Category: Projects

Streaming classical music! I love classical music! As of this writing, the website, http://iclassix.tv, is still work in progress. Powerful Aida, moving Nabucco, funny Barber of Seville, romantic La Traviata, it’s all there just a click away. Sure, it’s way better to go to the Royal Opera House to see La Traviata, but not all…

Now we have MySql, Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and more. But at that time there were only very slow database applications. So, I wrote my own, binary index and all. It was as fast as lightening and it had to be because the software using it had to send real-time orders to a production…

The Milan Polytechnic is a prestigious institution. People come from the U.S. to study there. I graduated there with the best grade and a special mention. It was a challenge. There are students who study there who fail an exam 10-20 times before passing it, and they aren’t stupid. I specialized in Automatics: how to…

This was an IBM project. With the help of eight developers, suppliers and consultants I created a state-of-the-art system to support the workflow leading to the treatment of appeals against fines. Millions of documents were going to be scanned and put in digital form. It was a race against time. There was a penalty of…

Telecom companies need GISs, Geographical Information Systems. These are programs that help you draw a map of telecommunication networks. They don’t need just one copy of these programs. They need thousands of copies and, to decide which supplier they will buy from, they run a competition. I had three months to build a prototype to…

When you use ticket machines to buy a train ticket, they will find the shortest route for you. This is done thanks to a very complicated program which computes the shortest path between two points. In my case, I was working for the Italian national railways company. The program doing the above calculations used bit…

Yes, the major Italian telecommunications company stores information about every call made. There are more than one billion of them per month. To treat this enormous quantity of data you need a mainframe and not a small one. It was an S/390 and used terabytes of storage. When a program stops working and you can’t…

When you buy hosting for your website, a server in a datacentre will run your website. I worked in such a datacentre for many years. There were 300 servers and a lot of other hardware. We needed to write a lot of software to monitor these servers and to manage the information about them. There…

If you want a free email address, you can find a lot of them on the web. Many of these websites offering free email don’t actually do the job. There is another company behind the scenes doing it for them. They just put their name on the package. I worked for one of those companies…

Imagine having a big Meccano set with thousands of moving parts which you control using a computer. I have played with Meccano toys. They are fun. They have been around for more than a century. I am pleased to live, now, in the homeland of Meccano toys. When I was doing PLC programming, my Meccano…