Fabrizio Balliano

Back in 2003, with CreaLabs we started the e-Socrates project, creating the first Italian portal promoting the free e-learning philosophy, because we truly believe that knowledge must be free.

Some days ago Simone Brunozzi told me about an idea he was working on, a community made by students and teachers, together creating documentation that would be grouped in books, maybe printed, obviously released under a free license. Hey this is just a small resume about his idea, please visit his blog for further information!

This evening, driving back home after work, I was thinking about Italian high schools, let’s talk with some numbers (examples):

• every 2 years every student has to buy 10 books, 40 Euro every book
• 40 * 10 / 2 = 200 Euro/year
• let’s think about 2 million of Italian students (actually there are many more, but let’s take some margins)
• 200 * 2,000,000 = 400,000,000 Euro/year

Let’s imagine what my country could do with only half of this amount every year… with 200,000,000 Euro/year Italy could pay a huge team of teachers that would create all the books for the next year. All this books should be released under a free license and freely available for everyone to download. Many low cost print services could be used for who students that want a paper copy of the books (I think that a paper copy could be given to any student for free).

Amouts are higher than what I wrote because in Italy there are more that 2,000,000 high school students… what a better world could be…

Maybe I’m not the first having his idea, it seems so obvious…

Enabling compiz by default is one of the goals of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) release, but following a thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list it seems that the final decision was not taken yet.

I agree with all the points of view, compiz has some major problems and dependencies.

Just an overview on the main graphic cards:

• Intel: open source drivers, compiz runs smoothly AFAIK, it could be enabled by default.
• ATI: open source drivers have some performance issue, proprietary drivers do not support AIGLX and anyway compiz has some bugs with these cards (I’ve one of those inside my laptop) thus I don’t think enabling compiz by default it’s a good choice now.
• Nvidia: open source drivers do not support 3D (I’m not talking about nouveau ’cause they are still too experimental), proprietary drivers are really good but they’re not bundled with Ubuntu thus compiz can’t be enabled by default.

I’m sorry but I can’t find a way compiz could be enabled by default… I think the right decision is to disable it until all graphic cards would be supported and bugs would be solved. I also think that, if this feature is so important for Ubuntu, Canonical should hire some programmers and sponsor the compiz development.

with the help of Google, creating a company named gBox. This will only be a time-limited experiment to check the market but it’s always a good thing.

Original news on Digg and Last100.

This post is OT in my blog but I think this news on TechCrunch needs attention, because technology should always be created keeping “life” in mind, any form of life.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQe1tssyGkU]

htmlentities, htmlspecialchars and html_entity_decode have 3 parameters:

1. string to be converted
2. quote_style
3. charset

but charset default is ISO-8859-1 and there’s no way to change that default, what happens if you’re porting 1,000,000 lines of code from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8? you’ve to wrap those functions or patch every call passing all the 3 params. All these 2 solutions are bad solutions.

PHP should implement a customizable default, maybe also reading mbstring.internal_encoding if available.

In the latest days I took a deep breath and went on finishing some pending tasks on P4A devel snapshot, they were waiting since too long… I was thinking about releasing the 2.1.4 as 2.2.0 but… better wait till the end of summer.

The main part of the work was finishing porting the P4A_DB_Navigator drag&drop to jQuery, finally this task is over and it seems to work the right way.

In this release you’ll find the color picker field type and some libraries updates.

Here you have the changelog:

- P4A_Field::setType(’color’) was added with nice color picker plugin (fabrtastic) from jQuery
- a bug with file upload error trapping was solved
- FCKEditor was updated to 2.4.3
- jQuery was updated to 1.1.3.1
- jqModal was updated to 2007.07.30 +r10
- P4A_DB_Navigator drag&drop functionalities were implemented thru jQuery

and the download link:
http://tinyurl.com/2ruu76

I took a few minutes to release the new beta, there were some interesting changes that need to be tested by users so here you have :)

Changes since beta1:

* GUI:
* The question about which desktop environment will be used to manually
customize the ISO was removed, this is now autodetected by the backend
* Fix for bug 116018 (–nofork option for adept)
* A question about removing win32 files was added
* “others” option was added to the desktop choice to allow a better
usage with Ubuntu derivatives

* Backend:
* Package manager and console applications run inside the livecd are now
autodetected
* uck-remaster-remove-win32-files script was added
* Support for Xubuntu/XFCE was enhanced

Download:
http://tinyurl.com/2cvzkj