The book is targeted to novices like me and starts from the very basics of audio editing using Audacity, an open-source software available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.
It actually constitutes a step-by-step guide to edit audio files and publish your own podcasts, without forgetting expert topics such as Skype integration and using advanced effects and filters.

The author structured the book into 10 chapters, but you will be already able to edit audio files and publish them on the web after the first three chapters, which sum less than 50 pages. Chapter 4 talks about basic editing while chapter 5 explains how to perform advanced editing to turn your recordings into professional tracks.

Going through the second half of the book you will also learn to export your podcasts, add background music or how to use plugins to add functionalities to Audacity.

If you are new to audio editing and want to learn, check this book out, you won’t be disappointed.

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You may have heard many stories on what working for Google is like, and many of them are actually true, but you won’t know until you are inside, and that’s exactly what happened to me.

When you start at Google, you have to attend the Noogler Orientation training sessions for one or more weeks, where you learn how things work (and a lot of secrets too!). In the meanwhile you have to understand how to move inside the huge internal documentation section and start a personal project.

One of the other advantages of working at Google is that you can attend to many Tech Talks on any kind of topics. Just to mention a few, in the two weeks I have been here I listened to Vint Cerf, the “Father of the Internet”, and to Monty Widenius, the creator of MySQL.

What else? I’m having a lot of fun and eating too much. You already know about food at Google, don’t you?

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Now it’s time to work with them again and I’ve been asked to perform the technical review of their recently published book called “Getting started with Audacity 1.3” written by Bethany Hiitola.

The book guides the reader to create podcasts, edit music and more with this open source audio editor. It also teaches the basic techniques for using Audacity to record and edit audio tracks like podcasts and interviews. For more information, please visit: http://www.packtpub.com/getting-started-with-audacity-1-3

I’ll receive the book soon and I’ll write my comments on this blog. If you use Audacity or similar software, can you tell me what I should look for in a book like this?

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This new article covers more advanced topics and is focused on writing a basic spell checker that mixes together the functional and object-oriented programming paradigms.

The spell checking algorithm is implemented in functional F# and is based on the Jaro-Winkler similarity distance while the UI is WPF-based and written with OO code.

I hope you will appreciate the article and I’ll be very happy to get any feedback from the readers.

IoProgrammo - February 2010

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One of the most popular distributed key-value store that tries to overcome this problem is Project Voldemort, an open-source project based on Amazon Dynamo and sponsored by LinkedIn that uses it for some high-scalability storage problems.

Project Voldemort is written in Java and also provides the developers with C++ and Python client libraries to access the store. One thing that (strangely) was missing is the support for the Ruby language, mainly because of the lack of a stable Google Prototocol Buffers implementation for this language.

There is however a gem called ruby_protobuf, that besides being in alpha release, turned out to be reliable enough for my purpose of porting Project Voldemort Python client library to Ruby.

The library I wrote is called voldemort-ruby-client and is now released under the Apache 2.0 License on Google Code, so it is absolutely free for you to experiment with it.

While writing the library I also ported the Python test cases to Ruby and I found the latter to be 3000 times faster than the former!
Does anybody have a suggestion for the reason of this outstanding improvement?

In my machine the Ruby client performs about 2 millions PUT (or GET) requests per second against the 6 hundreds of the Python client.
Is there anybody else willing to repeat the benchmark on his machine and publish the results?

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In this reborn blog I will focus on my passion, that is software development, and I want to start presenting the WordPress plugin that I wrote for this event.
It is called Front Page Exclude By Date and is a very simple plugin that I needed to hide my old posts from appearing on the front page without deleting them and losing all links pointing to them.

You can still read the old posts by searching for them or clicking on your bookmarks and now you can also find on this blog the series of posts on functional programming and the F# language taken from the FSharp.it website, which is no longer updated and merged with this blog.

In the next days I’ll talk about my Ruby client library for Project Voldemort, stay connected and follow me on Twitter!

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Come ho sempre sostenuto, il blog costituisce più un esercizio per me che un vero punto di interesse per i visitatori, ed è per questo che d’ora in poi l’argomento principale sarà la programmazione e il resoconto di tutti i miei esperimenti in questo campo.

Fra qualche giorno quindi il blog cambierà radicalmente, anche nell’aspetto, ed integrerà i post su F# di FSharp.it. Inoltre gli articoli saranno scritti in inglese e non più in italiano.

Non so quanti degli attuali lettori saranno ancora interessati a tornare su queste pagine, penso comunque di mantenere accessibile tutto l’archivio dei contenuti scritti finora.

Fatemi gli auguri, ci vediamo presto con la nuova versione del blog!

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Per partecipare è sufficiente recarsi presso uno dei punti vendita coinvolti, la cui lista può essere visionata sul sito dedicato al campionato, e provare a scrivere un sms con un cellulare LG fornito dall’organizzazione.

Come in ogni campionato che si rispetti i premi sono molto interessanti e comprendono viaggi, televisori, sistemi home-theatre e, ovviamente, telefoni cellulari LG.

L’attuale primo classificato ha completato il test in 23 secondi. Dite di riuscire a fare meglio?

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Dopo una serie di inutili reset dei sistemi da parte del personale di bordo, essi stessi ci hanno suggerito di inviare un reclamo ad Alitalia, dato che i loro rapporti sui malfunzionamenti a quanto pare vengono regolarmente ignorati e di conseguenza nessuna manutenzione viene effettuata.

Al mio ritorno ho provveduto ad inviare il reclamo e finalmente, dopo sole tre settimane di attesa, ho avuto il piacere di ricevere una lettera dalla nostra compagnia di bandiera nella quale mi risponde che “prendono atto con rammarico di quanto segnalato” e che la mia lettera “è stata portata all’attenzione della Direzione competente“.

Faccio bene a prenderla a ridere o dite che dovrei incazzarmi?

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Pensate che gli scandali nostrani non escano dai confini nazionali? Provate a guardare questo video tratto dall’episodio di Halloween della serie 30 Rock:

C’è bisogno di commentare?

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