Alessandro Rossini’s Web Site

I had a short vacation in Moldova together with my friend Diego. Probably you are asking yourself “Why Moldova!?”. At least this was the reaction of all of my friends when I told them that I had planned a trip to Chişinău. To be honest, despite the fact that I came back from this trip just few days ago, I am not sure what to answer to this question.

As far as I am concerned, I just wanted to have a trip to an east European country, eventually an ex USSR country. The idea was to go to a country which was culturally, architecturally, geographically and economically speaking very different to what I am used to. After several discussions with Diego about which country to visit, Moldova caught our curiosity… And there we went.

I have to admit that I knew really little about this country before to go, and two things impressed me the most there. The first is, unfortunately, the poverty. The time seems to have stopped in the Nineties there. The average monthly salary in Moldova is around 2500 MDL (151 EUR) while in Norway is 30000 NOK (3533 EUR). Of course, life is cheaper in Moldova than in Norway, but even normalising the salary to the cost of life the difference remains huge.

The other thing that left me puzzled is the lack of linguistic and cultural identity. Native Moldovans belong to the Romanian ethnic group. The official language in Moldova is Romanian, although natives speak a Moldavian dialect which is not so different from the original Romanian. However, Russians and Ukrainians form a large ethnic group in Moldova. Russian is then the default second language at all levels of education, and everyone in the country can speak it fluently. Oddly enough, local Russians refuse to speak Romanian and oblige native Moldovans to speak Russian. Walking around Chişinău I heard more conversations in Russian rather than Romanian, which is quite sad. Maybe this is a superficial analysis of the integration problems, but what kind of cultural identity is this?

I learned a lot from this “very original” trip… especially to give value to the things I am lucky to have in my life. Being at home with all the comforts seems like a luxury now… I hope I will always remember about it.

Ho deciso di condividere un articolo che scrissi nel 2007 dal titolo “La tastiera italiana come causa di un pericoloso malcostume linguistico“. Nell’articolo mostro come il layout di tastiera italiano favorisca l’uso del digramma lettera + apice in sostituzione della lettera accentata. Pur non avendo una preparazione universitaria in linguistica, decisi di scrivere questo articolo come reazione alla trattazione decisamente superficiale dell’argomento da parte dell’Accademia della Crusca. Ogni commento è benvenuto.

Buona lettura.

I have the feeling that my blog is slowly becoming just a collection of reports about my trips… Not that there is anything wrong with that, but a bit more of variety would be better. Anyway, here I am once more talking about research and travelling.

During March I had two trips. The first was in Marburg, a little town about one hour train north of Frankfurt, Germany. This trip was not due to a conference, but because I needed to work together with my colleague Adrian – who was spending three months as visitor research at the University of Marburg – on an paper which we had to submit for a journal publication. Marburg is a delicious university town, it reminds me a bit L’Aquila, at least the L’Aquila I am familiar with. I have been staying one week in a king sized room of a guest house, with furnitures from the beginning of the 20th century and a bathroom that was probably bigger than the room I have in Bergen. No, I did not have money to waste in my travelling budget, on the contrary I tried to spare… This was actually the cheapest solution available since Marburg was hosting a big conference on Medicine exactly that week and all the hotels were fully booked. We managed to get finished with the paper and to submit it. But fortunately it was not only work, we have also been able to enjoy German beer and food. I enjoyed so much a couple of “auflauf” (casserole) I tried. I learned also something curious: many of the public toilets in Marburg has special sink specifically designed to… puke. A local PhD student commented with “We have strong drinking traditions in Germany…”. Amazing!

The second trip was to York, as always together with Adrian, to attend the FASE 2009 conference, part of ETAPS. Here I presented our last published paper. I was not so stressed in the end, and everything went smoothly. I am very satisfied by the presentation, and receiving compliments from colleagues and other researcher was a great reward. The very same evening after the presentation we had a “gala dinner”, which was actually delicious, and of course we continued the celebrations in the pubs of the city centre. The ale beers from the local breweries helped me to forget about the research carried on in the last months… The city of York was somehow fascinating, also because of its history. Founded by Romans in the year 71 and captured by the Vikings in 866, it shares a lot with the history of both my home country and the country where I live now.

I hope to be able to upload pictures from both trips soon!

This year I applied for 20 working days of vacation… Strange feeling to have vacations constrained by a contract… Well, I am a full-time worker now, first or last it had to happen.

Planning my vacations was not so easy this year. I wanted to go home in Italy, but at the same time I wanted some action somewhere else in the world… And I had to make it fit with some deadlines at the University. The final choice was the following: Italia at the end of June, and Россия — it means just Russia, but I could not resist to write it in Cyrillic — at the end of July.

A journey to Italy always gives me a mixture of contradictory feelings. On one hand it is pleasant to come back to my home-sweet-home after a long while: my family, my wonderful nephews and niece, my (few) good old friends, good weather, good sea, good food, good wine… On the other hand, the little old-fashion culture of Italy makes me pissed off every time I clash with it. Italian society seems hopeless and passive, staring at the cultural and economical decline. You can sense it everywhere, even in the speeches and faces of people. Every time I am preparing my trip to Italy I am so excited, but once back I always feel that my vacation has a sour after-taste. Anyway, my home village is very little and I did not do that much except sunbathing, swimming and going out with my friends. At least one day I was brave enough to climb the Gran Sasso mountain up to the top (2912m). This was the most exciting moment of my vacation in Italy, and I have to thank Antonio for being my guide.

If the first vacation was calm and relaxing, the one that came after was absolutely thrilling and exhausting. I visited St. Petersburg and Moscow, together with Diego and Federico, probably the best — or the worst depending on the point of view… — “colleagues” I could ask. The same way Diego said it to me one year ago, now I can say as well “la Russia mi ha cambiato la vita” (Russia changed my life). Part of me will never be the same after this vacation… It was probably the best I have ever had, well done guys!

St. Petersburg is a lovely old-fashion city, quite European in the way of living, but still Soviet in its symbols. Being full of art, it was a very good place to enlarge my photography experience. Moscow is young and dynamic, somehow too big for my taste, but definitely magnificent. Very good night life, even though we had only a couple of chances to experience it. It is difficult to compare those two cities, they are very different but I was fascinated by both.

I was very surprised by this country and by its people. Russians, especially Russian girls, were extremely charming and welcoming. I got in touch very special persons, who helped me in many ways and acted as tourist guides just for me. Curiously, I noticed that Russians dress up on more occasions than Europeans do. Even to go for a casual walk, a Russian woman could wear high heels and a nice dress. A hardcore feminist might have the wrong impression that women do this because they are victimized, but Russian women themselves explained it this way, “We only live once; I want to look and feel my best”. I was actually very glad of it. Moreover, all the stereotypes I heard before about criminality in Russia were exaggerated. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we spent most of our time either sightseeing or in our apartment, but I had the impression that both St. Petersburg and Moscow are not more dangerous then other big cities in Europe.

What else can I say? Probably that I will be back in Russia one day, hopefully soon! I uploaded pictures from my trips. Check my Flickr photostream, and do not forget to leave comments!

До свидания.

Americans were the first to land on the Moon, Italians (and in particular researchers from Abruzzo, my home region) were the first to “photograph” the female G spot…

Read the full article here.

Definitely one my favourites comedians.

I can’t believe it!

For geeks only.

Probabilmente in pochi si saranno accorti del fatto che nei testi faccio uso dell’accento acuto sopra alle vocali i ed u. La cosa potrebbe sembrare atipica, ed in effetti lo è.

Quella che si considera la norma di riferimento per quello che riguarda l’uso degli accenti nella lingua italiana è la nº 6015 dell’Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione (UNI), nella quale si raccomandano le seguenti convenzioni:

• Il segnaccento, nei casi in cui è obbligatorio, è sempre grave sulle vocali: a, i, o, u;
• Sulla e, il segnaccento obbligatorio è grave se la vocale è aperta, è acuto se la vocale è chiusa.

Questa norma è completamente illogica e a sostenerlo non sono solo io ma linguisti autorevoli come Canepàri. La questione è abbastanza semplice da capire: se l’accendo acuto <´> indica la vocale chiusa e quello grave <`> la vocale aperta, per coerenza verrebbe da pensare che quest’ultimo venga raccomandato per i ed u poiché sarebbero vocali aperte. E proprio qui nasce la contraddizione. Nel sistema vocalico italiano tali vocali vengono descritte come, risettivamente, anteriore e posteriore di massima chiusura. Questo vuol dire che la i e la u sono le vocali foneticamente piú chiuse dell’italiano.

Già questa sintetica spiegazione dovrebbe far capire quanto la norma di riferimento sia illogica, ma siamo in Italia… le cose fatte “alla carlona” sono il nostro forte. Studiando le basi della lingua catalana (lingua madre della mia ragazza, ovvero colei che senza volerlo mi ha aperto la mente sulla linguistica ) ho avuto solo conferme: il loro sistema vocalico è quasi identico al nostro, eppure coerentemente prevedono solo l’accento acuto su i ed u.

Ad ogni modo c’è chi ha trattato l’argomento in maniera piú che esaustiva, se siete curiosi potete leggere un articolo scritto da Paolo Matteucci qui.

Se vi state chiedendo poi come si possano digitare questi caratteri con la tastiera italiana, be’, questo è un capitolo enorme e spero di parlarvene al piú presto…

Some days ago, while a was hacking (that simply means “to devise or modify a computer program, usually skillfully”) the code of the theme I use on this site, and I started to think about how much time it passed since my first appearance on the Internet and how my web site evolved in such period.

I started connecting to Internet in 1995 with a U.S. Robotics 28.800bps modem, paid through the nose. My first nickname was Nemo – poor choice I know, but at that time it was possible to choose an unoriginal name.

I think I made my first home page in 1997. It was hosted in a web space offered together with the connectivity by my local provider. I used it to load some picture and to test the script that I was finding hither and thither on the network, like the windows bombing one that associated an infinite pop-up opening cycle to a button conveniently tagged “Don’t click”.

Even if moved several times to other free web hosting, the structure of my home page remained almast the same until 2000.

Forward in time, it became evident the difficulty to continue to use the nickname chosen: Nemo was widely used and I almost didn’t have have the opportunity to register with this username to free services. So I decided to change the nickname, something that was very hard for me both because I was really attached to that name and because I wanted to choose something enough original. At the end I choose Aronnax, because I decided that like the first my nickname had to come from the book “Vingt mille lieues sous le mers” (20000 Leagues Under the Sea) by Jules Verne. Moreover, Aronnax starts with my initials AR, something that was binding it even more to me.

For this occasion I designed my new home page, giving it a more personal look and feel. Also the contents changed a bit, and I start to upload my first coding experiments made with GNU/Linux between university and spare time. For the graphics I took inspiration from the Apple time, that at that time was introducing MacOS X. That version of the home page lasted in 2002.

Also in 2002 decided to finally register the aronnax.it domain. The old home page was dismissed to make room to a news portal dedicated to GNU/Linux. That portal was based on a content management system developed by me and Graziano Liberati, and the newses were loaded directly by me. Despite the efforts after 3 years the portal was closed because the time to spend over it was too much, and the income too poor.

In 2003 I also registered the alessandrorossini.it were I loaded my first real personal web site, of a typical computer science student that starts to think about his future work. The look and feel changed from funny to serious: the main content – excluding the welcome page with my face that I used until this year – was the Curriculum Vitae. For the graphics, I choose the simplest way of downloading one of the templates available at the Open Source Web Design portal.

The versions that went form 2005 to 2007 were not different in the contents, but renewed the graphics that became more attractive.

The last is the version you are looking now. I switched to the powerful Wordpress system and I will continue to add my blog. I also decided that the Italian and the English version of my web site will be completely separated, and the latter will be hosted to this freshly registered alessandrorossini.org domain.

At the end more then ten years passed since my first page, the technology grew a lot and I changed radically as men…am I becoming old? Help me!!!