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A beautiful childhood I’ve never been a fan of videogames, neither as a child nor today: do not get me wrong, as many guys of my generation I also owned and played with the legendary PlayStation 1 (1995)1 and PlayStation 22 by Sony and the Nintendo Game Boy3. It was fun, but not so much as playing to videogames born a few years before I was born. In the 80s, there were not yet the powerful graphics chips that today can be found with a few hundred euros. How did the videogames work? It’s simple: without graphics. There were many textual games and in my opinion, for many vintage lovers, they would still be cool today. My generation has lost this advantage of literaly building with fantasy the world around a game. So, some days ago I found my self thinking back to Sheldoon Cooper that plays with the game Dungeon in the Big Bang Theory4, or to the kids of Stranger Things by Netflix, or to my father, to whom I gave an original Playstation 1 with the first TombRaider(s), and I asked myself how it would be possible today to play again one of those text games that were so popular in that decade…to the point of deciding to create one of my own. ...

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. ...

A journey through the network - Introduction During the last year I understood one thing: sooner or later everyone should review network notions, so I decided to start writing articles about network fundamentals. As a main source I would use Computer Networks and TCP/IP Illustrated. In this article, I will talk about two important network architectures: the OSI reference model and the TCP/IP reference model. These two model has opposite characteristics, in particular: ...

Predix Machine and how to configure them In September, waiting for a contract proposal from the company where I currently work, I wrote a tool for the (more or less) automatic configuration of Predix© Machine. Predix©1 is the platform created by GE for Industry 4.0, powered by CloudFoundry2, to securely connect machines, data, and analytics to improve operational efficiency, help you develop, deploy, and operate industrial apps at the edge and in the cloud. As part of my internship I worked with the predix machine and I shared my work to the GE platform. GE mantains an open repository with predix tool ...

History We can date the birth of artificial neural networks in 1958, with the introduction of Perceptron 1 by Frank Rosenblatt. It was the first algorithm created to reproduce the biological neuron. Conceptually, the easier perceptron that you might think of is made of a single neuron: when it’s exposed to a stimulus, it provides a binary response, just as would a biological neuron. This model differs greatly from the neural network involving billions of neurons in a biological brain. Shortly after his birth, the researchers showed the world the problems of Perceptron: in fact, it was quickly proved that perceptrons could not be trained to recognize many classes of input patterns. To get a more powerful network, it was necessary to take advantage of multiple level of units and create a multilayers perceptron, with more intermediates neurons used to solve linearly separable2 subproblems, whose outputs were combined together by the final level to provide a concrete response to original input problem. Even though the Perceptron was just a simple but severely limited binary classifier, it introduced a great innovation: the idea to simulate the basic computational unit of a complex biological system that exists in nature. ...

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. ...

Recipe for a good meal A few months ago I started working with Golang to a proof-of-concept project using the amazing goa package (thank you atosatto for your advise): I omit the praise, I would only say that - imho - Golang it’s a very funny language to use for many reasons (stay tuned, I will write about Golang and my favourite packages). However, in this post I want to share a little piece of my experience about this project: the main ingredients for this recipe are Golang (in particular the goa package) and Docker - with some piece of Angular 4, nginx, and minor stuff. I excluded the storage part so the two elements of the boilerplate I will talk about live in separate container - you can of course orchestrate with k8… ok, whatever you want :P ...

Why Java why now I recently followed a course1 on YouTube by Adib Saikali (NewCircle Instructor) about the key features introduced in Java > 8: it’s an old post regarding old stuff but…I collected some notes (mainly because I need to write down what I’m listening to to stay focused and learn new concepts) that I decided to share with you. This is to say, this post is for every one that had put aside Java for a while and is now looking for a quick overview of the key aspects - exactly like me some weeks ago - to improve his abilities in coding, taking advantage of the old (n.d.r.) features introduced a few years ago. For thus who missed the footnote before and want to jump directly to the lesson, here you can find the main source of the content of the next paragraphs. ...

The problems of life Each of us has dreams, aspirations, hobbies, interests, but also hundreds of deadlines, a thousand commitments, ten thousand thoughts, a hundred thousand different problems to cope with every day. I am a computer scientist and personally all these things in my life translate into a huge pile of [things/books/articles/guide/blogs] to read, which by the way are very often interrelated. The situation is more or less this: ...