Congratulations Dott.ssa Stefanie Franchi

I'd like to take the occasion to congratulate my girlfriend Dottoressa Stefanie Franchi to her successful graduation as Bachelor of Science in Economics and Mangement Sciences. Congratulations!!!

She began her studies at the School of Economics and Mangement of the University of Bolzano in the accademic year 2004/05. Being an ambitious, hardworking and very clever person she managed to finish all her exams with bravery.

In July '07 she then started to work on her thesis supervised by Dott. Stefano Lombardo. She has written a very nice work (~100 pages :O) about trademarks, in particular about the economic and normative aspects of the Italian trademark law: "Il diritto dei marchi: aspetti di law and economics".

English abstract:
The national trademark law has often been the subject of legal, but rarely of economic analysis.
The underlying thesis is therefore focused primarily on the identification and determination of the most significant economic principles and normative aspects, which emerged from the recent reform of trademark law. The first argument presented in this work is the efficiency with which the Italian legislation has been able to satisfy the new economic needs. Another important aspect is the extent to which the principles of the two most significant economic theories, cited in the literature, have been taken into account within the framework of the reform. Furthermore a possible propensity towards one of those views on the part of the legislator is examined.
Dott.ssa Stefanie Franchi: "Il diritto dei marchi: aspetti di law and economics"

Yesterday was her "big" day. After six months of hard work and study she had to face up to her thesis defense.



Although a "little" nervous ;) the presentation went extremely well and she successfully graduated with 102/110 points!!!

Speed check: Test your broadband connection

I finally got a broadband internet connection at home :) For those who don't know it: I actually live on about 1,100 meters above see level and so I had to content myself with a normal 56K ISDN connection. Now the necessary technical facilities have been created and I finally got an ADSL connection, Alice 7 Mega, although I don't really know what they understand with 7 MB ;)
I just wanted to do some checks on the speed of my connection and found Speedtest.net, a quite nice page which may be interesting for some of you out there. So I thought it may be worth to quickly write a post.

Never wanted to download a YouTube Video??

YouTube has become an enourmous platform of video information. You find everything from technical tutorials and speechs, music clips to nonsense stuff put by someone. I guess it happened also to you that you wanted to download a video to your computer for maybe viewing it offline at a later point. Recently Marco - a working collegue of mine - had the same problem and he also found an appropriate service which does it for you. There are a bunch of it, but this one seems quite nice. You have just to go to http://keepvid.com/. There you have to enter the URL of the desired YouTube-video or you can also drop the "keep it" button to your toolbar, so it does it for you. The direct download link will then be provided to you. For playing the file you'll need a Flash Video Player which you get here.

Creating simple backups with WinRAR

When I'm working on some code for a program I'm developing, I got into the habit of creating regular backups. That's quite useful, also when you're using a version control system (SVN, CVS,...). The backup can be very simple. Generally it is enough to zip the folder of your developing directory where your source-code and other project resources lie (i.e. Eclipse project workbench). It is however more handy if you automate the process. For this purpose I've written a !very! simple batch script in combination with WinRAR.
Lets take the following directory structure:

• Projects
• backups
• MyProjectBackup
  
• MyProject
• ...

The folder structure is quite intuitive and actually reflects the one I'm accustomed to have. "Projects" is the root folder and can lie somewhere (i.e. D:\...\...\Projects\...). Inside the "Projects" folder, each project has its own directory such as "MyProject" in our example. Moreover in the "backups" folder there is another one where all the compressed rar-files (actually our backups) will be created.

The automated backup script is composed of two files: filelist.lst and backup.bat.
The filelist.lst contains the path(s) to the different locations which should be included in the backup. In our example it would look like this:

..\..\MyProject\*.*

The 2nd file backup.bat contains the command line actions to the rar.exe file for creating the compressed backup. Its content looks as follows:

@echo off
"c:\Program Files\WinRar\rar.exe" a -agYYYY-MM-DD_HH.MM MyBackupFileName -r -m5 @filelist.lst

Pause

Here the highlighted path to the rar.exe has to be modified according to the right location on your own workstation. Both files (filelist.lst and backup.bat) should be placed inside the "MyProjectBackup" folder of our sample-folder structure. A simple double-click on the backup.bat creates the backup and puts it into the "MyProjectBackup" folder. For convenience purposes the backup.bat file can be linked from some other location (i.e. place a link to the desktop).

Degree ceremony 2007!

The pictures are online! Some may have read of my degree exam already. Well here are some of the pictures of the degree ceremony at the university.

Related pages:

• Finally graduated!!!!
• All of the pictures of the degree ceremony 2007 of the Free University of Bolzano.
  

Finally syntax highlighting on my blog!!

This was actually a point which was somehow a thorn in my side. I wasn't far from writing my own syntax highlighting javascript... Today however I found one that works great. It is simple, adaptable and easily configurable.
The used strategy is the one that is most commonly used by web-based syntax highlighting tools. It basically consists of two components: a CSS and a JavaScript file. The CSS file defines the different tag-colors that will be used for highlighting. The src-code that is published on some HTML page is usually placed inside a pre or code container. This container is then parsed by the JavaScript file which assigns the CSS class declarations to the correct keywords, having the effect of highlighting them.

But now some more details to the tool itself that I've found. It is called "google-code-prettify" and can be found here. For more details about the configuration stuff and how it can be implemented on your own website just refer to the README.html page on the project site, which explains clearly all the necessary steps that have to be taken.

Here are some examples how it looks like (also here):
My old code formatting style:

public class MyTest{
private String myString;

public MyTest(){
 this.myString = "Hello World!";
}

public void printMessage(){
 System.out.println(myString);
}

public static void main(String[] args){
 MyTest t = new MyTest();
 t.printMessage();
}
}

New google-code-prettify style:

public class MyTest{
private String myString;

public MyTest(){
 this.myString = "Hello World!";
}

public void printMessage(){
 System.out.println(myString);
}

public static void main(String[] args){
 MyTest t = new MyTest();
 t.printMessage();
}
}

The colouring works perfectly. I also modified the highlighting script a little such that I was able to keep my way of highlighting things in the code:

...
System.out.println(myString);

That was quite easy since I just needed to add some lines to the CSS file.
What I've still to optimize is the loading of the JavaScript files. I'll see whether I can do that in an asynchronous mode because otherwise it starts to slow down the loading of my blog as the number of scripts increases.
If you have problems in configuring the google-code-prettify script on your own blog, just drop me a line.

Roundup of blogging-year 2007

It's 2008!! I hope everybody of you had a good start. Well, I've seen that many bloggers post some kind of roundup, by summarizing the past year or by giving some stats. So I've decided to follow this habit - although I'm a little late. I find stats interesting since they provide you some feedback about your blog visitors.

General

Year Overview: Visitors

Visitor Distribution


Browser Types


Operating Systems


Traffic Overview


...where I still have to work on :)

Visitors Loyality


Visit Lengths


My Project of the Year
Projectname: News Mapper
URL: http://newsmapper.googlemashups.com
Online since: 20th October 2007
Number of visitors: 1,522 (1,832 page loads)
Blog posts: * Click *

Roundup
Metrics need always an interpretation, otherwise they're useless. Well, I have to say that I'm quite satisfied with the number of visitors of this year. It is quite a nice number since I started this blog on February 2007. As can be seen from the visitors overview, visits started to constantly increase since the last 4 months, which I hope will go on in this way.
A nice point is that the number of visitors from search engines increased to a share of 1/3 (see traffic overview). That's due to a better ranking of my blog in search results, mainly on Google.
Where I still have to work on is on the visitor loyality and on the visit lengths. The situation is usually that people come to my blog from search engines, the look at a specific post, find/or don't find a solution to their problem and then they leave the site again. The number of visits and the duration is therefore quite short.
For the new year I plan to focus more on programming issues. Possible topics could be on developing Eclipse RCP applications, ORM with Hibernate, Spring, GWT,... I've still to see :) , usually I post things as they come me in mind.

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