#sniffo dot org - english

#sniffo.org is alive!

vjt — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:42:00 +0100

alk's song !
( Based on "Armless Skater", by Satanic Surfers )

[11:50'18"]     vjt| I had a friend whose only job
[11:50'28"]     vjt| Was to keep him nerdish and to flog his log
[11:50'37"]     vjt| Those were the only things he wanted to do
[11:50'44"]     vjt| And I think that's really NERD
[11:50'53"]     vjt| Then one day he had an accident
[11:51'00"]     vjt| And had to amputate his fingers
[11:51'08"]     vjt| I'd like to guess if he was sad that day ..
[11:51'14"]     vjt| He can't code
[11:51'25"]     vjt| He can't browse pr0n
[11:51'32"]     vjt| And he surely cannot masturbate no moooooooore

( E adesso, qualcosa di orribile )

Goodbye sniffo.org/, welcome sindro.me/

vjt — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:42:46 +0100

I'll never regret the creation of sniffo.org, and I'll always thank MorrigaN for forcing me to do it, back in 2007. Like the endless days and nights we spent together on IRC in the first years of the new millenium, setting up and managing sniffo.org was fun, until only myself started posting and following it. Much the same that happened to the IRC channel.

Yeah, I know that I'm the founder, and I should keep up the channel, site and feelings. But I ain't no god and neither wanna be, I didn't create the past situations nor was the pulsating heart of the #sniffo community. I simply gave my time and soul to it, and all of you inconsciounsly felt it and did the same. That's why we spent so much good time together. Because of our big big hearts, and the amounts of love that flowed through them .

Again, I'll never regret, this is not a "fuck you off" post, quite the opposite, in fact. I love you all, and I'll never stop thanking you for all the good time we spent together. So good that it'll never come back, and no one can ever make come it back. We tried, MorrigaN, and we failed, because things are constantly changing, and living in the past is a no-brainer .

Now, back to the subject, I've decided to split the funny bullshits me and you posted here from humbly serious and technical stuff I work on everyday, so I built up http://sindro.me/, on which I'll continue posting much more often than I post here. So, click on the link, and add it to your bookmarks and RSS reader!

~Marcello

How to mirror a static copy of the opensource.org website

vjt — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:47:52 +0100

I currently maintain the italian mirror of the Open Source Initiative web site, and today I realized that the script I wrote some months ago wasn't doing its job well.. because the CSS files weren't downloaded at all, causing a rather unpleasant rendering of the site.

To mirror opensource org I'm currently using the plain'ol GNU Wget -r --mirror and so on. While the good'ol wget downloads each page prerequisite defined in the HTML source, it doesn't support @import CSS rules, and doesn't download images referenced in CSS with url() rules.

BTW, nothing that can't be resolved with some regex-fu: that's why I'm sharing the script I'm currently using to mirror the opensource.org web site, hoping it will generate either a new mirror or some insights on how to do this job better :).

The script: update_opensource_mirror.sh

Cheers!

a permalink_fu improvement: allow modification of permalinks and create redirects on-the-fly

vjt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:30:04 +0100

Another spin-off from the www.visitacsa.it website: a permalink_fu improvement that allows dynamic permalinks. I know it is an oximoron, because permalinks should be .. well .. permanent! And because search engines index them, they should never change. But what happens when you publish something, your permalink is generated with permalink_fu using the title of your post, and after a couple of days you want to change the title, and the permalink under which the post is accessible as well?

Following the specification, your app should send out a 301 moved permanently HTTP status when accessing the old permalink and redirect the client to the new Uniform Resource Locator. That's quite the same thing what my modification to permalink_fu does: whenever your post attributes are changed, the former and new permalinks are saved to the database, and you can enable your controller to generate 302 moved temporarily redirects when needed. In other words, it checks whether the requested URL is an old permalink, and automagically redirects the client to the new one.

Everything is done behind the scenes, and the plugin has also got nifty rake tasks to set up the Redirect model and associated migrations. And you can change its name, of course! :)

The 302 code was chosen because the 301 permanent status code has quite disruptive effects on search engines, but more discussion is welcome.

Have a look over my repository at github, read the README that contains the documentation of the added features, and check out the code! :)

The jQuery ajax-upload-fu plugin

vjt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:03:32 +0100

This jQuery plug-in allows AJAX file uploads without having a fixed file input button. It achieves its goals by installing an OnMouseMove handler over the selected elements, and moving the input button under the mouse cursor.

The quote that inspired this code is: "If Muhammad won't go to the the mountain, the mountain will come to Muhammad",the opposite of the more known proverb :).

It has been spinned off from the http://www.visitacsa.it/ JavaScript codebase, see the gist for more information, and have a look onto the live app code for an example of its usage.

Here is the source code:

The Windows 7 default wallpaper meaning.

vjt — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:19:58 +0100

When you install the developer beta of Windows 7, after the usual 3 reboot cycle, you are greeted with the following image:

It is the Siamese fighting fish, a beautiful tropical fish, but with an interesting characteristic: it is extremely aggressive. It is popular belief that two males fight themselves even in the wild, but that's not quite true. This belief descends from the behaviour of the fish into an aquarium, where the victor continuously attacking the loser, eventually causing the loser's death.

Now, think about the software ecosystem as an aquarium. And think about microsoft into this aquarium. The latest release of Microsoft OS has an aggressive fish as its default skin, and it is alone in this aquarium. And there's no place for anyone else: they'll fight whoever adversary, even if it's from the same species.

What's uncertain is .. they'll succeed, or not? . We'll see!

AU Lab power II

vjt — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:04:19 +0100

AU Lab power II.

Improving: there is no need to use NetSend and NetReceive to play on 8 speakers: an aggregate device composed of Soundflower 2ch, the USB 6ch SBlive and the Built-in output is enough!

Also, note the new bus: it's required because the AUMatrixReverb effect added to the center channel to improve the audio stereophony actually takes two channels, so it overlaps with the following one (the LFE). But applying the effect to a bus does not exhibit this side effect.

Result: excellent 7.1

The end of online anonymity

vjt — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:55:16 +0100

Exactly the words that run around my mind these days:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_end_of_online_anonymity.php

"When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity."

I'd think these describe exactly the "facebook effect".

What do you think?

Making the CCacheServer Kerberos Ticket server actually Work(tm) on OSX

vjt — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:21:22 +0100

If you're wondering *why* the CCacheServer daemon, that caches in memory Kerberos tickets obtained via kinit(1) is NOT starting .. that's because of a *strange* bug regarding the LimitLoadToSessionType specified into the agent .plist, located into

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/edu.mit.kerberos.CCacheServer.plist

on OSX 10.5 systems.

You simply have to comment out these two lines:

<key>LimitLoadToSessionType</key>
<string>Background</string>

And either

launchctl load \
  /System/Library/LaunchAgents/edu.mit.kerberos.CCacheServer.plist

or reboot your system .

CCacheServer will then be instantiated when you do a kinit:

$ kinit
Please enter the password for :

$ klist
Kerberos 5 ticket cache: 'API:Initial default ccache'
Default principal:

Valid Starting     Expires            Service Principal
11/12/08 20:59:35  11/13/08 06:59:14  krbtgt/DOMAIN.LOCAL@DOMAIN.LOCAL
	renew until 11/19/08 20:59:35

The bug is *strange* because the LimitLoadToSessionType key actually *should* instruct launchd to automatically start up the daemon and run it once for every logged in user, when kinit asks its services. But, if the key is set in the .plist, a launchctl load on it fails with "nothing found to load". Weird!

Pushing git commit messages to lighthouse in a batch

vjt — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:22:48 +0200

If you use github-provided lighthouse integration, from the "Admin" pages of your git repository, you may have stumbled upon on a glitch: every changeset on lighthouse appears as done by the lighthouse user that configured the integration on github.

This happens because lighthouse uses the API token to link changeset authors to LH users, and that's not good when you're not alone committing .

A simple solution is to use a post-commit hook, as described here, but that's not satisfactory because it means that every time you issue git commit on your console, the commit message will go public, and if you --amend or reset --soft the index you'll have to browse to lighthouse and delete the changeset.

A much smarter solution is to push all changed revs when pushing them to github: I modified the original post-commit hook and installed it alongside the git command in $(dirname `which git`)/git-lh

This gives me a new git lh command that fetches the current HEAD revision from github using refs/heads/master and POSTs every changeset between that rev and the current tip in the working tree to lighthouse.

So, if you issue git lh before issuing git push, every change you're pushing to github will go to lighthouse, too.

UPDATE: A simple bash script like

#!/bin/bash
git lh && git push

saved as git-lh-push saves you from typing two commands when you want to push .

Have fun!

References
git lh script