Nicola Iarocci

Oh, joy. After many years with an iPhone, today I learned how to stop spam calls with a single, not-really-super-secret move. Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers That’s it. Unknown callers now go straight to my recent calls list for me to (eventually) review. Most importantly, the phone doesn’t ring. I initially had True Caller installed and enabled, which worked for a while. Spammers use throw-away numbers anyway, so it’s super-hard for tools like that to keep track. »

Yesterday I was at WPC 2022, “the most important Italian conference on Microsoft technologies”, where I presented a one-hour session titled “Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps with Microsoft Playwright.” Attendance was great and there was a lot of excitement up in the air; it was evident that people were happy to meet and interact in person again. After the forced two years hiatus, it was great to be back at a big on-site conference, let alone speak at it. »

Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious. More here. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

Ben Werdmuller has a terrific post up on his website. His “tortured” analogy of the web and governments as platforms for people to build upon is fascinating. I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. »

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement. The full story is available here (via). Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

The New Yorker, in The Man Who Explains Italy: The Italian podcaster Francesco Costa thinks that the foreign press’s fixation on creeping Fascism in the country is overblown and unhelpful. If the center-right coalition wins, “Will Italy be a police state? No,” he said. “Will it be very badly run? Yes.” Full article is available here. I’ve been following Francesco Costa for a few years. He’s talented, conscientious, brilliant, and gifted with good humor. »

Eve 2.0.2 was just released today. It fixes a problem introduced with v2.0 in which ETag generation failed if uuidRepresentation was not set in MONGO_OPTIONS. See issue #1486 for details. Many thanks @tgm for reporting and then contributing the fix. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

In my early morning stroll, I sometimes listen to audiobooks. This was the case with The Count of Monte Cristo. Rai Radio 3, the third channel of the national broadcasting service, has been airing Ad Alta Voce (Aloud) for many years. In the program, top-tier actors read old and new literary classics. The quality of these productions is astounding. Audio editions are often edited, which was the case with The Count, as the unabridged edition surpasses the 1200-page count (a little-known fact is that most printed editions are also edited for brevity). »

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s hot take on software quality: Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals. This leads to the insightful conclusion: »

Last weekend I went on a motorcycle trip with my club. Our goal was to visit the beautiful Dolomites in the Italian Alps1. We had twenty motorcycles on the road, evenly split between modern classics (Bonnevillles in all their variations) and adventure bikes (Tigers new and old). A great turnout considering that the weather forecast for the weekend wasn’t exactly great. Of all the TOMCC members who registered, only two were missing because they tested positive for COVID. »

My perception of zoos has always been of prisons—places of suffering where animals are held captive for human entertainment. Smiling Bears offered a new perspective. Some (hopefully most) zoos provide a safe harbor to abused and rescued animals who could never return to their natural habitats. Zookeepers like Else Poulsen care for these creatures, accompanying them in their rehabilitation process. I imagine not all zoos and zookeepers meet these standards, but it is reassuring to know these things happen. »

Today I released v3.4 of FatturaElettronica, a .NET open source project that allows validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the standard defined by the Italian “Agenzia delle Entrate”. It’s doing very well for such a niche project, with downloads now well beyond the one hundred thousand mark. Be aware that this release anticipates support for v1.7.1 of the specification going into effect on October 1, 2022. For more information, see the appropriate ticket and the changelog. »

I added a new tool to my amateurish DevOps toolbox. Developed in the open by Tom Williams, the Docker Event Monitor is a “tiny container that monitors the local Docker event system in real-time and sends notifications to various integrations for event types that match the configuration. For example, you can trigger an alert when a container is stopped, killed, runs out of memory or health status change.” At its core sits a simple python script that monitors the docker. »

Today I released Eve 2.0.1, which contains an essential fix if you’re using MONGO_URI to connect to your MongoDB instance. See the relevant ticket for details. I’ve also pinned Flask dependency to v2.1, as v2.2 brings some breaking changes that, you guessed it, break our CI runs. If you think you can help wiht that, please do so. The complete changelog is available here. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

A few days ago, I was browsing my Twitter feed when a suggestion from my friend @flaper87 caught my attention: On my “comfortably old” MacBook Pro1, Spotify has been an absolute hog. The simple act of opening it will require three hundred MBs. That’s a remarkable amount of memory for staying idle and doing nothing useful. Let it play for a few hours, and have fun glancing at CPU and RAM usage ramping up like there’s no tomorrow. »

This week the “Sunday Morning Reading Award” goes to Lisa Whittington-Hill, for her The Women Who Built Grunge on Longreads: Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy. More here. Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

Robin Rendle quoting Neil Gaiman, who is quoting G.K. Chesterton: Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated. I read somewhere that he based the Gilbert character from The Sandman on Chesterton, so it’s no surprise to find Gaiman quoting Chesterton in Smoke and Mirrors. Wanting to find the work in which the quote first appeared, I did a little research only to discover that G. »

As part of his captivating Hidden Heroes series, Steven Johnson publishes an account of the mother of all demos. More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the “mother of all demos” that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since. More here Subscribe to the newsletter, the RSS feed, or follow @nicolaiarocci on Twitter »

Open Culture shared a “jaw-dropping visualization of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ solo.” Indeed, it is stunning, beautiful and valuable. A visualization like this makes music much more accessible. Quoting Open Culture: Coltrane’s complexity is daunting for the most accomplished musicians. How much more so for non-musicians? It can seem like “you need a doctorate of music to go anywhere near his recordings,” Nicholson writes. But “nothing could be further from the truth. »

Bret Devereaux has long been my go-to source for all things ancient and military history. One thing I somehow missed reading from his incredibly resourceful website is the This Isn’t Sparta series. He recently published a three-year-anniversary series retrospective which promptly surfaced on my RSS feed, giving me a chance to catch up over the holidays. The whole thing is a very long read, with some installments more engaging than others but overall very enjoyable, eye-opening, and information dense. »