I think web suicide is one of the bravest actions currently available in a society which seems to get more intrusive as time passes. We got no privacy, no hidden secrets. Our human relationships are treated as "tweets", "comments", "feedbacks" or "posts". We are allowed to know all the intimate details of a person's life and when this person is so exposed we pretend to know him/her better than his/her real friends. Recently Mark Pilgrim closed all his web sites and all of a sudden most people started to worry about his health. Why that? Because we're so accustomed to confuse our digital life with our real life that we simply can't accept the fact that a person may actually be more worried about his real life than keeping his web life alive. Digital life is, to put it in psychological terms, a derealisation of our real self. It's a fake self, it's a movie we're directing, it's not us. We pretend we're true when we write something, but we're lying, though we're not conscious of that. I'm lying even while I'm writing this post because I can change my words, I can choose the most appropriate expressions and modify them. In the real life it's much more difficult to do that, since the physical presence of other people may affect my judgement. The web has the words, not the emotions.

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Sorry if you don't see many posts these days, but the fact is that I'm hard-working on an important project and I basically don't have the time to write some new tutorials or examples. Yesterday I ran through 14 straight hours of CSS, jQuery and HTML that must work even in Internet Explorer 6, so you got the whole idea. In the meantime, check out my linked resources on CSS if you want to read something interesting. Oops, I gotta go. See you soon! smile

Today the server farm that hosts the web sites where I store my examples and assets used in this blog has been shut down for several hours. Apparently, a fire started in a room so that all the servers have been put offline for precaution. Probably you first noticed that my blog was awful slow. That was due to the fact that your web browser was trying to load my unreachable assets, so I had to comment the HTML to temporarily fix the problem. Now everything works fine again, and my assets are back in place. My hosting company, Aruba, tweeted a lot about any news concerning this problem but it was forced to close their call centers (lines completely overloaded) while they were working to fix this problem. I have to say that they've faced the situation bravely: a fire in a server farm is not the ideal situation when you have the half of Italian web sites hosted on your servers. smile

Since I noticed that most of my readers come from a wide variety of countries across the globe, I'd like to know what's your connection status, especially the state of the art of the connectivity in your country. This is important because in all the web sites I developed this kind of feedback was actually lacking. This is also important for site optimization. Actually, this blog is on Blogger, so tweaking it is a little difficult and I'm not interested in it very much. What's important to me is to know if the myth of high speed is true or not. So, let me know! wink

Being a web developer was not among my childhood dreams. In fact, when I was a child there was no Internet, at least in Italy. I dreamed a lot about being a paleontologist, because I liked dinosaurs a lot, but neither this dream became true, though today I can proudly say that I know a lot about dinosaurs. Another dream, when I was 12 or so, was about becoming a painter. Honestly, I didn't paint very well so I can honestly admit that this was for good. But there was something that I could do very well: reading. When I was 10 or so, I read all my mother's books in less than a summer. The point was not reading, but finding connections between books. I was convinced that there were connections between different fields of human knowledge, that everything was (and is) somehow connected, somehow linked to form the global shape of the human mind. I didn't study much at school but only a few years later when I went to university, first as a student of classical cultures and then as a student of foreign languages and literatures. I didn't have a computer at home until 1998 and I didn't start using it until 2004. It's odd, but I devoted only the last years of my life to the web. Everything started in the background: a friend of mine helped me with opening an email account and I remember me spending the last months of 2003 with sending and reading emails from an Internet-enabled store. And yes, I didn't get an Internet connection at home until 2005, so I can say now that I spent only 5 years on the web. After five years, I can say that the most beautiful part of my job is answering to people who have some problems to fix and helping them to fix their problems. There's nothing better in my job than waking up at dawn, checking my email, and find someone's message saying simply "thanks". And it's in these moments that I understand why I am a web developer.

Currently (and finally) there are more than 1,000 posts on this blog in less than one year of existence! Thanks to all my readers for their support during these months. This would not have been possible without you.

I got an email from a CSS Discuss reader where he clearly focused on a major flaw of my posts on web standards here. The point is that most of my posts lack of an in-depth discussion and description of the various topics presented each time. So this is one thing, one important thing that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Besides, I wish you a wonderful and happy new year! Thanks again for reading this blog.

Today I got this beautiful card from Matteo Campofiorito, blog editor of Html.it. Happy Christmas!

Apparently Skype seems to have some problems today. Most users are marked as offline and you're unable to see your buddies. On the Skype's site there's a special announcement saying that they're currently investigating the problem. Fortunately this happens when we're about to take our season's holidays, so I don't think this problem will affect our daily work too much. We'll wait and see.

I think there's always a logical explanation to all human behaviors and feelings. For example, have you ever experienced a kind of morbid depression during Christmas holidays? In persons affected by a mood disorder this is generally due to the season's transition occurring during December, when the overall amount of daylight is dramatically reduced to its minimum, at least until the end of December. In persons without this kind of problems, social and environmental factors may actually affect their way of living. Generally, the truism about the fact that during Christmas holidays you must be happy because everybody's happy is rooted in the view of life that today most media use as their own Gospel. This view desperately tries to hide the simple and obvious truth about consumerism that so clearly has been expressed by Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting: live, consume, die.

But there are people who think differently: why should I follow this line? why should I be happy only because the media's Gospel tells me that it's Christmas? Why should I buy something new? Why should I consume? And what is at the end of the line? Christmas holidays force this kind of people to face the fact that they're a minority. And they actually feel lonely. And when you feel so, the shadow of sadness silently slips under your door. The solution is to turn this sadness into energy, trying to find if there's actually an end to this line. Finally, these people conclude that there's no line at all. And if you want to, Christmas is every day.

This early morning I opened my bedroom window and I saw an unreal veil of snow covering buildings, streets, cars and trees. Did you read Eliot's Unreal city? Same here. Now everything is clearing up but this kind of magic is still around. Waiting.

My little niece Matilde likes music... and dances! At the moment she usually listens to a David Bowie's compilation, but I'm going to run some tests to check what kind of music she really likes. Stay tuned!

I've installed Aptana on my computer with Windows 7 which has no Internet access. Since I had previously installed Aptana on my iMac, I opened the Applications/Aptana Studio 2.0/plugins folder and I've copied all the .jar files I did need to import on my PC. Typically, they look like these:

Then you have to surf to your plugin folder on your Windows installation and simply paste all the files you've copied there. Once restarted Aptana, all the plugins you've inserted will be automatically loaded by the application.

Today Gmail's POP3 is not currently working. At about 11:00 AM (US time) the web interface seemed not to work either. Then it started working again, but any ping command sent to pop.gmail.com gives the following result:

A temporary solution to this problem is changing the POP3 server to pop.googlemail.com. This works, at least for me.

Some breaking news from my little niece's world: she started walking about two months ago and now she's able to walk just like little children can do. But wait, there's more: she can say "mama", "tata" (dad), "grazie" (thanks) and some other words. She can also say "zia" (aunt) but not "zio" (uncle) (ok, so I should teach how to call me properly..). She's very friendly with other persons, especially with other children. She always smile at you and she's absolutely lovable. I'm very proud of her. We're very proud of her. I think that she resembles mostly her parents, especially in her temper. My smart brother and his wife have given us the best gift of ever.

It seems that Google has apparently a problem with indexing new posts on Blogspot since October 19, 2010. This issue has been reported on Google's and Blogger's forums where, very kindly, Google's developers answered to tell that yes, there is a problem and yes, the problem has been reported to the technical staff. So we bloggers are all waiting. However, this problem seems to be more widespread than it could seem. In fact, many other blogs have been affected in the last few hours, not just those on Blogspot. I'll tell you more when I get more information about it.

Reading books on web development is not a required feature for a good developer but it can actually improve our knowledge of how web standards work. I've read more than 50 books on web development so far, including publications on CSS, DOM, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, SVG, jQuery, Prototype, plus many books on PHP, Python, C++, information architecture, usability, browser development and accessibility.

What have I learned? Very much, indeed. The fact is that these books are carefully written, extensively tested and proved to be actually valid in most scenarios. Although people tend to consider paper books as obsolete, I think that it's still quite relaxing lying in the bed before falling asleep with a good book to read. By doing so, you can dramatically increase your level of technical background with a minimum effort.

Generally speaking, these books are written in a very simple language, full of examples (not to mention the downloadable code that comes together with each publication) and with a step-by-step approach. It's also worth mentioning the fact that authors are always great developers (Eric Meyer, John Resig, Nicholas Zakas, just to mention few) with a strong technical background and a vast working experience.

So here's a little piece of advice: read! There's nothing to lose and everything to learn.

Basically, I'm a person whose childhood dream was doing a job where you can help other people. On August 12, 2006 I wrote down on a piece of paper the following quotation from Matthew 25, 35-41:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

I didn't found elsewhere a passage like this, clearly expressing my old childhood dream with words. I always bring that paper with me.

Yesterday was the first birthday of my little niece Matilde. I'm going to upload some photos in the next few days on my Flickr account. The party was fantastic! Matilde has a lot of fans. My mother brought a birthday cake with a Trilly made of candies on the top. Very cool! Here is the event manifest.

I was diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder since 2002. This is the first time that I talk openly about my illness, so if you're not interested please don't feel guilty. It's okay. From 1998 to 2002 I was misdiagnosed: they thought I suffered from a simple depression. Then manic symptoms came and it was clear to the doctors that I was bipolar or, so to speak, manic-depressive. I don't think it's a matter of words: you can call me bipolar or manic-depressive or even manic. It doesn't make any difference. All these terms refer to the same illness. The good thing of being bipolar is that you don't need drugs to feel like God. When you're up, you're God. Sorry. It was a joke. This is my way to handle my illness. I take my pills and have fun with it, so to speak. But I'm grateful to my illness because it made me discover the web. Once discovered the web, I became involved with web standards and web programming. Then everything begun. I don't think that bipolar disorder is too hard to bear. It's not a burden, it's not your fate: it's a challenge. You have to make it. You need time, love, doctors, pills and a lot of will. Yes, you have to want to make it. It's not your or God's fault: it's all chemicals, a little twist in the DNA chain, that's all. Your brain has trouble with serotonin, so you don't have to feel guilty about that. You're more than a single twist in your DNA or some stupid serotonin receptor: you're a person, a human being. You can make your life extraordinary simply by bearing this burden. Sometimes it's not easy. But, as Plato said, it's in the night that you believe in the light. And the light will come.