Nethead
alf and the NET
I have been fascinated by the Internet since I heard about it
(which was quite early, back at the University). In fact, I think I
can claim "Italian internet pioneer" status : I was webhopping when
the dominating Windoze browser was called "Cello" (and, yes, I'm old).
Being the geek I am, my interest has taken a technological twist,
so this place is where I am collecting links to various Internet
technologies, and more. (And, if you're wondering why I have - so far
- failed to cash in on the recent Internet madness, I am wondering
too. Must say something about my business prowess.)
Wikipedia
For the longest time, I have been a contributor of the English and
Italian Wikipedia. I have since concluded that it gets to a point
where contributing to that project is a waste of time, like the Red
Queen country: you've got to run the hardest you can just to stay
put. That was the place I had gotten myself in, at any rate, so I quit
the project altogether. Since I have dedicated much time and effort to
the (italian) project, and wikipedia things are here today, gone
tomorrow, I saved my main
contribution. That is the article on Miles Davis, which was given
Featured Article status, and of which I was the principal author for
the italian version (I estimate I wrote about 90% of it, give or
take). You can find the HTML
version here, and the PDF version
(with discography) is here.
In the process of writing the principal article, I also wrote - or
contributed to - several
other articles, on related subjects. When I have time I will also
link them here.
Translations
Half a geological age ago (July 4th, 1999) I translated Eric Raymond's
seminal document "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar". The translation was published on the
Emilia Romagna Linux User's Group (ERLlug) website, of which I had been a
founding member, from which it has since disappeared. I believe it was
the first such translation. If not, it was definitely one of the
first. You can still read it here.
Unicode and all that jazz
I finally got a handle on encodings and Unicode in italian and in english.
Protocols
I wrote a primer on
HTTP. Far from complete, but enough to get one started.
SGML,XML and all that
The Docbook documentation. Also
published by O'Reilly. Even if you are not into book writing it has
an interesting tutorial on SGML and XML, besides links to other resources.
My bookmarks have sections
devoted to markup languages, too.