Happy Holidays

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Facebook and Berlusconi

Hello,
today many people are getting subscribed (with NO authorization) automatically to this group: Sosteniamo SILVIO BERLUSCONI contro i FAN di massimo tartaglia. You have NO notification that you've been subscribed to this group.

Also consider the geographic position (screenshot) of the group contact.

Also consider that the group can't be signaled to facebook, because the feature looks like out of service.

It's clearly a mafia group, beware of!

Lua for Pythoners - Dictionary

Hello,
as promised this is the second post, this time for dictionaries. The most important thing to notice is that tbl[key]=nil means deleting the entry from the table, while in python dict[key]=None is still a valid entry with None value.

Here's the snippet you can launch in a lua interpreter and this is the catalog of python dictionary examples.

Lua for Pythoners - Lists

Hello,
lately I'm discovering Lua as general purpose language. Many people don't agree with lua being used as a general purpose language, many others (including a newbie like me) think Lua has such a simple syntax and powerful tables to become a full fledged language.
I use a lot of Python, so I start from here: what Python does that Lua can't do almost in the same way? Read the question as it is, don't read "what Python does that Lua can't do", it's different.

This is the first of several post series I'm writing. I'm trying to "translate" python pills in Lua + Penlight

Please consider that many things can be done really better in Lua. As I said, this is a kind of "translation". You will understand that Lua does better than Python in other things that will not be shown because the examples are made in Python.

Here's the snippet, you can run it with a stand-alone Lua interpreter.

If you know better ways of doing things like in Python please comment. Comments like 'Hey, it's inefficient! This is not the way you do things in Lua' are accepted of course but not related to the post.

Errata:
I've had some important feedback thanks to #lua people in IRC:
- Variables in Lua are globally assigned, so at least in functions you must use local
- Using table.insert in loops is slow, better use tbl[#tbl+1] assignment, and even better remember the next free position tbl[next] = element; next = next + 1

Mimaggia, cairo tester

Hello,

From GNOME

I've created a simple pygtk project for testing cairo statements. It includes a sort of terminal where you write statements in a simple language. It features immediate preview of what you write.

Say it's a new format for images.
If you want to test it and see the code, ask me.

Python and RSA

There are many Python toolkits for crypto, so I hope I've done the best choice (at least for now). This is a simple utility class for managing RSA keys, a sort of wrappera to the m2crypto class.

import M2Crypto

class RSA (object):
def __init__ (self, bits=1024, padding=M2Crypto.RSA.pkcs1_padding, exp=65537):
    self.bits = bits
    self.padding = padding
    self.exp = exp
    self.rsa = None

def generate (self):
    self.rsa = M2Crypto.RSA.gen_key(
        self.bits, self.exp, lambda x: None)

def encrypt (self, s):
    c = ""
    bytes = self.bits/8-11
    for i in range(0, len(s), bytes):
        c += self.rsa.public_encrypt (s[i:i+bytes], self.padding)
    return c

def sign (self, s, algo="sha1"):
    dgst = M2Crypto.EVP.MessageDigest (algo)
    dgst.update (s)
    return self.rsa.sign (dgst.digest (), algo)

def verify (self, s, sign, algo="sha1"):
    dgst = M2Crypto.EVP.MessageDigest (algo)
    dgst.update (s)
    try:
        self.rsa.verify (dgst.digest (), sign, algo)
    except:
        return False
    return True

def decrypt (self, c):
    s = ""
    bytes = self.bits/8
    for i in range(0, len(c), bytes):
        s += self.rsa.private_decrypt (c[i:i+bytes], self.padding)
    return s

Example usage:

rsa = RSA ()
rsa.generate () # generate key pair
s = "a"*2000 # test data
edata = rsa.encrypt (s)
sign = rsa.sign (s)

ddata = rsa.decrypt (edata)
assert rsa.verify (ddata, sign) == True

Debian+Apache+Tomcat+Axis

Hello,
one of the courses I'm following at the university is "Laboratorio di reti
di calcolatori" which uses the technologies (really technologies?????)
listed in the post title. This is a little tutorial for making them works,
with a little script for registering .wsdd files.

- aptitude install apache2 tomcat6
- download the binaries of axis 1.x (latest is 2.x, it's not used in our course) and xerces then unpack them.
- copy *.jar of xerces into the "lib" dir of axis.
- create "/etc/tomcat6/policy.d/99axis.policy" with:

grant codeBase "file:/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/-" {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

- copy the "axis" directory found under webapps of the axis binaries into /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps
- invoke-rc.d apache2 restart
- invoke-rc.d tomcat6 restart

Now go to http://localhost:8080 to make sure that Apache-Axis works.

Finally, this is the script for deploying web services (call it deploy.sh):

export AXIS_HOME="/home/lethal/ingegneria/reti/axis/axis-1_4"
export AXIS_LIB="$AXIS_HOME/lib"
export AXISCLASSPATH="$AXIS_LIB/axis.jar:$AXIS_LIB/commons-discovery-0.2.jar:$AXIS_LIB/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar:$AXIS_LIB/jaxrpc.jar:$AXIS_LIB/saaj.jar:$AXIS_LIB/log4j-1.2.8.jar:$AXIS_LIB/xml-apis.jar:$AXIS_LIB/xercesImpl.jar"
java -cp "$AXISCLASSPATH" org.apache.axis.client.AdminClient -lhttp://localhost:8080/axis/services/AdminService "$1"

In the script, you must tweak the AXIS_HOME variable to point to the unpacked axis binaries: avoid using spaces in this variable or you'll encounter several errors in terms of classpath.
Usage of the script:

sh deploy.sh file.wsdd

We're done!

Speeding up zsh completion

Hello,

since I've started using zsh, a great shell with great out of the box completion, one of the most boring issues was having a really slow completion. I can understand it could be slow to get a list of packages, remote files or command line options, but also paths were often slow to be completed. After lots of searches I've ended up in adding this magic line to my ~/.zshrc:

zstyle ':completion:*' accept-exact '*(N)'

This way you tell zsh comp to take the first part of the path to be exact, and to avoid partial globs. Now path completions became nearly immediate.

Another important speed up is using the cache for packages and other stuff:

zstyle ':completion:*' use-cache on

zstyle ':completion:*' cache-path ~/.zsh/cache

If you know how to boost up options/remote files, please share :)

New GPG key

Hello,
due to some synchronization problems between my desktop and laptop, unfortunately I've lost my GPG secret key. I was planning to renew my key after the SHA issues, but this way I can't neither revoke the old key nor sign the new key. So I please anybody having my pubkey to delete it:
gpg --delete-key C29A9371

I've uploaded my new key as usual so you can get it:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys D2C27B6B

Spadi source code

Hello,
after I've written really a few docs, and cleaned up some stuff, I've published the code of both Spadi and Corraza on gitorious here. In the while, I've added support for floors and closeable views.
Help... help is needed.

Stay tuned.

Constructing a free ArchiCAD alternative

Hello,
together a couple of university mates we talked about a possible free (as in freedom) ArchiCAD alternative. There are several free CAD out there but none is free for architects/engineers. The project is too big and ambitious, but I wanted to give OpenGL a shot with this excuse to learn something new.

I've started two projects:

• Corraza, the OpenGL framework for editing 3d objects and exporting the scene graph to ray tracing software... think about a very very very minimal blender but as library

• Spadi, the GTK+ application that runs on top of Corraza

You can find a video here to see what it can do now, after a week of development.
There's no code published at the moment, contact me if you would like to join the development.

Stay tuned.

Aruanne, pdf reporting framework

Hello,
a while ago I've been talking about pango cairo and how to generate pdf with a couple of tables.
In the meantime I've worked on it, improving and enhancing new kinds of elements. This has lead to the creation of a small project, a library providing a simple framework for generating mostly PDF reports (I haven't tried to generate SVG or something else yet).

After a couple of release requests, I've found finally the time to publish a sort of working code.

Here's the git repository and here you can download the snapshot tarball.

Any patches welcome.

The less consuming radio player ever

Hello,
multimedia always killed desktop performance, also audio with all such effect-based players out there. I've been using deezer for a long time, but sometimes I'm tired to see my desktop lagging.
I don't need that, I need random music from internet while I'm either programming or studying, and my computer has only 512mb ram and 2.4ghz amd64 (onLY??? yes nowadays it's a little amount).

Let's see what we can do using gst-launch:

while [ 1 ]; do wget -q -O - http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg|gst-launch fdsrc fd=0 ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! alsasink; done

The URL above is a hard rock station :) The while ensures re-connection. I think performances are great, 6% cpu and 2% ram.

But there's yet a bettere solution (see comments):

mplayer http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg

Syx changes web and git hosting

Hello,

I'm officializing the change of web hosting and git hosting from googlecode to berlios:

The new website is up!

For several reasons, including reliability, we switched both the website and git hosting to berlios. Also the purpose of this change is to rewrite the website backend using Syx.

The mailing list and the bug tracker are still hosted at googlecode.

Some progress news in the while

We're working on a new memory management, object representation and garbage collector. On the other side the lack of time is making things harder for releasing the new version. Together with the above changes, new Smalltalk standard pieces will implemented as usual. I remind you the new code is in

the object branch.

Website: http://syx.berlios.de

GIT: git://git.berlios.de/syx

Project page: https://developer.berlios.de/projects/syx/

Render tables with pangocairo like reportlab

Hello,
lately I was wondering if there was any alternative to the well known reportlab python software for creating PDF reports. I immediately thought about Cairo. The only two problems are:

• Cairo doesn't create multiple pages
• No support for creating tables containing text, necessary for table-based reports

I still can't realize how to achieve the first feature, but the second one could be solved using Pango layouts.

The idea is to create the cells of the table using such layouts, so that the text get wrapped etc.

Here's the Pango tables code snippet containing the necessary classes for achieving the job. Notice that the methods in the snippet often make use of Pango units instead of pixels.

Now let's use the Table class as follows: create a table with two rows and two columns, then show it twice with different background colors.

surface = cairo.PDFSurface ("test.pdf", 300, 400)
cr = cairo.Context (surface)
cr = pangocairo.CairoContext (cairo.Context (surface))

sizes = [pango.SCALE*12*10, pango.SCALE*12*10]
data = [["first test with pango tables", "seems to work correctly"],
["though it needs", "support for borders and spans"]]

table = Table (cr, sizes, data, pango.FontDescription ("Sans 12"))
cr.rectangle (0, 0, pango.PIXELS(table.get_width ()), pango.PIXELS(table.get_height()))
cr.set_source_rgb (0.8, 0.8, 0.8)
cr.fill ()
cr.set_source_rgb (0, 0, 0)
table.show_table (cr)

cr.translate (0, 200)
cr.rectangle (0, 0, pango.PIXELS(table.get_width ()), pango.PIXELS(table.get_height()))
cr.set_source_rgb (0.4, 0.5, 0.7)
cr.fill ()
cr.set_source_rgb (0, 0, 0)
table.show_table (cr)

Here's the result test.pdf:

Blogging from Epiphany WebKit

Hello,
I've been using Midori for a while. It's a great browser: innovative and light. However all my bookmarks and data are in Epiphany. Last week the new epiphany-webkit version has been uploaded in Debian Sid and I couldn't wait to test it. I'm currently using it instead of gecko; it has still some issues but I begun living without it.

Create a GdkPixbuf from cairo surface

Hello,
here's the inverted code snippet of the previous post.

w, h = surface.get_width(), surface.get_height()

pixmap = gtk.gdk.Pixmap (None, w, h, 24)

cr = pixmap.cairo_create ()

cr.set_source_surface (surface, 0, 0)

cr.paint ()

pixbuf = gtk.gdk.Pixbuf (gtk.gdk.COLORSPACE_RGB, True, 8, w, h)

pixbuf = pixbuf.get_from_drawable (pixmap, gtk.gdk.colormap_get_system(), 0, 0, 0, 0, w, h)

Create a cairo surface from a pixbuf

Hello,
sometimes in the code of a couple of projects I see some hard algorithms to transform a pixbuf in a cairo surface.
Maybe most of people don't know that GdkCairoContext, contrarily to cairo_t, is created against a cairo context not a cairo surface:

surface = cairo.ImageSurface (cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, pixbuf.get_width(), pixbuf.get_height())

cr = cairo.Context (surface)

gdkcr = gtk.gdk.CairoContext (cr)

gdkcr.set_source_pixbuf (pixbuf)

gdkcr.paint ()

Notice gtk.gdk.CairoContext (cr), which cr is not the surface. That's the key of the code snippet.

For instance this can be applied on a ClutterCairoTexture to render pixbufs in the canvas.

Awesome/other wrong keyboard layout

Hello,
due to the high resource usage by Eclipse (I have to use that unfortunately because of my professor) I've temporarly dropped GNOME and now I'm using Awesome for a while.

Ok let's say the problem: the keyboard. Do you have different languages, layouts and so on among several configurations (GNOME, X, ...) and your keyboard layout is messed up with awesome?
Just do it:

setxkbmap -layout YOURLAYOUT

Where YOURLAYOUT for me is it.

I've found this utility in this mailing thread. Yet you can read that awesome is still too young and lacks some keyboard configuration features.

Have fun!

JMF and MPEG

Hello,
I'm recently writing a game with Java AWT/Swing/SwingX/JMF for a university exam.
If you are using the Java Media Framework and most of the formats (all the well known and used formats) can't be handled by the library here's your definitive solution to the problem.
You will usually get "Unable to handle format: MPEG" or something like that.

How do you get rid of that and make things work? There's a great plugin named jffmpeg which handles a huge number of audio and video formats (including ogg/vob).
Just follow the instructions on the project website to install the plugins.

Alternatively you can register only the codec and demux you use from within your application code as follows (e.g. only handle MPEG video format on input):

Format[] inFormats = { new VideoFormat ("MPEG") };

PlugInManager.addPlugIn ("net.sourceforge.jffmpeg.VideoDecoder", inFormats, null, PlugInManager.CODEC);

PlugInManager.commit ();

FreeSpeak 0.3.0 has been released

FreeSpeak is a free (as in freedom, developed and released under the terms of GPL) frontend to online translator engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.). It is written in Python, it uses the GTK toolkit and some GNOME infrastructure features.

This is a major enhancemenfts release.



Overview of Changes from FreeSpeak 0.2.0 to FreeSpeak 0.3.0
===========================================================

* Project is now hosted at BerliOS.de: http://freespeak.berlios.de

* Support for cancellating operations has been added

* Translation suggestions (open-tran) have been added

* A menubar has been added and the toolbar has been cleaned up

* The behavior of language/translation selection has been fixed and improved

* GNOME documentation has been added

* Dependencies in the configuration have been cleaned up

* Support for global keybindings has been added through python-xlib

* An introduction widget for the main window has been created