The Catholic Church

Reading “The Case of the Pope” by Geoffrey Robertson QC I am discovering a lot of interesting facts concerning the current pope and the way in which the Vatican operates. It was written in a somewhat boring way and contains several repetitions, but I recommend it to both catholics and non-catholics.

Mussolini's Racism

While researching for the historical novel I am writing, I stumbled onto the so called “Manifesto of Race”, signed by ten Italian scientists and published in the magazine “La difesa della razza” (“The Defence of the Race”) on August 5, 1938. It provides a glimpse into the Fascist ideology concerning an area that, I believe, is poorly known. Somehow, I feel compelled to translate the document into English for those who don’t understand Italian.

Is this true about Islam?

Earlier today, I viewed a YouTube video that makes statements about Islam.  I confess that I found it a bit disconcerting.  Unless somebody managed to get it removed, you will find it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib9rofXQl6w&f.

Photovoltaic Panels Update

At the end of the post titled “Photovoltaic Panels” of September 8th, I talked about my intention to extend my PV system. I did, and here is a new picture of my roof showing the new array.

The responsibility of the pope

I just finished watching the Australian talk show Q&A (Questions and Answers), in which a panel of five well known people (politicians, intellectuals, journalists, etc.) answers questions asked by the public. One of the panelists, Geoffrey Robertson QC, is known to have suggested that the Pope should be formally held responsible for the abuses of catholic priests against children. During the programme, he was asked to explain why the pope should be held accountable for what he clearly condemns. Obviously, being a lawyer, he answered in a very articulate manner, but one sentence stroke me as being central to his argument, and I feel compelled to report it here. He said: “If you have got the power to stop a crime, you have the duty to do it.”

This is a very compelling statement and, in my opinion, at the heart of the issue. For years the catholic church has been transferring to other dioceses priests who had been accused of abusing children. The fact that the pope recently apologised for the abuses doesn’t cut it. If he really wanted to stop them, he could, right now. He would only need to tell the bishops that any case of suspected abuse should be transferred to the local police. Easy. As long as he will fail to do so, he will make himself a potential accomplice of the crime after the fact.

 

Writing timelines

This post is for fiction writers, and especially for those who are not particularly IT-savvy. Obviously, most authors of fiction are familiar with word processing programs like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer, but not with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc. It turns out that the programs designed to process tables of numbers are the perfect tool for writing and maintaining the timeline of a novel.

A message from the FBI?

This post is about somebody impersonating the Director of the FBI on Facebook.

Yesterday, I received the following request from Facebook:

Australian peculiarities

To start off, I feel I have to explain why I haven’t been posting much lately. I have begun working at an historical novel. The subject is: “The struggle of an Italian sailor to make a family, on the background of his ten years of war, from 1935 to 1945”. It will be based on my father’s life, which was more adventurous than most. And now, to the actual post.

My wife and I like Australia, and have decided to spend the rest of our lives in Canberra, its capital. Of all the places we lived in (Hamburg, Rome, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Stuttgart, Zurich, and Paris), and of all the places we visited (London, New York, Washington DC, Sydney, Milan, Venice, and Cairo, to name some), we found that Canberra was for us the best city to settle in. And yet, for central and southern Europeans, Australia has got some peculiarities that require getting used to.

SW processes

At the end of 1998 I became Software Engineering Process Group Leader of the Swiss branch of a large multinational group.  It was my responsibility to ensure that software was developed in accordance with the corporate standard processes.  Some of the developers had very little knowledge of Software Process Improvement (SPI).  To “break them in”, I developed “ab initio” presentations with some basic SPI concepts explained in very simple terms.  I just discovered some of the slides in an almost forgotten folder and, given the fact that:
1.    My presentations were never officially registered in the corporate archives;
2.    the business division I was attached to no longer exists;
3.    more than ten years have passed;
I believe I can share them with you without infringing any copyright.

I am what I am

This is a very short story that I wrote for the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild.  To be honest, I don't know whether they used it.  I include it here to show that it is possible to write micro-fiction in 124 words.

      When I was first switched on, people often asked me “How does it feel being a robot?”

      My answer was always “When my operational parameters are close to their optimal values, I could say I feel good.”

      They didn’t seem to be entirely satisfied by my answer, and kept asking questions like “Are you happy to be a robot?”

      Bios are very much interested in what they call feelings. Robots are not. When I do what I have been built to do, the potentials in my positronic brain are in balance. Whether this condition could be called happiness is irrelevant.

      Now that they have become used to me, the bios have stopped wasting time with useless questions. It is better so.

Photovoltaic Panels

Advertisements for solar panels have begun appearing on Australian television. At least, they have become frequent enough that I noticed them. Obviously, the purpose of the ads is to encourage the viewer to buy solar panels, but they tend to be misleading. By selling the electricity you generate, you eventually repay the acquisition price of the photovoltaic system. That’s true. It is also true that your electricity bill is reduced and can even go negative (which means that you get money from the utility). But you shouldn’t consider the two facts simultaneously true. After all, the utility pays you only once!

In this post, I will describe what I think is the financially correct way to look at the photovoltaic panels. But to start, I will first tell you what system my wife and I have bought.

We have on the roof eighteen panels manufactured by Sharp (model NT-N5E3E), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Our panels.

Each panel can nominally generate up to 175 W of power. Therefore, our maximum generating capacity is 3,150 W.

OO - UML Behavior Diagrams

This is the last post on Object-Oriented Technology. I know, there is so much that remains unsaid... Perhaps one day I’ll write more about it. But don’t hold your breath!

Behavior Diagrams

There are six different types of behaviour diagrams. They are: activity diagrams, state machine diagrams, use case diagrams, communication diagrams, interaction overview diagrams, sequence diagrams, and UML timing diagrams. The last four are also collectively called interaction diagrams because they concentrate on control and data flow among the system components.

OO - UML Structure Diagrams

In the previous post, I described a basic method suitable for designing simple OO applications. Obviously, as the applications grow in complexity and the teams grow in size, making lists of properties and methods quickly becomes insufficient to support the development process.

A widely used (and very powerful) software development process is the Unified Process, of which IBM's RUP (Rational Unified Process) is currently the best example. But describing RUP would be too much.

What I can do is to introduce you to a formalised and standardised way of describing OO systems, suitable for applications of any complexity and with all possible development processes. This is the Unified Modeling⁽¹⁾ Language (UML).

OO Development

A lot has been written about how to develop software. In this post I want to summarise the basic concepts. That is, those concepts that many drown in rivers of jargon and buzz-words.

OO basics and Java

Inheritance

In relative terms, some classes are very general, others very specialised. We use the term subclass to indicate a class which is a more specialised version of another class. For example, the class Convertible is a subclass of the class Car, because a convertible is a special type of car. The reverse is obviously not true, because not all cars have a retracting or folding roof. It would be incorrect to say for example that the class Bike is a subclass of Car, although both are subclasses of Vehicle.

OO does it with Class[es]

This post begins a small series of postings on Object Oriented Technology.

In our everyday's life, we deal with objects all the time. Some are so small that they fit in the palm of our hand, and some are so large that we can walk into them and then even get lost in their interior.

In its basic meaning, an object is a material thing that falls under our senses. Notwithstanding the obviousness of this definition, objects have revolutionised the way in which we write computer programs.