Matteo Landi

Prompt user for input while processing a file, line by line, in Bash

2012-01-15T11:02:00.000+01:00

Have you ever had the need in Bash of looping on a file (or the output of a piped command), line by line, and then in the middle of such process, ask user for inputs (e.g. a confirmation of an action to be taken)? Well solving this has not been as easy as I expected. The task I come into this problem while writing a Bash script for semi-automatic merge of two subversion repositories (henceforth

About CakePHP and Vagrant!

2012-01-08T10:36:00.000+01:00

Weeks ago I found this, an article describing how to test your CakePHP application using a Vagrant-powered virtual environment; unfortunately the author makes use of a custom box already configured with PHP, MySQL, etc, which is a solution I don't find quite reliable (and the fact that the author decided to create a backup torrent with that box, is an action that speaks for itself). In this post

Bluetooth on FreeBSD

2011-11-28T11:13:00.000+01:00

I found the holy Grail! Add these lines inside your kernel config: device netgraph options NETGRAPH options NETGRAPH_SOCKET options NETGRAPH_BLUETOOTH # ng_bluetooth(4) options NETGRAPH_BLUETOOTH_UBT # ng_ubt(4) options NETGRAPH_BLUETOOTH_HCI # ng_hci(4) options NETGRAPH_BLUETOOTH_SOCKET # ng_btsocket(

About CakePHP and sqlite

2011-10-15T09:40:00.001+02:00

I would like to shed some light on how to make CakePHP 2.0RC2 correctly work with a sqlite database (really useful for development and debugging purposes). First of all, CakePHP 2.0 DOES support Sqlite3 by default; so please, stop wasting your time trying to install stale 3rd party plugins as explained here and here: everything you need is already present in the distribution package. However,

Curriculum Vitae

2011-10-03T21:49:00.000+02:00

I finally managed to finish the first draft of my curriculum vitae. What do you think about that? Have you got any advices to make it better? I would really appreciate it! Someone told me to stick to the Europass Curriculum Vitae format, but I don't really understand why. I see the curriculum vitae as something really personal, so why should I have to make mine equal to other ones? Do

Windows, Cygwin and PHP

2011-10-02T22:40:00.000+02:00

Those of you who constantly try to use Windows as a standard Linux/Unix OS, will agree with me that cygwin represents the only solution to make Microsoft operating systems friendlier for users coming from different OSs. Some days ago I needed to install PHP and mysql on my machine; I fired cygwin setup.exe application, updated the list of available packages, and finally looked for

FreeBSD hacking!

2011-09-14T11:34:00.000+02:00

Time has come to spend some time describing the workflow I followed for about 9 months when working on my master's degree thesis; in that period I implemented a new character device for the FreeBSD Kernel, hence I have been busy all the time modifying the Kernel, compiling it, and finally testing it. In the first section of this post I will show you how to compile a custom FreeBSD Kernel, then

More about mercurial notify extension..

2011-09-03T12:02:00.001+02:00

This morning, working on a personal mercurial repository hosted on my home server, I found out that the email commit notification system (described on this previous post) was not working anymore; on each commit I got back the following message: changegroup.notify hook raised an exception: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '../subscription.conf' I checked the root folder of the repo, and the

Setting up a Mercurial server.

2011-07-24T22:45:00.001+02:00

[Update: if you get error messages from the email notification extension, read this] Today I'm going to write down a list of notes and tips I've collected these days while trying to setup a Mercurial server. Even if Internet is full of well-written guides and tutorials describing how to approach the task, I chose to keep gathered information in a single place (i.e. this post) so that to simplify

I'm still alive .. (cont.)

2011-02-20T19:44:00.005+01:00

Sorry for the silence of the last month, but I've been busy carrying on my master's degree thesis. When you are really focused on something for the 70% of the day, it's hard to find the time to keep you up to date: all you need is a couch and some silence.Yesterday, I decided to break the silence with an image; today I'm going to talk about a couple of things.BooksI can't believe it! At the

I'm still alive..

2011-02-19T17:19:00.002+01:00

..stay tuned!

Hitsmash: conclusion (part 7)

2010-12-30T12:28:00.001+01:00

It's been a month since the first blog entry about Hitsmash. The time has come give a brief summary of this funny game.AnalyticsHave my readers enjoyed Hitsmash?They do ... on the first day.This is perfectly aligned with my expectations; indeed I created anything innovative or attractive. How is it supposed to capture the attention of the reader and make him come back a second time and vote a

FreeBSD: kernel networking for dummies

2010-12-13T16:15:00.002+01:00

Today I would like to share with you some notes I collected in the last month during my research study for the final work of my master's degree. At the time of writing, the title of my thesis is something like "Design and Development of an API for Packet Filtering in Userland", hence I will try to hack the actual FreeBSD network stack in order to improve, hopefully, the performance of operations

Hitsmash: deployment (part 6)

2010-11-23T14:56:00.002+01:00

Are you ready to take the plunge? I hope so!Clear the developement database, and populate it with new data.Create a new Google Analytics profile, and paste the activation code inside the PHP scripts.Register a new 3rd level domain pointing to your homemade server.Configure Apache in order to accept requests addressed to the new registered domain.Restart Apache.Cross your fingers.http://

Hitsmash: ui (part 5)

2010-11-23T13:25:00.003+01:00

I finally finished the user interface for Hitsmash.It's very simple: a title, two boxes , two videos, two buttons and one footer. The hard part runs in the background.When you visit the homepage, two random hits are extracted from the database and new fight entry is added to the fights table; finally the page described above is shown to the user.Once you make your decision and click one of the

Hitsmash: ui (part 4.5)

2010-11-23T02:32:00.003+01:00

It's late, and I have not finished the site.I spent too much time creating the script that populate the database, and now I'm here with an incomplete interface. Dammit!

Hitsmash: database (part 4)

2010-11-22T23:21:00.006+01:00

The database is used to store the hits, and information about the fights.An hit is composed by an artist, a title, a string representing a YouTube video, and a rank.+--------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |+--------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+| id | int(11) | NO | PRI |

Hitsmash: Youtube videos (part 3)

2010-11-22T22:13:00.003+01:00

What if you don't know one of the hits you have to vote? It simple: you click on the play button of the embedded YouTube video, feel the grove, and then make your choice.Now that we have the artist name, and the title of the hit, we have to ask YouTube for its video. I like Python, so I downloaded the client library [1] and played a bit with its API. Finally I succeeded in querying YouTube for

Hitsmash: list of hits (part 2)

2010-11-22T21:15:00.004+01:00

We need a list of hits people are going to vote.After a couple of searches with Google, I found a site that really suits my needs: www.bestsongever.com. It seems perfect: we can navigate through the chart by minor modifications of the url and the hits are arranged inside an HTML table.Now that we have found the source of our hits, we need to parse these HTML pages in order to extract the artist

Hitsmash: Introduction (part 1)

2010-11-22T21:04:00.003+01:00

Do you remember Mark Zuckerberg creating in one night a site called Facesmash used to vote girl students? I'm wondering if I'am able to create something similar.Instead of girls, I would like people to vote for music hits.Instead of photos, I would like to display Youtube videos of the songs, if present, so that people could listen to the songs in case the hit is unknown.Everything else should be

PuzzleMaster

2010-11-18T09:11:00.002+01:00

PuzzleMaster is a Facebook application which aims to make users compete in a puzzle programming competition. The idea is simple: you read the problem, devise an algorithm, send an email to a bot, wait a response from the bot and start over on a new problem.The hardest part seems to be point number three: being accepted by the bot. The bot every four hours or so, read the emails, looks for

XTerm: friendly copy and paste.

2010-11-01T17:27:00.004+01:00

Taken from http://www.davidsimmons.com/soft/xtermhacks/:Many xterm users are frustrated because it is difficult to copy text from an xterm and paste it into modern applications such as Firefox. The root of the problem is that there are two different "selection buffers" that are commonly used in the X Window System:The "CLIPBOARD" selection buffer is used for the cut-and-paste functions that most

Smallest Snippet

2010-10-06T23:28:00.003+02:00

Come back now to algorithms and programming exercises.Problem statement"Given a search string of three words, find the smallest snippet of the document that contains all three of the search words --i.e. , the snippet with smallest number of words in it. You are given the index positions where these words in occur search strings: each of the lists are in sorted order, as above."SolutionMy idea was

Let it snow!

2010-08-22T23:05:00.000+02:00

Today is definitely not the kind of day you expect someone writing about falling snow-flakes: if you thought so, you were wrong!The effect shown in the screenshot is everything but innovative: you can find in Internet lot of applications with similar goals like Compiz or Xsnow even though they can be considered overkill, at least, for my needs.First of all I was looking for a very simple solution

Canvas

2010-08-13T13:08:00.003+02:00

Everytime I need to create an application with drawing capabilities, I always end up writing it from scratch which is a total waste of time.So I decided to merge all these clones and create a simple one-module-library based on gtk and cairo: canvas.A Canvas object is nothing more than a window with a packed drawing area. When a canvas is created, the user could specify callbacks for different