P. S.: Post Scriptum

This morning I received a mail from Copenhagen. It was very moving, and describing a situation of chaos, strong commitment, and braveness. It told the story of people fighting with non violence, and shouting that they want change.

And I am afraid all this is useless. I feel once again what I felt looking at Iran insurgency. But stronger.

Let’s focus on Copenhagen. The sensation is that there is a lot of people on the street asking for a strong carbon tax. Count me among them. But there is more. I am afraid people have ideas, and those ideas are not being heard. And then people assume the worse, and assume the world leaders, the ministers, and everybody who is inside is on the pay check of some big corporations. And then they demand change. But now they do not focus any more on the small change. The key point. Now they want a huge change, that will not happen. And then there are rallies, and people pushing, and the police resisting. And violence. Yes police violence should not be there. And I feel this is not the way. It is not by shouting “Shame on you”, that you win the heart of the police men. It is not by shouting to people that you get yourself heard. As it does not change if I write this in normal letters or in CAPS LOCK. It is the content that matters And when you are shouting, when you are polarized, you are already making violence. This is not the way.

Now, there are people who work hard to negotiate among different positions. The Center for Non Violent Communication is probably one of the best. It was created by Marshall B. Rosenberg. One of the student of Gandhi (or so I remember from his book. The wikipedia page does not seem to mention it). Now Marshall has worked in the past as a negotiator between groups, and I am sure there are a number of very good negotiator working inside the conference to negotiate between the  key people. What I don’t think there is, are negotiator between the people in the conference and people outside.

It is like all the effort is concentrated in getting the communication going between those big players. But no work has been done to get enough communication between the inside of the conference and the outside. The assumption seem to be that either there are no good ideas outside or it is just impractical to engage them. I think both of those assumption are wrong. Yes, we still need to develop the tools to make an efficient brainstorm with millions of people. But the idea of having everybody writing their own ideas, and voting on the ideas they like is already a good start. Why is there no system like this to harvest the ideas from the people?

I was just looking at a youtube cnn conference where people sent questions, and voted on the questions. Again there is the assumption that normal people are just ignorant. This is not true. Not anymore (if it ever was). Not with the internet that let anyone study any topic.

In all those situations we need to set up systems where people can chip in their ideas. While it is happening, can read each other ideas. And the most voted ideas emerge from the noise to the people who are making the discussion.

[crossposted on the moblog, and the facebook notes.]

One of the leit motif in spirituality is to reach an integration among the various parts of oneself. There are many important reasons for this, which I am not going to enter right now. Becoming One is not seen in Taoism as a spiritual goal, but as a spiritual prerequisite. It is not school, it is preschool. Until you are one you cannot really get involved with spirituality. It is like if in your family you decide to build a house, but not everybody agrees on that. Then one part of you builds it in the morning, and someone else of the family will destroy it in the evening. Maybe using the bricks for something else.

The idea that we are many, that each of us is many, is quite common. In psychology is common, Junghian Psychology, if I recall well. Again, in Taoism it even reaches the point of believing that this is true in a litteral point of view. Each of us, is seen as a patchwork of different spirits (shen). And when you die each spirit will then go its way. As such in Taoism until you have reached a real integration between your parts of yourselves (your spirits), you cannot even have reincarnation unless you have developed a unit which is integrated enough to go through the trauma of death without shattering in a 1000 little pieces.

And another idea that is very common (you have it in Taoism, but also in Christianity, for example), is the idea that one day, one time, at some point we will all get together. Christian say “sit by the father”. In Taoism the idea is that any person who have showed a spark of interest for spiritual work will eventually join together in some place beyong space and time, a sort of heaven. And the joke then is if people are following the 1 lifetime program, the 10 lifetime program, the 100 or 1000 lifetime program, to reach it. And the faster it is, the rougher it is.

I have to say I am amazed by how well is Facebook helping in this integration work, for me. I have many friends, on facebook. But more importantòy I have friends from different groups. Each friend knew a different Pietro. Some were from my spiritual life (taoism, tai chi, meditation, …), some from my academic world (artificial life, mathematics), some are Go-brothers, others people I knew from childhood, or from high school, or middle school. And with each of them I was a different person. And now they are all together. All in the same place. And the internet does indeed feel a little bit like this place beyond space and time. And I read of many of them. But what is more important, is that, as I write about my life, I am forced to write in a way that is acceptable for both my academic side and my spiritual side. I can only write in an integrated way, because I know that friends from both worlds will read me. In this sense facebook is catalysing an integration in me. Is helping me to become one.

I know many people are having problems with facebook. I think a lot of the problem is that they are not ready or willing to have this integration. For me Fb is pretty easy: to become my friend you need to know me. With very few exceptions I do not add anyone who is not someone I personally know. But if I have met you, and you want to befriend me, then you are in. I don’t keep people that I know out of the door. Because that would be equivalent to keeping some part of myself out of the door, the part of me that interacted with them. You are all invited to the party. I sometime even go back in time, and look for people I once knew. People that were important in my life. Or people I wished I had the time to know better. Maybe now we have another occasion. But then on my status, in my notes, in the caption of my photo, I try not to speak thinking about one in particular (I might have done it, but mostly I try to avoid it). I speak to all my friends at the same time. And if anyone comments, I answer that person, personally. The answer is personal, but anybody can see it, and thus the integration goes deeper. I write in English and in Italian, because those are the languages with which I live, work, chat, play and love. My inner dialogue is sometimes in Italian and sometimes in English, depending where I am, what I am thinking of doing. And my facebook reflects that.

Most of you know that I use facebook pretty frequently. I update the status often, sometimes more than once a day. But what some of you have not realised is that I do not do much less on facebook. I avoid facebook applications. I only use the ones that are truly useful, that add functionalities that were not there, and are truly helpful. If I want to wish to my friend Happy Chinese New Year, I will do it in person, or through the status. Not through an application. In this way the integration proceeds. I very rarely invite people to use applications. I only do so when I think an application is very very good. (The “skip this” button is my friend). I invited my friends for the geo tagging application. I would do it for the “cause” application. Maybe the iRead could be another one, and the application to play Go online. Here you go, this makes it 4. And when I invite people I only invite people I think will appreciate it (or should, they know it or not ). I consider the other applications to be equivalent to spam. I try not to spam my friends. When a new application arrives (elves, and pirates, etc…) , I usually just block it. If an application is requiring me to send invitation to let you proceed, I report it (because it is breaking the TOS, and ruining the party for everybody), delete it and block it. With absolutely no pity, whatsoever.

I see often people who get tired of facebook. But very often those are people who are not using facebook as a tool to interact with friends that are far away (in space or time), but as a game. Those are the friends that use more of those facebook useless applications. They get tired, but what they are really getting tired are those useless applications. They are right in getting tired. They just need to use facebook, instead of be used by it. And then fb will stop being a toy, and become an instrument. You will forget about facebook, and think about your friend.

Keeping the application to the minimum necessary.
Speaking to everybody. Inviting all your (real life) friends.
It is fairly easy to let facebook help you in the integration process.

I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing some time in Greece and coming back still with Ryanair on the 19th.

So I tried to move my first flight to another date. I know for sure I will go to Rome for Christmas, so moving it to the 21st of December seemed the best thing. You can’t actually do it online because the system would not accept a going ticket (21st of December) later than the return part of the ticket. I thought, fine, it sounds like something that really needs an operator.

And the operator just confirmed me the same thing. We can’t move a going part of a flight later. We can’t twist a flight around making what was the coming back the going, and adding a flight after while deleting the first.

Those things make me boil, it sounds like machines are in charge.

The crazy thing is that if I had bought the ticket as two separated flights I would have paid the same and had the possibility to change them. Crazy, eh! And ths limit is a total nonsense imposed by some wanker programmer, who imposes on other useless limitations.

So the first take away message is: when you buy a ticket alway buy each separate flight as a stand alone flight, and never buy two tickets as a return ticket. You never know when you might need to change the ticket.

As I was discussing the issue with my collegues, I was further told that when you buy a return ticket you still pay double taxes on each credit card transaction, so you are really paying the same. And then I was told other stories of how Ryanair handled everybody much worse. From mother who are required to submit the babies trolley as a “outsized” package. While in all other companies they can go with the trolley up to the plane and are then uploaded in a place where they can easily taken back. How then they have to walk with baby, handluggage and baby carseat to the plane (which in Dublin is about 1 km, sweet). And so on.

So generally the agreed wisdom from the office is:
never fly with Ryanair when you have a choise, and if you don’t have a choise wonder if your flight is really necessary.

It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.

I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling process, and now it is too late.

What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading Polyphasic Easter

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

In the last weeks I have been interested in polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a sleeping pattern where the person does not sleep in one big chunck, but in many roughly equivalent pieces throughout the whole day. The first time I heard about it was from my father, some twenty years ago. The pattern is sometimes used by solo sailors, who travel through long oceanic trips. My father has always loved to sail, and read many books on the subject; so that’s how he knew about it. According to thos books Leonardo Da Vinci was a polyphasic sleeper, sleeping some 15 minuites every 2 hours.

But I don’t want to discuss in this post about polyphasic sleep. I want to describe everything else I know about sleep, so that at a later post I can say: “And this has totally blown off everything I knew about sleep” (with a link!). It’s like when in go you play a stone, that is not that important, but such that later you can link to it. You build your framework.

And if all I said in the rest of this post will sound like pseudoscience, is because mostly is. It comes out of personal observations, some lessons explained, learned, and integrated, but no scientific work that I know off (or that I searched for).

My knowledge about sleep originate from a lesson I received some sixteen years ago. At the first yoga class I went to. The teacher explained to me that not every hour is equally important to sleep. There are some moments that are definitly more important, and others less. Some time between Continue reading Sleeping patterns: when is it better to sleep

So, here is the quest. You need to discover the password of your best friend. Although this might seem morally reprehensible you are moved by nobel and deep reasons. You need to check in his email and discover if he is having an affair with your wife. You can’t just confront him if you are not sure. Nor can you run the risk of confronting your wife before you are sure.

We will assume that you have access to your best mate computer. After all he trusts you, right. And with reasons, you would never do anything against him… normally. But this time it’s different. If he has been seducing your angel, he deserves the worse.

We will also assume that your best friend is really into security, and since firefox is a more secure system, he uses firefox. Daily. And as a final assumption we shall assume that since he keeps his mail on the web, and accesses it through the browser. Let’s assume it’s on Yahoo.

This is what you need to do:

1. Get his computer, in a moment he is out for launch (with your lady, bastard!), and lock yourself for the work. You will need privacy for this. If you are confronted you can always say Continue reading Reading your mate passwords in Firefox

Note: This entry is connected also to a mindmap. Some people were having problems in opening the page because of that. As such the mindmap has been stored in a separate page, and can be viewed from here.

Introduction

As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet I keep seeing services which should be using tag clouds that keep on using tag sets. It is not just a problem of programming a tool which can only support tag sets, but also but also of programming tools which might in principles produce tag clouds, but such that the users are not invited to use a tag if one already exists, and as such don’t generate a tag cloud.

Example of the first type of tools are Flickr, 43things, consuMating, tagsurf ^* , example of the second is the tagged version of the BBC^* . In all those cases a tag set is used, where instead a tag cloud would be more appropriate. Some of the differences between a tag cloud and a tag set where explained in Vanderwal.net: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies. Let’s see them again, and see some consequences of those differences, which should clarify when is better to use one tool and when is better to use the other. Continue reading On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws

Interesting.
I was making a search on process algebra, and still I am new to the field I was also looking for a tutorial.
So I searched Google for “process algebra” tutorial
And look at the result. In some tutorial is not even present (for example here).
Instead Google used the words how to, as a synonym for tutorial. You can see it by the fact that it had even bolded how to in some of the excerpt that it gives in the search page.
I wonder:

• How general is it?
• In what cases will it use a synonyme?
• How could I turn it off, or on, or even ask for a broader range of synonims to be accepted?

As the price of houses rises, more and more people find that the best solution is to divide a house among friends. Usually each person gets a room. The problem then is: who gets what room and how much should he pay. Usually the total rent is fixed, and usually the rooms are not exactly all the same. Some might be bigger, some smaller. Some might have a better view, more privacy, closeness to the toilet, more silence, and so on. And what’s also important is that different people might value the various elements in different ways.

I present here two ways of splitting the rent and dividing a house. I personally favour (and has designed) the second, but while I was presenting this method to some friends to get some
feedback, I was told the other, it seemed simpler, yet interesting enough to add it. They both assume that:
a) the rent is fixed,
b) there are no favoritism among the will-be-housemate on
who gets to choose first.

The ‘find the objective value first’ method.

Before the rooms are assigned, get together and agree on what are the objective value of each room (i.e. 20% of the rent for this, 50% of the rent for this). The total value must of course be the whole rent. Then randomly select who gets what room (at the agreed price), and as a final action people are allowed to exchange rooms if they want to.
Positive element: it is simple and quite straightforward.
Negative element: it assumes that people can easily agree on the actual relative value of the rooms, and that such value does not change respectively to the persons.

The ‘each person gets the best room’ method.

As I said this is the method that I love most. First of all let each person inspect all the room. Then each person, writes, secretly, the relative value of each room in a piece of paper. The sum of the values must be equal to the requested rent. The idea is to divide the house so that each person gets a room, and pays for that room the value THEY wrote on the piece of paper, while the sum of the valued paid by each person totally covers the requested rent.

Obviously, very often, the collected money would then be higher than the rent. Let’s call the collected money minus the monthly rent, the ‘extra money’.

Often there is more than one solution, that permit to have a some extra money each month. When this happens, the solution that permits to maximize the extra money is chosen. The extra money is then used to pay for the light, any extra expenses, or whatever is needed for the house.

Sometimes there are more than one optimal solution, that is some solutions generate the same extra money, everybody is paying the requested cost for each room, and all other solutions are less optimal. In that case the adopted solution will be one of the optimal one, randomly chosen.

Examples, examples:
Let’s suppose we have a house with 3 rooms (a, b, and c) and 3 persons (A, B, and C). Let’s suppose the total rent being 100.

Person A might find the three rooms equivalent, so he might just write (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3). Person B might instead favour room B, because is more sunny, and she likes to paint, and then she thinks that room ‘a’ is slightly better than room ‘c’, infact she would prefer not to be in room c at all, so she would write: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25). Person C instead does not care about the sun, but has noticed that room A has more privacy, plus is near the toilet, and since he likes to have his gf as a guest, thinks that having room A would be a better deal. So he votes (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30).

Then the papers are revealed.

Generally when a room has a person that values it more than all the others, and he values that room more than all other ooms, then that room gets taken by that person at the price he has choose.

In our example we have:
A: (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
which would give us that A would get room ‘c’ paying one third of the rent. B would get room ‘b’ paying 40% of the rent, and C would get room ‘a’ for 40% of the rent… and the collected money each month would be 33.3+40+40=113.3 . The extra money would be 113.3-100=13.3 and would be used to pay for the electricity, water, gas, or whatever.

It is also possible to rinormalise the prices, by lowering them so that the total sum becomes exactly the cost of the rent, while the relative ratio remains the same. In our example
A: (33.3/113.3)*100=29.4
B: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
C: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
and person A would pay 29.4 of the rent (since he took the room nobody wanted)
person B would pay 35.3 of the rent (and took the sunny room)
person C would pays 35.3 of the rent (and took the room with more privacy)

So, what if the situation is not that easy. There isn’t a person that prefers each room? For example you could be in a situation like:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
well in this case it is obvious that person A will get either room a or room b. But it is also obvious that room c will go to person C. So C get’s c at 30% of the rent. Both A and B value the room a and b equivalently. But once the room will be assigned person A will pay more than person B, so it seem fair to me that person A chooses a or b and pays 45, and person B gets the remaining room, but pays less (40).

But things can get even more complicated if some people
value some rooms exactly the same:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
C: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
in which case A and B have obviously to randomly choose who gets what.

Or if the situation is symmethric among the rooms:
A: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 40)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 30)
C: (a: 30, b: 40, c: 40)
In which case you randomly choose if A gets a or c, and then the other follow obviously.

So here we have the first mehtod, where everybody chooses the value together, this is equivalent on the second method if everybody agrees on the relative value:
A: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
After which, also in this method, you would randomly pick who gets which room.

Please, let me know if you have tried it and if it was succesful.

I added an extra bookmarklet. I was in this room with 25 great minds discussing molecular dynamics inquantum fields. I couldn’t understand a iota. Luckily new talks are given in places with wifi connection. So to try to get up to speed with what was going on I wrote a small wikipedia fast search.

Now I could just type “w molecule” in the link bar and the browser would automatically go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecule.

So how do you do it?
Just copy the link in your bookmarks. Copy it in the “Quick Search” directory, then edit the properties and add keyword “w”. And voilà .
Following a talk with it is much faster.

I was getting really annoyed with my Italian keyboard. I just could not find the graph parenthesis. Those:’{‘ and ‘}’. I tried all sort of combinations. You know it’s a pain int he ass to program without ‘{}’ . Yes, it’s possible to organise some macro, but each macro will be for a specific program. Finally I decided I would have solved the problem once and for all. If necessary I would have rebuilded the driver. I started looking in the web for informations on how the keyboard drivers were built, and I found this page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wceddk40/html/cmconkeyboardlayouts.asp

Here I learned how to open and close graph parenthesis:
CTRL+ALT+SHIT+’è’
and
CTRL+ALT+SHIT+’+’

Which are just the same keys to get the square parenthesis.
Only the square parenthesis os done ‘just’ with
CTRL+ALT+’è’
and
CTRL+ALT+’+’
And since CTRL+ALT can be reached by just pressing the ‘ALT GR’ (the ALT on the right side of the spacebar), then is also possible to have { with ‘ALT GR’+SHIFT+è
and } with ‘ALT GR’+SHIFT+’+’

Just in case you were wondering.

{Pietro}

I can’t believe how stupid I can be. I think I surpassed myself this time. I was playing with my new toy the blog setting, and I was trying to get it to append an rss of the category at the end of each category page. So I needed an image of the little rss red button. You know the one that appears like this: RSS. I remembered that del.icio.us had it, so I went forward to steal it lend it. But as I went and right clicked on the picture the menu did not list the option save picture as. Uh?
I went to check out the code, thnking: what the hell are they doing here?

I could not find and <img ...> at all. What I found instead was a link to
<a href="/PleaseBanMe//%username%"><span></span></a>

Ok, you already have understood what I did.

I wanted to try the link out… and I did not even logged out before. Well, now I can assure you, the link works, and I was banned for 30 minutes. I can imagine Joshua laughing at all the people who ban themselves.

Still thinking about the rss image? Well, it was not an image at all, but a carefully crafted text:
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight:bold;
text-decoration:none;
color: white;
background-color: #F60;
border:1px solid;
border-color: #FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
padding:0px 3px 0px 3px;
margin:0px;">RSS</span>

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