A quick how to on setting up your own portable sandbox to text your web projects, or text your site on a test zone, either you are on the move, or safe at home. This post is about setting up a WAMP scenario on a USB pen, or an external storage device more in general.

Let's say you are frequently travelling, or maybe you are a freelance web developer and have a lot of meeting with clients and want your work with you without the need to bring your laptop together. Or you want a simple test zone to play with your blog, or web site, but you are running on Windows and your web pages need a MySQL database and an Apache server to run. Whatever the case, this quick step-by-step guide will help you to run you own WAMP scenario on a portable device like a USB pen.

What you need to build a WAMP scenario on a USB pen

In this post we are presuming you'll have a USB storage device to work with, nevertheless it should be quite easy to replicate the process no matter the device you would use. The main goal of this guide is to have a portable WAMP system, if you prefer this same scenario could be set up on your pc hard disk quite easily.

Germanwatch, a German think tank devoted to the promotion of North-South equity and the preservation of livelihoods. We observe, ana-lyse and interfere. In doing so, we focus on the politics and economics of the North with their worldwide consequences. presented today in Bali (Indonesia) the Climate Change Performance Index 2008, a comparison of the 56 top CO2 emitting nations.

Two concurrent news in the last week are a sad window on Italian society. The first one is the yearly Women to Watch ranking published by the Wall Street Journal, a list of the top 50 women in world politics, economics and culture. Not even an Italian one, despite Italy being one of the G8 nation.

It doesn't sound so strange if you look at the second news, reporting a study realized by the Italian Association of Pediatrics (Sip) interviewing 1.251 children among 12 and 14 years old (the study is dated 2006). When asked what they wanted to be when grown up, young girls had no doubts: their dream is to be a velina (a barely speaking/barely dressed television showgirl). That was the most popular answer, followed by an embarrassing I don't know.

Welcome to Italy

Android, the Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications, has just released its SDK to public. The Google sponsored open source software for mobiles is running a Android Developer Challenge to promote it around the web. Fact is Italy is out of the games, this is because the heavy, baroque and useless bureaucracy of a Country stuck in middle ages won't allow Google to run the challenge in an acceptable time range.

Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the fathers of hard disks

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for their discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR, a physical effect that gave the impulse to the development of technologies for read-out heads used in hard disks for computers.

This year's physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.

Italian coffee, known also as espresso, it's quite an easy task if you think globally to Italian cuisine. As often occurs things are more difficult, and results not quite perfect, if you don't know how to do it. Another thing that occurs, possibly since Java programming appeared and USA coffee shops colonized the globe, everybody's playing the coffee guru.

What you need to make your Italian espresso

As a coffee aficionado, and Italian, I'll give you some hint (my 2 cents opininion, if you wish) on how to obtain your own espresso the Italian way and become your friends hero.

The coffee comes first

The first thing you need is some good coffee. I'm stressing good here because really this is the thing that really makes the difference. I won't dive in any geopolitical discussion, and just present two of the most famous Italian coffee brands (and the most likely easily available outside Italy). Again, leaving apart politics, a basic economical law will help you decide on the coffee brand: the best raws goes to the one that pays the most, the same that sell at the highest price, and it sells at high prices because there's an audience paying those prices.

Google My World: Not Found.

Serbian professional tennis players Novak Djokovic (3rd on the ATP Ranking as of September 2007) is quite famous in the tournament for his colleagues. Prove is the following video where Djokovic plays Maria Sharapova and Rafa Nadal at the US Open 2007.

I know what you are asking for, here we are with Djokovic impressioning Roger Federer, Andrew Roddick, Rafa Nadal, and others. The radio in the background sounds very Blade Runner opening scene.

Urban Brooklyn

Urban Brooklyn II

Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford University video is available on iTunesU here: Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Address

Stay hungry, stay foolish

If you really want a video to pass around, forget miss South Carolina, go for this one.

Peekaboo-k is a small publishing company specialized in flip books, those small books where a series of pictures, or drawings, vary gradually from one page to the next so that when flipping pages rapidly it gives the perception of an animation.

Peekaboo-k by Emmanuel Arcache

Peekaboo-k is an idea of Emmanuel Arcache, a young French 3D professional living in Barcelona, Spain. The first series of Peekaboo-k's flip books consist of five different scenes, all focused on Paris, the birthplace of mr. Arcache. The originality of the Parisian series of flip books published by Peekaboo-k's consisting in their retro art déco style; the five flip books are in black and white, the scenes made with 3D packages.

Flip Book, the making of

The following is a video detailing the making of the flip book with 3D software, the process used by Peekaboo-k to make the ParisFlip series.