While I was working as waiter at the recent Workshop Ambrosetti, the international meeting about economy taking place annually at Villa d’Este during the first week of September, I had the unexpected chance to exchange a few words with Carlo Rubbia, the 1984 Physics Nobel Prize winner, and you can imagine my satisfaction when I told him that I choose his quote “Hardware is nothing without software” as the topic for the written composition at my school-leaving examination, a quote which is now printed on my business card.
So, speaking about good software, I’m glad I’ve finally found what I think is the best hard disk defragmenter tool in circulation, Raxco’s PerfecDisk, a combination of speed and efficiency which is uncommon in today’s defragmenters. Just after purchasing it I also discovered an invaluable system recovery tool on Raxco’s website. It’s FirstDefense, a tool which works on the concepts of “snapshots” and “anchored data” to safeguard a hard disk with WindowsXP and the NTFS file format from system failures or even to quickly boot to a clean OS installation. Had I discovered earlier I would had a better time those two times my system crashed, so now I’m passing the advice to you.
Getting back to good Pocket PC software I’ve just upgraded to RepliGo version 2.0 and I’m very satisfied of the new features Cerience introduced, like bookmarks, text searches and live hyperlinks among my favorite ones.
Then I must say that SpbTime, the advanced time toolbox from Spb Software House, has been a nice new discovery since I find myself often using its timer and desktop clock functions, with different skins of course.
Well that’s just what I need to keep up with my software projects… time!
But I must also say that Ecpc 1.4 is coming along nicely.

Update: a curious note about Rubbia. During the lunch a sommelier approached him and asked what was the status of his project for the atomic propulsion space engine and Rubbia told him that the research is proceeding, but in the USA, not certainly in Italy…

This has been a very busy summer for me since I caught the opportunity to work as waiter in some well known restaurants around my town, like the ones in the exclusive Villa d’Este and in the recently opened Birrificio di Como, one of the biggest brew-pubs in Europe.
During these months my coding activity has been pretty limited and I barely managed to keep myself updated about news and events of the frenetic information technology world. To do things on my good old PC piled up so much that the only way to actually complete most of them is sorting them out and set a series of well definite priorities.
Top priorities are publishing a new version of Ecpc with some important changes and updating the website, then I’ll start the work to make Ecpc fully multiplatform.
I’ve met a lot of people and found a few old and new friends by working in these summer months and the season is not over yet, so if you find me working in one of those places I’ll be pleased to serve you as an Ecpc user really deserves, in particular at the Birrificio di Como because no matter what happens in life, there’s always time for a good beer.
As Paracelsius said in 1614, Cerevisia malorum divina medicina.