Big G or Big Brother?

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

1000px-Chromium_11_Logo.svg Google Criticized For ‘Opaque’ Audio-Listening Binary In Debian Chromium (source Slashdot): Debian, mother of Ubuntu, a major player in the software Libre world always required to have access to the sources of the programs they distribute1, especially in web-browsers. I’m not surprised to read this.

I do not use proprietary browser for this very reason, you can’t be sure what it really does, so I avoided Internet Explorer, Opera but also Google’s Chrome which is based on a libera (italian adjective for free-as-in-freedom) version named Chromium which I seldom use as my main browser is Firefox.

An opaque, binary-only module is by all mean of definition proprietary, so I think I’ll try to avoid Chromium too, or to use it silencing my microphone….

You smart reader may already be complaining that most web-applications are proprietary too and although coded in an interpreted language such as JavaScript they are nevertheless proprietary. Yes, you’re right, but that’s another issue. Quite big actually and quite bigger than me.

 

  1. there are some small exception, namely NVidia and Radeon 3D drivers but they are few and well segregated ↩

A little too much

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

In a middle of typical morning I saw the battery of my smartphone quite lower than what I expected so I looked at power usage :
image

Hey, wait a moment, I haven’t used Google Play Music! It must have been working under the wood:
image

Dear Google,
I understand that you strive to provide refined, responsive, polished services yet three gigabytes of data in two weeks are an order of magnitude or two bigger than what I would consider a fair usage of my bandwidth for a program I haven’t run in months, for music that I haven’t listened to since last autumn.
So thanks for all the fish, I’m going to un install Google tunes. I’ll use it properly confined into a browser I trust which incidentally is not Chrome.
Your truly
Paolo Redaelli

Discovering #NoFilter Milan – Ms. Adventures in Italy

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Let’s re-discover my own Milan. Actually I don’t life in Milan, but in a nearby town in the southern part of Brianza, near enough to reach it with a ½hour of train. I graduated here, and went to lessons by bike, so yes, that’s my city.

Thank you Sara Rosso, to help me rediscover it! (from: Discovering #NoFilter Milan with London City Airport – Ms. Adventures in Italy)

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Post-processing and filtering images on our phones is almost too easy, which is why I love this initiative to post unedited photos of Milan, and to encourage each other to shoot #nofilter as often as possible. Being Italy’s business and commerce capital, Milan does not always get swept with the same rustic-charm beauty brush as other classic Italian destinations. You have to pay more attention in Milan to catch its beauty and its charm, which is why I think seeing the city through others’ eyes reminds me, too, that there is more to Milan.

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JavaScript + Other Languages

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

JavaScript+OtherLanguages

Those slides JavaScript + Other Languages are really useful to implement an eventual Eiffel to JavaScript compiler.

Well, actually it should be called transcompiler….

We could just feed the C files made by current Liberty compiler but it seems to me that passing throught C which is a procedural language like C could easily makes things quite beefier as an Eiffel compiler usually translate all the nifty niceries of Eiffel into low-level C code which could be quite cryptic.