a long term fix for this, but in the meantime we can only advise using another browser to play the game or it'll be even more frustrating than usual.

Of course, you've chosen to play this game so that sense of permanent frustrating bafflement may be something you enjoy, in which case, please carry on as you were."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition

50 anni fa nasceva Creeper, il primo worm della storia dell'informatica - il mio articolo di qualche giorni fa per Wired

https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2021/02/20/creeper-primo-worm-informatica-cybersecurity/

L'idea alla base di questo saggio è molto semplice: vanno eliminati anche dirigenti della pubblica amministrazione, perché spesso la colpa di molte cose è loro ma non c'è una valutazione e una responsabilità simmetrica

Money quote: "I’ve talked a lot recently about bad management as a root cause of poor infrastructure, especially on Twitter. The idea, channeled through Richard Mlynarik, is that the main barrier to good US infrastructure construction, or at least one of the main barriers, is personal incompetence on behalf of decisionmakers. Those decisionmakers can be elected officials, with levels of authority ranging from governors down to individual city council members; political appointees of said officials; quasi-elected power brokers who sit on boards and are seen as representative of some local interest group; public-sector planners; or consultants, usually ones who are viewed as an extension of the public sector and may be run by retired civil servants who get a private-sector salary and a public-sector pension. In this post I’d like to zoom in on the managers more than on the politicians, not because the politicians are not culpable, but because in some cases the managers are too. Moreover, I believe removal of managers with a track record of failure is a must for progress."

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/02/06/the-need-to-remove-bad-management

Il BBC Micro, lo home computer creato dalla Bbc (!) compie 40 anni. Qui la sua storia

Money quote: "The project helped inspire a generation of coders."

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-56098808

Letture consigliate durante pandemia e lockdown

Money quote: "Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitude

Lo strano caso del successo di Alan Ford e del Gruppo TNT in Serbia e nel resto della ex Yugoslavia

Money quote: "The fact that Bunker’s humour was understood by his Yugoslav readers had a lot to do with translator Nenad Brixy. “He managed to create a peculiar language” Sršen explains, “through which all the characters spoke with a strange mixture of high style and street lingo, something originally theatrical and bizarrely funny.”"

https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/12465/alan-ford-comic-books-yugoslavia

Tra le più interessanti in uscita questo mese.

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/03/anime-streaming-marzo-2021/

Mac, iPhone, iPad: la sicurezza informatica secondo Apple - il mio articolo per La Stampa

https://www.lastampa.it/tecnologia/news/2021/03/07/news/mac-iphone-ipad-la-sicurezza-informatica-secondo-apple-1.39992056

Puf puf, anche questa domenica ce l'ho fatta: ho finito alle due di notte ma Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter della domenica, è pronta, in tutta la sua gloria e i suoi refusi (o i suoi gloriosi refusi, se preferite). Per iscriversi basta andare qua, come sapete:

https://antoniodini.com/iscrizione/

Niente di più facile. La cosa divertente di scrivere questa newsletter è che sta cominciando a prendere forma un "sistema" che coinvolge anche il mio sito personale, la scrittura con il markdown, la sincronizzazione dei contenuti con git, l'integrazione e deployment continuo di un sito statico in Jamstack. Tutto fatto a manina. Qualcosa racconto qui:

https://antoniodini.com/storie/computer/scrivere-con-git.html

ma il meglio deve ancora venire, se riesco a trovare il tempo per mettere assieme il ragionamento che vorrei fare su come si fanno i siti oggi e sul digital gardening. Intanto, anche questa domenica la newsletter è partita!

Una delle cose che si pensa quando si legge un articolo in inglese è che abbia un valore globale: se c'è una contrapposizione est-ovest, Asia-Africa-Occidente, ad esempio, noi italiani ci sentiamo dalla parte dell'articolista madrelingua e non nel resto del mondo. Invece, questo che peraltro è un tema interessante (la modalità occidentale di allevare i bambini piccoli è in rottura con quella del resto del mondo e della storia dell'umanità) diventa un trattato insulare e limitato, una cosa tipo anglosassoni-vs-resto-del-mondo. Però è interessante.

Money quote: "In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210222-the-unusual-ways-western-parents-raise-children

È un caso reale di “Bobby Tables”:


https://twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/1368004197166108676

(Il thread è uno spettacolo)

Compreso il consiglio: “If you decide to change your name, Rachel’); drop table AppleID_master; —
has a nice ring to it”

Questa è una domanda molto interessante e anche intelligente. Alla quale ho risposto nel modo sbagliato probabilmente

I migliori libri per costruire una strategia digital personale - il mio articolo per Macity
https://www.macitynet.it/i-migliori-libri-per-costruire-una-strategia-digital-personale/

La tilde perduta…

https://youtu.be/NoAzpa1x7jU?t=146

E se di sera tardi, prima di andare a letto, aveste voglia di leggere qualcosa di buono e di qualità, Nerdology, Sports and More di Alessandra Ortenzi è la vostra altra newsletter (io non mi offendo, anzi: mi piace un botto).

http://www.alessandraortenzi.it/nerdology-sports-and-more-la-mia-newsletter/

Infine, ecco a voi la puntata numero dieci di Tilde, il podcast che conduco con Riccardo. È passato un po' di tempo dall'ultima volta, ma è che siamo stati presi. Infatti nel frattempo abbiamo fatto un sacco di cose: un paio di lockdown, tanto lavoro su zoom, la spesa al supermercato, pure qualche giro attorno a casa e infinite maratone in soggiorno davanti alla Switch. Insomma, tanta roba. La puntata, intanto, eccola qua.

https://tilde.show/podcast-10/

Storia di Barbara Liskov, la donna che ha contribuito in maniera determinante alo sviluppo degli algoritmi moderni. Un pensierino per l’8 marzo.

Money quote: "By the time Barbara Liskov earned her doctorate in computer science from Stanford University in 1968, she envied electrical engineers because they worked with hardware connected by wires. That architecture naturally allowed them to break up problems and divide them into modules, an approach that gave them more control since it permitted them to reason independently about discrete components.
As a computer scientist thinking about code, Liskov had no physical objects to work with. Like a novelist or a poet, she was staring at a blank page."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/barbara-liskov-is-the-architect-of-modern-algorithms-20191120/

La storia dietro VLC (software che cambiano il mondo)

Money quote: "VLC is a juggernaut among media players. Since February 2005, it’s been downloaded 3 billion times, according to VideoLAN. Even before the nonprofit began tracking downloads, it was clear that VLC was a runaway success. In an era before Netflix and YouTube, users had few choices when it came to media software, and none of them were terribly good. There was Windows Media Player, a janky and underpowered program sufficient for entry-level users, as well as monstrosities like RealPlayer, which locked users into odd codecs and file formats. Though first developed in 1996, VLC was a breath of fresh air when it was released in 2001 under a GNU General Public license: It was customizable and high-powered, and, above all, it worked. That release extended VLC’s reach beyond École Centrale as the software was adopted by the wider public."

https://increment.com/teams/the-team-that-powers-vlc/

Come mi sono organizzato per pubblicare cose sul mio sito dall'iPad velocemente e senza distrazioni: "offline first"

https://antoniodini.com/on-writing/