Miscellaneous

Preamble I would like to say “recently”, but actually is almost a few years I heard - and I’m still hearing a lot about Machine Learning and I didn’t want to believe it until now - believe me, I truly didn’t want to believe it - but yes here we are Machine Learning ufficially replace Big Data as buzzy word of the this past years, most problably will be still the word of the next year and I could not be more sad, frustrated, and worried about. Please haters don’t hate me, Internet don’t misunderstand me, companies don’t hire me, but first of all - please - don’t teach anything to your machines before finishing this post (!) 🤓 because they never learnt anything until now and they always felt good about so please - keep them simple operating system as they are, or at least talk with them before enrolled them in any advanced analytics course. ...

Prelude Disclaimer this post contains references to real problems, addressed in a disuruptive and totally not informed way. Lot of employees were mistreated to have enough material to write this post. What you will read is played by professionals: dont’t try this in your Company. The truth about companies Today every company in this beautifull world suffers the same problem: the migration problem. Yes, I know you got it and you’re kind of thinking “what the fuck?! Am I NOT alone in this shit?!?!” and the answer is “Yes. You’re not. And most probably is the only good news, if it is”. Yeah, you correctly understood THAT’s The - Problem - (of) TODAY, but it was already yesterday and most probably - and unfortunately - will be even tomorrow. And, of course, this Problem - in memories of all employees became crazy for this, let call it simply The One from now on - doesn’t have a real solution. It’s not like choosing where you want to spend two weeks in the summer - maybe it should. Let’s investigate a little bit why 🧐 ...

Prelude As far as I know there are many ways to create today in IT. What is becoming more difficult is doing it properly and taking the right decisions but (spoiler)… But… I’m starting feeling that my repository is on the right direction to be self.deployable and agnostic. Above the infrastructure, which is provisioned by terragrunt and terraform, one or more actor(s) is placed (i.e. Jenkins, but whoever it is), the actors will be redeployed, the pipelines restored and they will start redeploy applications (even pieces of infrastructure with dependencies) on their behalf to the various parts of the infrastructure. ...

Prelude Ok, first of all: I know, I have already used the yoda picture below in the past, but even if I am not at all a fan of the Star Wars saga, I like it. ATTENTION! This is a deeply desperate post: don’t judge me, I’m sad, I’m alone, it’s raining, I don’t feel to have any perspective but there’s a positive thing: I’m still learning. So… let’s divide the complaints by sectors. ...

Much more than a post What is the quantum theory? As said by quantumexperience official site by IBM, it’s an elegant mathematical theory able to explain the counterintuitive behavior of subatomic particles, most notably the phenomenon of entanglement. In the late twentieth century it was discovered that quantum theory applies not only to atoms and molecules, but to bits and logic operations in a computer. This realization has been bringing about a revolution in the science and technology of information processing: I decided to write some notes to better explain, from a physics-agnostic computer scientist’s point of view XD, what I understood - and it is certainly wrong - about Q until now and why I think it’s an amazing field for computer science. For skilled guys, here latex source (and here pdf pre-compiled version) that collect my personal notes about IBM Q platform, in general the quantum-computing world. I was also invited in Verona by the Quantum Research Group of the Department of Computer Science - why? don’t know, maybe the coolest guys were sick 😂 - to talk about the platform and we had a really interesting brain-storming conversation about a quantum version of the Tris game I am working on 😎 ...

Preamble Recently I became nostalgic and fascinated with stuff from the past, so I decided to create a Vagrantfile to work with FreeBSD1. Why FreeBSD? Because as a developer, I really like Docker and I started looking in the past to find its historical birth: in fact, as a concept, Docker is no so recent as you think, and I think it exists also because of the works of some other bigs from 80’, such as Poul-Henning Kamp2. Starting from its work and using a FreeBSD installation I did some experiments with jails, to understand better what they really are, how they works - how can you create what it will look like a vintage container - and why you should use them in a FreeBSD environment - at least, to learn something new. ...

Merry Christmas by nerds Here we are!! Christmas holidays are coming and it’s time to collect nerd greetings for nerd friends! In this article I have collected some of my favorites: starting from css to the most unhealthy c code in the world, I hope you enjoy these repositories / snippets / gist / sketch! Best wishes for happy holidays! CSS While I was looking for some cool css stuff to share with you, I found this fantastic gist that show the kind of magic a web expert can do with a bunch of css lines. Riddle: what do you see if you use IE as a browser? The answer after the preview! ...

The Doomsday rule A few months ago I came across the name of J. H. Conway: you’re wondering who the hell he is. Well, Conway is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics and he is the invention of the Game of Life. Ah, I was forgetting one last thing: he is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey1. Ok. let’s respect this guy but…what would I talk to you about? Well, in this article I will talk about a magic trick: the Doomsday rule. ...

Prelude Nobody ever tells you enough: you need to know the fundamentals. Ok - what am I talking about? I would rather limit myself to talking about computer science, something I really do not know about. Intro As this blog says, I’m an IT guy, and I reiterate that…I do not know anything about computer science. It is of course a fault of mine, at least in part, but I think it is also due to the time we live, the opportunities that surround me, the needs of the market, an endless amount of statistics about the world, the number people who live, the kind of people who are gone, the people who govern, the people who don’t, the available types of work, the new laws, the old laws, the borders, netflix-facebook-twitter-snapchat-telegram-instagram-pinterest-reddit-batman, certainly also because of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and so many others things. I think I will go through some of the reasons that I feel are the most important ones to explain why I feel a lack of knowledge and why I am disappointed about it - more in general, about the global lack of fundamentals. ...