EN - Porto Cervo -Winchester day4

Today was the big day. Eurotunnel and left-side driving. Yes, the wrong side for me. I found that Reims is a must if you come from Italy to England. It is simply on the way. Plus you have plenty of hotels at a reasonable price. Getting to calais from there is also a matter of 270 Km:

Visualizzazione ingrandita della mappa

The journey was smooth but we paid 48€ for the toll motor-road. I was never being in the Eurotunner nor in a train witch loads cars, vans and trucks...
Anyway, they checked us and a couple of the 61 and more boxes i was carrying in the van. A bit annoying but a good thing for us and everyone traveling trough the eurotunnel. Though i was a bit scared about driving on the wrong side after a couple of «miles» and roundabout it come natural to drive on this side of the road. Obviously you have to pay a lot of attention to avoid disasters. The more problematic thing was the difference between french (private and not fee) motor-road and the English one. Quality of road signage and asphalt was really a step behind in england (which have free and public motor-road). We lost our road and passed trough some nice villages in the southern-england country side. Same thing as in france, but driving on the other side of the road. Mind thet we didn't had any gps navigator but only some google maps suggestion.
Anyway we reached winchester without mayor troubles and once in the center of the citi i was able to find my final destination easily, so we reached the boxes owner's house in the afternoon. We went then to the queen inn pub to have lunch and the mandatory English beer and then moved to the hotel. Giffard House hotel will be our harbour for two nights.

EN - Porto Cervo -Winchester day3

Champagne! Day off from driving today. Woke up at 11 o'clock so no breakfast at the hotel but had a sandwich near the cathedral in the center of the city. Bought a bottle of champagne "Blanc de Blanc" so 100% Chardonnay and drunk it just under the cathedral: But Reims doesn't offers much in a Sunday. Especially in August when everyone is on holydays. No cave to visit, no big champagne company to have a look at. So after drinking our bottle of champagne we had the idea of taking a train to Paris so we vent to the train station to search a train to Paris. Sadly the last one was 5 minutes before us, and so no Paris. Then we went to the reims country-side to see vineyards. Endless vineyards in fact. But still no luck, every little factory we found was closed. We only found a bar when we had another bottle of champagne and then went back to our Novotel in Tinqueux. Diner was two steps out the hotel, in a luckily goos grill restaurant. Tomorrow: Reims --EUROTUNNEL--> Winchester!!!

EN - Porto Cervo -Winchester day2

The long long road from Annecy to Reims has started. Long driving today for me, even when i was sure it will be a straight driving trough the motor-road. In fact it wasn't because of an incident and we had to take a "bis" route trough French country-side villages. This deviation wasn't so bad. Beautiful sights, very nice villages and some castles. Sadly the photographic equipment wasn't that professional (nor the photographer was) so i can't provide nice pictures: The deviation took about 3 hours and we re-joined the motor-road only 100 Km after the deviation! Yes, we lost a lot of time and i had to push the gas to make it to Reims before the night. Fortunately i didn't count that our position was rather northern than sardinia so i colud count on approximately an hour plus of sunlight, and so was. we reacher Reims arount 10 o'clock and the light was still fading! It is amazing how many differences you can find moving on this planet! Anyway. We reached safely Reims and had our double in the booked Novotel in Tinqueux

EN - Porto Cervo - Winchester day 1

Taking the wrong road only a couple of minutes before driving in France couldn't obviously taken as a good start. However after this little mistake we didn't faced other real problems, at least until we reached Annecy. The day begone nicely with a not-so-bad veeery-long coffee, a croissant and a bit of marmalade on some bread. Mandatory orange juice was also on the shelf. French road are not bad. Autorutes are really big and only in some case and only for a bit of kilometres are composed by two ways witch generally are four. We visited Avignon for an our or so, watched old papa's castle which is impressive and had some photo:
After a sandwich we run to the van witch was not exactly well parked and i was frightening to found him with a paper sicked on it's windshield or worst not finding it at all. Went back on the road to Annecy we pointed to Lyon and for at least 180 Km followed that road. At a certain point google directions where not correct and we missed the right Autorute exit wasting at least 45 minutes to come back and reach the Right exit to Gèneve. At the end we arrived at Annecy at 17:30 and here started the nightmare. I really never, never saw so little roads, even in the centre of Aggius. It is almost impossible to park in a closed parking with attendant because all of them accept only Cars under 2 meters high and i can't pass in because my van is 2.50 Meters. Others arrived almost at the same time, but they found parking instantly in the hotel, thing that i couldn't do. I found a rather acceptable solution asking the receptionist for a secure parking for the van and she pointed me to a closed park near the hotel. Placed the vector in there we started a sightseeing of Annecy witch is really impressive. I didn't know it before, it's really nice and offers wonderful sights. Occasions to shoot good photos are endless and the most impressive thing is the crystal clean water of the lake witch, with it's white sand recalls the beaches in Sardinia. Wonderful. The old city of Annecy takes you straight to the medieval age, but with lots of restaurants and shops. For diner i asked a menu with ratatouille just to try it because of the pixar movie.

EN - Porto Cervo -Winchester day0

Today the trip to Winchester started with a little problem. One of our cars had to have the back tires replaced at the last minutes due to a big scratch on the rear-right tire. The service was quick, so we didn't had any delay. I personally moved from Calangianus at 12:15 to tempio to fetch Gianluca which, as usual like a woman, leaved me waiting for a couple of minutes prior to come out. Arrived at Porto Torres at circa 14.00 i hat to wait a couple of minutes to others to arrive with the second car, a fiat Ulisse, before checking in. Cost for me, the van and two additional drivers (witch weren't really drivers) was 550 €, with diner coffee and breakfast included. The cinema was playing "La casa sul lago del tempo che scorre" in the evening and "Showtime" by night. Obviously in french and without useful subtitles both (the first in fact was subtitled in German). Diner was server before 21:00, we had almost all good steaks with Fries and some good cheese. Wine was good, from the south of corse and splendidly combined to the meat. After diner we had a awful coffee and tried the famous "Pietra", the beer made in corse from castagne. Fortunately the weather is perfect, the sea is like a flat dish of olive oil. Aperitif was the famous "Pastis", witch i can't suggest to a friend but let me say that i think one have to try the specialities from every place he visits. Arrive is scheduled to 7:30 of the 8 August 2008. Will blog to resume the first day of real driving trough France. stay tuned!

IT - arora, un web browser che promette battaglia!

Prendete un appassionato di KDE, mettetelo davanti ad un pc con installato il suo ambiente desktop preferito e guardatelo negli occhi. Ciò che si vede è il ritratto della felicità! Ora chiedetegli di entrare a controllare la posta di Gmail, noterete istantaneamente un cambiamento nella sua espressione facciale. Perchè? Per il semplice motivo che dovrà avviare Firefox, altrimenti la posta di Gmail potrà solo fruirla nel «vecchio stile»... Ma i tempi stanno sicuramente per cambiare, basta dare uno sguardo allo splendido KDE 4.1 per rendersi conto che le cose sono destinate a non stagnare ancora per molto. Ma chi volesse una esperienza totalmente KDE non può al 100%, ameno di fare qualche rinuncia non troppo semplice come Gmail o altri servizi che non riconoscono o che non funzionano al meglio con KHTML. La soluzione ci sarebbe, ed apparentemente è in via di sviluppo. Un motore WebKit per il nostro amato Konqueror, un'idea che sembra ottima ma che, pur essendo stata concepita agli albori delle Qt 4 non è ancora stata implementata al meglio:

Come vedete la possibilità di utilizzare WebKit in teoria ci sarebbe pure, ma per ora è solo un concetto. Si pianta spesso e non fornisce pagine utilizzabili proprio dove KHTML viene a mancare, per il resto KHTML è perfetto e non si sente la necessità di un altro browser. Quindi per poter utilizzare Gmail con il nostro browser preferito si dovrà aspettare.

E quindi? Dobbiamo per forza essere condannati ad utilizzare un browser che ci impone di scaricare tonnellate di roba che non ci interessa (gtk e altre cose di mozilla...)? NO. Esiste un browser che ci può aiutare a superare l'ostacolo e pensate un pò è in Qt/Webkit! Pur non essendo legato in alcun modo a KDE (per ora!) Arora è un browser che nasce come browser di test per le Qt4 le quali, ricordiamocelo, portano con loro il motore WebKit. Questo browser di test è attualmente in continuo sviluppo e, lungi dall'essere ancora un browser a semplice titolo dimostrativo, si prepara a fare il suo ingresso nella scena dei browser:

Certo, ancora non mi sognerei di consigliarlo per l'utilizzo quotidiano, ma vista la frequenza con la quale vengono apportate modifiche al codice io posso anche scommetere che per l'anno nuovo una versione stabile in grado di competere con Firefox sarà già uscita. Non dimenticate che WebKit, il motore che visualizza le pagine HTML per arora (e per tutte le applicazioni Qt4 che lo vogliono utilizzare), è sviluppato da Apple, Nokia e altri bestioni del genere, rendendolo un soggetto abbastanza interessante per gli sviluppaotri di siti che, per come stanno andando le cose, non si potranno permettere di snobbarlo ancora per molto.

Come si vede dali Screenshots, arora non è ancora in grado di competere con i browser più rinomati, ma questo è normale visto che si tratta di un prodotto in via di sviluppo. Ma vediamo nel dettaglio cosa ci offrirà Arora quando pronto:

• Possibilità di essere utilizzato su Linux, Windows e Mac OS X
• I programmatori intendono realizzare un prodoto semplice e di qualità, per l'utilizzo quotidiano
• Possibilità di essere integrato con delle estensioni
• Stabilità e leggerezza dell'applicazione

Arora ancora non ha una gestione avanzata dei preferiti, ma ciò edestinato a cambiare. Filtri per le pubblicità e blocchi per i popup non sono ancora presenti. Il soppoto a Flash ancora è una utopia (non dipende dagli sviluppatori, sta ad adobe supportarli!) e non è certamente sicuro andare in giro a fare acquisti con la carta di credito oppure utilizzarlo per lavorare, ma state pur certi che se seguirete il progetto con costanza avrete in anteprima un browser fra i migliori degli ultimi anni!

Ho trovato che arora non è ancora nei repositories di molte distribuzioni, se volete provarlo su windows o su debian visitate la pagina principale, dove troverete pacchetti precompilati, se volete compilarlo per linux sappiate che le dipendenze si limitano alle Qt4 e a poche altre cose. Buona navigazione a tutti!