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Homepage of Flavio Stanchina

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.” — Albert Einstein

A friend of mine once pointed out that these pages were poor and I could do better even without using FrontPage. See the HTML Hell page before you dare saying something like that yourself.

Flavio spends most of his life in front of a computer

I started my IT career with the good old Commodore C64 when I was 12. A couple of years later I switched to the Amiga; I still have an Amiga 3000 here, and I don't think I will ever get rid of it, although I'm not using it very often anymore. At the end of the past millennium (that is, during late 2000) I salvaged a bunch of old computers (a Pentium, a 486 and a 386) near to being dumped, installed Debian GNU/Linux on them and stuffed my room with a considerable amount of hardware and network cabling. After getting through a Linux-induced larval stage, I got a brand new AMD Athlon 1200 with plenty of memory and disk space and I'm currently hacking on Linux, KDE and related stuff. In case you're wondering, yes, I consider myself a hacker; hackers are not crackers, but their curiosity can get them into trouble. Read the Hacker FAQ if you'd like to know how to deal with a hacker, or read the Hacker HOWTO if you would like to become one.

I work as a computer programmer in a firm that develops AutoCAD® applications, so I happen to use a PC running Microsoft Windows® 8 hours a day. That's not to say that I enjoy using Microsoft products: in fact, I completely agree with Frank Willem van Wensveen's "Why I hate Microsoft" and am actively doing my best to support alternative systems and free software. See also the open source page (under construction) and Alan Cox's note on free software.

My favorite programming languages are C and C++; I can also write M68k assembly, Pascal, Delphi and, if forced, Visual Basic and i86 assembly. Please see my informal resume if you want a detailed list of my skills.

Here you can find miscellaneous documents related to Linux (mostly intended for personal use), some Debian packages I've built which you may find useful and patches to various programs.

You can still find some of my shareware/freeware utilities for the Amiga on Aminet.

Computers? Oh yes, those things you need to access pornography on the Internet

I'm really tired to hear the media and often the governments talking about the Net as if it was inhabited only by pedophiles, terrorists and "hackers". This is simply not correct: this article on The Register explains it well. Fortunately, there are people who noticed long ago that the freedom we could enjoy from the Internet needs to be actively protected against the corporations and even some institutions with mindsets too old and interests too big to appreciate it: see the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. But if you are reading this you know already; it's your friends and relatives who need to know.

References to hacker's terminology from the Jargon File.

Flavio rides motorcycles

(picture courtesy of Kundun)

I'm sitting here doing nothing but aging, as George Harrison once said; with my thirties behind my back, the time has come to get a BMW. My poor Ducati MonsterDark 600 is gone after a car cut me at a crossing, so farewell ugly Monster and welcome GS.

I would have bought a BMW some time ago if I had the money, but then the big ones are not really my business, in spite of their outstanding handling. When I saw the 2001 F650 GS I said: "That's it -- everything I want from a motorcycle." After recovering from the aforementioned crash and feeling like I was missing something, I saw this orange thing in the used bikes park of a store and it was love at first sight.

Fellow motorcycle riders, here is a short list of my favorite trips around Trento (sorry, Italian only for now).

Flavio rides snowboards too (and it's what he enjoys more in his life)

I started snowboarding in 1996 after 20 years on skis, and I have never used my skis again. Here you can even see some pictures of me riding.

I live in the Italian Alps (you can see the Brenta dolomites on the left and the Ortles live on the right, click for more images) so I can ride in some of the best ski resorts in the world, for example the Dolomiti Superski area. I can also ride during summer: the best places for summer skiing are the Presena glacier at Passo del Tonale and the Val Senales glacier.

If you want to learn more about snowboarding, check out Transworld Snowboarding Online. Also, make sure to have a look at Burton snowboards, the biggest manufacturer of snowboarding equipment (and also one of the best, in my opinion).

I got a Nitro sticker on the back of my car with a nice motto:

Ride big.

Burn all your GIFs!
(gif2png is pretty good at that)