Matteo Vescovi's blog

That Google released a massive corpus of data based on the vast amount of web pages that their GoogleBot crawler indexes is old news.

Don't you just love the subtle reference to the "All your base are belong to us" phenomenon. Incidentally, all my X display manager sessions great me with the catchy "All your base are belong to us" motto. So do my screensavers. I know...

If you paid any notice to the title, I am sure you guessed that it is a metaphor. I would hardly write a blog entry about an actual storm or the quiet that ensued after it.

This is about no atmospheric event, even though the significance of what happened in the last few days is as important as the world itself and it shook my world even more than a seismic event could do.

Wala and I bought a house and moved in last weekend.

Mmmh, I made it sound like everything happened in a day... it actually took a bit longer than that. Much longer than that, in fact!

It all started five months ago, when the realization that our current apartment was getting a bit to small downed on us. We immediately discarded the idea of looking for another place to rent.

Years ago I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop as a gift for my loved one. Granted, it was a good few years ago, when IBM still owned their laptop business, well before Lenovo acquired their Thinkpad line of portable computers. The laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 600, equipped with an Pentium II processor, 64 MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, has worked consistently and surprisingly well.

Until a few days ago, when it started to report BIOS error codes 161, 192, 163 on bootup.

What's a man to do, if not disassemble the machine open and fix the problem? Read on for an account of what was wrong with the laptop and how the problem was fixed.

I just won a bid on an awesome ultra-mobile slick Dell laptop!

Yahoo!!! I got this featherlight, ultra thin and very powerful notebook from Ebay.
It is only 1.36kg in weight. It is only an inch thick. It's got a 12.1 inches display.

I can't wait to entirely wipe out all the load of crappy proprietary software that comes preloaded on Dell machines and install my operating system of choice!

Today marks my second year since I joined IONA.

I am sure you've all heard that Australia outlawed incandescent light bulbs.

I have to admit that the Australian government once again surprised me for its forward thinking and that every other country should take example from their smart and responsible move.

I went to the markets in Thomas Street today.

The market is on every Saturday and it is right on our doorstep.

It is my trusted and reliable source of vegetables and fruit. Gotta have my tomatoes... can't do without!

One thing I love about this market is that I can find better quality fruit and vegs than I can get in supermarkets.

It is one of those things that makes me realize how convenient our apartment is, right near the centre of town, well serviced and close to many amenities.

...or the art of recovering from a bios flashing gone bad.

Picture this scenario: you set about flashing your mainboard bios with an updated version, but something went horribly wrong and now your computer is no more useful than a giant paperweight.

I sincerely wish you will never have any use for the information contained in this article. In the unfortunate event that you do, I hope this information will make your life a little bit easier and help you fix what seems to be an insurmountable problem.

I realize what I am about to write will sound highly unlikely and quite hard to believe, but rest assured it is the truth I speak. And you do not have to take my word for it, I have evidence to back my claim.

So here it goes. A fine sunny day, I went skiing with a good old buddy of mine in ski resort close to Lecco, at the footsteps of the alps, in northern Italy. The resort, Piani di Bobbio, is admitedly not one of the best for either its slopes quality, beauty of scenery, abundance of snow, or ski-lifts' efficiency.

Nowadays you see many people tapping and scribbling at their new fancy PDAs while waiting for the bus or commuting on train. These new personal digital assistants come with all the bell and whistles: bright color screens, generous memory, good applications, etc.

If you though that I am listing all the upsides of these devices to lead up to the point when I point out the inevitable downsides, you'd be right. However, you'd be wrong to believe that the downsides I thought of were that these devices don't run Linux. As a matter of fact, many of them do.