Cromoteca

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

Very promising: good song and good video.

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I keep trying to find some time to develop MeshCMS 4, but unfortunately there are many features that need to be implemented, and some design errors that need to be fixed. Despite of this, MeshCMS 4 is running this website and some others since one year.

I was not working on MeshCMS 3 at all, even if there are some websites around that use it. But I recently discovered a report about a vulnerability in MeshCMS 3 and I decided to fix it.

While working with the code, I realized that it was not too hard to add some other improvements to the new 3.x release, like upgrading TinyMCE to its latest version, thus fixing compatibility with modern browsers.

So, this is the list of changes that I implemented in a very short time:

• Fixed vulnerability reported at http://secunia.com/advisories/42946
• TinyMCE updated to 3.4.2
• jQuery updated to 1.6
• Colorbox updated to 1.3.17
• Thumbnail creation performed using less memory
• Added Artisteer support to listmenu
• Created a new…

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Owning a Sony NEX means having a choice between three specific lenses only, but it also means that you can use almost any other lens, provided that you buy an adapter and that you're fine with manual focus that the lens has an aperture ring.

Recently I read an article on Steve Huff's blog (the link is below, because IMHO there's a mistake in that article), showing a cheap (under $100) 35mm f/1.7 lens that allows to take interesting and unconventional shots. That's exactly what I was searching for: a cheap fast lens for my NEX.

The lens is a Chinese CCTV lens with an adapter for the NEX. You can find it on eBay. I bought one for less than $40, shipping included. It arrived in 9 days from Hong Kong; the package included the lens, the adapter, some caps and two macro rings. This is the lens with the adapter mounted.

So, what's wrong with Steve's article? The seller he suggests is a liar, since he claims that his lens is not a CCTV lens, while by just looking at it on eBay,…

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The development of MeshCMS 4 is going well, and I'm enjoying it to manage my website and some other ones. But, unfortunately, the build process is not complete yet, so if you want to try it, you must make some steps manually.

First of all, check out MeshCMS 4 with Subversion from https://meshcms.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/meshcms (it is located in trunk). Then, download GWT from http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/download.html. Unpack GWT within the project, in /lib/gwt, so that the JARs are located in that directory (e.g. /lib/gwt/gwt-servlet.jar).

While this is the required effort, you might probably want to use a WYSIWYG editor in the CMS. At the moment, TinyMCE and CKeditor are supported. Download one of them (or both) and unpack in /lib/editors, so that you have /lib/editors/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js and/or /lib/editors/ckeditor/ckeditor.js.

To build MeshCMS 4 you need JDK 5 or newer and Ant. Open a command shell in the project directory…

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The news that Oracle sued Google brought me back to what I wrote more than year ago: I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source community. Unfortunately I was right.

I agree with the need of an open source Java alliance, but the need I feel now is to express my disappointment in some way that Oracle can hear. I recall an article that suggested to delete Facebook accounts due to their privacy issues, so I thought that deleting my Oracle account(s) could be a good way of being heard. For this to work, though, many people should do the same. So I ask you to consider this option.

But there is an issue with this: I tried, but I was not able to get it done. It appears that there is no way to be deleted. Furthermore, I have more than one account, since I registered on both Oracle and Sun in the past. I sent an email to the support team, but I received an automated response that explains how to unsubscribe from newsletters.

So my questions are: does anyone know…

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