Matteo Vescovi's blog

I have just seen Avatar.

I am at a loss for words to describe how absolutely brilliant it was.

I could say that it is visually stunning and evocative.
That everything you see is so beautiful and imaginative that it takes you to a different world and makes you forget about everything else.

Today I married Wala.

Visit our wedsite to find out more and see our wedding photoes.

Nokia has recently announced the introduction of the stunning n900, the evolution of the n770, n800, and n810 internet tablets. The n900 is not just an internet tablet, it is a phone!

This announcement has sparked renewed interest in the maemo development environment for the n-series devices.

Rossnowlagh. Wala and I have been there. We surfed, ate vast seafood platters, drank refined wine, walked the beaches. We spent two wonderful days there, but we still don't know how to pronounce the town's name!

What a wonderful spot it is. Just north of Bundoran, it is one of the best spots in the Irish surfing mecca that is Donegal county.

Low and behold: GNU Emacs 23.1 is out. The latest release of the greatest text editor ever written includes a number of features and enhancements.

I have built in on my GNU/Debian Lenny box and started using it immediately. It is amazingly good. I just love the traditional Emacs look dressed GTK+ widgets and TrueType font support.

A powerful and flexible tool that comes with every Windows XP setup CD is the Recovery Console.

It proved really helpful in repairing a damaged partition boot sector in one Windows installation.

Recovery Console turns out to be useful, even when safe boot mode and other startup options do not work. This is certainly the case when the partition boot sector, containing Windows boot code, has been overwritten.

Restart the computer from Microsoft Windows setup CD. At the first prompt, start the Recovery Console by pressing R.

On Sunday 29 March 2009, I ran a distance of 10km in 42 minutes and 27 seconds around Phoenix park, Dublin.

No, I wasn't being chased by a giant panda bear. No, you wouldn't commonly find panda bears in Dublin. Besides, there is still some controversial debate on whether pandas are actually bears.

I ran in the Great Ireland Run 2009, one of the top running events taking place in Dublin. The race attracted over 11,000 other participants and was even televised on the national channel.

I covered the 10km distance in 42:27, finishing in position 392. I was delighted with the result!
I had set my heart on running the race in under 43:00, so I patted myself on my back after crossing the finishing line. Mission accomplished!

Etimology
From speaker + -ectomy

Noun
speakerectomy (plural speakerectomies)
1. (surgery) The surgical procedure for the removal of the pc speaker kernel module.

If you ever wanted to prevent the ever so annoying pcspkr kernel module to automatically load on system boot, you can add the following stanza to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file:

blacklist pcspkr

Tested on Debian Lenny, works a charm!

When working on a multilingual Drupal website, you might want to only show a block on pages that are translated in one particular language.

This is particularly useful since one might have a block in English, which is meant to be displayed only on English pages, and a block in Italian, to be shown only on Italian pages.

I won money on scratchcards!

Considering that I paid nothing to get the scratchcards, my ROI approaches infinity. Pretty good, huh?

Here's the proof: this photo shows the three winning scratchcards, together with a clear shot of my left thumb, index, and middle finger. You might also make out some of my other left fingers... but the real focus of this photo is the scratch cards! They paid off 15 euro, 4 euro, and 5 euro respectively (from top to bottom), bringing the grand total to 24 euro.

If you are wondering how I came into possession of three winning cards without having to pay a cent for them... it's no big mistery, I got them as a birthday gift.