H3RALD - Tag 'wedding' (RSS Feed)

11th of July 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 04:54:00 -0600

Prologue
The wedding party
The stag night
The preparations
The ceremony
The reception
The honeymoon
Photos
Trivia
Famous quotes

Prologue

Roxanne and I arrived in Ireland on the 3rd of July, just over a week before the wedding day. We thought a week would have been more than enough to finish organizing our big day, and we were right: we spent a few days enjoying our holiday with relatives and going around to meet the photographer, the florist and all the others.

Slowly guests started arriving into the country from Italy, England, Romania etc. For some reason, everyone chose a different day to get to Killenaule, so we had people turning up right until the very day before.

In a similar fashion, I was waiting for my waistcoat to arrive until the last minute: it turns out that the guy I bought it from decided to send it through normal post about 10 days before — “They normally arrive in less than two weeks”, he wrote to me in his last email.

I ended up having to drive to Clonmel the afternoon before the wedding with half the wedding party in my car looking for a waistcoat. I eventually managed to rent one (with matching shirt and cravat) for just 40 Euro.

The wedding party

The following table lists all the members of the wedding party, for your own reference.

Name	Role
Fabio Cevasco	Groom
Roxanne O’Mahoney	Bride
Matteo Lagomarsino	Best man
Simona Angheluta	Maid of Honor
Roberto Pischedda	Head Usher
Delia Angheluta	Bridesmaid
Zacharry O’Mahoney	Usher
Caspar O’Mahoney	Usher

The stag night

In Italy, England, US and in many other countries a “stag night” may end up in many different ways: dinner with friends, strip club, wild practical jokes to the groom, and so on. In Ireland, it generally means one thing: drink. It occasionally ends up badly (there are rumors a poor fellow who was thrown out in a river and got married with a broken nose), but generally everything turns out just fine: have a few pints, sing and dance, and have a couple of eggs in the morning. That normally does the trick — if you’re an Irishman.

I was well aware of my in-laws drinking habits, so I decided to take uncle Felix’s offer: “I’ll have a taxi ready for you whenever you want to sneak out of the pub, and make sure you do” — he said.

The evening started with a few pints at Laffansbridge, an old country pub in the middle of nowhere, probably one of the best places for a pint of Guinnes in the whole Tipperary. The little smart guy who runs it has one simple rule: at midnight the light goes off and no more drinks are served, so all 16 of us got into a minibus by then, heading for the next pub.

Quinn’s is the family pub, in the sense that it is owned by Felix Quinn Jr, son of Felix Quinn Sr, brother of Anastasia Quinn, mother of James O’Mahoney, father of Roxanne O’Mahoney, my wife (families are still very large and very close, in Ireland). Being the family pub, Quinn’s doesn’t close at midnight; in fact, it often doesn’t close at all for family and friends (i.e. the entire village of Killenaule).
As soon as we got in, Claire (wife of Felix, son of Felix, etc. etc.) greeted us with a full round of pints, and then another, and yet another…

Around the third round someone asked me if I could sing a song — a request I politely but firmly declined due to my total ignorance in Irish folk songs and my total inability to utter sounds in even the slightest musical way. Luckily, someone else volunteered and sang a beautiful ballad, perfectly in-tune, with no music backing at all: Irish people are amazingly musical when sober, imagine when drunk!

When people started getting into their fourth round (note the pronoun), I decided to try out an old trick to keep myself sober: I drank less than half a pint, and then pretended to drink the rest, leaving always something in my glass. In that way – I thought – I could pretend I didn’t need yet another pint. Unfortunately the pub owner spotted me straight away and said “That pint is stale… here, have another one, on the house!”. At that point I decided it was better for me & the rest of the Italians to quietly sneak out.

I was at home (uncle Martin’s house) and in bed at about 1:30 AM. I almost didn’t sleep at all that night, as expected, so I wasn’t too bothered when the rest of the drinking comrades came back, singing and shouting at 4:30 am. Simona [the Maid of Honor and girlfriend of my brother-in-law Zac], on the other hand, wasn’t too amused when Zac turned up after drinking the (Irish) Nightly Guideline Drink Amount: approx. 10-11 pints of Guinness — those he could count, that is.

The preparations

This part of the day is best reported in chronological tabular form:

Time	Event
7:35	The groom ~~wakes up~~ decides to stop pretending to sleep.
8:00	The bridesmaids are up and about, ready to go to the hairdresser
9:00	Uncle Martin and the rest of the gang slowly regain consciousness. The groom spends about half an hour trying to explain uncle Martin that he’s his only hope to collect and bring back the flowers for the church (_"Ahhhh you want me to do it… you could have said so since the beginning!"_).
9:45	The groom takes the bridesmaids into town, to the hairdresser
10:00	The groom attempts to gather his groomsmen for the first time
10:15	The groom starts having a chat with the best man and the head usher. The other ushers are somewhere around.
10:30	The groom realizes that one of the ushers (Zac) has the most terrible hangover on Earth and the other (Caspar) slept solidly from 3 am (while still in the pub) until now
11:00	The groom attempts to gather his groomsmen for the second time, this time telling them it’s time to get ready (he’s not taken seriously)
11:30	The groom attempts to gather his groomsmen for the third and final time, now everyone is starting to try out their suits
11:45	For some weird reason auntie Noelle decides to call the groom and tell him that the florist is not accepting checks, after 5 minuts of absolute panic, she says we’re going to get the flowers anyway and there’s nothing to worry about.
12:00	All groomsman are dressed. It starts raining.
12:30	Zac decides he needs some fresh air and takes a walk outside in his morning suit, regardless of the heavy rain and the groom’s prayers
13:10	The groomsmen go to the church.
14:00	Guests start arriving
14:20	The brides arrives and the ceremony starts.

The ceremony

The wedding ceremony was very suggestive, almost magic. As soon as I looked at Roxanne in her wedding dress all worries faded away, and we both enjoyed the wedding rite. I must say I also don’t remember much of the whole ceremony, but I’m told it’s a common thing to happen.

As the ceremony started, we sat down without looking at the audience, so I didn’t feel paranoid and enjoyed listening to the priest’s speech, the readings and the songs. Canon Liam Ryan embodies the typical Irish priest: about 70-year-old, tall, extremely talkative, cheerful and very charismatic. He shocked us all during the reharsal telling us what we’d have had to do the day after, and it felt like a lot of work. The groomsmen and the bridesmaids were terrified: “So I have to help you sit down, move the chair… like that… then… go back… no, wait, what was that again?”. Matteo and Roberto couldn’t believe the whole choreography involved in the event: it’s nothing like that in Italy, but they were glad they were part of it in the end.

It all happened exactly like Father Ryan predicted, he even guessed almost all the few mistakes we made: “You have to walk slowly in front of the bride” – he said to Delia, the bridesmain – “and if you think you’re going slow while you’re doing it, you’re probably going way too fast”. But nobody noticed, really, and nobody cared: they were all too excited to mind that, and everyone’s eyes were on Roxanne, anyway. She was really, really gorgeous and her dress was fabulous. It felt unreal, at times: we both felt we were in one of those movies…

The most peculiar thing about the whole ceremony was perhaps the different languages involved: English, Italian, Gaelic and Latin. I doubt there was a single person among us who could understand the entirety of the mass, but it was very evocatory. The whole mass was predominantly in English, with the following exceptions:

The First Reading was in Latin (my mum read it superbly — she’s a Latin teacher!)
The Second Reading was in Italian
Our Father was sung in Gaelic

By our own common decision, we didn’t ask for a professional video of the ceremony, only photos. Nevertheless, my uncle captured most of the ceremony (and the most embarassing bits of the dancing after the reception) using my dad’s video camera.

The reception

When the ceremony ended it was still raining heavily, so after an endless amount of pictures taken we went straight into our Rolls. Technically, that was not our Rolls of course: we rented it from a local car hirer, and it was worth every penny. A lot of people get married in a VW Beatle or in a Mercedes at most, but Roxanne and I really love old cars, so when we saw Ruby, a red 1961 Silver Cloud II, we just had to get it. Champagne and chauffeur included, of course.

The chauffeur was a very jolly and chatty fellow from Waterford, and drove that beauty of a car for a very long time. Unfortunately though his sat nav decided to stop working and he wasn’t really local, so erhm…, well, let’s just say we were really lucky that at least the brideknew her way around. We made it safe and sound to Raheen House in no time: so fast that everyone else arrived about 10-15 minutes afterwards.

Raheen House is a very charming XIX century Georgian House. One of those places you normally see only in movies: tapestries on the walls, old armchairs, stuffed heads over the doors (an african buffalo, a huge deer, an antelope, and some more)… you get the picture. Unfortunately it can only accomodate 120 people, so it isn’t a very popular location for wedding receptions in Ireland, because the number of people invited at Irish weddings ranges from 150 to 300. We were about 60 in total, nevertheless the dining hall looked quite full and lively, with 7 big tables covering all the room.

As soon as we got there, my best man was informed by the staff that he had to introduce the bride and groom. “What? No, wait! What do I say… how… what? Fabio, come back!” he freaked out, but as soon as I wrote down the two lines he was supposed to say in English everything was OK. Not only did he introduce us properly, he also made a terrific speech: he obviously gave it a lot of thought and it sounded just perfect.

After he spoke, it was my dad’s turn. Now, my dad speaks perfect French but never got a chance to learn and practice English (yet), so not only he had to write down his entire speech, he also had to annotate the pronunciation of every word. He managed fine though. It felt a little bit long, but he said really wonderful and touching words about Roxanne and I, our respective families, and countries. I’ll publish it soon on the Internet, for posterity’s sake.

The last three speeches were Jim’s (the father of the bride), who did great as always, without reading anything, right on the spot. And so did Roxanne and I: we basically just said a few words thanking all the guests for coming, and half of them for helping us with the wedding as well. Every speech (except mine and Roxanne’s) was characterized by subtle and very discreet exhortations to produce progeny (“get on with it!”), but other than that they were fine.

After all the traditional obligations, we finally started our dinner. The food was delicious and extremely tasty: Raheen House is renown for that, as we were told, but we honestly weren’t 100% sure until we started trying it. And there was also plenty of it, so everyone felt really satisfied towards the end of the meal. So satisfied that we decided to postpone the cake till later (see below) and indulge with wine instead.

Wine, right. They were going to charge us 20€ per bottle for some weird Chilean or Australian stuff. Silly and almost offending, especially considering that my family has been producing wine for family and friend’s use for at least three generations! This was my dad’s primary concern until we left for Ireland: “You sort the restaurant out, because I’m going to bring some bottles, no matter what”. He shipped over 96 special bottles of our 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 vintages. Ninety-six. We used about 25 of them for the meal and the rest of the evening, then we gave one to almost every guest, three to the staff of the restaurant, a few more to other hotel and B&B owners, six to each uncle of the bride, etc. etc. None came back to Italy, that’s for sure.

Right after the meal the band came in, and we got ready to dance. Roxanne and I had to start with our First Dance, of course, then everyone else slowly joined in. The group was playing a mixture of traditional Irish music, ballads and rock ‘n’ roll: they were amazing, and especially the Italian’s were really impressed.

Not as impressed as when they noticed uncle Martin dancing. I’ve never seen anyone in my life dancing so vigorously and wildly in my life. He has his own special technique that cannot be described with words. I’ll try to post a video of him soon. He really felt the rythm and never missed a step. Like a whirlwind he dragged everyone in, dancing with him: first his daughters and sons, then his brothers, the he thought he’d take my auntie for a spin, then the bride (well, mostly her dress), then even me! I don’t remember much, I think I was in the air at one point, and then all over the place…

Everyone of course joined in and started drinking and dancing for the whole evening. When the band performed the last two songs, I just remember a huge circle of nearly all the guests holding hands dancing around Roxanne and I, then coming closer, then far, then closer again. It was definitely the wildest night in our whole life.

The honeymoon

The day after we slowly recovered. We didn’t sleep much, but we managed to get up and have breakfast with some of the guests at the hotel, before they started heading back. Then we decided to go shopping in town: it was basically Roxanne and I, plus her brothers, her parents, and my parents. Not much of a honeymoon, as my mum pointed out, but we didn’t mind.

After spending the following day saying goodbye and thanks to all the relatives, we finally headed to Co. Galway, in Connemara. We booked three nights in the fabulous Abbeyglen Castle, highly recommended. Our superior room had a fireplace, a four-poster bed and jacuzzi bath: the bare essentials for a honeymoon really. Roxanne and I really enjoyed those three days, finally alone in the most breathtaking and romantic area of Ireland. Three days weren’t enough, really, but we’ll eventually go back there hopefully: maybe Sir Paul Hughes, proprietor of the castle, will still remember “the bride and groom”, as he kept calling us throughout our brief, but very pleasant stay.

Exactly as auntie Noelle said, everything was over in a blink: the ceremony, the reception, the honeymoon… everything went back to normal, eventually. It took a while to get used to our normal life: we had to go on a shopping spree before we went back to work… let’s say the money we got as present from most of the guest was well spent in a 42" LCD HD TV, surround sound system, etc. etc.

…And we still have our other half of the honeymoon, too! Probably Miami Beach and Bahamas, next November.

Photos

Our wedding photos were taken by Pat McCoole, who did a truly amazing job portraying the magic of our special day.

Trivia

On the wedding day, it rained non-stop from 12 am to 7 pm.
The groom drove for a total of 1758.7 Km in 14 days.
On his stag night, the groom only drank 2.5 pints of Guinness (almost everyone else had 10, on average).
The night before the wedding, the groom slept only from 5:30 to 7:30.
Only the middle tier of the wedding cake was eaten on the wedding day. The top tier was eaten during the following days by relatives and the bottom tier was shipped to Italy, together with the Bride’s dress.
The father of the bride decided to change into more comfortable clothes right after the ceremony. He borrowed a waistoat and a jacket for the speech.
Uncle Martin danced with a lot of people after the meal, including the bride, her father, and the groom.
When he arrived at the church, the groom immediately realized he left the mass booklets and the confetti in the back of his car, at home. They were eventually brought to the church by a cousin of the bride just a few minutes before she arrived.
At the very start of the ceremony, the groom told the priest to tell the best man to get a mass booklet so that he and the bride can follow the mass properly. After 30 seconds of lip-reading and signalling, the best man understood and fetched one of the infamous booklets.
The bride forgot her change of clothes in uncle John’s car, who had to drive in early in the morning or she would have had her breakfast in her wedding dress.

Famous quotes

“This journey feels like going to Lourdes: you come back and your life changed forever.”

— The best man, when he arrived in Killenaule.

“Is there a garage around?”

— Auntie Isa while waving a car mirror, when she arrived in Killenaule

“Do I really have to do a speech? Are you sure?”

— The best man, when he met the groom in Ireland.

“My preciousssss!”

— The best man, when he was given the rings in custody.

“She’s the most calm and organized bride in history.”

— Auntie Noelle, about the bride on the wedding day.

“You could tell he was panicking on the phone”

— Auntie Noelle, about the groom on the wedding day.

“Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes…”

— The father of the bride to the groom, during the traditional handshake of the wedding rehearsal.

“Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes…”

— The groom to the father of the bride, during the traditional handshake of the wedding ceremony.

Best man: “[…] this is the first time for me to speak in public, in front of an English audience […]”
Audience: “Irish! IRISH!!!”
Best man: “…oh, right, Irish! Sorry…”

“I need another shirt!”

— Uncle Martin, after about 2 hours of continuous dancing with almost all the guests.

Personal Log - June 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:24:00 -0600

Welcome to yet another of my extremely boring, excessively fragmented personal log posts. I’m seriously thinking of dropping the whole series in favor of more frequent (and shorter) blog posts, starting from next year. This means you’ll probably have to read another six of these priceless gems, until december 2009.
As usual, feel free to skim through as each of the following sections is almost completely unrelated to the others.

H3RALD Web Site v8.0

It’s the time of the year, again. It doesn’t happen every year but it’s definitely a trend (hence the high version number): I’m going to redesign & redevelop my web site.

This time is not the usual “Let’s pick another language and another framework and start from scratch”, but a rather more radical shift, and yet at the same time less painful. The idea is to transform H3RALD.com into a 100% static web site, without losing anything in functionality (gaining, if anything!).

Tom Preston-Werner is definitely not the first person to blog like a hacker, and his very own Jekyll is definitely not the first static web site generator our there, nevertheless, he inspired me to embrace what seems to be one of the latest trend in developer’s blogs.

The idea is simple: turn all the blog posts and pages into static content, and rely on third party web services for things like comments, search etc. For a rather extreme by very interesting example, see Tagaholic.

The advantages of this approach are many:

Free yourself from a database.
Free yourself from a resource-hungry, server-side app (Typo, in this case).
Increase speed and reliability, without using caching or similar artifacts.
Keep everything under version control.
Don’t worry about breaking things when upgrading (even if the static content generator changes, it shouldn’t really break things).
Unleash the power of client-side scripting (namely, JQuery).

For now, I’m just brainstorming a little bit on GitHub, feel free to participate. The first step is obviously choosing a static content generator, and atm Jekyll seems to be slightly ahead of Webby. Opinions?

Glyph

Did you ever want to write a short manual or a book, or even a long article? If so, chances are you gave LaTeX a shot and either fully embraced its philosophy or totally refused it. Sadly, I belong to the second category: I believe sequential documents like manuals or books should be easier to create simply by using HTML.

Whever I have a chance to actually start working on it, Glyph will become a document authoring framework, i.e. a way to create visually appealing documents in a simple way. All the ingredients are there, it’s only necessary to glue them together in a pretty form:

Textile (and RedCloth) to produce clean HTML code from a human-readable markup
CSS3 to specify page rules
A few rake scripts to produce a standalone HTML file, TOC, Index etc.
An internal DSL for the document structure and metadata
Liquid for control flow, snippets and filters
PrinceXML to generate a PDF from HTML

This project is still in planning stage, feel free to have a look at the issues/features page on GitHub. Feedback is appreciated, as usual.

Vim files & the Stash

If you read the previous two sections of this post, you may have noticed that I’m growing more and more fond of git (and GitHub). Besides the repositories I already mentioned earlier on, I also created a personal stash, which I’m using mainly to store some of my Linux dotfiles, article drafts and …Vim customizations.

If you’re looking for a color scheme for Vim, check out my very own herald.vim, and tell me what you think.

Getting ready for the Big Step

This will probably be my last post as a free man, as I’m getting married (civilly) on July 2nd and (religiously) on July 11th.
Luckily the photographer agreed to give us a CD with all the pictures taken on the big day, with no copyright restrictions attached to it (believe it or not, some photographers don’t allow you to republish your own photos unless you ask them first), so I’ll probably write a long post with pictures when we come back from our (half) honeymoon.

Everything is pretty much organized. We had troubles with the waistcoats we got from eBay: they were cut almost randomly to resamble waistcoats, but they weren’t so we had to re-order another lot of 7 sets (waistcoat, cravat and shirt this time) from another seller, this time UK-based. I seriously hope to get them in time.

On the 24th we’re having a party at our house. If you were invited, feel free to drop by, otherwise be prepared to be thrown out of the window (4th floor) by one of our ushers (Roxanne’s big brother). It’s probalby going to be about 30-40 people in the end, mainly because most of my office can’t come due to holidays they booked in advance.

What’s left to do now? Well:

Send the bomboniere over to Ireland
Make sure my dad actually ships the 96 specially-bottled bottles of our own wine to uncle John, in Ireland.
Make sure uncle John doesn’t drink all the 96 bottles of wine before the wedding reception.
Make sure my best man understood that the speech he has do make must be in English, at least 3 minutes long and not too offensive to the groom.
Pay a huge, colossal heap of money for the whole thing. It’s going to cost us (and my dad) quite a bit, in the end. But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, after all (getting totally trashed in a fancy hotel with all your family, including 2nd and 3rd grade cousins).

Personal Log - May 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 30 May 2009 22:35:00 -0600

Yet another extremely busy month, as you can see from the total absence of blog posts and lack of tweets even. Things are getting pretty hectic at work now I guess: less people, more work, more responsibility, same money. They call it contingency; it’s the latest trend in the Western World, didn’t you know? I’m really not impressed. I can’t complain though I guess: I still enjoy my job very much and I know it could be much worse, so it’s just a matter of enduring until autumn — or so they say.

Star Trek Premiere

The month started with an event I’d been looking for for months: the premiere of Star Trek XI, aka “Star Trek”. It’s not that J.J. Abrahms couldn’t come up with a more original name (Star Trek: Academy used to be the working title, at one point), he simply wanted to tell the world that this movie was a new beginning, an elaborate way to start from scratch, to reboot what was more than once dubbed a dying franchise.

The movie was enjoyable – daring and a bit flamboyant – but still enjoyable nonetheless. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, and although it was not the usual Star Trek movie, I somehow liked Abrahms’ bold revisitation of Roddenberry’s universe. Take a bunch of unknowns (Chris Pine) or semi-unknowns (Zachary Quinto), then add some spicy British humor (Simon Pegg) and some old friend (Leonard Nimoy) and throw in an awful lot of XXI century special effects: what you get is not the usual, let’s-all-rock-because-we’re-hit traditional Star Trek, of course, it’s an alternate version of it.

That’s precisely what the movie is meant to be: what Star Trek would have look like if it had been created in the XXI century. The timeline feels disrupted since the very first minute (nevermind the end!), with a Jim Kirk stealing his stepfather’s car. Chris Pine is an alternate Kirk, quite different from the original one, but not that bad. Zachary Quinto, on the other hand, is a true revelation: he definitely is the new Spock, and he couldn’t have been cast better. So is Simon Pegg as Scotty, but unfortunately he’s not involved enough.

The baddies were a bit of a letdown. Nero is a bit too flat, and his ship is way too fancy, no matter where it comes from. Clearly some Hollywood junkie wanted a big, invulnerable dark ship to bring havoc in the galaxy, but that is NOT a Romulan ship, period.

At any rate, I enjoyed the movie and I’m looking forward to the second one, which I hope it will be followed by many others.

Unfortunately in Italy Star Trek is not worshiped in Italy as in it is the US, which is very unfortunate… Roxanne and I decided to play along and go to the cinema half-dressed-up, but our friends Elora and Michelle came with a full-blown Uhura uniform! The whole cinema kept staring at us. It was a bit freaky, but fun (check out the pics on Facebook — if you can, that is, I won’t post them here!).

Wedding Planning

Just over a month to my wedding. Scared? You bet. Stressed out? Indeed. Roxanne and I managed to get most of the things organized in the end, luckily. In particular, this month:

We went to the British Consulate in Milan, and applied to get Roxanne’s legal documents.
I bought and had the 7 vest sets delivered to Roxanne’s brother’s (Caspar) place, in London.
I ended up buying 8 (buy three, get one free) morning suits from Marks and Spencer, and had them delivered to Caspar’s place. He’ll be sending all the stuff over soon, hopefully.
Roxanne got the dresses for the maids of honor, and apparently we have to collect them on monday.
We sent all the invites we needed to send, but we’re still waiting for confirmations. It looks like it won’t be a big wedding, probably around to 60-70 people mark.
We ordered the bomboniere, they should come through soon.
Uncle John told us he had the music for the church and the reception sorted out.
We got the rings!

We still have to organize a few things, namely:

Write and print the prayer books
Book the flight for one of my ushers
Get some fancy gifts for the bestman and the rest of the people involved in the ceremony
Get married civilly here in Genoa
Organize a party at our place for the people who can’t come to the wedding
Do something else I can’t remember right now

Yes, we are still busy as hell. I’m looking forward to it all, but I’ll definitely be much more relaxed when it’s all over!

Home Internet: Epilogue?

I got broadband at home, finally, after five months. Let’s do a quick recap:

Last December I signed up to Libero Infostrada, and told them I wanted to disconnect from Telecom
In January I actually got disconnected from Telecom, got a new phone line contract, but the Internet was never activated.
I kept calling clueless operators on both ends pointlessly for 2-3 months.
I got pissed off with Libero, so in April I signed up to Tele2, telling them to disconnect me from Libero. They told me it would take at least 4 weeks.
Meanwhile, I signed up to 3g, and got an Internet USB key. At least I can go online, even if with a crappy UMTS connection.
After a month, Telecom rings me asking if I want to come back to them, promising I’ll have the Internet back on soon enough. Out of desperation, I accept and tell them to disconnect me from Tele2.

Just when I was about to write a long post cursing Telecom and their perverted schemes to force their customers to stay with them, I receive a call from Libero and they tell me that the Internet is now activated! Unbelievable. Now all I have to do is send letters to all the other ISPs (they don’t do these things on the phone — clueless operators, remember?) telling them I don’t want anything to do with them anymore.

This is how broadband Internet works in Italy. Jealous?

Nimrod

Last month I decided I would stop programming until after the wedding and so I did (at least at home). Nevertheless, I still keep strive to keep up-to-date with everything concerning technology and in particular programming.

Out of all the tech news I came across throughout this month, the Nimrod programming language definitely struck me the most. A German guy came up with a new language — that’s not a big news, new programming languages are born every week, if not every day.

I believe Nimrod is different though. Basically, here’s why:

It’s a mixture of Lisp, Python and C. It looks a bit like Python and it behaves like it (indentation matters), it allows the creation of macros, like in Lisp, and – this is what really matters to me – it compiles to plain C (which can then be compiled using GCC or whatever).
It is open source and can be used to produce commercially distributed executables.
The manual is simple to read (but with a few rough edges), and the language looks simple to learn.
The language is not yet complete, but it’s getting close to a 1.0 release. It works as advertised, nonetheless.
It offers a comprehensive standard library, and a huge amount of libraries and wrappers from everything from Windows API to GTK and Cairo.
It is cross platform, the Windows version even comes with a one-click installer.
It has garbage collection and it supports manual memory management, if you need it.
It’s statically typed, with type inference
It can generate standalone executables, with very little overhead (90KB for an hello world program).

A language like this has been my secret dream for a long time. I thought no one would ever come up like this. I am really looking forward to give it a proper try someday. What’s wrong with it? For now, a few bits are missing (like native serialization), other than that someone pointed out the weird, rather extreme case insensitiveness of the language. Basically, case and underscores are ignored to allow programmers to use their own programming conventions.
Personally I don’t think this is that bad. After all, if you name your variables “a_thing” and “aThing” and you want them to mean different things, that’s bad programming style anyway. Nevertheless, as far as I know it’s the only language I know which offers such an extreme degree of flexibility in this sense.

Learning new things

This month I also found myself to be extremely eager to learn about new things. I’m still faithful to Ruby and all that, but I’m opening up to new possibility, for different things:

I decided to start listening to slightly more technical podcasts, which are _not_related to tech news. In this way, I don’t have the pressure of having to listen to them on a regular basis. Other than FLOSS Weekly, which is probably the best show about Open Source Software out there, I’m going to try out Software Engineering Radio and The Command Line, both slightly more technical.
Because I decided to put my personal programming projects on hold, I’m having all sort of new ideas about even more projects I could start as soon as I can. No anticipations until after my wedding, of course.
I’m using Vim all the time now, both at work and at home. I feel confident with it, but I feel I still have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to marks, registers, etc. And I’m not yet ready to write an article about it — not the kind of article I’d like to write, anyway.
I’d like to learn more about Javascript and JQuery. I played around with it and loved it, but I really never used it for anything serious yet. This, however, may change in the future.

Personal Log - April 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:11:00 -0600

April is tratidionally a rather busy month: Easter, public holidays, and — always — some deadline to meet at work. Moreover, my birthday is also in April which makes it even more busy! Let’s see what happened this year…h3. Using Ruby in a corporate environment

I’ve been using Ruby at work for a while now. I started off writing some automation script for my own needs, then someone noticed it and asked me if by chance I could develop some scripts for them, for automating part of their own job, and so on. My boss ultimately noticed it, and she liked the idea of me investing a small portion of my time to make other people save huge amount of their time, so now I am officially in charge of workflow improvements and automation (it’s even in my job description!).

This month a colleague of mine and I had to figure out a way to write some documents once in XML format and then produce different kind of outputs (other XML files, PDFs, etc.) using the DITA Open Toolkit. Originally we thought the toolkit would do most of the job, but we soon realized we needed to tweak and change a lot more than what we usually expected.

We ended up hacking together a system using:

Microsoft Infopath as XML editor for the end users (the company buys it by default, so no worries there)
A Ruby program to parse and manipulate the original XML and produce DITA-compatible XML files.
Some Apache Ant tasks available in the open toolkit to produce an XSL-FO file
Apache FOP to produce the PDF from the XSL-FO file…

The thing seems to work fine (after a lot of tweaking), and I really enjoyed creating the Ruby program to glue everything together. I even got a chance to introduce my colleagues to the wonderful world of Textile (they are so happy that they don’t want to use WYSIWYG editors anymore!).

Easter in London

As usual, Roxanne and I spent our Easter holidays in London, at her brother’s place. This year we actually had 9 days to go around ~~squandering money~~ spending wisely in food, books, clothes and entertainment.

Most notably, I managed to drag Roxanne to Foyles and I got myself a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer, which I’m reading avidly. If it was up to me I was going to buy half of the computing section, but Roxanne kindly pointed out that I could get all of them from Amazon for half the price.
And she was right: for my birthday I preordered a copy of Programming Language Pragmatics, 3rd Ed., which should be shipped soon.

Wedding planning

My spreadsheets for the wedding guests, wedding expenses (!) and …suit sizes are getting bigger and bigger. We managed to book a lot of flights to Ireland to my parents, us, relatives etc., but there are still quite a few things to do for the wedding. The most urgent thing to do right now is sending the invites: we had them printed with the words RSVP within May on them, so they have to be out in one or two weeks at most.

The other thing which must be sorted soon are the suits. According to English (and Irish) tradition, the groom, the bestman, the father of the groom, the father of the bride and the ushers have to wear the same type of suit, with minor differences (the color of the waistcoats?). In my case, this means getting 7 (SEVEN) morning suits off eBay, in the right sizes! Hopefully I’ll be able to get them by the end of next week (if my bestman manages to let me know his sizes).

XBox 360 Gaming

Now that our new XBox 360 finally came through, Roxanne and I have a lot of hours of hard core week end gaming ahead of us! This, added to the physiological increase of stress due to the wedding, may result in a temporary slowdown of my coding and writing activities.
Right now we’re playing Mirror’s Edge, Mass Effect, and Unreal Tournment III. The last one was a special surprise present from Roxanne (“…so we can kill each other!” — she’s really lovely at times!).

Other tech-related tidbits

I can’t wait to go to the cinema to watch Star Trek XI
I started using Shelfari
I started using Star.io as my personal, bare-bones start page.
I recently released Concatenative 0.2.0.
I’m currently evaluating the possibility to create a Ruby-based Document Authoring Framework. Stay tuned.

Personal Log - March 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:04:00 -0600

Another month without the Internet at home. This is getting really annoying, and I decided to change provider, again, hoping that I’ll eventually get my broadband back, someday. Luckily I can still go online at work, but of course it’s not the same thing: my time on Twitter and Facebook is now basically limited to weekends only, when Roxanne and I go down to Tuscany to stay with her parents.

Concatenative programming

For some weird reason I became fond of the Concatenative programming paradigm. I started reading about Joy and then started to work on a Ruby DSL able to do the similar things: Concatenative. Another pet project — as if I didn’t have enough things to do already!

Some people seemed pleased about it, especially on Reddit and dzone. The downside of it is that it’s still fairly slow if compared to Ruby code (which is not exactly fast, either!), so if I had some spare time I should really try to implement it as a C extension, maybe.

Learning new programming languages?

Incidentally, I’m still fighting with myself on whether to learn another programming language or not. At this point, learning Factor could turn out to be more natural than months ago. However, I would only learn new programming languages as a hobby, as I don’t need to do so for profit: luckily I’m still a happy technical writer and I enjoy my job.

I admit, I’m still looking for the perfect programming language which is fun to learn (not easy: fun), elegant, minimalist, fast, general purpose and cross platform (meaning Linux, Windows, and Windows Mobile as well). Of course there is no such thing out there and there will never be, so I’m still evaluating the current alternatives. Possible candidates are Haskell, Factor, some dialect of Lisp or C.
Why C? Well, because I didn’t do much with it since my first year at uni, and it could still be useful to write Ruby extensions or implement something at a lower level. After so much time getting spoiled by high level languages, I kinda miss the low level stuff. Ahhh where are all the pointers gone?!

On the other hand, I’m getting married soon, and I should use these months to help my wife-to-be a bit more with wedding planning (see next section). After all, I can always learn a new programming language after getting married, right? …right?!

Wedding planning

Roxanne and I are slowly getting more and more things done for the wedding. Every attempt I made to introduce her to GTD failed miserably so far, or better, it worked too well: she is now getting used to make lists and deciding on our next actions for the weekend.
This weekend we booked our flights to Ireland, looked at cottages and hotels for the three days after the wedding (not the honeymoon yet, we’ll have a late honeymoon in autumn), chose the waistcoats for me, my bestman and the ushers, and …booked the wedding car!
Now, this turned out to be good fun! Take a look at Ruby (yes, yes, I know… ), a Silver Cloud II 1961 Rolls Royce which will be ours for (less than) one day!

Other tech-related tidbits

I successfully migrated to Ubuntu 9.0.4 Jaunty. Everything works, except the flash plugin for Firefox.
I’m now using TweetDeck as my main Twitter client on both Windows and Linux.
I’m thinking of buying (after the wedding) an Eee PC (no Macs: Ubuntu is sleek and powerful enough &emdash;and free, too).
We finally got an XBox 360 from eBay, this time it came through the post.
Roxanne is thinking of buying a big LCD TV to go with it &emdash; I’m politely (and sadly) postponing till after the wedding.
After listening a FLOSS Weekly episode featuring it, I think I’ll get myself an Arduino Board for my birthday.

Personal Log - January 2009

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:51:00 -0700

Those who read my blog regularly may have noticed how I normally refrain from posting articles concerning my own life. I used to have a more blog-like web site, but things changed: "Who would want to read about my life, anyway?" — That's what I always thought. Hence, I focused on writing general-interest, computer-related articles about programming in Ruby, about some IT book which came out, or about the latest chapter in the Browser Wars. You'll find all this in the archives.

On the other hand, I thought it may be useful for my own sake to keep a more personal log of what happens in my life, so here it is, the first of hopefully many personal log post, covering January 2009. ### Being social

Call it a New Year Resolution or simply an unexpected change, I joined Facebook on December 31st 2008, after years of adamant opposition against the popular social network. What I didn't realized is the amount of people who use it regularly. This may sound naive to the Americans reading this blog, but as an Italian, I was really shocked to discover that about 80% of the people I know here in Italy, here in Genoa use it.

When I started using Twitter, I really couldn't find many people I knew in "real life": Andrea Gandino was the only one I vaguely remembered from uni, but none of the people I knew from elementary school was there, of course! Why's that? For one because Twitter has always been more geared towards geeks, and also because Twitter is not available in Italian. Believe it or not, this makes the difference. Immediately after I joined Facebook my dad joined it too, and found people he knew from school.

Enough with the sensationalism now, Facebook is old news and the more I write about it the more I sound out-of-the-loop. Anyhow, I quickly discovered how annoying Facebook apps can be and I immediately learn how useful the Ignore button is. Are there people actually using those apps on a daily basis? I can't believe it. Facebook is good for contacting people, that's about it. That's all I can say after 1 month of moderate usage.

The other funny aspect of this is the way people react to my status updates and everything I allegedly put on there. Let's clarify this. I do NOT provide any content just for Facebook:

I update my status every time I post on twitter
I post a link every time I save a bookmark on delicious
I post lengthy notes every time I post to my blog

That's the truth. I consider it normal, but I find it amusing when some colleague of mine comments to my status asking But... What is Data Mapper?. No one on Twitter would do that. Simply because the wide majority of people who follow me on Twitter are Rubyists.

What about Twitter then? I'm using it more than before (that's part of the same New Year Resolution) and I am actually following some complete strangers! It's nice, in a way. I never did it before because I couldn't keep up with the tweets coming up, but now I can. Here's how:

Following these instructions I quickly crafted a special feed which now sits permanently in my Google Reader and updates me with all the tweets from everyone I'm following.
I started using Tweet Replies so that every @h3rald reply goes straight to my mail. It works perfectly.

Wedding Planning

Let's move on to something much more important and life-changing. I am getting married this July, in Ireland, after 5 (five!) years of engagement with my beloved Roxanne. We've also been living together for over a year, and it has been awesome (so far), so we both decided it's the right time to tie the knot and get on with it!

The wedding is just six months away and we'd better get something done, and quick. We already booked the church and the reception, so far, so the main things are sorted. We also attended our pre-nuptial course with our local priest, another 8 couples plus three quite obnoxious "expert" couples for 7 (seven!) weeks, every friday night (those people are nuts). If we survived this, we can survive everything, I tell you.

Because we're getting married in Ireland, we have to take care of some extra things like taking my relatives abroad (it's definitely easier than bringing 70 O'Mahoneys, Quinns, etc. etc. here, that's for sure), organizing car rentals, et al. But it will be great, it will be fun, and I can't wait!

Writing and Programming

On the programming side, I was actually thinking about learning Haskell, once and for all. I have a deep admiration and respect for the language and what it can do, but I've always been somewhat overwhelmed by its functional purity, monads, and similar. After reading Learn You a Haskell (an excellent read), I moved on to Real World Haskell, and I was understanding everything, amazingly.

Then I decided to take a break and try coding a little bit in Ruby (I had to prepare a small script for work), and that was enough to motivate me to start working on RedBook again. I was determined to polish it up and put a shiny 1.0 badge on it, but I decided to stop and re-think the whole thing. I originally thought of it as a simple daily logging program to record timestamped entries to a YAML file, but then added more and more features until I finally realized that perhapsI could have used SQLite as its backend. It turns out I was right: when I started coding RedBook about a year ago, I didn't know much about Ruby, andI didn't want to use a relational database because it seemed too unnecessary cumbersome for a beginner. It turns out I was totally wrong and DataMapper proved to be an excellent, simple and powerful choice.

RedBook might be ready in a few months, when also all its documentation is ready, too. As a technical writer, I really cannot afford to release any amateur pet project to the while without documentation, it would be a bad example, wouldn't it? To make the whole thing more fun, I'll try (try I said, I may change my mind) to write the RedBook Manual using LaTeX. It shouldn't be too complicated as I'll need only 10% of its features, and hopefully the result will be pleasant enough to read.

That's it for this month, I think. For those who think this is just a long note on my Facebook profile, check out the real deal on my web site (did I say Facebook is totally useless for web promotion?).