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, 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 think I’ve finally found the best hard disk defragmenter tool on the market, Raxco’s PerfecDisk, a combination of speed and efficiency which is uncommon in current defragmenters.

Just after purchasing it I also discovered an invaluable system recovery tool on Raxco’s website. It’s FirstDefense, a tool which works with the concepts of “snapshots” and “anchored data” to safeguard from system failures a hard disk with WindowsXP and the NTFS file format or even to quickly boot to a clean OS installation.

Had I discovered it earlier I would had a better time the two times my system crashed, so now I’m passing the advice.

Getting back to good Pocket PC software, I’ve just upgraded to RepliGo version 2.0 and I’m satisfied of the new features Cerience introduced, like bookmarks, text searches and live hyperlinks among the favorites.

Then I must say that SpbTime, the advanced time tool from Spb Software House, has been a new discovery since I find myself often using its timer and desktop clock functions, with different skins.

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 progressing nicely.

Acurious note about Rubbia: during his 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…