In order to work at the InternetTV decoder project at the University of Urbino, I recently needed to setup a VPN connection to the university's network.
Installing OpenVPN on Windows 7 RC 64 bit is trickier thank expected. Fortunately I found an extremely helpful blog post that helped me out.
During the next months I will probably be able to stay at home for longer periods and will continue to work (and occasionally study) from there. Since my old ASUS A8Jp laptop started to break apart a year ago (and now I risk to complete the process every time I open or close the screen, by tearing away the last plastic pieces that keep it attached to the rest of the laptop), I either had to buy a new laptop (and would have picked a Mac Book Pro probably) or upgrade my old desktop computer.
I chose the latter, which also is the option with better price/performance ratio anyway. I ordered all components on AvalonPC, they shipped very quickly and today I'm busy putting all pieces together.
Above you'll see the brand new components: a shiny Intel Core i7 920 CPU, an ASUS P6T SE motherboard and two kits of 6 GB RAM (for a whopping total of 12 gigs). The amount of memory is probably overkill, but it being so cheap I simply couldn't resist. And it sounds cool, anyway... 
I ripped out every old piece of my previous desktop computer and spent almost two hours dusting and cleaning everything. These computers sure get incredibly dusty! Perhaps my next PC should be with oil cooling?
Then I quickly put the new stuff into the case. By the way, the 1366 socket is quite easy to mount. Quite a difference from the screaky and uncomfortable 939 socket of the previous Athlon X2 (which you have to lock in position forcefully with a screwdriver while risking to destroy your whole motherboard). Also nice, a "power" button on the motherboard itself that works before you wire the case buttons.
I immediately installed Windows 7 RC and it literally flies! Can't wait for the final version to be released. Gaming performance must still be tested, but since I kept the "old" X1900 XTX Radeon while waiting for an affordable DirectX 11 card, I don't think there will be great improvements. Still, the most fun thing is watching task manager and those 11 gigs of available RAM... how cool is that?! 
Now... what do I do with them?
I have been using a Windows Home Server at home for more than 6 months: it backups our three computers, stores my whole music collection on an SMB share and shares it as a UPnP media library... I love it.
Even if the server is powered by a - relatively - power saving Intel Atom, it wouldn't feel right to keep it on all the time. In order to save some power there's a really effective and simple WHS plug-in: LightsOut.
A common need I have in my ASP.NET MVC based projects (and other people have too, as it appears) is to render a complete "View" to string instead of the http response and then present it or embed it in another rendered view.
Finding a solution isn't very easy because view rendering (using the default WebForms view engine) is tightly coupled with the response stream and therefore you have to intercept the output in some rather complex way. There are several different solutions online, for instance using filters on the HttpResponse or taking the view as a WebForms control and rendering it directly.
Today a couple of friends and I went to San Galgano near Siena, a wonderful medieval abbey with a nice hermitage/church on the top of a nearby hill. The weather was nice, if a bit chilly, and the place was awesome. We shot a ton of pictures and I spent some time stitching them together as panorama pictures.
Output caching in ASP.NET MVC is usually done via the built-in OutputCacheAttribute, an attribute that marks an action as cacheable and relies on the default ASP.NET caching module. This means that the caching is usually very efficient and doesn't go through the MVC framework at all in case of a cache-hit.
Donut caching, i.e. returning a cached page with a part that is not cached and rendered at each request, can be done in some ways. Usually they use features of the WebForms engine in ASP.NET, for instance using the Substitution control or explicitly caching UserControls. A nicer method is the one suggested by Maarten Balliauw, which requires manual caching and embedding the "donut holes" as strings in the cached page.
Starting from this idea, I wrote a donut caching method for my blogging engine BABiL that should be able to work with every view engine, integrates with MVC ActionResults (no change required on the views) and partial requests.
Longtime friend, university colleague and more, Alessandro graduated two days ago from the University of Urbino.
He worked on an interesting application of genetic algorithms to an economic simulation. The results actually support monopoly as a winning economic model, so it can't be too wrong.
Anyway, congratulations!
And here below, a picture of the four of us who lived together in an apartment in Fermignano for two years. Fun times.
Three days ago Windows 7 was released. I have been running the RC version for some time, both on my laptop and my desktop computer, and I'm loving it so far. It certainly is more than a "better Vista", but nonetheless the amount of polish, stability and overall lightness are major selling points of the OS. Especially if compared with the previous edition which is still perceived as sluggish and bloated (for instance, all elements of the new control panel have a consistent visual style finally!).
I decided to get Windows 7 Home Premium edition today and in the next days my copy should ship from Germany (it's kind of difficult to get a disc of the English edition here in Italy).
Microsoft also released some funny "7 seconds demo" ads.
ascending
