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Tonight I had my first salsa class of my entire life! And, guys… I’m not young any more 🙂
Actually, if I want to be honest, this was the first dance lesson ever in my life!

Impressions? Well… I had fun, even if at some point I was a bit embarrassed for my complete incapacity to improve quickly!

My main problem with dancing is that… I am a computer scientist!
Nooooo… I don’t mean that I stink as a good nerd computer scientist, and nobody wants to dance with me!
I mean that I am completely logic in what I do! I apply a fixed sequence of rules and steps to obtain a result! More or less like if you are drawing a flow-chart!

Dancing is not like this at all!
I was thinking that a good way could be to memorize a sequence of things to do and try to replicate over and over.

But salsa (and probably dancing in general) is not like this either! While dancing you should improvise the sequences, even if you keep doing the same steps.

So, poor me, there is not a simple an stable “dance algorithm” simply because if there was such a thing, probably inside there is a piece of code like
“next_step = random(possible_steps)”

Anyway… I’ll finish these lessons in any case… There hasn’t been a single algorithm I didn’t implemented successfully in my life 🙂

I’ll keep you updated!

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September 11 has been the first wedding anniversary for me and my wife!
What can I say? That it has gone in a blink!
Many things have happened: who knows us can tell that it has been a tough year for us! Probably not the ideal year that a just married couple would like to spend!
But for sure the love that we have for each other has been our soundtrack in all the moments we have lived this year!

Thanks, Francesca, for being my wife!

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I wrote this simple piece of code to validate ISBN strings and I publish it because I hope it can be useful for someone else.


GeSHi Error: GeSHi could not find the language pythonlines (using path /home/zoegxvjs/dimilia.it/wp-content/plugins/codecolorer/lib/geshi/) (code 2)

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I know, I’m probably too old for school but this is not a real one: it’s an online class!

But let’s start from the beginning!

Few weeks ago my colleague Jay tweeted me about the existence of this online class about how to develop websites/web apps for mobile devices.

So which better moment than this to go back and study again?

I have a lot of expectations from this class because I always wanted to learn about web and mobile devices and I never had time to spend on this!

The class is going to start next week and I already have something to read!

I’ll keep you updated!

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I just read an article in the New York Times (you can find it here) where the ideas of some Republican Candidates to the next year presidencial elections are described.

In particular one of these politicians says that the evolution is only a theory (what?!?!) and the global warming is a conspiration organized worldwide by scientist to receive founds for their researches (I swear it’s true! Read the article).

Now I don’t want to judge these candidates: as I always say, I am only a guest in the US and I have to accept the rules and the ideas that the US Citizens have even if I think that are crazy!

What I want to do is making some considerations about the period we are living now, inspired by a comment of a friend of mine on Facebook: “mala tempora currunt” (latin for “bad times are approaching”).

My question is: Are we living in a period that is the beginning of a new Middle Ages?

Ok, I’m not an expert in history but only someone that likes to read some books, so maybe all I’m going to say are only a pile of nonsense.

To answer this question first of all I want to say that the transaction from one age to another is not immediate… I mean when Columbus arrived in America, he didn’t find a poster with the sentence “Goodbye Middle Ages, Welcome Modern Era”. It was a very long process that led to that transaction. In the same way the process that I think is going on in this period will not be complete before hundreds of years!

But where do I see these affinities between the period before the Middle Ages and now?

Well… I have the sensation that many things are similar!

For example the big Roman empire that collapsed after reaching a huge (for that time) dimension reminds me the economical difficulties that big countries are facing now!

Another similarity is the increasing number of people that want the religion deeply connected to choices that must be completely secular!

What else? The corruption and the increasing lack of honesty of politicians in all the world (remember the corruption of the Roman senators?) or the “great leaders” that resemble too much the emperors that had the senate only to subscribe their choices…

I repeat… maybe it’s only nonsense (and please forgive me for this), but every time I read something like the article of the NYT I’m scared of the direction that the world seems to take.