Remmirath-en

Goodbye Dennis...

2011-10-13T15:28:00.001+02:00

These are really sad days for the IT world. Last weekend Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at 70 after a long illness.

His contributions to techlonogy have been outstanding: he was the creator of the C programming language and the father of the UNIX operating system along with Ken Thompson.

He received the Turing Award, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal and the National Medal of Technology.

The influence of his work and creations is widespread in each and every software product you are using right now, either as direct heritage or as indirect influence on developers and programming languages.

Linux, BSD (and therefore MacOSX and iOS) users owes to him much more: the core concepts, stucture and basic utilities of these operating systems.

His collaborators remember him as "a quiet and mostly private man" and it was sad that the news of his passing spread with this delay only because he was not a pop-celebrity.

Then, thank you Dennis for everything you made possible with your work and passion!
I borrow my last salute to him from the internet because, in my opinion, there's nothing more appropriate than this:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("goodbye, dad\n");
return 0;
}

Goodbye Steve...

2011-10-06T10:36:00.001+02:00

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

Steven Paul Jobs

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

Of Neutrinos, Tunnels and Ministerial Stupidity

2011-09-24T13:14:00.000+02:00

It's simply true! Experimental evidence says that lightspeed is not an universal limit. But if Theory of Relativity will need a fix to comply with these new findings, Einstein has not to worry so much, because Italian Ministry of Research demonstrated another of his theories, the one about Human Stupidity.

From Gran Sasso and CERN researchers say that after 6 months of checks and reviews looking for measurement errors, it seems that Neutrinos travel a bit faster than that almost confortable universal limit, which was the pivot of 20th century Physics: c, the speed of light, 299 792 458 m/s in perfect vacuum (Google It!).
http://www.infn.it/news/newsen.php?id=621

But the best was yet to come! Few hours after the announcement, just in time for getting the credit for the result (which is described like a victory ?!?!) italian Minister of Research Mariastella Gelmini sends her congratulations to the scientists in a Press Release:
http://www.istruzione.it/web/ministero/cs230911

Here you are the translation of the absurd part:

Italy contributed with an investment esimated in about 45 million € to the construction of the tunnel between CERN and Gran Sasso, in which the experiment was conducted.

Yes... you understood correctly! According to the minister and her staff, the experiments with Neutrinos have been possible thanks to a 732 km straight tunnel from Geneva to Gran Sasso (Central Italy) with a maximum depth of 11.4 km into the ground!

We as Italy, contributed with "about 45 million €" for its construction!
A few bucks if you consider that the just finished Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland - the longest to date with its "poor" 57km in length - had a cost of 10 billion dollars.

Of course, we could ask for the minister resignation and for the idiots at the ministry press office to be fired. But we are in Italy, and nothing will happen... at least until meritocracy and professionalism will become, for the Italian People, common values.
This change is the key for any real economical and cultural growth for Italian society and for a better country... finally outside the tunnel of nonsense!

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

Marinelli 3, Drupal 7: HTML entities shown in banner image_title and image_description

2011-09-06T13:01:00.002+02:00

Today I was beginning to create new content on a website in Drupal I renewed updating to D7 and installing the great Marinelli Theme (7.x-3.0-beta11)
I noticed that some characters in banners title and description showed as HTML entities (i.e. & #039; for the single quote symbol).

I digged in the code and I fixed the issue in a quite rude but effective way.
Learning more about the t() funcion from Drupal bootstrap.inc I found what was the meaning of Parameters give to that function

!variable: Inserted as is. Use this for text that has already been sanitized.
@variable: Escaped to HTML using check_plain(). Use this for anything displayed on a page on the site.

The generation of banner title and description string is there made with the @ parameter. Unfortunately somewhere else in the code a further check_plain() call is made on the same strings. This second application of check_plain() function simply converts the symbols into HTML entities and this is the cause of the issue.

My solution was to replace the @ parameter with the ! one in t() function calls into marinelli_banner_markups()
This function in marinelli/logics/banners.inc

Here you are the code snippets:

'alt' => t('!image_desc', array('!image_desc'=>$banner['image_description'])),
'title' => t('!image_title', array('!image_title'=>$banner['image_title'])),

...

'longdesc' => t('!image_desc', array('!image_desc'=>$banner['image_description']))

Keep on hackin' ;-)

ArchLinux: kdeinit4 segfault at shutdown because of Phonon Config

2011-08-08T20:22:00.000+02:00

I tried to change the Phonon backend from the default Gstreamer to Xine.
Then I couldn't manage to open again the Phonon pane in System Setting's Multimedia.

The only way to get it work and to set Gstreamer again, was via the manual modification of the backend configuration file:
.kde4/share/config/servicetype_profilerc

And in the end I caused this bug:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269785

The solution?... Nothing simpler than:

$ rm .kde4/share/config/servicetype_profilerc

and a reboot (or maybe even a Logout) ;-)

Keep on Hacking! ;-)

Vittorio Utopia Arrigoni ... a winner!

2011-04-23T02:27:00.002+02:00

Thursday, February 24th 2011, little big manoeuvres in LEO

2011-02-24T00:02:00.005+01:00

It's due to the respective longer or shorter launch delays if today, Thursday, February 24th 2011 became a day of many events in LEO.

The first is NASA with the night launch of the Glory satellite, which will study Earth's climate. It is already atop the Orbital Science Taurus XL rocket at Space Launch Complex 576-E at Vandemberg Air-Force Base in California.

Yesterday's launch was scubbed because of a wrong reading from the sensors interface between the rocket and the ground station. With a launch windows of just 48 seconds there was no time to investigate on and solve the issue. Hence the 24h delay.

If everything will be in shape, the next target launch time is 5.09am Eastern Time (11.05am CET).

As usual the launch will be covered by NasaTV, with the trasmiossion start at 9.00am CET.

From 4.15pm CET the cosmic scene will be for the space ballet between ESA's ATV Johannes Kepler and the International Space Station (ISS).
Docking is foreseen around 4.45pm CET. The event will be streamed live on the ESA website, at this page:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ATV/SEM7VVLTRJG_0.html

and definitely will be covered by NasaTV which will relay those images.

Finally, at 4:50pm EST (10.50pm CET) after some months and extensive repair work, the Space Shuttle Discovery will lift-off for STS-133 mission, which will be its last and the first to be carried out of the remaining three in the program.

Heading to the ISS, Discovery will expand the outpost with the last pressurized module of the US segment, the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module). This module is nothing but the Italian MPLM Leonardo refurbished and modified for a long duration stay at the Station.

Hoping everything will proceed smoothly, I've nothing more to say that "Enjoy the show!" ;-)

Have a nice Space Trip @astro_paolo !!!

2010-12-15T11:10:00.000+01:00

Tonight @ 20.09 CET, italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli will liff-off from Baikonur along with Dmitri Kondratyev and Catherine Coleman onboard Soyuz TMA-20 heading to the ISS.
This launch will mark the beginning of the first ISS long duration mission by an Italian astronaut. Paolo will stay at the Station till May 2011 performing maintainance work for the space outpost and also many experiments which take advantage of microgravity environment.

You can follow Paolo on Twitter @astro_paolo where we expect to see wonderful photos from above in the coming months!

Is also online, on the ESA website, the official magISSstra mission page:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/magisstra/index.html
Here you can also watch the live webcast of the launch!

If you could not wait and want to have a more detailed glimpes of what Paolo will do during these 6 months onboard, you can find a cool presentation video here: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/magisstra/SEM5V1TOREG_0.html

Surfing the web for that beautiful photo of Paolo you can above... I have also found, by chance, a photo of me and my friend Teo attending a lecture by Paolo in PoliMI in 2008 about his Shuttle mission for the installation of Node2-Harmony on the ISS.
It was a great lecture! Unfortunately we didn't manage to take a photo with Paolo, anyway, the web shows its awesomeness once again and thanks to pamoroso on flicker I found at least this photo of us ;-) Thank you!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamoroso/2383678284/in/photostream/

Then, Paolo have a nice trip and enjoy your long stay on that beautiful piece of engineering which is ISS! We will be here on Earth sending our greetings to you, every time we will see your new home passing above us, enlightened by the Sun just after sunset or just before dawn!
See you soon... from space! ;-)

Time of troubles - HTPDATE: Time Syncing under Proxy

2010-11-03T10:13:00.004+01:00

Yeah, you know, in Europe last weekend we changed the time. In Italy we switched from CEST to CET.
Well, KDE4 is smart, as I remember giving the possibility of setting the time via NTP time servers. Also, no matter what desktop environment you use, on every Linux distro are available NTP utilities... but what to do if you are connected under proxy?

No way, if port 123 is closed, NTP won't work. So how to sync the time automagically without this amazing service?
The answer is HTP the "HTTP time protocol" which of course permits to sync under proxy, even if with less accuracy than NTP.

http://www.rkeene.org/oss/htp/
http://www.clevervest.com/htp/

In archlinux HTP is available via the AUR via the htpdate package. Here you are the steps for its installation and use.

1) Go to the AUR to get the package tarball.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php and search for htp or htpdate
You'll find this package page: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=25963

2) Download the tarball

3) Extract it in your favourite folder

tar -xzvf htpdate.tar.gz

4) Make the package

cd htpdate
makepkg

It will be created a ".tar.xz" file. That is your Archlinux package you can install with pacman -U

5) Install the package

sudo pacman -U htpdate-1.0.4-2-i686.pkg.tar.xz

Now you have htpdate installed... let's play with that...

6) Sync the time under proxy
It's very simple. Via the -P option you can tell htpdate your proxy address and port. If you want to see more output messages you can specify the -d option. Then with the -q option you submit only a time query without setting the time. With the -s option, instead, you will set your system time according to what retrieved from the specified host. As http server I used www.ntp.org which should be well synced itself givend the service it supports ;-)

htpdate -dq -P proxyIP:proxyPORT httpSERVER

in order to set the time system wide you may need to be root

sudo htpdate -ds -P proxyIP:proxyPORT httpSERVER

Pay attention to this, the time which will be set is just your system time.
Following I'll show you how to set also the hardware clock preventing the time to be restored to the old one.

7) Set the hardware clock according to the system time

date

will show you the current system time (it should be correct because just set with htpdate)

hwclock

will show you the current hardware clock time

With this command you can set the hardware clock according to your system time

sudo hwclock --systohc

Now your time is synced and you are happy!
You can further try to run htpdate as a deamon... Here you are the web version of the manpage and a good page on the gentoo wiki:
http://www.clevervest.com/foswiki/bin/view/HTP/HtpdateManpage
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Time_Synchronization

I think that's all ;-)

Be on time!

Upended trees: with skyward roots...

2010-10-08T01:31:00.010+02:00

It happened, a few days ago, waiting for the shipment of my first telescope ever. I took an old book of mine, dealing with astronomy thanks to sky maps and complete descriptions. It was given as a present to me when I was a child. At first I used it only a couple of times, since I was more interested in its fluorescent ink of the star charts than in the explanation of what the different regions of the sky contain... Later, it was enough for me to be able to recognize some constellation thanks to its sky maps...

This book, it was neither one of the ones which literally made me dream with eyes wide open, being responsible for the choice of my studies and for my fondnesses. This book simply was there, sometime flipped through, but never really read.

It happened that, for the first time, I ran into the words. And I found in the preface an idea which clarifies to me something I always felt gazing the stars.

It's true: the books are patient friends! These words waited for me on that page, only to come to me years later.

These words are by Hubert Reeves who I discover to be (God bless Wikipedia!) a French-Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science... with a likeable face. He wrote a simple remark on why it's worth to look at the sky, and how let us enter in harmony with the cosmic dance which is just in front of our eyes if we want to see it...

... the knowledge of the sky has also a further dimension, linked with Man's roots. The changes in lifestyle, caused by the pressing rythm of the technological advances, lead to a lack of identity in Contemporary Man. A reaction against this feeling of alienation caused by the present world it could be found in a renewed interest in regionalism. Everyone feels the need to belong to something. Man seeks desperately his own roots, even at the point to invent them.

Nowadays, one of the reasons of the popularity of astronomy stands, I think, in the link it shows between the Man and the Stars. Far from being extraneous to the Universe, as existentialists teach, the latest discoveries of astrophysics place us as a part of everything shines in the sky. We will owe forever to the stars, because inside them the very atoms that make the molecules of our eyes gazing them were created.

The feeling of belonging we need so much, it's given to us by astronomy in a way far more satisfying than by our history books. Before being French or Italian, black or white, male or female, we are earthlings, sunlings, people of the Milky Way, daughters and sons of the Universe. Our roots are in the stars.

This awareness is important for the human being as a whole. But it remains confined to the mind; it doesn't gain its actual dimension. It's required, nevertheless, that this awareness is proven with the physical observation of the sky. To rationality, has to be associated the emotion of find again the Orion nebula - star formation region - or Antares, generator of carbon and oxygen...

It's with this spirit I want to look at the sky. Always. This is why an humble dobson "cheap but yet good" is my ideal companion. It doesn't take nothing to let it hop from one star to another with the levity of a dancer. Without any claim, without any coordinate dial, without the noises of the go-to mountings, but humbly, silently, with all its limits, it stands underneath the night sky showing to me the wonders of the cosmos.

This is the point: let us be amazed. Let us be impressed. In the very same way our retinas do.

AMZ Live! @ Villa Litta, Lainate

2010-09-02T12:16:00.002+02:00

Hi all!

Back from my summer wanderings I'm proud to announce the first Ammazzacaffè performance since Teo was back from USA ;-)

It will be for sure an awesome moment, at least for us! Here you are the info:

Sunday September 5th, 2010

9.00PM

Cortile Nobile di

Villa Borromeo Visconti Litta

Lainate (MI)

Music with Ammazzacaffè

in collaboration with Job Caffè

Italy, the country of scientific sensationalism

2010-07-22T11:31:00.002+02:00

Hi all,

starting from a comment I made to a buzz of a friend of mine, I take the opportunity to write a couple of things about a "sensational" article published on Repubblica's online edition on July 15th 2010.

"Newton was wrong
gravity doesn't exists"
In the US restarts the debate about the principles outlined by the famous scientist thanks to the works of a Dutch physicist: "His theory is an illusion". Erik Verlinde binds his criticism to the strings and holographic universe hypoteses

If you understand Italian, here you are the link to the article: http://bit.ly/cbGdeC

I would like to know what is your reaction to this title, apart from the strings theory and the holographic universe (named in the subheading as the perfect background to the main overstatement, as if the journalist himself is accustomed with those new theories which seems to ridicule classical physics).

What was my reaction? I was ashamed to be a reader of that stuff. I was ashamed of Italian scientific sensationalism. I was indignant for the stupidity and ignorance with this journalist (just to be read) makes fun of Newton an moreover about his studies on gravitation!

I don't want to defend the dear old Sir Isaac as a physics totem, such a new Aristotle versus a new impertinent Galileo... mine is a defense of a right scientific information and a refusal of the sensationalism which upsets the core of research.

Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller - 1689

Not many words are needed in order to understand how a title like that is in open contrast with the spirit at the foundation of any scientific and cultural progress. The fact I have to cite Sir Newton himself about this, makes me more angry about the ignorance of the journalist even if this quote raises suddenly the level of the discussion, leaving the overstatements to what they are.

So wrote Isaac Newton about Optics matters to Robert Hooke on February 15th, 1676:

"What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Newton himself was one of those Giants. We know that. He knew that. Anyway this is the naked truth he recognized: we all due the starting point of any research, to our predecessors. This is the deep humility only the great people are able to maintain even when they are aware of the extraordinary contributions to world's knowledge given by themselves.

This understanding generates respect for the predecessors, even if our new theory fits more reality revealing the mistakes and the errors of the previous one.

But we are different! We like controversy! We like gossip! And "our correspondent" il Mr. Federico Rampini well knows that. He doesn't stop to copy, adapt and translate this article published only 3 days before on the NYTimes http://nyti.ms/cJPog8 (like this I could be an "our correspondent" too :-D).

He choose a stupid title which bring his article we below the lever of the original one: more precise and less controversial. By the way it's very funny to read at the bottom of the page © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA (reproduction limited)... but... that was a plagiarism itself !!!

The bitter conclusion is that we don't really know what is the cause and what the effect.

We cannot state if it is the ignorance in science, many Italians are subjected to, the cause of this insane arrogance or if it's the opposite: because of daily stupid discussions or worse, because the spread of rubble called "science" (TV shows like Mr.Giacobbo's Voyager) true science information in the right tones doesn't interest the people and even less the young generation.

Cassini Saturn Orbit Insertion

In our country truth is a personal opinion, even in science. We are not only free to think what we want about "gravity" but if we think our theory is better than Newtons we can insult him without any problem.

It doesn't matters that Newton's equations let us place spacecraft in incredible orbits around Saturn!

The outcome of this article is that, if the gravity will be demonstrated as an effect of entropy.. then Newton can be called "a great idiot"!

Even if it was the second half of the 17th century.

Even if he was so honest to understand the honor to start his research from what he could see "standing on the shoulders of giants."

Even if the scientist who proposed this new theory didn't insulted Newton in that way.

Even if who wrote that article speaking loudly of strings theory and holographic universe probably finds hard to remember the universal gravitation equation and what a revolution it was for physics.

In Italy gossip takes the place of information. That it's unbelievably true for scientific information too. And this happens on one of the media which denounce everyday the "cultural drift" of this country.

That's really sad.

President's view of the Final Frontier. Great Speech.

2010-04-18T12:04:00.003+02:00

kdemod4 doesn't work after latest Arch update

2010-04-10T21:29:00.004+02:00

Hi all!
Here I am with a post on the fly!

UPDATE April 12th 2010: this post has become useless since the last update of qtmod to version 4.6.2-2

DISCLAIMER: on the net they say symlinking ssl libraries is never a good idea for security issues(!?!). As always... the choice is yours! In this way it simply works, but everyone of you should know the risks he can afford. Another solution is the downgrade of openssl to version 0.9.8, waiting for the next kdemod update ;-)

As the title says, few second ago I couldn't make it work kdemod4 after the latest Arch update.
After some troubleshooting finding that Xorg alone was working, I checked the kdm log file:

$ tail /var/log/kdm.log

and this was the answer:

    (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sat Apr 10 20:54:38 2010
(==) Using default built-in configuration (30 lines)
(EE) Failed to load module "vesa" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) Failed to load module "fbdev" (module does not exist, 0)
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Warning:          Type "ONE_LEVEL" has 1 levels, but has 2 symbols
>                   Ignoring extra symbols
Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server
/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kdm_greet: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Then I checked libssl finding that its package (openssl) had been updated to version 1.0

Hence the solution is a simple symbolic link in order to let kdm_greet launch the 1.0.0 version looking for the 0.9.8 version

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.0.9.8

... all done?!?! NO :-P because after the next kdm restart I got this variation among the same theme:

    (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sat Apr 10 21:00:53 2010
(==) Using default built-in configuration (30 lines)
(EE) Failed to load module "vesa" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) Failed to load module "fbdev" (module does not exist, 0)
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Warning:          Type "ONE_LEVEL" has 1 levels, but has 2 symbols
>                   Ignoring extra symbols
Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server
/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kdm_greet: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

which says it's needed another sym link, this time for libcrypto:

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.0.9.8

And today, again, the day is safe... thanks to log files ;-)

keep on hacking!
Andy

Remmirath - Reprise

2010-03-18T03:20:00.001+01:00

Hi all!
As someone of you (the "aficionados"!) can notice, Remmirath has a new look. Hope you like it!

Last time I wrote a post was in November 2009.

Many things happened since then...
some of them have been sad,
some of them have been beautiful.
But what's important is that what's going on in my little corner of space-time is still LIFE rather than "a succession of days".

Since November I've been putting in order...
Tonight it was time to tidy up this corner of the web as well, with the hope to restart blogging sooner or later. Definitely I will try!

So far... that's all folks! Thanks for all your comments, thanks for all your visits, especially when there wasn't anything new on these pages.

keep on dreamin' and see you soon!
Andy

MATLAB 2007a with JRE 1.6 to solve the "CANNOT PASTE" issue

2009-11-20T12:20:00.004+01:00

Hi all!

After many posts, here we are speaking again about Mathworks MATLAB R2007a, a glorious version of this remarkable programming environment for Scientific Computing.

This version of MATLAB is now a bit old, but many universities and then professors, research teams and students are still using it. Also my famous neighbour is still using it with its awesome license and he is still so kind to let me use it in change of maintainance work on his Linux machine. ;-)

In older posts I already wrote about some solutions to issues about this MATLAB version in times when it was "too new", or "too humble" for Compiz...
This is, I think, the first post about an issue caused by the fact this version is now becoming "too old".

Recently, for some needs, I dropped from openjdk (on Archlinux) switching to the closed version of Java.

In the meantime I was playing with Emacs so I decided to change in MATLAB che "Copy and Paste" keybindings in order to learn better the Emacs ones.
They didn't work so well, especially the "Paste" command.. (but it was caused by Java).
Anyway, after a second, I needed suddenly to be more productive in order to finish a work and sadly I had to come back to the Windows-like keybindings CTRL-X CTRL-V and CTRL-C.

But what a surprise when I discovered that either in the Command Windows and in the MATLAB Editor a "Paste" was permitted literally only once per session 8-|

Since it was my fault playing with the "Copy and Paste" keybindings, I spent hours checking, patching, deleting and recreating MATLAB's preferences files in order to try to revert all the "Copy and Paste Universe" back its previous "Time's Arrow"!

After weeks using an external editor now I discovered another error dealing with a call to the Helvetica font I didn't set in any preference... so I started MATLAB with the debug option and I looked for some forum solution to cope with that further issue.

While reading I find an advice by a user suggesting to use the system's native JRE instead of the MATLAB's one. And then my eyes opened and I asked myself: "Could it be the copy and paste issue caused by the Java versione included in MATLAB?"
So I checked which Java version was embedded in MATLAB R2007a and I found it is the 1.5

After all this story here you are how to fix all the misterious errors you can experience in MATLAB due to its old Java:

You only need to create a custom script for launching MATLAB in order not to modify the native one (it's possibile but it's not adviceable):

#!/bin/sh

# This was good for Compiz issues
# but I don't need it at the moment
# export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

# This is the magic environment variable to fill
# with your system's Java Installation directory
export MATLAB_JAVA=/opt/java/jre

# This is my matlab start command... probably only
# "matlab -desktop" on your system
/opt/matlabR2007a/bin/matlab -desktop

So that's all, if you start MATLAB with the MATLAB_JAVA environment variable pointing to your system's Java installation directory you (hopefully) will solve all the issues due to the old 1.5 Java embedded in the R2007a version.

At least, for me it worked, not showing anymore the Copy and Paste issue and the strange font issue at MATLAB's start.

Hope this will be useful for someone else ;-)

Keep on hackin'

Awesome: learning to use a tiled window manager

2009-11-18T02:54:00.003+01:00

Awesome is a great, highly configurable and extremely lightweight window manager for X. There are many chances for you to find it already packaged for you distribution.
Awesome is a "tiled window manager" even if it has also a "float windows mode". Anyway in its default settings you won't find the actual windows titles and their usual functions because the windows are placed automatically for the best use of the screen. In this mode you will have a graphical interface you can master completely using nothing more than your keyboard.

In order to achieve any sort of "productivity" with Awesome the user has to get used to it and to configure himself some keybindings and functions, since the defaults settings don't cover everything (and this was intended in order to put the stress on customization).

In the coming posts I will explain the results of my usability experiments with this "awesome" window manager ;-)

At first I had to recreate my custom configuration copying the default rc.lua file to ~/.config/awesome/

There I put also the copy of the default theme folder with the themes I wanted to use. So in the end I had this directory structure:
~/.config/awesome/themes/default (with all its files and subfolders)
~/.config/awesome/themes/sky (my chosen theme with all its files and subfolders)

Then I started the customization and I fixed the Java non-reparenting-wm issue. This problem caused alla Java GUI windows not to be drawn correctly leaving them blank and therefore rendering useless their applications (like MATLAB... which GUI is written in Java too).

In the coming days I will try to explain better the steps that led to my present configuration.

I you like, you can have already a look on my configuration files at this page on the webpage I use as file download support for this blog:

http://remmir.ath.cx/awesome

Keep on hacking! ;-)

How to enable KMS on an Intel GM45 X3500HD

2009-11-16T21:38:00.014+01:00

Hi all!

Here you are "Yet Another How-To" to enable KMS on an Intel board ;-)
... of course, on ArchLinux... but the instructions can be easily adapted for others distributions

The procedure to activate the graphics drivers on the adapter directly during kernel loading is simple:

modify the file /etc/mkinitcpio.conf having the MODULES string like this:

MODULES="intel_agp i915"

modify the archlinux kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst

kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sd[x][n] ro i915.modeset=1

where /dev/sd[x][n] is your / partition and i915.modeset=1 substitutes any vga=NNN or video=... options that won't be supported by KMS which find itself for the best resolution.

That's all, now you should see the very first post messages of kernel startup in the very ugly and big "standard console character", but then you will see the rest of the startup messages in the correct (and autodetected) resolution.
Furthermore the switching between Virtual Consoles and the X server will be really faster than before.

So enjoy your Intel video adapter's capability with the new Kernel Mode Setting you just configured on you machine!

Keep on hacking! ;-)

Happy Carl Sagan's Day

2009-11-09T16:57:00.002+01:00

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Stellarium libjpeg microbug in Archlinux

2009-08-16T23:16:00.001+02:00

Minutes ago "dreaming of a telescope" I did what Galileo did 400 years ago, when, in 1609, pointed one of the first basic refractors telescopes upwars to the sky, towards Jupiter, discovering its 4 main satellites (that afterwards were called after him as "Galileian Satellites").

I took my dear old scope and I aimed it to the brightest object of tonight's sky (even from this desert Milan but photo-polluted as usual): a great Jupiter of -2 mag and something more with Ganimede at mag 4 in the top left of the ocular.

Yeah... but for knowing it was Ganimede I needed the awesome Stellarium.

I started the program but it said that without libjpeg.so.62 it wouldn't start. :-(

Then I tried to symbolic linking as "libjpeg.so.62" the libjpeg I have installed by default in Archlinux that's version 7:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.7 /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62

No way :-(

So I had to remove the just created link to clean:

$ sudo rm /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62

.. and search with yaourt if version 6 is still available on aur.

Luckily it is! Bingo! After building and installing "libjpeg6" package from aur Stellarium worked!

... and everyone lived in happiness even if with two versions of the same library installed :-)

Goodnight and keep on hacking ;-)

bYe,
Andy

Sent from my iPhone

Gimp Colorize: I couldn't get it

2009-08-16T15:43:00.000+02:00

Last days I fought with Gimp's Colorize tool. To understand what was the generated color I studied again color spaces pages on wikipedia, as I already did some years ago.

The tool did't shocked me because its use of HSL color space (with google you can find many RGB, HSV, HSL converters, even online). I was disappointed because in this tool Luminance has a -100 - +100 grade instead of a 0 to 100 one.

So I tried to recover the "true" value by means of a proportion, after I tried with sums and differences, and at last I merged some HSV and some HSV values because HSV Saturation made more sense than the same saturation from HSL.

Anyway there was nothing to do: the recoloured region was of the same hue (so H parameter was right) but the resulting color was clearly differente with respect of my desired color.

The only solution I found to colorize the blurred pattern (so I couldn't use effectively the magic wand) I was interested in, was a mask creation on that layer using the image itself as source. After that I applied a convenient background color to all the layer and the mask did the rest.

In this way the result was what I wanted but this strategy worked only because of the kind of the particular image I wanted to colorize. Because of this, I'm really curious about to know where I made my color conversion mistake with the colorize tool and if some of you readers worked out this problem. ;-)

On the net there is not so much about this issue, since the problem reveals itself only when the user wants a specific color and tries to put it inside the tool via the HSL digits. It one works manually and "by eye" everything is acceptable but the "bug" remains.

Okay... I hope that someone could get through this issue, bug or simply mistery and tell me how much I am "idiot" GIMPly speaking :-P

bYez,
Andy

Sent from my iPhone

Wisdom pearls

2009-08-16T15:04:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I had to rename with a unique and chronological code some photos made by different cameras but among the same holidays.

I remembered about the EXIF informaztion set which is inside any camera-generated jpg file... and I remembered of a tool to work with these information.

So I installed exiv2 on my Arch box and with a rapid sight to the "man" I was ready to batch renaming all the pictures. I thought I would have been quite complicated but it worked like a charm! Here you are the command:

On a terminal, once you are in the folder containing the photo to be renamed, you have to do only:

$ exiv2 mv ./*.jpg

It's incredible how rapidly is done a work that could take a full day for a human! All the pictures in the folder are now renamed witha strandard patterna like the following:

YYYYMMDD_hhmmss.jpg

So now instead of having different folder for different cameras to prevent to overwrite or mess up the pictures, you have all the photos in the same place and time-tagged.

But there is some issue because anything could be perfect.

First of all, this program doesn't work with the movie files, so you will have to rename them manually.

The real problem is, anyway, when we do more than 1 shot per seconds (multiple shot feature of professional cameras) or when we shot at the same time with the two different camera we are trying to merge.

However, being careful about these situations before the renaming and the merging of the folders the system works very well... if the time on set on the cameras is correct and more or less synchronized. If there will be a delay of some 5 minutes all the consequential order will be badly disrupted.

For the windows users: I didn't check if there is such an EXIF utility for your OS... but I'm quite sure I will be... at most it won't be free of charge... but that's your way to think sofware doesn't it? :-P

Make nice pictures and Have good holidays!

bYe,
Andy

Sent from my iPhone

Apollo 40th anniversary

2009-07-18T17:17:00.009+02:00

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

In two days on July 20th @ 20:17:40 UTC we will be landing on the moon, "live" from 40 years ago...
› Real-Time Replay of Mission Audio (July 16-July 24)

This time, thanks to LRO, we will enjoy the moment with the final evidence that such dream became really true!
› Apollo Landing Sites pictures

A farewell to a special person

2009-07-13T09:55:00.000+02:00

Some time has already passed since that 25th of May 2009 when you left us, uncle Eugenio.
This blog was already stuck before because of lack of time for my usual many thing to do. During this month and a half many things had to be written: not only train-of-thoughts, but silly or technical things too, from a Linux user life... but I couldn't let it be. It didn't seemed right to me, to write "anything" before having placed a farewell to you, on this little corner of the net too hard for me to keep up to date...

To say "goodbye" to you, it's not a thing I can accomplish in 2 minutes, even if I don't want to share with the net, abruptly, my deepest feelings, and that's right. Anyway, I won't write too much... but I simply need the right time and the suitable tranquillity, because this is a little thing but it's important for me.

So it's natural to think that the emptiness a person leaves in the other's life when her way in this world come to an end, is nothing but commensurate with how much that person managed to fill just other's life, getting in the game with her own unrepeatable qualities.
You lived like this, and that's because we miss you. But just because of what you left inside us and thanks to what we believe in, and what you helped us with your life to take care of, we aren't able to say us "desperate" even among this inevitable sadness.

This is already a great thing, and I'm grateful to you for this. As I'm grateful for your testimony and for your strength you paradoxically and very kindly gave us during your illness. Your "strong tranquillity" is helping us and will be always with us.

But although the beauty of your example and the clarity of your testimony in the time of trouble, I'd like to remember you in the time of peacefulness too.
My memories are the ones of a lucky child, grown up in a great family, in touch with cousins as brothers and with uncles and aunts as "second parents".

So my head becomes full of memories, small things, your "Good Shot!", your intelligent glances, your thinking moments, ...a wristband you gave to all we nephews when we were to the primary school, to initiate us to the football "faith" (and you managed very well with Alby and Teo, with the poor uncle Claudio fan of Inter who found his two children fan of Milan!)

And I recall my first time at the stadium (my only for a "serious" match to date)... I restored from my memories and from the web: it was April 17th 1994, Milan vs Udinese 2-2, the match that gave its 14° Championship to Milan in the 15th match, two before the end. It was the last italian championship with 2 point for the winner... and in that match in Udinese there was a player "Testaferrata" (Iron Head in Italian) who didn't have the head so hard since he fell down after an air-tackle with the big Desailly...

My memories go on with all the Sunday afternoons at the granparents' marked with the sport program "90°minuto" just before come back home... my thoughts flow to all your gags: when you went out to ring the bell, or when you shut down the light pretending there was a blackout... getting the relatives crazy and we children laugh. An at last when we were on the beach and you call out the wrong time looking at your watch, and making all the people check theirs!

And this playful part of your character we had the pleasure to know, completed very well your professionalism and precision you had in your work as a university professor, while you remained for your collegues, simply "Eugenio": a sociologist who loved the "city" and very careful to its issues and changes.
For this work and for your committment in the catholi association "Azione Cattolica" as President for Milan Diocese, you have been widely mentioned by the ones who shared this experiences with you in these years.
As for me, I had the pleasure to have you as an "uncle-president" while I was in the youth association. I had the chance to hear from you the picture of our present society and of the role of the citizen and of the Christian in it, in the occasion of some seminars.
I saw you put on challenge in person when just two years ago we gave birth to the italian Democratic Party so that Italian politics could finally start a new season. If I continue to believe in this effort although all the troubles, it's because of you too.

This is my remembrance I decided to share with my readers, its just the top of the iceberg.
For this and for all the rest, I want to say my "Thank you!"

These things, and many others, you have been... and you are again, in that "time" and in that "place" in which we will meet again.
But if it's true that those "time" and "place" are nothing but the most true "being" of the "here" and "now", it's not silly to feel that you are with us every single day with your peaceful smile and your smart glance upon the world :-)

Goodbye zio Eugenio!
Andy

Xorg 1.6 in [extra] on Archlinux

2009-04-13T01:48:00.002+02:00

Tonight, as usual, I upgraded my box with the good yaourt and what an Easter Surprise I got?... Xorg 1.6 was in [extra] and in that very moment I no more needed to use testing packages to make my laptop work in all its grace!

Here you are the notice directly from Archlinux news:

Xorg-server 1.6.0 and its related drivers will make their move to extra.
This new release features input device properties, DRI2 and kernel
modesetting (KMS). Note that DRI2 and KMS are only implemented by the
Intel driver at this moment.
This release also comes with a new driver: xf86-video-intel-legacy. This
driver is an old intel driver version, patched to support recent
xorg-server versions. This driver should be used by people having
problems with the newer xf86-video-intel driver.
People still using xorg-server 1.4.2 are advised to upgrade and replace intel or i810 drivers with the legacy driver.

Remmirath-en

Goodbye Dennis...

Goodbye Steve...

Of Neutrinos, Tunnels and Ministerial Stupidity

Marinelli 3, Drupal 7: HTML entities shown in banner image_title and image_description

ArchLinux: kdeinit4 segfault at shutdown because of Phonon Config

Vittorio Utopia Arrigoni ... a winner!

Thursday, February 24th 2011, little big manoeuvres in LEO

Have a nice Space Trip @astro_paolo !!!

Time of troubles - HTPDATE: Time Syncing under Proxy

Upended trees: with skyward roots...

AMZ Live! @ Villa Litta, Lainate

Sunday September 5th, 2010

9.00PM

Cortile Nobile di

Villa Borromeo Visconti Litta

Lainate (MI)

Music with Ammazzacaffè

Italy, the country of scientific sensationalism

"Newton was wronggravity doesn't exists"

In the US restarts the debate about the principles outlined by the famous scientist thanks to the works of a Dutch physicist: "His theory is an illusion". Erik Verlinde binds his criticism to the strings and holographic universe hypoteses

President's view of the Final Frontier. Great Speech.

kdemod4 doesn't work after latest Arch update

Remmirath - Reprise

MATLAB 2007a with JRE 1.6 to solve the "CANNOT PASTE" issue

Awesome: learning to use a tiled window manager

How to enable KMS on an Intel GM45 X3500HD

Happy Carl Sagan's Day

Stellarium libjpeg microbug in Archlinux

Gimp Colorize: I couldn't get it

Wisdom pearls

Apollo 40th anniversary

A farewell to a special person

Xorg 1.6 in [extra] on Archlinux

"Newton was wrong
gravity doesn't exists"