Goodbye, Rick

As you probably already know, Rick Wright, founder and keyboardist of the Pink Floyd, passed away on 15th September.
I still remember the day in the summer of '89 when I, a young fan of the Pink Floyd, had the unique chance to shake his hand in Venice, when he arrived at the hotel in Lido (Venice) the day before the World famous concert Pink Floyd played in Piazza San Marco.
David Gilmour, in his website www.davidgilmour.com, remembers his friend with the following beautiful words:

Like Rick, I don't find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.

Back home - Pics of Indore

I am finally back home after spending my last two weeks in Indore, India, working with my colleagues (and now very good friends too!) of the Indore offices of HotWax Media.
Even if I have to admit that life and customs in Indore are totally different, and somewhat shocking too, from what I am used to in Padova I can really say I had a great time because I have found there a lot of good friends that did all the possible (and more) to make me feel like I was home.
Here are some pictures about this great experience, including pictures of the Sayaji Hotel, the inauguration party for the new HWM offices, a birthday party in the office (Happy Birthday Jyotsna!), me having some pleasant moments (and drinks) in a pub with Ashish, Vikas, Mridul, Ratnesh, Pranay and Rishi, the street food, the chaotic traffic of the city, etc. etc.

HWM presentation at the DAVV University of Indore

Today has been a great day: we did a presentation of HotWax Media and OFBiz at the Devi Ahilya University, Department of Computer Science & Information Technology of Indore. The students showed interest for the subject and after the presentation we had the pleasure to receive a present from the Head of the University, Dr. A.K. Ramani and we also had a nice conversation with him.
For me, it has been also a great chance to see an Indian University from the inside.

Animals in Indore

Some more pictures from Indore about some of the many free animals that walk around... this is amazing: you can meet cows, but also pigs and dogs, walking, or having a nap, in the middle of very crowded streets, the cars just move around them.
In the pictures below you can see a curious cow getting too close the building's fence and hitting a parked motorbike... funny.

My first day in Indore

As expected, the travel has been very long: it started from Venice at 10:30am on Saturday and finished at Indore at 9:30am today, with two connection flight in the middle, Frankfurt and Mumbay.
Now I am too tired to write here but I'd like to say that it has been a great day thanks to Anil, Ashish, Vikas (and their family members) and all the HWM team members (and friends).
Well... there is actually a lot more to say about this day full of events, maybe tomorrow after some rest!
In the meantime here are some pictures I took today (hotel room and city sight from its window, some street view pics with free animals walking around etc...); more to come soon.

Checklist before leaving

Well, my stuff is all packaged, the flight reservation is confirmed, the business visa is attached to my passport, my Mac is all setup, I have three good books in my bag ("Haunted" and "Stranger than Fiction" by Chuck Palahniuk, and "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu), my iPod is full of good music... I am ready to leave for Indore.
This is my very first trip to India; I am going to stay there for two weeks and even if I will be there for work (visiting the software development offices of the company I work for, HotWax Media) I am sure I will have a great time: I am excited to finally meet face to face with persons with which I have worked a lot in the last few months and to get in touch with the customs of such an amazing country.
I hope I will have a chance to post to this blog some pictures of my trip, while I am there.

Christian and me in Padova

Here are two pictures of Christian Geisert and me (I am the guy with the blu t-shirt), taken by Christian's wife during the day they spent in Padova a few weeks ago: they were in Italy for a summer holiday and they were so kind to spend a few hours in Padova so that we had a great chance to meet in person, chat about our work, interests, passions, OFBiz... and of course to drink a "spritz", the traditional (lightly) alcoholic drink of Padova.



Summary of Main new features in OFBiz - July

Here is the summary of the most interesting features developed in July 2008 by the Apache OFBiz open source project's community:

My Page:

• New application currently under development and is now fairly complete. This component shows all information for a specific user such as personal email, project tasks assigned, timesheet and company events such as holidays.

Party Component:

• Enhanced the communication event screens and created specific forms for emails and internal notes.
• created the possibility to create Customer requests from incoming emails which allows the import into the project manager component where request can be converted into project tasks
• When emails come into the system and the email is not known, a form is added which allows the quick creation of new parties. Also has a bulk delete button to delete incoming spam.

Order Component:

• Enhanced the Customer request screens and changed them according the OFBIz interface standards.
• Implemented returns of purchase orders to suppliers

Framework:

• Added support for default entity-group for entities: now, if an entity belongs to the org.ofbiz group, there is no need to explicitely specify this

All Components:

• a bunch of Beanshell scripts have been converted to Groovy scripts
• removed all the, no more needed after recent enhancement, entity-group.xml files

As usual, you can see the full list of new features here.

Cartman sings at the Congress

I know that South Park cartoons look ugly, are politically incorrect (using an euphemism) and are often offensive and gross but... I still think it is a great series (that stands as high as The Simpson's and Futurama).

In this clip Eric Cartman tries to persuade the government to revoke the ban on stem cell research for an egoistic and stupid reason (that is not what he states, i.e. to save his friend Kenny's life) and so he goes to the Congress and... sings the "Heat of the moment":



How couldn't you love this?

Summary of Main new features in OFBiz - June

Here is the summary of the most interesting features developed in June 2008 in the OFBiz open source project:

Framework:

• New deploy option for JBoss422
• Embedded Tomcat has been upgraded to 6.0.16
• Embedded Geronimo TX Manager have been upgraded to 2.1.1
• Added support for LDAP Authentication

User Interface:

• New and faster calendar lookups
• New collapsible lookup interface is slowly spreading in OFBiz (Ajax style)

As usual, you can see the full list of new features here.