Today Margot Wallström wrote a post about Tibet, China and the Games. This is my reply (added some formal corrections) which I posted to her blog.

It’s time to start asking China to become a really democratic country, this is the first point: freedom of thought (and so religion), freedom of speech and press, freedom of association and peaceful manifestation, freedom of choosing the government__just for citing the basics.

This is what the so called Western Countries must start asking to China. Chinese government said that you cannot make economic and democratic reforms at the same time, I do not believe to much in this principle but even if we admit it to be true, anyway there are already 300′000′000 Chinese as much rich as west Europeans or Americans are and for these people its time to have the freedom we already enjoy. If Chinese government fears to fall into chaos as happened to Russia during the 90s they can just start with limited democratic areas as they started with limited free trade areas in the 80s on the base of the intuition of Deng Xiao Ping.

About Tibet (and Xinjian and Inner Mongolia and Taiwan), the actual solution is an actual federation as USA are (and as EU is going to be) and this will be a natural consequence of a really democratic reform.

So this is what to ask to China and this is what a real democratic government (at any level: region, State or Union, both European or American) must ask, without fear.

About Olympic Games, if Western governments are trapped into fear, I am not: I will not follow this Games on TV or every other mass media, it’s my freedom and freedom has no price.

Finally I finished to write the code: now it is possible to leave comments again!

When I started building my customized WordPress theme some months ago, I decided to adopt ISO 8601 international standard for date and time representation. After having paused for many months, during these last few days I started again to work on the code and today afternoon I have finished it.

After having installed the new theme, I discovered that there was a problem. With PHP 5 you just need to use the letter ‘c’ as an argument for the date function and the date will be automatically formatted according to the ISO 8601 standard. Unfortunately even if on my PC I have installed PHP 5, I discovered on my provider’s server it is still running PHP 4…

I was in hurry so I found the first thing rapidly working: ‘r’ command, RFC 2822 format, that’s ok for that moment.

Having a little more time, this evening I have worked for few minutes in order to format manually the date and time following the ISO standard. The only problem was the difference between the GMT, the time at which I write posts and finally the time on the server!!!

I already knew that WordPress can modify the GMT time in order to adapt it to your time zone (under the ‘Options’ panel there is where to write how many hours must be added or subtracted), but today I discovered it is not able to regain that value when you print out the time stamp plus your time zone designator, instead of your setted value it gains the time zone of the server, in this case -06:00. However I live in Italy not in the State of Utah, so my time zone designator is +01:00 (or +02:00) and not -06:00.

Given this problem, and given also the fact that every year you have to change manually that value when it starts the daylight-saving period, I decided to revert to plain GMT, or better to the UTC. So from 2008-03-14T21:00:00Z on all posts will appear with a “Z” at their end. That letter stays for “Zulu Time” alias UTC, once were GMT…

Old posts will appear with a “+01:00″ string at their end. This means their time was set according to central Europe (Berlin, Rome, etc.) time zone. If I will have time I will write also a piece of code for the old posts written during the the daylight-saving periods.Done.

This section will be started very soon. Wait just few days