Luciano Vernaschi's Blog (Cromoteca)

Sickabell: Sort of Mess (Video)

Mon, 16 May 2011 09:28:00 CEST

Very promising: good song and good video.

MeshCMS 3 Is Still Alive

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:06:00 CEST

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…

More Fun with My Sony NEX 3 and a Cheap CCTV Lens

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:03:00 CEST

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…

How To Try MeshCMS 4 Alpha

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:55:00 CEST

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,…

How Can I Delete My Oracle Accounts?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:14:00 CEST

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…

MeshCMS 4 Now Used To Serve This Website

Tue, 18 May 2010 17:04:00 CEST

MeshCMS 4 is now serving this website, and the current code is published on SVN (in trunk). There's much work to do before making a release though: fix bugs add missing features write code comments write documentation Due to the slow development pace, all this will require months, but at least the MeshCMS 4 era has begun. I find it much more enjoyable than MeshCMS 3.x. For example, the file manager is much faster and creating and adding modules to pages is a pleasure now. And finally…

GWT and ASP.NET Can Work Together: a Proxy To Connect .NET and Java

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:26:00 CET

GWT is primarily used in the Java world for obvious reasons: apart from being an excellent tool for creating RIAs (indeed it's my favorite one), it allows to develop both the server and the client part using a single language and a single IDE, and it even allows to share classes. But GWT can be used with any server technology, and although those advantages do not apply anymore, it is an alternative that deserves serious consideration from developers of any server platform. I happen…

Google App Engine Is Not Free Java Hosting

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:00:00 CET

Let me clarify: this is not a rant about GAE: I just want to write about my first approach with it. GAE is Free, is Java and is Hosting, so why this title? Because I've read some articles talking about GAE as a solution to host Java web applications for free. But it depends on how you think to use it: if you have written an application and are searching for a solution to host it, you must keep in mind that you will need to make heavy changes to your app. In my case, I use MeshCMS, my own CMS, to experiment…

MeshCMS 4 On Google App Engine

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 18:43:00 CET

Google App Engine is one of the best things that Java developers have got in the last years because it means free Java hosting . When I read about it for the first time, I thought to try MeshCMS on it, but the first limitation I learned was a no go: Google App Engine forbids writing to the filesystem, so a file based CMS can't work on it. Recently I thought that maybe I discarded that option too early and that GAE is too good to be ignored. I constantly keep an eye on Java hosting and there are…

MeshCMS Supports PHP!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:10:00 CET

I was not aware of the existence of Quercus , a PHP implementation written in Java. It runs as a servlet and is not limited to Resin, so I dropped the JAR in MeshCMS 4 (which I run on Jetty at the moment), and added index.php to the welcome file list to mark .php as a page extension. This is how the Quercus test page looks without any change: This is very important, since MeshCMS 4 allows to create modules and themes using any scripting language, like JSP, Freemarker and, from now on, PHP.…