WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference tomorrow and Saturday in Milano

The free WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference looks very interesting with tracks for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, cross platform development etc. There will be a parallel Mobile Hackathon if you want to show of your coding skillz.

Plenty of interesting topics on the agenda.

Friday 13th

Disaster struck Friday:

You can say what you want about the dreaded BSOD on Windows but at least it tells you something.

Murphy's law struck at the worst possible time (of course) as I had just moved a lot of photos from my digital camera to my harddisk for editing and I hadn't uploaded them to Picasa yet. 

PhotoRec to the rescue, again, as it was able to recover all photos from the memory card. I've used in the past when my Compact Flash card got corrupted. PhotoRec managed to recover all the pictures including old, partially overwritten, photos. It's free, it works and runs on just about every OS there is. What more can you ask for?

I've got almost all my data in the cloud so I didn't loose much but I did loose some Android code I was playing around with. Time Machine would have kept my data safe but I cannot use it on my work machine so I put together a quick script using rsync to backup my personal directory yesterday. Let's see if it works on Friday January 13th 2012...

Challenge: a new dinner recipe each week

I'm trying a less extreme version of Matt Cutts' 30 day challenge for the next few months; at least one new dinner recipe each week.

Why?

I have a set of dinners recipes that I really like so I end up making them over and over again instead of trying something new. It's not a problem from a nutritional point of view due to the variety (meat, fish, pasta, salads, etc) but it gets boring after a while. The kids are old enough to try something new and tell what they think my experiments so why not?

What?
Try at least one new recipe each week.

The first experiment is: Meatballs in tomato sauce (automatically translated so be careful...) with spinach as a side dish:

The Human Chaos Monkey

I have never worked on a project with an automated Chaos Monkey, but I have had the great pleasure of working with a human Chaos Monkey for many years (I'm sure you know who you are :-)

This particular Chaos Monkey insisted on;

1. Having everything load balanced/replicated even in the testing environment (both for testing and for making sure it matched the production environment as much as possible)
2. Making sure that the replicated services worked correctly but killing one instance, waiting for it to fail over then kill it again to make sure it failed back.
3. Running a short stress test even for minor changes
4. Running long, preferably over the weekend, load tests for major infrastructure changes

The result was a rock solid infrastructure that had close to zero downtime apart from planned maintenance windows where changes depended on other systems. The outages we had were due to external systems replying slower than required so we implemented a killer monkey that recycled com+ processes taking to long.

Making the process clear upfront is a great help; there is no way your code is going into production until you've passed the Chaos Monkey.

Five-leaf clover

Four-leaf clovers should bring luck. What about the five-leaf clover I found in the local park?

Too close to Milano and pollution or will I be extra lucky?

Reading protected PDF files on the Amazon Kindle 2

I recently bought a new Nikon DSLR on Amazon.fr as it had the best price I could find in Europe. As usual it arrived in no time in perfect condition but it only had the French manual. I found an English version of the  PDF version of the Users' Manual on the Nikon web site but is not readable by the Amazon Kindle 2 as printing is password protected.

I already own a paper copy of the manual so I don't feel guilty about removing the password protection of the PDF file so I can read it on my Kindle. This one line command on Mac/Linux uses GhostScript to remove the password protection:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=unprotected.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f protected.pdf

It also reduced the size of the file from 23Mb to 14Mb :-)

The first real motorcycle trip of the year

Thick fog in Milan, humid and cold this morning but I decided to trust the weather forecast that promised sunshine further north. Just above freezing until I hit the first hills and Lago di Segrino. Took a quick stop at Madonna del Ghisallo just to enjoy the warm weather (+10), blue sky and fantastic view.

The road up to San Primo was surprisingly good considering the time of year. Only found a few places close to the parking where the road was completely covered by ice.

Didn't stop for lunch at Rifugio Martina this time which is a shame as they have excellent food and a view of both the Lecco and Como branches of the Como lake.

View of San Primo close to the Rifugio Martina restaurant:

Headed down to Onno instead which offered a great view of Mandello del Lario, home town of Moto Guzzi