Seeking an Erlang job? Looking for an Erlang developer to hire?

The guys at Maximonster have just realized a simple website to post Erlang-related job offers. It definitely deserves a look.

Oh, the website is powered by Zotonic, an Erlang CMS.

The bad thing about access keys is that they’re often hidden, by default, in the web pages. This doesn’t make sense to me.

Take the Twitter home page. How many of you knew that, during a search, you could press CTRL+ALT+n to display the “N new tweets since you started searching” or that you could press CTRL+ALT+s to visit your “settings” page? As a different example, let’s consider Wikipedia. Did you know that CTRL+ALT+e lead you to the “edit” mode? Probably not.

Resuming, “accesskey” shortcuts can be very useful. So why they are not displayed by default on the web pages? How should we know about them? And how could we ever remember all of them?

Long time ago, I found this post on how to display the “accesskey” keyboard shortcuts in Firefox and I used it for a while. But I’ve recently fallen in love with Google Chrome and I was wondering if the same feature was already available.

At first, I googled for a quick solution and I couldn’t find anything really useful. Then, I asked on Superuser if what I wanted was somehow possible. After a couple of hours, someone answered my question, claiming he created a new Chrome extension just for that. I must admit I was more impressed by the rapidity of the answer than by the answer itself. If this guy could read my specification and implement a solution in such a short time, there was only one possible consequence: “Creating extension for Google Chrome is easy”.

So, I tried by myself.

First of all, I had a look to the “Getting Started” section of the Chrome extensions documentation. As expected, everything was extremely simple. To implement the “accesskey” shortcuts, it took me no more than five minutes. Literally. And now my Twitter page looks like:

Can you see the pink characters close to the links? They are all available “accesskey” shortcuts, a piece of information that was already embedded in the web page but that has just been hidden. Let’s see how can we make it visible again via a brand new Google Chrome Extension.

First of all, create a new folder somewhere in your hard drive and call it “shortcuts”.

Every Chrome extension is characterized by a “manifest” file, written in json, reporting the “properties” of the extension itself. Inside the “shortcuts” folder, create a new file, named “manifest.json”:

{

  "name": "Shortcuts",

  "version": "1.0",

  "description": "Display the accesskey shortcuts.",

  "content_scripts": [{

    "matches": ["http://*/*", "https://*/*"],

    "css": ["style.css"]

  }]

}

Apart from the name, the version number and the description of the extension, you can notice a “content_scripts” property. This is used to “inject” some code automatically every time a web page is displayed. In our case, we simply want to apply some specific CSS properties to the pages. The “matches” section tells Chrome to apply the transformation to every page using the http or the https protocol.

Now, we just need to create a style.css file (inside the same “shortcuts” folder) containing the needed stylistic information:

a[accesskey]:after,

button[accesskey]:after,

input[accesskey]:after,

label[accesskey]:after,

legend[accesskey]:after,

textarea[accesskey]:after {

  margin-left: 0.3em;

  color: Plum;

  content: "[" attr(accesskey) "]";

}

That’s all folks. We’re done. We can just install our brand new Google Chrome Extensions by visiting the URL:

and clicking on the “Load Unpacked Extension” button.

Using the same strategy, it is obviously possible to apply different CSS transformations. Imagine for a second that you would like to hide all the images from a web page. A CSS like the following would do the job:

img {

  display: none;

}

Hope this help.

Hope you’ll enjoy it

In the past few days, you might have noticed lot of tweets and noise (or maybe melodies) on the web regarding Erlang and Italy. Since most of the discussions have been performed in Italian, let’s try to summarize here what has just happened.

Everything started from a mail from @eolo in the official erlang-questions mailing list, proposing the creation of the first Italian Erlang User Group. A couple of members of the mailing list immediately pointed out that an Erlang User Group has already been created in Italy a couple of years ago.

Well, apparently that simple mail was enough to awake that old group from his sleeping phase. Lot of new members are joining the group, that counts more than 40 members right now.

Rumors about an Erlang interest reached the careful ears of Erlang Solutions Ltd., a UK based Erlang company, that showed a great interest in boosting an Erlang User Group in Italy.

In a couple of days, all these discussions have been translated into a concrete proposal: an Erlang Factory Lite in Rome. Essentially, an Erlang Factory Lite consists in a sequence of talks regarding Erlang, followed by a so-called “erlounge”, an informal meeting having place in a pub or similar to allow people to meet each other and to discuss their Erlang experiences.

A successful Erlang Factory Lite had place, for example, past November in Krakow.

To grant a free event, we’re currently looking at sponsors and at a venue, able to guest from 50 to 100 people. We’re doing our best to find some special “speaker”, too.

Together with the event, an Erlang course could be delivered by Erlang Solutions Ltd. at a special price, so whoever would be interested in this, feel free to contact me or directly the company.

It seems Erlang is finally meeting Italy and God only knows what is going to happen

In the meantime, stay tuned on Twitter. The tag to follow is #erlangit.

Berlusconi is not a dictator

We should be quite clear here. Especially abroad, people believe Berlusconi is governing Italy without having Italian consensus. This is just a wrong assumption and, as in mathematics, if you start from a wrong assumption, you’ll end wrong. So, for a moment, assume Italian people properly voted him, take a deep breath and reflect on why this could ever happen. An hint will follow very shortly.

A missing alternative

I’ll ask you again, after this heading. Why people is voting Berlusconi? Because they have no alternative. And it’s not just because of an extreme power on the media that makes impossible for opponents to show them up.

Seriously, there’s no one on the left party that could even remotely aim to the government in Italy. Italians are perfectly aware of this. They are aware of the fact that, even if they vote for the left party, they’ll be so disunited that they could never create a stable majority. They would be fighting each other and new elections would be needed in a few months.

If I ask you (and I’m looking at you, UK people) a name of someone from the left party, a candidate, their programme, would you be able to provide me with a name? How many of you know about Beppe Grillo and his political programme?

The wrong approach

One of the biggest errors in fighting Berlusconi regards strategy. Opponents usually reason in the following way:

1. Get rid of Berlusconi
2. Find an alternative

What I suggest, instead, is:

1. Find an alternative
2. Get rid of Berlusconi

It’s not a Media battle

It’s literally evident what a great communicator Berlusconi is. His power in the media world is just scaring.

Now, reflect. If you were in a war and you’d know your opponent is extremely skilled in a certain type of fight (say he’s got the best archers in the world), would you try to beat him by sending your archers against his own archers? Honestly, it wouldn’t make any sense.

You’ll never obtain anything attacking him on the media. You need a different strategy.

Be objective, don’t blame him for everything

Articles like this one have the opposite effect on the Italian population. Treat Berlusconi in an objective way. Don’t publicly attack him on literally everything. If something wrong happens, the press immediately blames Berlusconi. You’ll just make him look as a victim, and, trust me, you’ll loose credibility and professionalism. If he’s doing something good, talk about it, don’t ignore it.

Do not compare Berlusconi with Mussolini

Berlusconi has nothing to do with Benito Mussolini. If you compare him with the dictator, you’ll help him in winning consensus. I know this sounds weird, but, for example, in the South of Italy, some people have a deformed conception of Fascism. The problem is far from being trivial and a lot of historical education should be performed in this sense.

Even if it’s sounds awkward, you need to understand how people were living in the South during Fascism. Lot of burglaries and killings, chaos and disorder were having place before the dictator. During that period, people were living under a surface of  safe condition. Lot of roads and sewers and land reclamations have been performed. The Italian football team won two world cups. If you talk to an old grandfather you’ll hear sentences like: “Today, I’m not feeling safe. When Mussolini was governing, I could sleep with my front door open”.

You need to understand and educate these people. In the meantime, clarify that Berlusconi is not Mussolini. Don’t merge the two personalities, and you’ll gain consensus among this category of people (that is luckily not the majority, nut still they represent a good number in some areas).

Don’t talk about his private life

Berlusconi is not an actor. People shouldn’t care about his love affairs, he’s not Tiger Woods. Treat him as an actor and he’ll win consensus (actors will always have popularity, no matter if they’re good or bad behaving). Treat him as a politician and you’ll win. A Cornwell’s style Gotham Gotcha gossip column won’t help you in beating him.

Be informed

There are so many errors and imprecisions when foreign press is reporting news from Italy. Guys, if you want to gain consensus, be informed, send people there to check what’s really going on. Don’t trust rumors. Talk to Italian people, they’re better than you think.

Don’t focus on him, but on his co-workers

Berlusconi has a great personality. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good one or a bad one. He’s simply too strong (because of media, because of money, whatever you want). But he’s not governing Italy by himself. He’s surrounded by low-profile people, easily attackable. Focus on the Lega Nord, focus on people is selecting for decisive roles. Unmount these people, one by one. Carefully look at their political programme. You’ll find incredible things, extremely easy to attack.

Well, my installed version of Chrome didn’t detect automatically the update, so I downloaded the latest version from:

http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/

Then, when I tried to drag and drop the application into the Applications folder (this will require you to quit from Chrome, if open), Snow Leopard complained about:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

Well, just open the Applications folder in Finder. Move to Trash the old Google Chrome application (it will prompt you with the Admin password). Then, drag and drop the new Chrome on it.

Now, you can enjoy your new Google Chrome Beta version and its extensions.

highcharts-php is a PHP library to interact with the Highcharts JS charting library.

What is Highcharts

Reading from the official documentation, “Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application”.

The Highcharts JS libraries are available at: http://www.highcharts.com and they are free for non commercial use. For commercial usage, please refers to the license and pricing section of their website.

Are the Highcharts and highcharts-php projects related?

Again, the highcharts-php project has nothing to do with the Highcharts projects. The authors are different and the two projects don’t share any single line of code.

Why highcharts-php

The reason behind the highcharts-php project is to offer a useful tool to PHP developers to automatically generate Highcharts JS code starting from some PHP data.

The highcharts-php library is available for free download, as usual, at my software page:

http://aloiroberto.wordpress.com/software/

I registered this blog almost one year ago (even if I started adding posts to it in a more constant way just in August).

Now that one year is passed, it’s time to view at the statistics. I passed from 0 to 2.270 visits per month. It’s not a lot, but it is still something. Currently, I have more than 100 unique visits per day to the blog.

I hope you find the blog and its posts interesting.