It was not a great performance (7215 points) but it was enough to win a valuable national title.

I was recently watching time ever records in number fo national title wins…. well, I’m still very far from Franco Sar, who won 8 times between the 50s and the 60s

Anyway, this title was a nice shine in the dark sky of my season, due to a long time injury and poor of good performances. The only good race, during the last Decathlon was a PB in long jump: 7.25. It already time to thinj about the next season and start working hard!

Good news today by ApacheCon Schedule: I’ll be a speaker at the next ApacheConUS 2008 in New Orleas.

Here is an anticipation of what my session will be about. Please fell free to send me or comment here any suggestions you wish! I really would like to build the session presentation through a community-like process, i would like to be the spokesman of an interested community!
Do you like the idea?Here is the session abstract.

Content analysis for ECM with Apache Tika

Apache Tika is an extensible content analysis toolkit designed for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from a large number of document formats. It represents an higher level layer over existing parser libraries.
World-class content management systems, and most of all enterprise document management focused ones, always have to face the challenge of detecting, extracting and indexing as more various media content types as possible.
This session provides a technical presentation on how you can integrate Tika inside an Enterprise Document Management System, in order to centralize media type detection implementation and leverage dedicated parsers behind a common extraction layer.
Partecipants will also learn how Tika is integrated with Lucene in order to provide high performance document indexing and searching features.
As a real life demostration, the most recent supported media types, Office Open XML (OOXML), will be detected, extracted and indexed.

I’m very proud to announce this partnership as I am one of the involved developers. It is going to be an important step for my company on the way to spread Open Source in the Enterprise industry.

We are developing the Office open XML support inside the POI Apache project. New Microsoft Spreadsheets (Office 2007 format) will be soon java manageable!

URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=640794&view=rev
Log:
XSSFCellStyle fillColors support; XSSFCellFill class; tests

Added:
poi/branches/ooxml/src/ooxml

/java/org/apache/poi/xssf/usermodel/extensions/XSSFCellFill.java
poi/branches/ooxml/src/ooxml/testcases/org/apache/poi/xssf/usermodel/extensions/TestXSSFCellFill.java
Modified:
poi/branches/ooxml/src/ooxml/java/org/apache/poi/xssf/model/StylesTable.java
poi/branches/ooxml/src/ooxml/java/org/apache/poi/xssf/usermodel/XSSFCellStyle.java
poi/branches/ooxml/src/ooxml/testcases/org/apache/poi/xssf/usermodel/TestXSSFCellStyle.java

…. I know that it does not sound so exciting for most of my readers, but this is just a self celebrating moment

The strange lines above are my first commit stacktrace as an Apache Commiter.

I have been working on the POI growing up project for a couple of months. We are basically providing Office Open XML support to the POI interfaces.

More to come about all that stuff..

.. oh, yes, you can reach me at the new address paolo-at-apache.org

Eptathletes after Osaka Eptathlon 2nd day.

Let’s guess who they are! Read the following names in order of appearence from right to left (fotofinish rules :))))

Vasilikí Delinikóla, Linda Züblin, Yvonne Wisse, Aryiró Stratáki, Jessica Samuelsson, Olga Kurban, Ida Marcussen, Karolina Tyminska (I suppose… ) preceding for some centemeters Sonja Kesselschläger, Irina Naumenko and Nataliya Dobrynska.

It would be nice to have them all! OK, I’ll search some other photo

Post Update…

As promised, I found another one

Same order: Marie Collonvillé, Simone Oberer, Aiga Grabuste, Linda Züblin, Carolina Klüft, Jessica Ennis, Sylvie Dufour, Lyudmila Blonska and Kelly Sotherton

You can definitely see that Rodriguez had a lot of fun directing it! He must be ‘orgasmically’ pleased to being able to put on a film EVERY scene and EVERY shot he directed.

What about the characters created by RR.. ?!? Cherry (Rose McGowan), the gogo dancer who loses her left leg, J.T. (Jeff Fahey) the fool BBQ owner, Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) with his unutterable secrets, and at least other 5 incredible ones.

This could be the most important difference between Planet Terror and Death Proof. In the first movie, Tarantino had a great satisfaction of the exterior appearence, in the second one is Rodriguez’s insanity that dominates everything.

just to taste:

Lt. Muldoon: Where are my men?
Abby: [ throws a bag to Lt. Muldoon] I put several right here.
Lt. Muldoon: What the fuck is this?
Abby: Their balls, sweetheart.

I really suggest to watch it, but don’t be disapponted if the former thing happens

This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same.

By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help.

How to participate:

1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234

2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results.

3. If you know how to add tags to your blog posts, add the Technorati tag 1081081081234 to your post as well. This will make your post findable sooner in Technorati.

THE SITUATION IN BURMA AND WHY IT MATTERS TO ALL OF US

There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post.

The situation in Burma is increasingly dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters, including monks and nuns, are risking their lives to march for democracy against an unpopular but well-armed military dictatorship that will stop at nothing to continue its repressive rule. While the generals in power and their families are literally dripping in gold and diamonds, the people of Burma are impoverished, deprived of basic human rights, cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly under threat of violence.

This week the people of Burma have risen up collectively in the largest public demonstrations against the ruling Junta in decades. It’s an amazing show of bravery, decency, and democracy in action. But although these protests are peaceful, the military rulers are starting to crack down with violence. Already there have been at least several reported deaths, and hundreds of critical injuries from soldiers beating unarmed civilians to the point of death.

The actual fatalities and injuries are probably far worse, but the only news we have is coming from individuals who are sneaking reports past the authorities. Unfortunately it looks like a large-scale blood-bath may ensue — and the victims will be mostly women, children, the elderly and unarmed monks and nuns.

Contrary to what the Burmese, Chinese and Russian governments have stated, this is not merely a local internal political issue, it is an issue of global importance and it affects the global community. As concerned citizens, we cannot allow any government anywhere in the world to use its military to attack and kill peacefully demonstrating, unarmed citizens.

In this modern day and age violence against unarmed civilians is unacceptable and if it is allowed to happen, without serious consequences for the perpetrators, it creates a precedent for it to happen again somewhere else.

If we want a more peaceful world, it is up to each of us to make a personal stand on these fundamental issues whenever they arise.

Please join me in calling on the Burmese government to negotiate peacefully with its citizens, and on China to intervene to prevent further violence. And please help to raise awareness of the developing situation in Burma so that hopefully we can avert a large-scale human disaster there.

I’m waiting for the event photos, and it will be evident, I’ll post about it; anyway, it was raining a lot, and less that 10 degrees, certainly not a good day for a decathlon.

Despite that, Lukas, Matteo and Paolo pushed all their best energies; they absolutely had no fear ;-), great job guys!

Results: note that they had some points penalty because they exceeded the 100 minutes for some seconds

So thank you very much Francis for the passion that you put in our Combined Events world, and, sure… your photos are really cool!

Here you can find Francis’ photos of Decastar , and here his Decaboura Project Website.