Blog on Lorenzo Bolla

On the Non-portability of the Concept of Consciousness to AI

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I discussed The Abstraction Fallacy at length with my friend Harsha Perera. We both found the paper interesting, but somehow incomplete.

Harsha distilled our dissatisfaction in a paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/PEROTN.

PhilPapers is a treasure trove of great articles. I’m reading Why You Can’T Make A Computer That Feels Pain now!

Pigeons in a cage

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From The Handmaid’s Tale:

I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who’d give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button which made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They’d peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who know what worked?

Sixtyseven is a bitch

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Circe Ulysses, one reads:

He’s getting his pleasure. You won’t get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don’t be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.

“Sixtyseven is a bitch”. What could it mean? I found a brilliant analysis of what it could possibly mean. Some explanations are pretty obscure, others boringly trivial.

I asked a boy, he replied: “Six seveeeeen!”.

AI chart of Ulysses characters

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Circe chapter of Ulysses features lots of characters from earlier in the book. I needed some help remembering them all, so I asked Gemini to draw a chart of all characters in Ulysses and their relationships.

Here is my first prompt:

Draw a diagram of all characters in Ulysses. Draw lines connecting them if they have a direct relationship in the story

It produced this chart.

First of all, I love the style: the yellowish background reminds me of an old drawing; the characters dresses and hairstyle is very much early 1900. But, the chart itself has some issues: for example, characters are duplicated (e.g. Dennis Breen) and some relations seem wrong. I tried another prompt.

Ulysses epub from Joyce Project

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While I was researching Ulysses, to make sure I really wanted to embark in the adventure of reading it, I stumbled upon The Joyce Project. Since 2012, Ulysses is open domain, so its text if free to publish. The great added value of The Joyce Project is its extensive set of notes, written by the late John Hunt.

In order to enjoy those notes, I created an eBook out of them. The raw text, notes and various scripts to build the eBook are available at https://github.com/lbolla/ulysses.

Digital Garden

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

lbolla.info is now based on Obsidian’s Digital Garden. Previously, my notes were written in orgmode as .org files. Here are the most important steps I followed to convert them.

From org to md

I used pandoc to convert from org to md, something like:

pandoc --from=org --to=markdown file.org -o file.md -s ...

The conversion is not perfect and required some cleanup to remove spurious “block” elements in the output.

Obsidian

I created a new Obsidian vault in the directory containing the .md files. I then installed the Obsidian’s Digital Garden plugin and configured to publish the notes to Netlify.

Netlify

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently moved lbolla.info to Digital Garden. The notes are now published and deployed on Netlify. Here are some notes about the whole setup.

Project

lbolla.info is a project in Netlify. The project has a GitHub repo from which it deploys. Staging deploys are possible from the repo branches.

Plan

The “Personal” plan includes generous traffic and deployments for 9 USD/month. I think this is enough for me. 9 USD/month may seem like a lot, but:

Wired elements

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, a cool project appeared on the front page of HN reported: Wired Elements.

I love the font Gloria Hallelujah, so, although I am not using the UI elements in this site, I wanted to give the font a try. It fits very well the spirit of these personal "notes".

Python MRO surprises

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Consider a script like this:

class A:
 def __init__(self):
 print('a')

class B:
 def __init__(self):
 print('b')

class C(A, B):
 def __init__(self):
 super().__init__()
 print('c')

C()

What will it output? If you are like me, you would answer, without much thought, that it prints:

a
c

To work it out you need to know about Python's MRO (Method Resolution Order): this article provides a clear explanation of how it works. In this case, we have:

gio in cronjob

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

gio provides a nice API to deal with VFS. I am using it to mount a NAS harddrive to use for backups.

The problem is that using it from cronjobs is not straightfoward. I got the following errors when trying to run gio info and gio mount from a cronjob:

gio: smb://internetbox-nas.local/philips%20ufd/: Operation not supported
gio: smb://internetbox-nas.local/philips%20ufd/: volume doesn’t implement mount

I didn't find the right answer in Google, so I am sharing it here in case someone else is affected.

Goodbye Linode, welcome AWS!

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After many years of service, I decided to move away from Linode. Linode has been hosting this website and my backups flawlessly and gave me my first introduction to Cloud computing back when it wasn't so widespread.

Since then, many new players have joined the cloud computing space and few big players have come up on top. Amazon AWS is obviously one of them. I decided to go with them over Linode for a couple of reasons.

Backlight control on XPS

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post is more of a reminder for myself on how I fixed an issue with Dell XPS 15.

The issue is that the Fn key to control screen brightness (using F11 and F12) doesn't work and results in this error in the logs:

[42134.228185] ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol [\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP.BRT6.LCD], AE_NOT_FOUND (20190816/psargs-330)
[42134.228216] No Local Variables are initialized for Method [BRT6]
[42134.228220] Initialized Arguments for Method [BRT6]: (2 arguments defined for method invocation)
[42134.228222] Arg0: 000000008e36102a <Obj> Integer 0000000000000002
[42134.228232] Arg1: 00000000cd43b166 <Obj> Integer 0000000000000000
[42134.228247] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP.BRT6 due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)
[42134.228692] ACPI Error: Aborting method \EV5 due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)
[42134.229069] ACPI Error: Aborting method \SMEE due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)
[42134.229455] ACPI Error: Aborting method \SMIE due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)
[42134.229734] ACPI Error: Aborting method \NEVT due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)
[42134.229999] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.ECDV._Q66 due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20190816/psparse-529)

The error has been reported many times in the last year.

Impl specialization in Rust

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I learnt about a feature in Rust, currently only available in nightly: impl specialization.

I had to solve the problem highlighted in the following snippet:

use std::hash::Hash;

trait Foo {
 fn get_foo(&self) -> String;
}

impl<T: Hash> Foo for T {
 fn get_foo(&self) -> String {
 "foo for hash".to_string()
 }
}

impl Foo for String {
 fn get_foo(&self) -> String {
 "foo for string".to_string()
 }
}

fn main() {
 let bar: String = "bar".to_string();
 println!("{}", bar.get_foo());

 let baz: i32 = 1;
 println!("{}", baz.get_foo());
}

Compiling this code gives the below error:

Nice threads in Python

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Python has two ways to execute code in parallel: processes and threads. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. In particular, threads are cheaper in terms of resources and are able to share memory, but besides the obvious pitfalls of multi-threaded programming, they suffer from some Python specific problems, notably:

Because of the GIL, only one Python's thread is actually running at any one time. So, very little parallelism is possible if the task is CPU bound. In fact, more often than not, it's more efficient to execute multiple tasks sequentially on a single thread (pinned to a single CPU), rather than spawning multiple threads and having the Python interpreter context switching too much and not being able to schedule the threads on all available CPUs.

Docker, vpn and `-etc-resolv.conf`

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today I encounter a strange issue with /etc/resolv.conf, while working with Docker on my company's VPN.

When openconnect sets up the VPN, it modifies /etc/resolv.conf, as expected. The funny thing is that if I now ran docker run <something>, docker would change /etc/resolv.conf back to its original value; it wouldn't even restore the "vpn" version upon exit.

After much head scratching, I figured that maybe, the problem was that openconnect and docker were messing with different network interfaces, therefore conflicting when writing their version of /etc/resolv.conf.

FuckRep

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Rep e' l'area di Repubblica.it con contenuti a pagamento. Sembra pero' che Repubblica non sia molto interessata a proteggere i propri contenuti: aggirare il paywall infatti e' banale.

Ho creato un Add On Firefox, che ho chiamato con poca fantasia FuckRep, che permette di aggirare il suddetto paywall. Basta installarlo in Firefox e si attiva automaticamente su rep.repubblica.it.

Il codice sorgente e' public domain, disponibile qui.

Speeding up Oh-my-zsh

Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today I read a very interesting article about speeding up Oh-my-zsh. So, I tried to profile my own startup times and I discovered that:

Zsh start time was about 500ms
Bash start time is less than 10ms
Zsh (without config) start time is less than 10ms

Most of startup time was spent loading 3 plugins that I regularly use:

emacs, which provides handy aliases to interact with Emacs daemon. I was surprised this plugin was slow because it just defines a bunch of aliases. It turns out that it was spending 50+ ms checking Emacs' version (by starting up Emacs every time). I sped it up considerably by instead checking emacsclient version. PR submitted.
kubectl, which provides aliases and completion for kubectl. It turns out that it was spending 200+ ms to generate the completion script using kubectl completion zsh every single time. I sped it up by caching the completion script, that is not subject to change very often. PR submitted.
virtualenvwrapper, which sources virtualenvwrapper.sh and little more. Virtualenvwrapper also supports a "lazy" version of its script, so I sped up startup times by preferring the "lazy" script to the "eager" one. PR submitted.

I hope the above 3 PRs will be approved and merged!

Edit Kubernetes secrets

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes secrets are difficult to edit using standard command line tools, like kubectl.

When doing kubectl edit secret my-secret you are presented with a base64-encoded blob that you have to first decode, in order to edit it and then re-encode before saving the file.

There are various ways to deal with it, but none is user-friendly, in my opinion. Therefore, I wrote kube-secret-editor: a simple Python script to decode and encode secret values on the flight before/after editing.

Kubectl outdated plugin

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We use Kubernetes at work and I am mostly responsible for making it run smoothly. This means staying on top of new releases, libraries and tools that come out at a pace I've never experienced before, in any project.

To help with that, I wrote a kubectl plugin that finds outdated components in a Kubernetes cluster. The code can be found here.

It works like this.

First it goes through all deployments and daemonsets, collecting the images referenced in their containers.
For each container, search for a newer image tag in its repository. I currently support querying Docker Hub and Google Container Repository (you need gcloud for that).
Outputs which deployment or daemonset needs upgrading.

E.g. running it on a testing cluster I setup gives this output:

org-based lbolla.info

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

lbolla.info is now written in Org.

I use org-mode daily for all sorts of tasks:

TODO list
Keeping tracks of meetings, events, etc.
Note taking
Presentations

It was annoying to have to switch to another markdown language for blogging. So, I looked into org-publish for a simple, no-frills way to write .org files and convert them to .html.

My org-publish-project-alist now contains these entries:

("lbolla.info"
 :components ("lbolla.info-html" "lbolla.info-static" "lbolla.info-cv"))
("lbolla.info-static"
 :base-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/static/"
 :base-extension "png\\|jpg\\|\\|gif\\|gz\\|css"
 :publishing-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/html/"
 :recursive t
 :publishing-function org-publish-attachment)
("lbolla.info-cv"
 :base-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/org/"
 :exclude "\\.*"
 :include ("cv.org")
 :publishing-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/html/"
 :publishing-function org-latex-publish-to-pdf)
("lbolla.info-html"
 :base-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/org/"
 :publishing-directory "~/src/lbolla.info/html/"
 :recursive t
 :section-numbers nil
 :auto-sitemap t
 :sitemap-format-entry lbolla.info/org-publish-sitemap-format-entry
 :sitemap-function lbolla.info/org-publish-sitemap-function
 :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically
 :sitemap-style tree
 :sitemap-title "Sitemap"
 :with-toc nil
 :html-doctype "html5"
 :html-head-include-default-style nil
 :html-head-include-scripts nil
 :html-link-home "<ignored>"
 :html-link-up "<ignored>"
 :html-home/up-format "<div id=\"org-div-home-and-up\"><a accesskey=\"h\" href=\"/\">Home</a> | <a accesskey=\"a\" href=\"/articles\">Articles</a> | <a accesskey=\"c\" href=\"/cv\">CV</a> (<a href=\"/cv.pdf\">pdf</a>)</div>"
 :html-preamble lbolla.info/html-preamble
 :html-postamble nil
 :html-head "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"./css/org.css\" type=\"text/css\">"
 :html-head-extra "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"./css/extra.css\" type=\"text/css\">"
 :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html)

Style is this one: some CSS rules made for org-generated HTML files.

Elixir pipe operator in Python

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Elixir implements lots of nice ideas, one of which is its pipe operator. It allows you to write things like:

iex> [1, [2], 3] |> List.flatten()
[1, 2, 3]

Or:

iex> inc = fn x -> x + 1 end
iex> dec = fn x -> x - 1 end
iex> square = fn x -> x * x end
iex> 5 |> inc.() |> dec.() |> square.()
25

Today, just for fun, I tried to implement something similar in Python. Here is the result:

So, you can write something like:

>>> 5 |P| inc |P| dec |P| square
25

Obviously, this is just a toy: it does not implement all the features available in the Elixir's one, but it was fun!

Comparison of blocking and non-blocking Python multiprocessing Queue

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Python's multiprocessing module offers a Queue implementation. Surprisingly enough (for me at least), its performance varies greatly if used in a blocking or non-blocking fashion. In particular, the non-blocking way is about ten times slower than the blocking one!

Consider this code, which feeds a Queue and then drains it in a blocking and non-blocking way:

Running it on my machine, with Python 2.7, gives me these results (Python 3.4 results are similar, but less dramatic):

lbolla.info is using HTTPS

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Today I have enabled https on this website. I am using certificates issued by Let's Encrypt, which is a new free, automated and open certificate authority.

To manage the certificates, I am using simp\le, a simple command line client to issue and renew certificates using Let's Encrypt API.

All working fine, so far!

Flycheck checker for Erlang dialyzer

Sat, 09 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Emacs Erlang mode misses the definition of a flycheck checker using dialyzer. Just add these lines to your .emacs to enable it:

I prefer to use it after the normal Erlang checker, so I define the following, too:

(flycheck-add-next-checker 'erlang 'erlang-dialyzer)

I also wrote another Flycheck checker if you are interested.

Enjoy!

EMpy 1.0 is out! Python3 compatible!

Sun, 26 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

After a long sleep, I resumed development on Empy. The trigger was an appeal from Guido van Rossum at PyCon 2015 to package authors to support Python 3.

There are no new features to Empy, but I have:

ported the code to Python 3, using the amazing future library: now, both Python 2 and 3 are supported;
setup Travis CI to run unittest on all supported Python versions;
upgraded the dependencies to the latest available libraries;
Pylint'd and pep8'd the code
Renamed the package in PyPi to ElectroMagneticPython to avoid name conflicts with EmPy.

You can try it out by simply:

Flycheck checker for Flow

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday Facebook open sourced Flow, a static type checker for Javascript. If you use Emacs, you can use Flycheck to check your .js files on the fly using Flow.

Here is the checker definition I use:

I prefer to use Flow after gjslint, so I define the following, too:

(flycheck-add-next-checker 'javascript-gjslint 'javascript-flow)

I also wrote another Flycheck checker if you are interested.

Enjoy!

Autocomplete paver with zsh

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a quick way to have autocompletion of paver tasks on zsh. Just add these lines to your .zshrc file:

_paver_tasks () {
 reply=( $(paver help | awk '/^ ([a-zA-Z_]+).+-/{print $1}') )
}
compctl -K _paver_tasks paver

Then, at a zsh prompt, if in a directory containing a pavement.py file, hitting paver <TAB> will list the available tasks.

Enjoy!

Experiments in pickling

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

pickle is a standard library module to serialize and deserialize Python objects. Being written in pure Python, it's fairly slow, so the standard library provides a pure-C implementation, called cPickle, with the limitation that it cannot be subclassed.

What's interesting about cPickle are two little known settings that can speed up serialization quite substantially.

cPickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL basically dumps a Python object using a binary protocol, rather than the default ASCII-based, more portable, protocol 0. If portability or backward compatibility are not an issue for you, you should use it: it's documented and probably here to stay.

Die zombie, die!

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The subprocess module in Python standard library allows you to spanw processes to do some tasks. The parent process should wait on its children processes in order get the return value of the process and avoid zombies.

Sometimes, though, processes are particularly hard to kill and even after a wait, a terminate or a kill they refuse to die: they become zombies.

In theory, Python should take care of reaping zombies for you once the zombie process gets garbage collected. In practice, it does not seem to work reliably and bigger weapons are needed.

Long running processes manager

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to run multiple processes in Python, the nicest way, in my opinion, is to use concurrent.futures (there is a backport for Python 2.x, too).

A problem that came up recently was to manage multiple long running processes, intended to run forever, from the same Python process. Using something like supervisord wouldn't be ideal, because each individual application would have its own config file and deployment procedure.

Instead, having just one "master" Python process to drive several other processes doing the job seemed the easiest solution to manage. The only caveat is that, being the processes managed long running, you want to restart them as soon as they die.

Overcoming Python GIL with Cython

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody is aware of the infamous Python's GIL. In a nutshell, the GIL is a global variable that prevents multiple threads to be run concurrently by the interpreter. Under some occasions, for certain operations, the interpreter releases the GIL therefore in certain cases this is not a problem. For example, the GIL is released before doing I/O, so I/O bound threads tend to run concurrently. Another example is when doing system calls. Unfortunately, for CPU bound tasks that don't make any I/O or system calls, the GIL prevents different threads from running concurrently, even on multicore CPUs. The astonishing thing is that, in fact, not only different threads do not run concurrently, but they also run slower on multicore CPUs than on single core ones!

Tornado Redis chat

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

redis is often described as an "in-memory persistent key-value store", but it's much more than that. One of its nicest features is its support for the Publish/Subscribe messaging paradigm, which makes it easy to implement, for example, a chat server.

In order to learn how to use it, I decided to implement a chat server using Redis and Tornado. This is a classical exercise, and others have done the same: but their solution has some pitfalls that I tried to fix.

Connect to MSSQL from Python with ODBC and FreeTDS

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is another of those posts that I wrote because I always forget how to do things…

This time, I don't want to forget how to connect from Python to MSSQL server anymore. In order to do it, you need the following system packages installed:

$> sudo apt-get install unixodbc-dev tdsodbc sqsh

sqsh installs all the required freetds-related libraries; tdsodbc is the FreeTDS driver for ODBC and unixodbc-dev is needed to install pyodbc.

Python and C with ctypes

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Calling C code from Python is very simple using ctypes. Here is a very simple example to get you started and to serve as a reminder for me!

Let's say you have this C file, defining 3 functions:

foo which prints something to stdout;
bar which returns and int;
baz which takes a parameter and returns a value.

First, you want to compile this C file into a shared object. Here is a Makefile to do just this: simple type make all and you're done.

Simple chat with Postgres LISTEN NOTIFY and Tornado IOLoop

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Postgres supports from version 8.4 a very interesting functionality: LISTEN/NOTIFY allows sending asynchronous messages to clients connected to the database.

As in a normal "chat", a client "subscribed" (LISTEN) to a channel receives all the messages that other clients "sent" (NOTIFY) on that channel.

Since version 9.0, a notification message can have a payload string as long as 8000 bytes.

In order to experiment with this feature, I've implemented a simple chat based on Tornado's IOLoop. Each client subscribes to a channel (or "room" in chat jargon) and listens to it adding a callback to react to a new notification. In the meantime, in another thread, the client is free to write and submit messages to the "room". Here is a screenshot of the chat in action:

Use Postgres advanced types in Python

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Postgres has a lot of useful builtin data types, but only some of them are mapped to Python types when accessing the DB using psycopg2.

Extending the support to other types is not straightforward, and involves the following steps:

Create a Python class to store the data, e.g. class Point
Write a function to convert a Point to its SQL string representation, e.g. adapt_point
Write the inverse function to parse the SQL string representation of a Point and return and instance of a Point, e.g. cast_point
Finally bind all these functions and types, see register_point_type

The complete code is as follows, also available as a gist:

Blocking tasks in Tornado

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and then a new discussion is raised on Tornado's mailling list about what is the best way to execute blocking tasks. It turns out that there are 3 feasible options, in order of increasing complexity:

Optimize blocking calls. Often, a slow DB query, or an overly complicate template are the blocking bottleneck. Rather than complicating the webserver, the first thing to try is to speed them up. This is sufficient 99% of the time.
Execute the slow task in a separate thread or process. This means off-loading the task to a different thread (or process) to the one running the IOLoop, which is then free to accept other requests.
Use an asynchronous driver/library to run the task. For example, something like gevent, motor and the like.

This blog post is about the second option, in particular using Python's concurrent.futures package.

UnshareMe

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last my weekend project was to write something similar to WeHasLinks. In fact, WeHasLinks is a file sharing website, but I misread it as "We-Hash-Links" and the funny thing is that they indeed hash their links (for obvious reasons…). Anyway, WeHasLinks's links are hashed so that only the user who visited the page is allowed to them.

I liked the idea very much, and I decided to implement it in go, as an exercise! You can find the code on github. A demo is available at unshareme.lbolla.info.

Useful scripts - Watch

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fifth post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

They are available on github: fork & hack at will!

Watch reacts to changes in a directory executing a command provided by the user. It can be used, for example, to monitor a directory and run some unittests as soon as files in it change. This is exactly how I am using Watch in acme.

Useful scripts - htmlind and xmlind

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the forth post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

In this post I'll describe 2 simple scripts to indent nicely HTML and XML files. I use them primarily with acme, to pipe selected text and get back nicely formatted output.

Code is available here: htmlind and xmlind. Both programs are written in Python and make use of specialized libraries freely available online. In particular, xmlind uses xml.dom.minidom, included in Python's standard library, and htmlind uses a modified version of BeautifulSoup.

Useful scripts - csvfmt, xmlfmt, jsonfmt

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

In this post, I'll describe 3 scripts to "pretty print" some common file types, to improve readability: csvfmt, xmlfmt and jsonfmt.

csvfmt takes a CSV ("Comma Separated Values") file from stdin, parses it and pretty print each record as a Python dictionary.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv
import sys
import pprint

for row in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin):
 pprint.pprint(row)

Output looks like this:

Wordpress to markdown

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I moved away from Wordpress. I did it primarily because Wordpress is so much more than just a blogging platform and what I needed was just a simple way of publishing posts with embedded code, links and images. Moreover, writing blogs using Wordpress's web editor is less than ideal…

The biggest problem to solve when moving away from Wordpress is how to not lose all your posts. Luckily, Wordpress allows you to export all your stuff in XML, but you also need a way to import them in whatever other blogging platform you are going to use.

Useful scripts - c+-c-

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

They are available on github: fork & hack at will!

c+/c-

In this post I'll describe a very simple script, c+, and its counterpart c-.

c+ prepends every line of stdin with #. c- strips # from the beginning of each line of stdin. I use these scripts to comment/uncomment lines in Python scripts when using acme.

Useful scripts - a+-a-

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

They are implemented in various languages (python, bash, go) and thought to be used in Linux. Some of them are "general purpose", while others are specifically designed to interface other tools I use (for example, acme.)

All of them tend to have the following properties:

Input from stdin, output to stdout, errors to stderr
Return zero on success, non-zero on failure
Do one thing only
Not too much customizable

These properties allow the scripts to remain very simple, be composable and easy to remember.

URL Counter in GO

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After having tinkered with #haskell for quite a bit, I decided that I needed some rest from theory and esoteric concepts, and a more pragmatic programming language to explore.

I've spent the last few days refreshing my memories on Go: I hadn’t touched it for almost 2 years and I must say that I find it changed: for the better.

Here is a short tutorial on how to write a simple web application in Go, and publish it on Google App Engine. The application is not a mere exercise, but scratches an itch I recently had: it counts how many times each of its handlers is hit. So, for example, visiting: http://go-count-urls.appspot.com/hello returns how many times the /hello handler has been visited. You can use it as a trivial real-time tracker.

Asynchronous programming with Tornado

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Asynchronous programming can be tricky for beginners, therefore I think it's useful to iron some basic concepts to avoid common pitfalls. For an explanation about generic asynchronous programming, I recommend you one of the many resources online. I will focus solely on asynchronous programming in Tornado.

From Tornado's homepage:

FriendFeed's web server is a relatively simple, non-blocking web server written in Python. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the non-blocking web server and tools. Tornado is an open source version of this web server and some of the tools we use most often at FriendFeed. The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll or kqueue, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means the framework is ideal for real-time web services. We built the web server specifically to handle FriendFeed's real-time features every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers. (For more information on scaling servers to support thousands of clients, see The C10K problem.)

Experiments with ExtJS

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For a non-designer, Ext JS is kind-of a blessing. It is a self-contained fully-fledged Javascript framework, with loads of fancy re-usable browser-compatible professionally-looking widgets. It's only lacking in documentation: finding your way through the API documentation is daunting at best.

So, I bought this, and while working my way through it, I decided to share some experiments. You can find them here. These are the ones I prefer:

Errors printing PDFs with CUPS

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is another of those posts to not forget. If printing a PDF file with lp prints a blank page with error messages like:

ERROR: configurationerror OFFENDING COMMAND: setpagedevice STACK: --nostringval-- ...

the problem is probably that your PDF has a certain page size (let's say letter) but your printer expects another (let's say A4).

Check your printer settings and your PDf (with lpinfo pdffile) to verify. If this is the case, print with this command instead:

Tornado vs. Warp vs. Yesod

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I tried to benchmark 3 web servers that I've used recently:

In fact, these are only *2* web servers, because Yesod runs on top of Warp and it's a fully fledged web framework, rather than a web server: but this was also the intent of the benchmark, i.e. to measure how slower all its goodies made Yesod with respect to Warp.

Tornado and Warp are obviously very different web servers (async vs. threaded, interpreted vs. compiled, etc.) but, who cares?

Auto add reviewers in Gerrit

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you are using Gerrit for code review and project management of git-based projects, you might find yourself manually adding the same bunch of reviewers to your patches every single time.

In the past, I alleviated the problem with a simple Javascript bookmarklet: add it to your browser and click it while watching the patch in Gerrit.

But there's a better method: do it from command line, when pushing your local commits to Gerrit. Just add these lines to your .git/config:

Broadcom 43xx driver install in Arch Linux

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is a vintage post to remind me how to install b43 drivers on Arch Linux for my "shiny" Belkin PCMCIA card (dated 2002…).

First install the firmware extractor: $> pacman -S b43-fwcutter.
Then install the firmware itself: $> yaourt -S b43-firmware.

Check dmesg. You should see something like:

Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PMNLS ]

and lsmod | grep b43:

b43 330774 0 bcma 19281 1 b43 mac80211 341044 1 b43 cfg80211 147429 2 b43,mac80211 ssb 42167 2 b43,b44 pcmcia 31182 2 b43,ssb mmc\~~core~~ 72742 2 b43,ssb

EMpy has moved!

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Empy has moved to Github!

Pipelines in Python

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Generators (PEP 255 "Simple Generators") and Coroutines (PEP 342 "Coroutines via Enhanced Generators") are the cleanest way I've come across so far to implement the concept of a "pipeline" in Python.

First approximation

A pipeline is made of:

a Producer, that generates data;
many /Stage/s, that receive data from the previous stage and send it to the next;
a Consumer, that receives data from the last stage.

The producer is a coroutine that only /send/s data, generated internally from some initial state. /Stage/s are coroutines that both receive and send messages. The consumer only receives data. Chaining is done in function pipeline: each argument but the last is instantiated with an instance of the next stage. The full pipeline is started by issuing a next (or send(None)) to the Producer.

Change engine to all tables in a MySQL database

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a simple shell script to change the engine of all the tables in a MySQL database:

DBUSER=user
DBPWD=password
DBNAME=db
ENGINE=MyISAM
for t in `echo "show tables" | mysql -u$DBUSER -p$DBPWD --batch --skip-column-names $DBNAME`; do
 mysql -u$DBUSER -p$DBPWD $DBNAME -e "ALTER TABLE \`$t\` ENGINE = $ENGINE;";
done

Just because, as usual, I keep forgetting these kind of things…

hsenv

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you have never used hsenv before, you should. It's basically the Haskell's equivalent of Python's virtualenv.

You can find a tweaked version of hsenv here: I've relaxed some requirements in order to make it install on newer GHC releases.

Finally, if when using you hit this error:

$ hsenv Creating Virtual Haskell directory structure
Installing GHC Initializing GHC Package database at /home/lollo/work/Unique/.hsenv/ghc_pkg_db
Copying necessary packages from original GHC package database
hsenv: fd:9: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)
hsenv: thread blocked indefinitely in an MVar operation

Then, you have a problem with your locale. Follow the steps here, and retry.

Sudoku solver in Haskell

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I've been challenged to write a Sudoku solver. Not knowing the rules and with only 30 minutes, I needed some help…

So, in case someone asks me again, I've implemented the same algorithm in Haskell.

I know that there are already a lot of other solutions, but, hey, it was fun!

HTTPS authentication in nginx

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In order not to forget again how to setup http authentication in nginx here is a reminder.

For HTTPS follow these steps:

$ sudo -s
# cd /etc/nginx
# openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out server.crt -keyout server.key

and add these lines to your server instance:

server {
 listen 443;
 ssl on;
 ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/server.crt;
 ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/server.key;
...

To setup basic authentication, add these lines to the same file:

location / {
 auth_basic "Restricted";
 auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/htpasswd;
 # you might also want to deny access based on IP here
 #allow <ip-address>;
 #deny all;
...

Finally, to generate /etc/nginx/htpasswd, use this one-liner:

ulint, Universal Lint

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I've been using so many code static checkers lately, that I decided to write a wrapper around the ones I use the most. I called it: Universal Lint, ulint for short.

At the moment, Python, Javascript and Haskell files are supported, but adding new linters/extension is trivial.

Download it and use it!

500 on YouTube on non-existing videos

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Now, this is embarassing… It looks like requesting a non-existent video on YouTube causes a "500 Internal Server Error"!

For example:

Valid url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5CeNunbHto
Invalid url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtf

Surely, a better response would be something like the one returned when the videoId is missing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=. It seems like predictions became true.

HSGrep benchmarking

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Few days ago, I rewrote sgrep in Haskell. I was curious to know how it compares to grep in term of execution speed. In particular, I was interested to verify that hsgrep scales as O(log n), instead of O(n), with n being the size of the file analyzed.

First of all, in order to have similar performance to grep, I had to convert my original program to use Haskell's bytestrings. You can find the code here. Testing files are generated with this script.

HSGrep Sorted grep in Haskell

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As an exercise to learn Haskell, I wrote a specialized grep to work on sorted files. It uses binary search to scan a text file and print all the (consecutive) lines that start with a user defined string.

My program is a rewrite of sgrep in Haskell: I called it HSGrep. Code is available on github.

Thanks a lot for all your useful suggestions! As soon as possible, I'll post some benchmarking here. (EDIT: benchmarks now available!)

After downloading the source code, build install and run it with:

git pre-commit hook for Python and Javascript

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Following a recent discussion on HN, I decided to share my own git pre-commit hook.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import sys
import re
import subprocess


devnull = open(os.devnull, 'w')


def call(cmd):
 p = subprocess.Popen(cmd.split(),
 stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
 stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
 out, err = p.communicate()
 return out.decode('utf-8'), err.decode('utf-8'), p.returncode


def execute(cmd, silent=False):
 if silent:
 params = {
 'stdout': devnull,
 'stderr': devnull,
 }
 else:
 params = {}

 retcode = subprocess.call(cmd.split(), **params)
 return retcode


def exists(cmd):
 return execute('which %s' % cmd, silent=True) == 0


def get_modified(ext):
 modified = re.compile('^(?:M|A).(?P<name>.*\.%s)' % ext)
 out, _, _ = call('git status --porcelain')
 modifieds = []
 for line in out.splitlines():
 match = modified.match(line.strip())
 if (match):
 modifieds.append(match.group('name'))
 return modifieds

It's a work-in-progress, so you can find the most updated version here. To use it, just drop it in your .git/hooks directory. At every git commit, it will run [pep8][4] and [pyflakes][5] on .py files, and [gjslint][6] on .js files.

Haskell and VIM

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I had to tinker quite a bit before finding a decent configuration for vim to edit Haskell files. Here are the packages and config files I use:

Haskell mode: interaction with Haddock, compiler integration, and other general settings.
Indentation: proper source code indentation.
More configs to enforce good style (no tabs, tabstops, etc.):

You can also have them bundled all together.

They broke delicious

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The new redesign of delicious.com broke so many things, that I thought I had to take notes:

bookmarklet in Chrome can't be drag-n-dropped to the toolbar. Its Javascript code is also hard to copy and paste to create the bookmarklet "manually".
install links for the chrome and Firefox extensions redirect to empty pages.
documentation for developer is coming soon (!)
the top-right menu with the logged-in username and stuff is the most horrible I've ever seen: it changes its width on hover, the corners look interrupted (in Chrome, at least – I'm not bothered trying with other browsers)
what the hell are stacks? Grouping can be done with tags, already, and I don't want that much space in the page taken by a "social" feature! Who needs it?
the list of links in the main personal page only shows 8 links on my screen… 8 links?! There's way too much padding, too whitespaces, too much to scroll… It's a bookmarking services, it should show you bookmarks in the most friendly way!
image: why should I use an image for myself? And if I don't use one, I got assigned one by default… Please…

I'll add more to the list in the future.

HTTP client in Haskell

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

To try to make sense of this, I decided to write a "simple" http client in Haskell in as many styles as I could think of:

import Network.HTTP
import Control.Applicative

url = "http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell"

-- Imperative style
fetch_1 = do
 rsp <- Network.HTTP.simpleHTTP (getRequest url)
 body <- getResponseBody rsp
 return (take 1000 body)

-- With Functors' fmap
fetch_2 = do
 rsp <- Network.HTTP.simpleHTTP (getRequest url)
 fmap (take 1000) (getResponseBody rsp)

-- With Applicative's >>=
fetch_3 = fmap (take 1000) (Network.HTTP.simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)

-- "fmap f x" is the same as "pure f <*> x" (Applicative's law)
fetch_4 = pure (take 1000) <*> (Network.HTTP.simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)

-- "pure f <*> x" is the same as "f <$> x"
fetch_5 = (take 1000) <$> (Network.HTTP.simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)

It's a long time since I found so many new concepts while studying a new programming language…

pylint.vim

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

vim + Python + pylint is a powerful combination, especially when using this vim plugin. Unfortunately, the script stopped working after a pylint upgrade:

$ pylint --version
pylint 0.24.0,
astng 0.22.0, common 0.56.0
Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 29 2011, 11:10:00)
[GCC 4.6.1]

You can download the fixed version here!

If interested, the patch looks like this:

diff pylint.vim.orig pylint.vim
69c69
< CompilerSet makeprg=(echo\ '[%]';\ pylint\ -r\ y\ %)
---
> CompilerSet makeprg=(echo\ '[%]';\ pylint\ -r\ y\ --output-format=parseable\
> %)
74c74
< CompilerSet efm=%+P[%f],%t:\ %#%l:%m,%Z,%+IYour\ code%m,%Z,%-G%.%#
---
> CompilerSet efm=%f:%l:\ [%t]%m,%f:%l:%m

MD5 vs SHA1 in Python

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you are interested to know if the myth about MD5 being faster than SHA1 holds for Python, here is the result I got on my box:

In [1]: import hashlib
In [2]: %timeit hashlib.md5('text text text').hexdigest()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.29 us per loop
In [3]: %timeit hashlib.sha1('text text text').hexdigest()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.4 us per loop

Result is: MD5 is faster, but only just, in Python 2.7.2. Considering that MD5 is broken, I think I'll use SHA1…

sleepsort

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

To honor the funniest thread in months, here is a lisp implementation of sleepsort!

(use-package :sb-thread)

(defun show (item)
 (sleep item)
 (format t "~S~%" item))

(defun sleep-sort (lst)
 (mapcar
 #'(lambda (item) (make-thread #'(lambda () (show item))))
 lst))

Scappatella con Ryanair

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Dal sito Ryanair.

Javascript templating benchmark

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There are many popular libraries to do templating in Javascript.

The most popular are:

I decided to benchmark them, so I created a simple "hello world" test.

As usual, the results are interesting. Here are, on my box:

	Firefox 3.6	Chrome 11.0	Safari 5.0
jQuery Template	297ms	138ms	113ms
Pure	309ms	43ms	36ms
Resig	309ms	41ms	41ms
Trimpath	15ms	5ms	6ms
JQote2	7ms	1ms	6ms

A part from the obvious result that Firefox is the slowest browser of all, I'm astonished by the excellent performance of JQote2!

Time to go home!

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Better go before I break it…

Case sensitive Google search

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Google does not support "case sensitive" searches (and here and here). It does seem to return slightly different results depending on the case of the search query, but if you are only interested in the exact "case sensitive" matches you're on your own.

To solve this problem, I've written a small Javascript snippet that shades results from Google searches if not exactly matching the case-sensitive search query.

You can download it as:

Related to... Andrew Lloyd Webber!

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It looks like I'm related to Andrew Lloyd Webber! Funny it's in Portuguese, though…

Migrating away from wordpress.com

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today I decided to migrate my blog from wordpress.com to my own domain.

I did it for many reasons:

To be able to add plugins
To be able to add javascript to individual pages
To run a customized theme
And all the other reasons listed here

I did not want to loose the popularity and the ranking of my original address, accumulated over the years.

Here are the steps I had to follow (if the following steps make no sense to you, this guide might help you):

Get registered domain in Python and Javascript

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

reg-dom-libs are a set of libraries for C, PHP and Perl to convert an arbitrary domain name to the registered domain name.

For simple domains, like www.amazon.com or news.ycombinator.com, the task is trivial.
For more complicated ones, like www.ebay.co.uk or www.japantimes.co.jp, handling the second level subdomain is a little painful.
For exoteric ones, like nic.com.ai or www.nic.net.ge or 公司.cn, the problem becomes virtually impossible.
After seeing stupid ones, like www.comune.caserta.it (believe it or not, the registered domain is comune.caserta.it!), I gave up finding an elegant algorithm for the problem.
A full list of valid registered domain is necessary. Luckily, it is available (and nightly updated) here.

Inspired by reg-dom-libs, I've ported the algorithm to Python and Javascript. See the tests at the end of each file for an example of the usage. A demo is available here.

Handling an iframe from the inside

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you've ever worked with iframes you've certainly run into the same origin policy.

From here:

The same origin policy basically limits how scripts and frames on different domains can talk to each other.

This is particularly bad if you want to resize an iframe to accomodate its content, as this is not doable with simple CSS (to the best of my knowledge!). It can be done using window.postMessage, though.

See a demo here.

twill revived

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After reading how to do automated testing in python, I've started using twill, by C. Titus Brown

twill is a simple language that allows users to browse the Web from a command-line interface. With twill, you can navigate through Web sites that use forms, cookies, and most standard Web features.

Unfortunately, development on twill seems to have stopped 3 years ago.

I've cloned the project on Github, fixed some deprecation warnings and added a cool new feature to inspect headers, as well as html.

Year 2038 bug in MySQL

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today I hit the "year 2038" bug. While working on MySQL, I did something like:

mysql> create table y2038 (x timestamp);

mysql> insert into y2038 values ('1900-01-01');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.04 sec)

mysql> insert into y2038 values ('2050-01-01');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.04 sec)

mysql> select * from y2038;
+---------------------+
| x |
+---------------------+
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
+---------------------+
2 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> drop table y2038; -- damn

It turned out that MySQL's TIMESTAMP only accepts dates between 1970-01-01 00:00:01 and 2038-01-19 03:14:07: everything outside this range will be truncated.

tdaemon for Python3

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

tdaemon is a neat little utility to do continuous testing in Python. Unfortunately, the original version only works with Python2. I've spent a little time to make it work with Python3.

Enjoy!

SBCL quicker than C?

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After reading a nice conversation on comp.lang.lisp I decided to play a little bit with SBCL and Debian's Shootout Benchmarks.

I considered the spectral norm benchmark and compared the C and SBCL implementations.

I started re-running the tests without any further optimization and the results were similar to the ones reported with C beating SBCL by a factor of 2. (for the C optimization used, see here).

Then, I noticed that there was no =(declaim (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (space 0)))= in the SBCL file! I've added it and rerun the test. Here are my results:

Find hyperlinks with lisp

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a quick-and-dirty script to extract all the unique links from a web page.

It uses cl-ppcre to extract the hyperlinks-like strings from a target string. Tested using drakma as web client.

(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :drakma)
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :cl-ppcre)

(defparameter *url-re* "href *= *['"](\S+)['"]")

(defun find-links (str)
 (let ((urls '()))
 (ppcre:do-register-groups
 (u) (*url-re* str nil :start 0 :sharedp t)
 (pushnew u urls :test #'equalp))
 (nreverse urls)))

(print
 (find-links (drakma:http-request "http://lbolla.wordpress.com")))

There are 139 links on this page…

lisp threading example

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today I wanted to experiment with threads in lisp (sbcl, in particular).

Here is a trivial example of how to access a shared resource (a closure, keeping a list of integers), from a set of *nt* threads.

(use-package :sb-thread)

;; number of threads
(defparameter *nt* 10)

;; threads
(defvar *threads* '())

;; mutex to use with shared resource accessed by the threads
(defvar *a-mutex* (make-mutex :name "acc-lock"))

;; shared closure accessed by the threads
(let ((x '()))
 (defun acc (v)
 (with-mutex (*a-mutex*)
 (push v x)))
 (defun get-acc ()
 x))

;; print the shared resource
(print (get-acc))

;; wait for all the threads to return
(mapcar #'join-thread
 ;; run the threads
 (loop :for i :below *nt* 
 ;; bind i to x so it is local to the thread
 :collect (let ((x i))
 (make-thread #'(lambda ()
 ;; body of the thread
 (sleep (random 2))
 (acc x))
 :name x))))

;; print the shared resource
(print (get-acc))

It can't get much simpler than that…

Simple Wordpress API lisp client

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I like old things, therefore I started to learn Lisp.

There isn't a better way to learn than by doing, so I tried to implement a client for the wordpress api. the result, even if not complete yet, it's so elegant that I'd like to share it.

(require 's-xml-rpc)

(defpackage :wp 
 (:use :cl :cl-user :s-xml-rpc))

(in-package :wp)

(defparameter +interfaces+ 
 '((get-blogs "wp.getUsersBlogs" username password)
 (get-tags "wp.getTags" blog-id username password)
 (get-comment-count "wp.getCommentCount" blog-id username password post-id)
 (get-post-status-list "wp.getPostStatusList" blog-id username password)
 (get-page-status-list "wp.getPageStatusList" blog-id username password)
 (get-page-templates "wp.getPageTemplates" blog-id username password)
 (get-options "wp.getOptions" blog-id username password)
 (delete-comment "wp.deleteComment" blog-id username password comment-id)
 (get-comment-status-list "wp.getCommentStatusList" blog-id username password)
 (get-page "wp.getPage" blog-id page-id username password)
 (get-pages "wp.getPages" blog-id username password)
 (get-page-list "wp.getPageList" blog-id username password)
 (delete-page "wp.deletePage" blog-id username password page-id)
 (get-authors "wp.getAuthors" blog-id username password)
 (get-categories "wp.getCategories" blog-id username password)
 (delete-category "wp.deleteCategory" blog-id username password category-id)
 (suggest-categories "wp.suggestCategories" blog-id username password category max-results)
 (get-comment "wp.getComment" blog-id username password comment-id))
 "Interface definition to WP services")

(defun defunwp (params) 
 (destructuring-bind (name service &rest rest) params
 (setf (fdefinition name) (compile nil `(lambda (host ,@rest &optional (url "/xmlrpc.php")) 
 (block ,name 
 (xml-rpc-call 
 (encode-xml-rpc-call ,service ,@rest)
 :host host
 :url url)))))
 name))

(mapcar #'(lambda (interface) (export (defunwp interface))) +interfaces+)

It uses the s-xml-rpc package and I've tested it with SBCL.

Il Ricci furioso

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

L'articolo "Il Ricci furioso" di Massimiliano Panarari, apparso stamattina su MicroMega e' misteriosamente scomparso…

Non conosco le ragioni della sparizione, ma Google Cache ha la memoria lunga e ricorda l'articolo nella sua forma originale.

Dato che, pero', anche Google Cache dopo un po' dimentica, ad eterna memoria potete trovare una copia qui (e in formato zip qui).

Enjoy!

Missing `Dec_0` and friends from Python Decimal

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This fails in py2.4, py2.5.1 and py2.6:

from decimal import Dec_0

But it works in all the other py2.5 subversions!

It seems that exposing Dec_0 (and other similar constants) was considered a bug and "fixed" on Jan 3rd 2009 by renaming it _Dec_0.

Indeed, if I had looked at the source code, I would have seen that Dec_0 was for "internal use only".

From /usr/lib/python2.5/decimal.py:5159

# Reusable defaults
Inf = Decimal('Inf')
negInf = Decimal('-Inf')
NaN = Decimal('NaN')
Dec_0 = Decimal(0)
Dec_p1 = Decimal(1)
Dec_n1 = Decimal(-1)

Those definitions are missing in py2.4 and py2.5.1, and renamed in py2.6.

Wordpress Python library

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I found this. It's a wonderfully simple Python library to manage your Wordpress blog via XML-RPC.

Enjoy!

Editors speed on opening big files

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

While playing with different editors (namely vim and sam) I tried to time how long some common editors take to open a big file (~140Mb).

Then, for curiosity, I timed less with and without (-n) line numbering:

Here are the results:

editor	real	user	sys
`ed`	4.866s	3.440s	3.440s
`vim`	2.086s	0.836s	0.232s
`nano`	16.264s	15.361s	0.172s
`sam`	way too long
`less`	3.552s	0.200s	0.072s
`less -n`	0.182s	0.016s	0.016s

Not sure what to do with these numbers, yet…

Trivial terminal speed benchmark

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today, while playing with st, I tried a very simple benchmark. Here it is:

$> time seq -f 'teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeest %g' 999999

Here are the results:

xterm: 0m28.508s
rxvt: 0m8.568s
st: 0m12.082s

All the terminals shared the same fonts, but xterm and rxvt had saveLines=1024 set for scrolling purposes, feature that st lacks.

Being st at such an early stage of development, I think this is a good result.

Charm, Markdown and Wordpress

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Following my previous post, a nice enhancement is using Markdown to filter your post before submitting it to Wordpress.

You can either filter it in your preferred editor (vim uses the ! command) or invoke the formatter (for example, markdown) from charm: command x.

Nice!

surf browser hints -3

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Another couple of hints about surf, after my previous post.

Honestly, I stopped using surf after 0.3 release. I think that the authors stripped out of the code too much sugar that, not being suckless, was nonetheless useful: a status bar showing the current URI, for example. Now URI editing is done via xprop and dmenu, which is great piece of software, but not always user friendly (it does not have editing capabilities).

Moreover bookmarking is a pain as it relies on external shell scripts. Or does it not? I realized that there is no need to use external shell scripts, as they can be "embedded" in C code. Here is how.

dwm restart

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

dwm is a wonderful window manager for X: it's small, fast and stable.

The only thing I missed, until today, was the possibility to restart it without losing my X session (i.e. all the open windows, etc.). Restarting dwm is something you might need to do often, as it does not have config files: changes are done by recompiling the sources.

The trick is to execute dwm in background and sleep forever! Take a look at the last two lines of my .xinitrc:

Installing pcf fonts in X

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As I keep forgetting, here is how to install pcf fonts in X

Create a new directory for the fonts, usually under /usr/share/fonts:

$> mkdir /usr/share/fonts/

Copy the pcf file(s) into it (sometimes the pcf files are gzipped):

$> cp /path/to/pcf/*.pcf* /usr/share/fonts/

Run mkfontdir, to create a fonts.dir file, used by X to find font files

$> mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/

Add the new dir to X font path. The easiest way to do it is to stick this line in your .xinitrc:

xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/

Now your new font should compare in xfontsel and you should be able to use it as normal.

The List and the Truth

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Spoon Boy: Do not try and bend the list. That's impossible. Instead… Only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon Boy: There is no list.

Neo: There is no list?

Spoon Boy: Then you'll see that it is not the list that bends; it is only yourself.

From "Practical Common Lisp"

My PhD thesis on Scribd

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As per title. Lorenzo\~~Bolla~~\~~PhDthesis~~

Videocracy

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

surf browser hints -2

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Following yesterday's post, here is another useful hint about surf's usage.

The following script lists the available bookmarks (from ~/.bookmarks file) and let's you pick one using dmenu. If a new link is inserted, it is added to the list of known bookmarks, so you won't need to type it in full the next time:

#!/bin/sh
bookmarks=~/.bookmarks
link=`cat $bookmarks | dmenu ${1+"$@"}` || exit 0
present=`grep $link $bookmarks`
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
 echo $link >> $bookmarks
fi
surf -u $link

If you don't want to open a new window, just change the last line to set the _SURF_URL X Property of the surf window you want to use (by clicking on it):

surf browser hints

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

surf is a simple web browser based on webkit/gtk+, the same web engine that powers Google Chrome. Used with dwm and dmenu, it's a very powerful, yet simple tool.

Here is a patch to apply X geometry hints to surf, so that surf windows behave in dwm.

*** surf.c.orig 2009-08-24 16:41:31.000000000 +0100
--- surf.c 2009-08-24 16:35:02.000000000 +0100
***************
*** 372,377 ****
--- 372,381 ----
gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(c->vbox), c->searchbar);
gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(c->vbox), c->urlbar);

+ /* Hints */
+ GdkGeometry hints = { 1, 1 };
+ gtk_window_set_geometry_hints(GTK_WINDOW(c->win), NULL, &hints,
 GDK_HINT_MIN_SIZE);
+
/* Setup */
gtk_box_set_child_packing(GTK_BOX(c->vbox), c->urlbar, FALSE, FALSE, 0,
GTK_PACK_START);
gtk_box_set_child_packing(GTK_BOX(c->vbox), c->searchbar, FALSE, FALSE, 0,
GTK_PACK_START);

Another hint is to create a script to feed surf with your favorite bookmarks.

vim and Python comments

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently undergoing a profound revision (read "cleanup") of my .vimrc and I recently had to choose a decent plug-in to comment python code.

The best so far is EnhancedCommentify. It's highly configurable, powerful and it supports a different number of languages (not only python).

The only one thing that wasn't easy to setup if the behaviour described here: being able to comment a block, respecting the indent, in both visual and normal mode.

Windows bugs

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A bug's just hidden in my keyboard… A green one… Under the Windows key!

Escape sequences for rxvt

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm posting this info because I had a hard time searching for it on the internet.

If you are using rxvt (or urxvt), and you want escape sequences to work as in xterm, you need to specify them in your .Xdefaults.

Here are the codes I had to add to have vim working properly on rxvt (I use alt-left_arrow and alt-right_arrow to navigate through tabs):

\*Rxvt\*meta8: false \*Rxvt.keysym.C-Left: 033\[1;5D \*Rxvt.keysym.C-Right: 033\[1;5C \*Rxvt.keysym.M-Left: 033\[1;3D \*Rxvt.keysym.M-Right: 033\[1;3C

Blog post with Charm

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a test blog entry, posted with Charm! Charm is a text-based client which uses the MetaWeblog API to post entries to Wordpress powered blogs. It also implements other APIs.

I'm wondering if simple ASCII entries like this one will be properly formatted by the Wordpress' Intelligent Text Formatting feature. It would be nice to use vim to edit it…

Enjoy!

Test with gnome-blog

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a post using gnome-blog, a weblog client for gnome. Here I read about this possibility, but there were no instructions about how to configure the client…

If this is published, it can't be so difficult…

qwerty vs dvorak vs colemak to edit Python code

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I was intrigued by the idea of choosing a more efficient keyboard layout to work with everyday. As long as I type Python code 90% of my time, I decided to evaluate the efficiency of the first 3 most widespread keyboard layouts: QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak. I used this excellent tool to compare the three layouts over the first 50000 characters of the webpy source code. Here are the results:

 <div id="page">
 <div id="text">
 <h1>
The Qwerty Keyboard Layout Vs The Dvorak Keyboard Layout
 </h1>
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">
:: UP ::Overall effort
 </h2>
 <table>
 <thead class="small">
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">
Layout
 </td>
 <td class="a0">
Effort
 </td>
 <td class="a1">


% improvement over worst layout


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


306,509.6


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


283,868.7


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


7.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Colemak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


275,347.6


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


10.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Keys for each finger (stronger fingers should be used more often)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <thead class="small">
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Layout


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Thumbs


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


LPinky


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


LRing


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


LMiddle


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


LIndex


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


RIndex


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


RMiddle


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


RRing


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


RPinky


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Total


 </td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


12.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


5.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


9.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


11.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


7.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


5.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


8.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


13.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


13.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


5.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


8.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


7.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


7.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


7.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


8.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


17.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Colemak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


12.7 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


4.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


7.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


9.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


8.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


10.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


6.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


14.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <table>
 <thead class="small">
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Layout


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Thumbs


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Left hand


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Right hand


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Total


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


38.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


35.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


33.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


40.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Colemak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


25.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


34.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


39.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


54,237.0 keys


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Finger Travel Distance (only the horizontal)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <thead class="small">
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Layout


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Thumbs


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


LPinky


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


LRing


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


LMiddle


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


LIndex


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


RIndex


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


RMiddle


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


RRing


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


RPinky


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Total


 </td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


18.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


2.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


10.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


15.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


12.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


8.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


9.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


23.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,441.5 m


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


21.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


4.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


3.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


10.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


12.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


7.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


10.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


30.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,210.3 m


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Colemak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


23.7 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


2.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


6.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


10.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


10.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


9.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


9.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


28.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,131.2 m


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <table>
 <thead class="small">
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Layout


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Thumbs


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Left hand


 </td>
 <td class="a0">


Right hand


 </td>
 <td class="a1">


Total


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


46.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


54.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,441.5 m


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


38.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


61.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,210.3 m


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="a1">


Colemak


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


0.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


42.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="a0" style="text-align: right;">


57.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="a1" style="text-align: right;">


1,131.2 m


 </td>
 <td class="a0"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% home keys (out of all character keys plus SHIFT and ENTER, but excluding keys operated by thumbs)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


20.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


33.7 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


38.7 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% keys typed with the same finger as the previous key (excluding repeating keys like ss)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


4.5 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


3.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


3.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% keys typed with the same hand as the previous key (ex: in Qwerty sd or ss are included, but s s is not since you type the space with the other hand)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


26.8 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


20.0 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


24.6 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% keys typed with the same hand as the previous key and jumping a row (ex: in Qwerty ev is a row jump -- you jump over the middle row -- and it's awkward to type; ef is not a row jump)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


10.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


5.7 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


4.1 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% keys typed with the same hand as the previous key and in reverse order (ex: in Qwerty df or kj are typed in the easier order pinky-ring-middle-index, whereas fd and jk are in reverse order index-middle-ring-pinky, and harder to type)


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


15.4 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


11.9 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


15.2 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::% keys that need the SHIFT modifier


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


Qwerty


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


14.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Dvorak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


14.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


Colemak


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


14.3 %


 </td>
 <td class="bar"></td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Pairs of consecutive keys typed with the same finger in Qwerty


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


:/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


253 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.47 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


de


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


200 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.37 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


tr


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


158 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.29 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


rt


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


102 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.19 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


ol


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


99 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.18 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


un


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


98 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.18 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


q\_LeftShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


87 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


ce


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


86 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


“/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


81 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


ed


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


80 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


}/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


62 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Pairs of consecutive keys typed with the same finger in Dvorak


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


ct


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


196 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.36 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


s\_RightShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


169 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.31 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


db


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


152 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.28 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


l\_RightShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


137 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.25 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


‘/LeftShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


133 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.25 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


rn


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


115 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.21 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


ls


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


100 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.18 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


}/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


62 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


=/RightShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


59 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


“/LeftShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


58 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


e.


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


58 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Pairs of consecutive keys typed with the same finger in Colemak


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


:/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


253 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.47 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


ue


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


237 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.44 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


db


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


152 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.28 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


e,


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


89 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


q\_LeftShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


87 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


“/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


81 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


}/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


62 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.11 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


]/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


46 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.08 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


pt


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


44 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.08 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


‘/RightShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


41 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.08 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


“/RightShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


41 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.08 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Key frequency in your text


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


/Space/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


14067 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


25.94 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


4391 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


8.10 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


e


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


3239 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


5.97 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


t


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2184 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


4.03 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


s


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2170 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


4.00 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


r


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1890 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


3.48 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


a


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1619 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.99 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


o


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1557 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.87 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


l


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1530 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.82 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


n


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1519 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.80 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1511 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.79 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


i


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1372 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.53 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/RightShift/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1357 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.50 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


d


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1014 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.87 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


f


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


971 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.79 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


c


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


855 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.58 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


u


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


851 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.57 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


m


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


716 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.32 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


p


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


715 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.32 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


(


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


674 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.24 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


)


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


673 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.24 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


.


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


658 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.21 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


‘


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


623 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


,


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


573 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.06 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


b


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


571 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.05 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


“


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


563 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.04 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


554 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.02 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


=


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


518 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.96 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


:


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


490 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.90 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


q


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


463 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.85 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


y


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


423 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.78 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


h


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


416 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.77 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


w


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


352 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.65 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


>


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


348 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.64 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


g


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


304 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.56 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


v


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


257 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.47 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


x


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


253 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.47 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


k


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


231 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.43 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


<


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


154 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.28 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


125 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.23 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


[]


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


119 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.22 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


;


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


113 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.21 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


0


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


86 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


`


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


85 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.16 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


+


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


84 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


1


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


81 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


{


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


80 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


}


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


79 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.15 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


-


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


78 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.14 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


j


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


76 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.14 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


*


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


72 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.13 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


#


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


69 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.13 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


2


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


67 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.12 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


%


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


55 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.10 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


$


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


52 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.10 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


3


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


31 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.06 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


6


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


29 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.05 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


8


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


18 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.03 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


@


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


17 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.03 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td></td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


14 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.03 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


z


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


13 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.02 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


5


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


13 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.02 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


4


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


8 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.01 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


?


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


8 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.01 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


9


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


7 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.01 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 <hr />
 <h2 style="font-size: 90%;">


:: UP ::Frequent pairs of keys in your text


 </h2>
 <table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_Space\_\_Space\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


9243 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


17.04 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_NewLine\_\_Space\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1233 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


2.27 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_Space\_\_LeftShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


805 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.48 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/(


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


674 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.24 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/)


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


673 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.24 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/”


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


563 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.04 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_LeftShift\_\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


554 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.02 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


se


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


549 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.01 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


,/Space/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


543 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


1.00 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/:


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


490 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.90 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


el


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


405 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.75 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


er


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


377 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.70 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


in


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


364 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.67 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


\_Space\_\_RightShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


362 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.67 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


or


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


352 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.65 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/LeftShift/>


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


348 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.64 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/Space/i


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


344 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.63 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/Space/s


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


341 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.63 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


te


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


340 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.63 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


e\_LeftShift\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


338 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.62 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


=/Space/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


332 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.61 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


/Space/=


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


321 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.59 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


re


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


306 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.56 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


lf


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


294 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.54 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


)/NewLine/


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


281 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.52 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>


e\_Space\_


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


281 times


 </td>
 <td style="text-align: right;">


0.52 %


 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 </div>

Actually, I was disappointed: there seem to be no clear advantage of Dvorak or Colemak, wrt QWERTY and, given the popularity of the latter, switching does not seem to be a good idea…

This is another weblog client test

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

…and this is using BloGTK, which seems a little bit better. It support tags, too!

Better…

wordpress.com and text based web browsers

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I was appreciating how well wordpress.com renders on text based web browsers (using elinks). Unfortunately, even if reading posts looks great, posting does not. Actually, I've been able to delete one of my posts, while searching to edit it. Completely wiped out.

Luckily, google cache saved my time and promptly found an older copy. Beware!

Command line HTML validator

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Valid HTML is something we should strive to achieve. W3C Validator is an invaluable tool to do just that. Unfortunately, validating a local file you are working on can be annoying after the 100th time you've uploaded it to the W3C website.

Here you can find a command line HTML validator that simply uploads anything passed to it from stdin to the W3C Validator. The basic syntax is:

$> python validate.py < file_to_validate.html

It requires html2text to print the detailed list of errors.

Pubblicita non richiesta da parte di RAI su e-mail

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

RAI utilizza la e-mail degli utenti per informazioni pubblicitarie non richieste. Se questo vi da' fastidio tanto quanto ne da' a me, evitate di compilare il modulo disponibile qui. Io l'ho fatto, purtroppo, per lamentarmi delle sciocchezze pseudo-scientifiche diffuse dalla trasmissione "La medicina". Ecco l'e-mail, automaticamente generata dal sistema, che mi conferma il successo dell'invio… e fa un po' di pubblicita':

Grazie per averci contattato, la Sua e-mail verra' esaminata nel piu' breve tempo possibile.

py2dot

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

py2dot is a Python script to generate graphs from a python program. It interprets a Python program as a graphs of function calls. It can represent classes and imported modules.

py2dot is available from pypi. More information are available here.

Tab completion in Python shell

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I saw with this little piece of code to give the standard python shell tab completion capabilities:

# setup tab completion in python shell
import rlcompleter
import readline
readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Obviously, you can use the environmental variable PYTHONSTART to execute this few lines anytime you start your python shell.

Enjoy!

Numerical recipes

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Numerical Recipes is a classic of Scientific Computing.

Download here the whole book in ps or pdf.

A little story. Older versions are freely available here. If you are lazy, like me, and you get bored of saving every single file by hand, you can use this fantastic Firefox plugin. Or download them zipped here.

If you are lazy, like me, and you get bored of having to open a new file for each chapter, you can merge them in one monolithic file.

Python and vim

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just a reminder of a very useful set of tips to effectively use vim to edit Python files: http://henry.precheur.org/2008/4/18/Indenting%20Python%20with%20VIM.html

CVS behind a firewall through an http proxy

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you work in a company with a too restrictive firewall, but you still need to access a CVS repository like Sourceforge, you can bypass it using the program connect.c.

From here:

connect.c is the simple relaying command to make network connection via SOCKS and https proxy. It is mainly intended to be used as proxy command of OpenSSH.

Just download it and compile it (for windows users there is a precompiled connect.exe). Then, if you want to use the SOCKS server socks.local.net to access the internet, add these two lines to your .ssh/config:

Memoize

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, from a discussion on the scipy-user group I discovered a very elegant way to code a function with memory.

Let's state the problem. Suppose you need a function that remembers, for each time it has been called, the input parameters and its output. This can be very useful in many different situations:

If it is very expensive to evaluate, you can check its memory to see if it has been previously evaluated and, if yes, get its return value without actually calling it.
Inside an optimization loop, to remember all the intermediate steps of the optimization.
To accumulate data on the behaviour of the function itself.
To surprise friends ;-)

The function's memory can be as long as the program's running time, or it can be "permanent" if hard-coded in a file. Starting from here I've put together a couple of useful classes in python that can be used as decorators.

Boundary Value Problem

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For you, Python lover, who always needs Matlab functions: boundary value problems are not a problem anymore.

Googling for a bvp4c clone, I ended up here:

This is a Python wrapper for a modified version of the COLNEW boundary value problem solver by U. Ascher and G. Bader. Modifications made include vectorization over mesh points and better compatibility with Python.

There are little differences in the usage, though. I tried to reproduce the examples in this tutorial, to clarify things. You can download the first two examples here.

India!

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=18.979025953255267,80.244140625&markers=28.635308,77.22496,red|9.927708,76.266918,red|27.177719,78.0093,red|25.282009,82.956337,red|12.61645,80.194031,red|10.78482,79.142029,red|8.400502,76.979828,red|9.913986,78.121727,red|9.286719,79.311633,red|8.084033,77.54187,red|&zoom=4&size=500x500&key=ABQIAAAAITb_ASiA6dCkZ7VuJlkzPhTq9fk25wIGSg_6hAqtwa_NWPtb7xRZ02wBNfD7jZf92ZjlbxH8CRwtMQ

Dopo lunghe pensate, ecco l'itinerario! Dal 26 aprile al 16 maggio.

IQ test

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Qualche giorno fa, mi sono imbattuto in questo test di intelligenza, proposto da ECM. Riporto il testo, per semplicita':

Using each of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 only once, form a nine digit number A that can satisfy the following criteria:

A is exactly divisible by 9.

Removing the rightmost digit from A forms an eight digit number B that is exactly divisible by 8.

Removing the rightmost digit from B forms a seven digit number C that is exactly divisible by 7.

Photopedia

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.informit.com/ShowCover.aspx?isbn=0789737256&type=a

Finalmente, sembra che Photopedia stia per uscire anche in italia! Conterra' una delle mie prime fotografie digitali, che potete trovare qui (rigorosamente sotto Creative Commons License).

Potenza della rete…

Overbooking di Alitalia!

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Questo weekend mi sono accorto di quanto sia messa male Alitalia.

In mezzo a tutte le altre compagnie del mondo, a Malpensa, espone il cartello che ho furtivamente fotografato (avete mai provato a fotografare i banchi dei check-in in aeroporto?). OK, niente di nuovo, se si pensa che tutte le compagnie aeree fanno overbooking da sempre e che Alitalia avvisa i suoi clienti di questa possibilita'. Ma sembra esserci chi non e' d'accordo.

Certo, rimane quantomeno fuorviante il messaggio: ti dovresti forse sentire premiato a restare a piedi?

Free phone calls from Italy to UK

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Since today, I always used Skype to call landline and mobile phones in the UK: it is much cheaper than any Italian telephone company. But from today, I'm going with something else: VoipWiseand VoipBuster. Here is a comparison of the rates to call the UK:

Skype
- landline: 0.020 eur/min
- mobile: 0.236 eur/min
VoipWise
- landline: FREE
- mobile: 0.100 eur/min
VoipBuster
- landline: 0.010 eur/min
- mobile: 0.180 eur/min

VoipWise is the winner!!! Now I can call UK for free! I wonder how long it will last…

Haiku

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Il corpo estraneo si ostina a sostenere. Vento limpido.

Secure GMail Notifier

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As you might have noticed, GMail Notifier uses the url http://mail.google.com/mail to access your personal mailbox. This is quite annoying for who cares about security. Here is a simple hack to make it use the secure url https://mail.google.com/mail. (It works for the Windows version - for the Mac version there is already a solution).

Create a backup copy of gnotifier.exe (usually in c:Program FilesGoogleGmail Notifier);
Open gnotifier.exe with an hex editor (emacs hexl-find-file will do);
Find the string http://mail.google.com/mail and substitute it with https://mail.google.com/mail;
Save the file;
Close any running GMail Notifier and launch it again.

Yes, it is as simple as that.

Prezzo del carburante

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Oggi ho fatto benzina dopo un sacco di tempo e mi ha colpito quanta poca differenza di prezzo ci sia ormai tra benzina verde e diesel. Cosi' mi sono incuriosito e ho messo su un grafico l'andamento dei prezzi negli ultmi 6 anni circa.

I dati sono presi da qui e si riferiscono al prezzo medio nei diversi distributori. Il grafico seguente mostra chiaramente quanto sono aumentati sia il prezzo della benzina verde 95 ottani che il prezzo del diesel. Unica costante: il self service costa meno, anche se solo del 2%.

EMpy

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

EMpy is out! Here is the release note:

I'm very pleased to announce the release of EMpy (Electromagnetic Python), a suite of numerical algorithms widely used in electromagnetism.

The package, in its very-alpha stage by now, only contains the transfer matrix and the rigorous coupled wave analysis algorithms, and some handy functions and classes (to model materials, for examples). The idea is to expand it in the near future with new algorithms and interfaces to existent software. The package is based on Numpy/Scipy and its homepage: http://empy.sourceforge.net.

Facile profeta

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Questo e' il secondo post in cui nomino Beppe Grillo: ormai e' una delle mie fonti di informazione primarie! Su repubblica.it di oggi e' riportata la notizia che, secondo un rapporto americano, in Italia sono presenti 90 ordigni nucleari statunitensi, conservati nelle basi militari di Aviano e Ghedi. Vale la pena ricordare che:

A rigor di legge, la presenza di questi ordigni non sarebbe consentita: la legislazione la vieta espressamente dal 1990. Il nostro Paese ha inoltre sottoscritto i trattati internazionali di non proliferazione nucleare e ha dichiarato di non far parte del club atomico, con tutti gli obblighi internazionali che ne derivano.

Le bandierine di Beppe Grillo

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Oggi sul blog di Beppe Grillo e' comparsa questa mappa. I marker blu non vi ricordano pericolosamente le bandierine di Emilio Fede?

Trackback

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I discovered a new cool feature of blogs: trackbacks!

This is a test, to see if I got it right…

Here is a clear explanation of trackbacks.

Qui Milano libera

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--4qyu5sSY]

Un magistrato di roma ha ordinato alla guardia di finanza di chiudere il blog di questo signore (Piero Ricca), reo di aver accusato Emilio Fede di occupare abusivamente le frequenze di retequattro, ed essersi beccato uno sputazzo per tutta risposta. Fortunatamente, il sito www.quimilanolibera.net ha deciso di ospitare i post di Piero Ricca finche' il suo blog non sara' di nuovo disponibile.

Tratto da www.quimilanolibera.net:

Rete 4 trasmette da anni "in proroga", contro due sentenze della Corte Costituzionale. Si è salvata fino ad ora grazie ad agganci politici e decreti su misura. Le frequenze occupate abusivamente da questa emittente spettano a Europa 7 di Francesco Di Stefano, titolare dal 1999 di regolare concessione nazionale. Di Stefano attende giustizia dalla Corte Europea e ha chiesto un risarcimento di 3 miliardi di euro. Se vince, lo Stato cioé i cittadini dovranno mettere mano al portafoglio.per risarcire un abuso compiuto da Berlusconi, nel silenzio di gran parte della sinistra.

V-day

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Dal sito di Beppe Grillo:

L'8 settembre sarà il giorno del Vaffanculo day, o V-Day. Una via di mezzo tra il D-Day dello sbarco in Normandia e V come Vendetta. Si terrà sabato otto settembre nelle piazze d'Italia, per ricordare che dal 1943 non è cambiato niente. Ieri il re in fuga e la Nazione allo sbando, oggi politici blindati nei palazzi immersi in problemi “culturali”. Il V-Day sarà un giorno di informazione e di partecipazione popolare. Beppe Grillo

Epytaph

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge is a deadly friend When no one sets the rules. The fate of all mankind I see Is in the hands of fools.

King Crimson - Epytaph

Papers about Python and scientific computing

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a list of articles about Python and scientific computing appeared in Computing in Science and Engineering, available online:

Python for Scientific Computing by Travis E. Oliphant (pdf);
Python: Batteries included by Paul F. Dubois;
A Python module for modeling and control design of flexible robots by Ryan W. Krauss;
Analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Python by K. Jarrod Millman and Matthew Brett, Computing in Science and Engineering, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 52-55, May/June, 2007;
IPython: A System for Interactive Scientific Computing by Fernando Perez;
Matplotlib: a 2D Graphics Environment by John D. Hunter.

Happy reading!

Binary hand counting

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Ecco un modo molto comodo di contare da 0 a 31 usando una mano sola. avendone a disposizione due, si puo' arrivare a 1023… Ho ideato il metodo mentre mi annoiavo a ripetere lo stesso esercizio 30 volte e, distraendomi, perdevo il conto. naturalmente, qualcuno ci aveva gia' pensato e qualcun altro ci ha anche fatto delle magliette… Praticamente, ogni dito della mano ha due stati: CHIUSO (0) o APERTO (1). 5 dita danno 32 possibili stadi, numerabili da 0 a 31. 10 dita danno 1024 stadi, numerabili da 0 a 1023. Usando i piedi, le possibilita' aumentano…

Numerical computing Matlab vs Python + numpy + weave

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I've discovered the power of Python for numerical computing. Being a slave of Matlab for many years, I've decided to give Python (and it's numerical module numpy) a try, comparing its number crunching capabilities versus Matlab's.

The tests are heavily inspired by Prabhu Ramachandran. I've only added Matlab to complete his comparisons.

Here is a short description of the test, taken from here:

The example we will consider is a very simple (read, trivial) case of solving the 2D Laplace equation using an iterative finite difference scheme (four point averaging, Gauss-Seidel or Gauss-Jordan). The formal specification of the problem is as follows.

Autoreferenza

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Si applica anche a questo post?

Riprendiamoci Telecom!

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Sarei tentato di comprare azioni Telecom solo per poter partecipare! Se non fosse che il mio LCA mi constringera' a letto in quei giorni… Restero' aggiornato via blog!

io parcheggio da culo!

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Finalmente un sito utile! www.ioparcheggiodaculo.com

Attaccate attaccate attaccate!

Il Metodo

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Il primo era di non prendere mai niente per vero, se non ciò che io avessi chiaramente riconosciuto come tale; ovvero, evitare accuratamente la fretta e il pregiudizio, e di non comprendere nel mio giudizio niente di più di quello che fosse presentato alla mia mente così chiaramente e distintamente da escludere ogni possibilità di dubbio.

Il secondo, di dividere ognuna delle difficoltà sotto esame nel maggior numero di parti possibile, e per quanto fosse necessario per un'adeguata soluzione.

Aurora 88s

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This is an Aurora 88s fountain pen. It was a present of my grand-grand-grandmother to my father, about 50 years ago. Now, my grandmother has given it to me. Amazingly, it still works smoothly. I wonder what of all the things I've bought in the last year will last for 50 years. Probably nothing. I will take care of it and I will use it wisely. Thank you.

Google Docs

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Cool! Google has launched a new service, called "Google Docs&Spreadsheets": http://docs.google.com. They are merging two different services already available (Writely and Spreadsheets) into one suite: at the very end, they are providing free a simplified online Office Suite.

One nice feature is that you can post your docs on your blog in just few clicks. This post is the witness…

Wouldn't be nice to have just one "editor" on the web that any website can interface to? Just like Vi in *nix? Pretty clever, though.

Maestro

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes people find you.

Sunday, I saw a documentary about Henri Cartier-Bresson. I must admit I had never heard about him: photography has never been an interest for me. But his photographs were mesmerizing. When, walking in the city center, thinking about decisive moments and how to picture them, I stopped in front of an exhibition. It was about photography. It was about Henri Cartier-Bresson.

From never heard before, to be met twice in a day. Shouldn't we follow coincidences? I like his philosophy: photograph is like an instant painting. The most important thing is the instant: the "decisive moment". Even if he was a reporter, he was convinced that reporting is not art. It's too much about informing. It's for everyone. Art is different, for few should like it. His photos inspired many people.

Nature

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

TRN, Bell Labs and USA Today report an amazing news (well, not very new to be honest, but it is for me!). Apparently, Nature has invented what I'm studying ways before humans… This silicon-based little sponge produces (god knows how…) silicon filaments, very similar to optical fibers used in the telecommunication industry.

Two things are particularly amazing:

The little thing is made of silicon, not carbon! It reminds me of an x-files episode…
The filament is produced at "room temperature" (where "room" means the bottom of the mediterranean sea), not at high temperature like human-made optical fibers. This means that other substances, which would help light to propagate, but dislike high temperature, can be used by the little sponge… and, indeed, they do! The resulting fiber is stronger and potentially more efficient

The Mediterranean sea is naturally wired.

Ontologisches Beweis

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ass.1: P(φ).P(ψ) ⊃ P(φ.ψ)
Ass.2: P(φ) ∨ P(-φ)

Def.1: G(x) ≡ (φ)[P(φ) ⊃ φ(x)]
Def.2: φ Ess. x ≡ (ψ)[ψ(x) ⊃ N(y){φ(y) ⊃ ψ(y)]]

Ass.3a: P(φ) ⊃ NP(φ)
Ass.3b: ∼P(φ) ⊃ N∼P(φ)

Theo.1: G(x) ⊃ G Ess. x

Def.3: E(x) ≡ (φ)[φ Ess. x ⊃ N(∃x) φ(x)]

Ass.4: P(E)

Theo.2: G(x) ⊃ N(∃y)G(y)

Therefore:
(∃x)G(x) ⊃ N(∃y)G(y)
M(∃x)G(x) ⊃ MN(∃y)G(y)
M(∃x)G(x) ⊃ N(∃y)G(y)

Ass.5: P(φ).N(φ⊃ψ):⊃P(ψ)

Gödel, 1970

Kant mi ha detto...

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

L'unico approccio razionale all'amore e' di essere irrazionali.

Traffic jam in India

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine sent me this. It reminded me of my trip in India just 4 months ago…

These guys live at an amazing speed… They never sleep! And they don't even need AIM (autonomous intersection management)!

The street is the most similar thing to a vein I can imagine. The city is the body. I've always thought that megalopolis are super-human and this confirms my hypothesis. Read this if you like the subject.

Here is where I work!

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

pic diggin', I found another cool link I'd like to share with you: quikmaps.

Basically, you can draw on Google maps… cool!

PS: unluckily, I've not been able to put the image directly on this page: press the link "pic" to see it! I'll work on that… mpf…

Mondiali di calcio 2006

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Questo e' il mio primo post in italiano. Ho pensato che quello che ho da dire interessera' piu' gli italiani che gli altri, quindi…

Tutti sappiamo quanto sia popolare il calcio qui in italia e anche quanto fastidioso sia che in tv non si riescano a vedere tutte le partite dei mondiali, anche quelle piu' "insignificanti" che rendono pero' il mondiale lo spettacolo che e'.

Ecco due soluzioni facili facili per vedere anche quelle partite che la RAI, nella sua piccolezza, non trasmette.

Installing Ubuntu 6.06 on Dell Inspiron 5150

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to switch to Ubuntu, at last. And I'm definitely happy for the choice: smooth looking feel, decent speed and big selection of applications.

Just one "down" point: I spent a whole weekend to install it! Not bad, for a distribution said to be "easy on"… After an afternoon reading here, not finding any useful suggestion for my case, I found the solution.

For me (and my Dell Inspiron 5150) the alternate cd worked. So, just forget the install/live cd and go for the alternate: there are no differences, a part from the fact that you'll have to forget the graphical istaller. hth.

AI for fun

Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I'll suggest you a new cool link: http://www.gnod.net/. From their website:

Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about."

Milano by night

Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

After all, I may have found some interesting use of Milan's chaotic traffic!

mi-vr-mi

Sun, 14 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

http://static.flickr.com/56/146087373_8241e23cec.jpg?v=0

First road trip by motorbike, this weekend: from Milan to Verona and back. You can see the photos here: one shot every 10 km, whatever there was… (taken by my new camera! Lot's of news since the last time!)

Motorbiking is relaxing and relaxing makes me think. So, while driving back home, I realized that there is a fundamental difference between motorcyclists and "car's drivers": Solidarity. If a motorcyclist has a problem other motorcyclists stop to help him, if he is OK others keep greeting him. Can you imagine that with "car's drivers"? In Italy??

Another geek in Denmark

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I'm writing from here, today. Man, a really nice place: it seems to me I'm a student, again! Sleeping on the floor in the dormitory, eating together in the common kitchen, coming to the uni and not attending to the lessons… I'm a bit scared of the "kantine", though. Denmark is not famous for food, is it?

Why "another" in the title? Because the original one is this.

Coincidence?

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Do you trust coincidences? Do you think they exist or do you belong to the conspiracy party?

Personally, I think that a coincidence is how we call an event we can hardly explain, because we miss the whole picture. In other words, if we don't know the causes, effects are coincidences. I'm not the only one to think that, as defined in the common sense (purely random events, weird enough to be noted), coincidences don't exist. Others give strong arguments supporting this opinion, explaining the law we sometimes miss.

Strange beautiful music

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine gave me this link: http://www.pandora.com. If I had to define it I would probably say: it's a customizable thematic web-jukebox. You just put the name of a musician you like and the system plays songs with the same "feel": great way to learn new songs! An example: the "led zeppelin radio" transmits led zeppelin (of course!), Jimi Hendrix (because of extensive vamping and heavy instrumental improvisation), free (because of electric guitar reefs and solos), Rory Gallagher (because of vocal-centric aesthetic), Nazareth, Judas Priest, … Ah, it's free.

My first post

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hi all! This is my first post.

Finally, I've decided to start my own blog instead of just reading the others'. Hopefully, I'll give them back some of the fun I've taken.

Cheers.