Tech 2010

On a previous post, I wrote about what I was goint to expect this yeas, "from an IT (strictly personal and professional) point of view": well, did a good job on that, as most of my expectations were accomplished. So let's start talking about what 2010 is going to be starting from what we've seen in 2009: activity under Linux has increased, and the latest Ubuntu/Kubuntu release is impressive. Karmic is mature, stable, fast, and the latest KDE 4.3.3 has drammatically improved responsiveness and performance, becoming, from my point of view, one of the best overall desktop environment - well, it still needs some strengthening, but it's going to become as good as OS X. In my previous post I wrote about my intention of going for an iMac "but I'm waiting for Snow Leopard to see if it's worth the price"... well: it's worth the price: my new 27" iMac is simply impressive, Mac OS X is absolutely great, and prices are affordable enough (here in Italy, Macs are much more expensive than is the US... 1500€ vs 1598$, which is something like 50% more!!) to compete with the windows world.
Well, actually now I would not buy a new PC with Windows, as I would choose a Mac for a high grade or professional machine and Linux for anything else.
In my personal hit parade, windows is in the last place.
So, what is going to happen next year? Windows Vista is most likely the worst OS in the MS history (evening the score with ME), so Seven will easily be a better overall system. From now on, 4 Gb of RAM will be the minimum wage, and XP is out of the game; new systems will be loaded with 64bit OSes.
Of course, except for netbooks. Netbooks are going to be the trend, next year, and I expect Apple to enter the netbook arena soon. I am not going to use a netbook, as I need more power when I work with PC class software, and more portability when I need a PIM. My notebook is powerful and portable enough for serious stuff, and my smartphone is smaller than a netbook and runs all the PIM stuff I need.
But anyway, netbooks are going to be a very big affair: and Chrome OS is going to be a main actor, along with Ubuntu in its netbook edition. Google's OS is more innovative, but a lot of people still want to use its portable PC during the home-work-home bus trip, not necessarily paying an UMTS connection. So there is still place for traditional OSes; and probably a lot of users will chose some stripped version of seven.
C++0x hasn't been released yet, let's hope next year will be the One. But now that Nokia has acquired it, the Qt framework is getting really really hot: I await a lot of new applications running under different OSes builded with Qt.
The new CPUs are all heavily multicore, so software will become more multithreaded, and tecnologies such as Apple's Grand Central Dispatch will help a lot. Anyway, nothing new under the hood.
My word for 2010? "Mac".

iMac 27"

Sun catame il nuovo iMac con il fantastico display da 27".
Che macchina favolosa...
Il display è veramente strepitoso, mi ha lasciato senza parole. La tastiera wireless appena tirata fuori dalla scatola mi ha fatto una pessima impressione, ma in realtà è eccellente pure lei. Il magic mouse ha veramente un che di magico: strepitoso.
Metto la spina, accendo. Parte tutto al primo colpo, funziona tutto, è tutto velocissimo. E' tutto eccellente.
La differenza con i sistemi windows è veramente, incolmabilmente abissale. Non ce n'è.
Solo una bella macchina con Linux o BSD può rivaleggiare, ma il tempo da dedicare alla scelta dei componenti può essere tanto, mentre il Mac è lì bello pronto.
Per chi stesse pensando di acquistare un nuovo computer, passando dal vecchio XP ad un nuovo sistema 7... bhè: 10 è > di 7. PUNTO.

Ubuntu 9.10

Open source data modeling tool

Per un nuovo progetto su cui sto lavorando, ho iniziato ad utilizzare Power*Architect, un tool per il disegno dei database. Scritto in Java, si connette via jdbc al target db (e quindi anche a Postgres)... per questi primi giorni di utilizzo ho individuato un paio di problemini, ma probabilmente li risolveremo mettendo mano al codice open. Problema ben più grosso il fatto di non poter introdurre, in un unico diagramma, relazioni appartenenti a più schemi (problema risolto con un workaround, ma radicato nell'architettura del sw).
Appena Ubik tornerà dalle ferie, valuteremo con lui la possibilità di partecipare attivamente allo sviluppo, e dare una mano ai ragazzi canadesi ;)

Disk Image in OS X

Attraverso la command line di OS X è possibile creare dei .dmg contenenti le immagini di interi dischi (come ad esempio il volume di sistema).
Ho trovato questa fantastica app, Cabon Copy Cloner, che wrappa in una splendida GUI le operazioni di ci sopra, e sto proprio ora facendo un backup del disco di sistema.