Valerio Di Giampietro

This is my personal Web Site, here you will find some IT related information based on my experience. I’m an Italian Electronic Engineer with more than 30 years of experience in the fields of IT management, Network and Unix System Administration, Telecommunications and Digital Electronics.

Fighting Spam

The increase of Spam is a trend that started few years ago and it is continuously expanding, but to fight it there is plenty of good Open Source software. To use it effectively, anyway, it is needed a good knowledge of how spam floods our inboxes.

How spammers collect email addresses

The most used address gathering technique is using virus and spyware software that, without user awareness, gather email addresses from Outlook (or other email software) address-books and send this information to the spammers.… Read the rest

My italian podcast “Notizie Digitali” is nr. 2

Thank you very much to the listeners of my italian language podcast “Notizie Digitali” (Digital News), you have been so many that my show has reached the second position in the “Top 10” of the italian iTunes Music Store.
For me this is a great and unespected result. I never expected to see that in so short time I was able to be head to head with the briallant journalists of “La Repubblica” and with the italian podcast pioneers like “Radio NK” and “Toilettecast” or with the very popular italian singer Max Pezzali.… Read the rest

My first podcast is online

My first podcast is online. It is in Italian langage (my mother tongue language), his title is “Notizie Digitali” (“Digital News”) and it is available on www.audiocast.it.
The content of the podcast is technological news that, in my opinion, are really important. Few weeks ago I registered the domain audiocast.it with the purpose of using it for publishing my podcasts and to put there informations and links on how to make and listen to podcasts.
Everything, however, is in italian language.… Read the rest

Improving english with podcasts

English is not my mother tongue language so I tried to learn it, possibly having fun in the process. At the beginning there was no fun, I studied it in high school but I didn’t have occasions to practice it, so it was quite boring. Later, when I moved to the University of Ancona to study Electronic Engineering, I found that computer/software related documentation and some textbooks were available only in English. Later, when I starded working in a big corporation, I was forced to use english to communicate with non Italian speaking collegues, customers and suppliers.… Read the rest

Linux/AS400: download and convert database files from ebcdic to ascii and excel

I was involved in trasferring data from an AS/400 and to do a minimal datawarehouse, loading that data on an Oracle database. The datawarehouse system was my responsability, the AS/400 was managed by another group located in another city. The AS400 database had packed and zoned fields.
At that time I had been involved in Unix and TC/IP administration and configuration since 1992. However I never worked in an AS/400 or IBM Host environment, this means that I knew something about Network and Unix, but I knew almost nothing about the AS/400.… Read the rest

Welcome to Valerio Di Giampietro’s personal web site and blog

I’m an Electronic Engineer with almost 20 years of experience in the field of IT management, Network and Unix System Administration, Telecommunications and Digital Electronics.
In this modest web site you will find:

In the Linux & AS/400 page you will find articles and scripts that I wrote and used to download and convert AS/400 database files and other related informations.
In the I and Linux page you will find information on my early involvement with Linux (since 1993).
Essential and suggested Freeware Unix Programs on my toolbox.

… Read the rest

Tools for Unix System Administrators

This is an uncomplete list of freeware Unix programs I have used for about ten years and that I continue to recommend with the same entusiasm I had when I installed them for the first time on Sun Solaris and SunOs machines.

Perl my preferred programming and scripting language

Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible. Perl is a language for powerful text processing, filesystem manipulation, process management, database administration, client-server programming, secure programming, web-based information management and even for object-oriented programming; it was designed to be a glue language from the start.… Read the rest

Freeware Unix Programs I can’t live without

I can’t feel at home without some good free Unix software. All the software listed here is used by myself and is an integral part of my Unix workplace. (This never finished list was compiled about 10 years ago when Linux workstations and servers were not so common and I worked mainly on Sun/Solaris and IBM/Aix workstations and servers).

Emacs the best Text Editor

It has everything: from language specific modes (for C, C++, Perl, Sgml etc.) to complete programmability. Without it I feel like a stranger, so, usually it is the second software I install on a new workstation (if automounting /usr/local is not an option).… Read the rest

My first Netscape

At the time it wasn’t possible (at least in Italy) to legitimely have an internet connection from home. At the end of 1993 i signed my first subscription to Galactica, it was a BBS with telnet, ftp access and usenet newsgroups imported as Fidonet Areas. It was funny to have internet access from home, but wasn’t possible to use Mosaic.
To navigate on the web i waited until the first months of 1994 when a provider with full SLIP internet access was born here in Italy; it was Inrete in Turin.… Read the rest

My first linux CD-ROM

This was my first Linux CD-ROM. At the time, it was May, 1993, I had a partial and slow access to the Internet at work (only e-mail, telnet and ftp, but no newsgroups); at home i was an active member of the bbs fidonet network community. A day, in the Fidonet UNIX.ITA area (a fidonet area is like an internet newsgroup) i read a posting about the aviability of Linux on CD-ROM from a company, based in Canada, and called SLS (Softlanding Linux System).… Read the rest