hackademix.net

As usual for very ambitious projects, more than one week later than the planned release date.
But definitely worth the waiting, as testified by this exclusive screenshot.

Davide had no better stuff to do, so here I am (hating him), abiding to these rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

7 Facts

1. I don’t consider myself a bearded guy: I shave my face whenever I find 10 spare minutes to do it. That’s once per month on average, therefore for most people I meet I am a bearded guy nonetheless.
2. I received a fifteen years long salesian catholic education (7 years with nuns, while I was 4-10, and 8 years with priests, 11-18). I suspect this had a big part both in the depth/breadth of my scriptural/doctrinal knowledge, and in my ultimate (consequential?) militant atheism. Which prompts an interesting paradoxical question: what should I better do to raise my soon to be released child as a free thinker?
3. My first computer was a Commodore 64… wait, you might know this one… OK, but you may not know that when I was 12 I wrote a trilogy of C64 school-themed video-games depicting my priest-teachers as flying horned devils. I sold them among my schoolmates with some good financial success (that was a so called “elite” school).
4. My first web page, established on Geocities back in the past century and entirely built with Amiga technologies, was the Marxism-Leninism-Prodism-Gargarism home page. I lost my credentials, and even if I did try several times to make Yahoo pull it down I’m afraid it will persist as an indelible stain on my past. It was somehow prophetic about the dissolution of any serious left-wing in Italy, though…
5. I met my wife, a teacher of Greek and Latin and a published author of school textbooks, when we both were 15, and we’ve been good friends albeit living in two different towns for more than ten years, meeting once every two years or so. Then I had to teach a short course in her town, staying there for a couple of weeks, and when I was about to leave I suddenly asked her to marry me. She just exploded in a loud laughter. But after less than of one month, she relocated to live with me. I punished her offensive initial reaction by making us “live as public sinners” for another ten years, until I decided it was time to perpetuate our genes :)
6. Both my thumbs can bend backwards by 90 degrees (much like in Andrès Segovia’s right hand).
7. Since I was 18 I wear an hammer and sickle-shaped piercing on my left earlobe.

7 people I’d like to inflict the same agony

• Gareth Heyes, because he blogs too much.
• Robert “RSnake” Hansen, because he almost doesn’t blog anymore.
• Eduardo “Sirdarckcat” Vela, before he stops blogging for ever (he knows why).
• Billy Rios, so he can take a break from the impossible mission of securing Microsoft’s stuff.
• Wladimir Palant, so he can take a break from his efforts to make Adblock Plus supersede NoScript.
• Giuliano Masseroni, because Mozilla is spelled “Mozilla” in Italian too.
• Jeremiah Grossman, because he’s such a fan of NoScript.

Planned final release date: Jan 28th 2009.

Also released this week:

• NoScript 1.8.1.5, featuring several HTTPS effectiveness enhancements
• FlashGot 1.1.1.6, improving FlashGot Media compatibility with non-Flash streaming movies.

As you’ve probably heard, the Firefox Summit 2008, albeit great for meeting face to face people I only knew through IRC or Bugzilla, has been quite challenging:

1. Besieged by bears
2. Cut away from the rest of the world by a crash bug in the Whistler-Vancouver communication module
3. Lost in the dark because of a truck-based DOS attack

We must all thank Dan Portillo for the (much) good of the Summit he masterly organized and the great job he made in working around the issues listed above, but on the other hand they might have been prevented perhaps by choosing a less hazardous place, since “Whistler” was the code-name for Microsoft Windows XP…

However, when yesterday night, after a 36 hours trip, I was finally back in Palermo believing it was all over, I went to get back my baggage — including most of my t-shirts, 3 pants, 9 bottles of maple syrup for my relatives and friends — but… it obviously wasn’t there. OK, I should have expected some problems since I packed also one leg of Wladimir Palant’s, which I had to smoke (on pure maple wood) the day of the power outage, before it started smelling inside my useless fridge.
After waiting about one hour because nobody in the airport could say if the unloading operations were done or not yet (what about implementing a callback architecture or a notification bus?), I had to formally claim it lost and was given a link to a website for tracking the baggage recovery process.

So this morning I tried submitting this form, but I got redirected to a page showing the following error message:

Il sistema non può indviduare* una lima valida per la vostra entrata.

For those who don’t speak Italian (like the author this disturbing text, I hope), this sounds like

The system cannot find a rasp suitable for your entrance.

As you can imagine, I was quite glad the system couldn’t ;)
Nonetheless, I still needed to know about the destiny of my baggage, so I retried on a clean profile: same result!
In the end I reluctantly switched the rendering engine through the IE Tab extension, and the system finally decided to be more collaborative: it reported there was no available tracking info yet, but at least it stopped threatening “my entrance” with steel tools.

At that point I checked all the browsers I’ve got at hand, with the following results:

• Gecko-based: RASP
• IE: OK
• Linx: RASP
• Opera: OK
• Safari: RASP

Before you ask, yes I tried to fake my headers via the User Agent Switcher extension.
Any clue?

* this misspelling seems even to rule out a machine translation with no human intervention

Just not to be always destructive, a couple of flash(!) news about browser plugins issues we discussed in the past:

1. The “Quicktime pwns default browsers” bug, after being worked around by Mozilla with the release of Firefox 2.0.0.7, has been fixed on the proper Apple side. Even if the advisory page refers to a SEP 21 date, the actual software update as been published right now.
2. The Java evil popups I demonstrated two months ago have been addressed by Sun.

On a side note, this Saturday I’m gonna get married.
Cheers :)