I had great days on the Alpe di Siusi (Alp of Siusi) or SeiserAlm as those who live there call their home. It is a lovely and smooth plateau at around 1800m, braced by imposing Dolomite pikes. Sasso Piatto (“Flat Stone” a sort of understatement) bounds the East side, while Denti di Terra Rossa (“Red Soil Teeth”) bound the South Side and ends with the tooth shaped Sciliar pike.We had sun for nearly seven days and, despite of the warm winter, snow was enough to ski.
Alas, in order to appreciate great things, we have to compare them with the grey, dull industrial landscape of Castellanza, that’s why (I guess) I’m back home and at work.
The first interesting surprise hitting me at work has been the anticipation of the milestone I was working for. Our customer product has been selected for a design prize, so we are expected to deliver the working product earlier. Anyway we’re working hard, against time and hardware shortage to hit the milestone nonetheless.
At home, Santa (in the person of my wife) gave me a Xbox 360 and I started playing a not-so-Xmas-spirit game: Gears of War. I’m about the first boss and I should say that it’s great. From the technical viewpoint I think this is one of the first real next gen game. It runs on the Unreal 3 engine and the look is as detailed as awesome. The gameplay is based on taking cover, i.e. as soon as enemies are encountered you should take cover or you get badly shot. This is somewhat different from the classical shooter where the player drives a Rambo-like bullet-proof character (well, in Serious Sam, this was intended). The first boss is a chasing game play – run away from the monster, let him smash the doors for you and eventually take him off. Great.
While I was so fresh from the holidays and relaxed from Gears of War, I decided to update my notebook to the latest linux available. I gave a brief look to Sabayon Linux, only to discover that it behaves badly with the Toshiba touch pad and apparently has no support for my wireless adapter (I can’t believe that today distros still do not support the Centrino wireless adapter that is so widespread and at least two years old). So I turned to what I know quite well – Fedora Core 6.
I opted for the upgrade option instead of the install. Years ago I was used to upgrade, only to find that the system resulted in something that wasn’t completely new nor old and often was prone to glitches. A friend of mine suggested me to never upgrade, rather to backup the /home directory, install and restore it. This time I was so light from the holidays that I decided that an upgrade could do.
Well, I was wrong.
Yes I got a sort of FC6 tailored on my previous FC4 installation, and, yes, the wireless adapter sorta worked. But I could only browse the google website. No matter how I set the firewall/SELinux properties, there was no way to browse the rest of Internet. But this is another story.