cavedoni.com: About & Contact

About the site

The fine Web site you’re visiting is cavedoni.com, the digital household of Antonio Cavedoni, yours truly.

The page you’re reading now is a first, shy attempt at resuming some kind of publishing on this Web site. I used to love it, but then I got sidetracked. Bear with me.

About me

[Antonio Cavedoni] I’m 28 years-old and I’m from Sassuolo, Modena, Italy. As of february 2006 I am a partner in the studio Bunker in Modena, where I work as a Web designer and developer.

I hold (the international equivalent of) a master’s degree in communications from the university of Modena and Reggio Emilia but I also studied in Bristol, UK, as part of the Erasmus program. If you can read Italian and are keen in learning a bit more about the life of a student abroad, my Dispatches from Bristol are a lighthearted account of these six months.

My work-related interests are programming (I’m doing a lot of Python/Django and JavaScript/DOM work these days), typography and design. I also like reading about usability and information architecture, although I like more practicing them rather than following rules blindly.

I’m also working a lot with ebooks these days. I own one of the first iRex Iliad e-ink reading devices and I’m experimenting a lot with it, trying to grasp its potential and the implications of digital books for the future years.

Contact

My email address is antonio@cavedoni.org.

For work-related issues or urgent matters you can phone me up at the office (+39 059 356073) although these days I very much prefer using instant messaging software. I am pretty much always online on my various IM accounts which you’ll find in the vcard below.

[Contact icon, thanks to the Tango Desktop Project] Download my vcard (71 Kb)

Typography & stuff

Pangramming
A toy Web application to write and publish pangrams online. I wrote it during PyCon Due in Firenze. In the source code you will also find an experimental porting of the app to Google App Engine, you can use it as a starting point to build more interesting stuff of your own
Aligner
A FontLab Studio/RoboFab macro class implementing align left/top/right/bottom functions for contours, oddly missing from FontLab Studio
FontLab Tokenizer
Tokenize FontLab’s preview/metrics text into single characters respecting escaped glyph names (eg. “/A.smcp”) and providing a lossless reverse function
Automatic Text
A useful way to check your kerning/spacing in FontLab Studio 5, modeled after an ancient FontStudio feature
Italic 2.0
A survey of Italian type design: two of my fonts, Clara and Micerino, have been been published on the Web site. Keep reloading the home page to see them appearing in the masthead (or take a shortcut)
Venti Caratteruzzi
A quote by Galileo Galilei concerning the alphabet
Bunker alla Tipoteca
An account of the visit we did at the Tipoteca, a museum about printing and typography in Cornuda, Treviso, Italia
Two quotes from Jean-François Porchez
Two quotes from JFP from David Earls Designing Typefaces, which is a series of interviews with type designers of note
Credo
Il “credo” tipografico di Giovanni Mardersteig
This is a printing office
A digital remake (warning: in PDF) of Beatrice Warde’s 1932 Monotype advertising poster for Eric Gill’s Perpetua Titling
Il carattere romano è un magnifico dono dell’Italia al mondo
L’alter ego rinascimentale di James Clough, Giacomo Coloffo, in una lode al carattere romano e al paese in cui è nato

Code & stuff

Django Google Search
A wrapper around Google’s Site Search XML service, ready to plug into your own Django Web project
feed.php
A very small library to generate Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds from PHP 5, somewhat modeled on the Django feed writing library
Notes from Hackday
I attended Yahoo and BBC’s Hackday event in London and posted some notes and screenshots from my unfinished hacks. Hackday was brilliant anyway, can’t wait for the next one
PyCon Uno
The first Italian conference on Python was held on the 9th and 10th of June, 2007. For some reason I was among the organizers of the conference; I also held a tutorial on Python an Unicode; you can download my slides
Chatterbox
I occasionally post stuff to this tumblelog where we take notes on Python, programming, technology, etc. My posts are also available through this Yahoo! Pipe
Venus’ Django templates support
I hooked the Django templating system with Venus, Sam Ruby’s refactoring of the Planet codebase
Statusbot
The script that currently powers used to power this site home page, displaying one’s Jabber/Google Talk status on a Web page
Jabber Bot
A rather minimal Jabber/Google Talk bot implementation on top of xmpppy
SSL Middleware
A Django middleware for HTTP/HTTPS URIs
Django mode
Syntax highlight definitions for Django templates in Emacs
Palidator
An automated, daily validity check on some sites of the Italian Public Administration
Basecamp daily report
A Python script that automatically logs into a Basecamp site and posts a daily activity report from one project to another
Unicoders
Various hacks having to do with Django, Python and Unicode, shared with Stefano Attardi
Django model to Graphviz DOT file converter
A small hack to better visualize one’s Django models
Validator newsfeed
An XSLT stylesheet that generates the Atom newsfeed for the popular W3C markup validtion service
Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0
A retired conversion web service
Id-Ego-Superego
Add id="" attributes to every element on your web page

Miscellanea (= everything)

Notizie illustrate
How images get used as commentary on daily (Italian) newspaper Web sites
Una domenica da parroco (di campagna)
A day in the life of Don Giuliano Guidetti
The Joe Clark Micropatronage Project
I designed some banners to help lining Joe’s pockets
Of course I have heroes
An incomplete list of people that left a mark
You can only work with people you like
Milton Glaser’s take on clients. I’m not sure I specifically subscribe to this theory, but it sure feels true in my own experience as well
The fear of making a mistake
Nice quote from Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways
My del.icio.us
I tend to update this collection of links when I have something I feel is worth sharing and/or saving for a later read
Archivi di Blogorroico
Sei anni di “elucubrazioni quotidiane”
Dispatches from Bristol
Racconti da un Erasmus
Zio Radio
Un buon motivo per lavarsi le orecchie
Vangelo del giorno
Un feed con la lettura del giorno

Search

I understand you might be looking for none of the above, as Frank Zappa would put it, so you can search for it below: