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.

Writing the beginning of a story

What follows is my summary of the first two chapters of the book “Beginning, Middles & Ends” written by Nancy Kress. It is a book that I recommend to everyone who is interested in writing fiction.

Network of Feedbacks on eBay

A network is a collection of nodes connected by links. Railway tracks, roads, blood vessels in our bodies, neurons in our brains, tunnels in ant nests, cables in electricity grids, airways, and sewer and water pipes are all examples of physical networks we are familiar with. The study of physical networks was first formalised during the first half of the 18th century by Leonhard Euler, who invented graph theory. Two hundred years later, to study complex networks and how they were formed, Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi studied fictitious networks in which the links were created at random. Random network theory dominated the study of networks for decades, but it had a critical flaw: all nodes had the same number of links. That’s not how most real networks are.

My back

During this month of August I haven’t been writing much. In particular, during the past week, I haven’t written at all. Now, for somebody who calls himself a writer, this is pretty bad. But when you have back problems and your doctor tells you that you shouldn’t be sitting, it’s kind of difficult to write. I do have a laptop and could have written while lying in bed, but it is easier said than done. The inspiration is just not there. Besides, I also have problems lying in bed.

With my back, it all started some decades ago, with crises of severe pain in the lumbar region. Initially, the crises resolved themselves after a few days of rest. Sometimes they were so bad that I couldn’t walk, but it only happened every few years... Then, about one and a half decades ago, I started taking medication to get back onto my feet more quickly. Till 2004, I only needed to take some Ibuprofen, available over the counter, for a week or so. In 2003, I started needing anti-inflammatory tablets, like Celebrex, to make the pain disappear. Then, in 2004, the pain lingered on, and I could only walk curved.

I.Q.

I had known of the existence of Mensa for longer than four decades and had considered trying their admission test since my university years but, for one reason or another, I only did it last year. As it happened, it was precisely on my sixtieth birthday. When I was told that it would take up to two months to know the result of the test, I explored the Web and discovered that there were many other High-IQ societies. And many of them had stricter criteria than Mensa. Now, Mensa (at least in Australia) only tells whether the candidates have an I.Q. within the top 2% of the population or not. That’s one of the reasons why I started answering some of the many I.Q. tests available online.

There are 10 types of people

Those who understand binary...
...and those who don't.

A ban on full veils?

I believe that everybody, as long as they don’t disadvantage or damage other people, should be able to say and do what they want. That’s why I am in favour of reforms like those aimed at legalising drugs and at extending the validity of marriage contracts to homosexual couples. On the other hand, in what might be considered a sign of intolerance, I am in favour of preventing women from wearing in public full islamic veils.