Quite amazing…
35.000-core ubuntu server farm renders Avatar.
Quite amazing…
35.000-core ubuntu server farm renders Avatar.
A little shell script that I’ve used to generate the list of page composing a given site
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$#" -eq 2 ]
then
wget -erobots=off --mirror --delete-after --reject .jpg,.png,.gif,.swf,.css,.js,.txt,.pdf,.rtf,.odt,.doc $1 2>&1 |grep $1 |cut -d " " -f 4 |cut -d "?" -f 1 | sort | uniq > $2
rm -rf ${1#http://}
else
echo "Usage: ./scriptname http://testsite outputfile"
fi
Save with a desired file name and give it a chmod +x and then just launch from shell:
./scriptname http://testsite outputfile
My first action of 2010 has been the subscription as associate member to Free Software Foundation.
Have a long life Free Software!
Great comparison between Nokia Maemo and Google Android from point of view of user rights: http://cool900.blogspot.com/2009/10/comparing-freedom-on-maemo-and-android.html.
I agree with writer of this post that the winner is without any doubt Maemo.
So, choose Nokia in your next mobile phone 
As said here by Jeremy Allison, creator of SAMBA, also the mandrill of Devonlinux say no to Mono.
Software patents problem.
But the problem is that Mono is dangerous for Free Software. The heart of the matter is, as usual, software patents. Microsoft have patents on the technology inside .NET, and since the Tom Tom lawsuit, Microsoft have shown they are not averse to attacking Free Software using patent infringement claims.
Novell agreement with microsoft.
Miguel’s employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn’t a problem, for them.
And all others?
It is vitally important to the continued success of the community development model that one part of the community does not enter into an agreement which gives some people patent protection while leaving other people out in the cold. That is why I was so opposed to the patent agreements recently entered into by Novell, Xandros and other companies.
This one is reported by Andrew Tridgell, negotiator with Microsoft for Samba.
Update 26-12-2009
Other valid reasons to say no to mono, moonlight, microsoft and the traitor de icaza.
developer Tom “spot” Callaway, Engineering Manager and Red Hat legal expert at Fedora, made it clear that the Fedora project, sponsored largely by Red Hat, will continue to leave the software out. One of the reasons was that the new promise does not protect Linux distributors any more than the old one did.
Just a quick post about tesseract, a quite good solution for OCR under GNU/Linux (specifically Ubuntu Karmic Koala).
First install it trough apt-get
sudo apt-get tesseract-ocr
Install also your preferred language (in my case eng -> tesseract-ocr-eng and ita -> tesseract-ocr-ita).
Ok, we are ready to do some text recognition…
But, under Karmic Koala, there is a problem with tif image as reported by myself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tesseract/+bug/461177
The problem is due to a transparent alpha layer that some tif images have (investigation needed here…*), so before do text recognition is necessary to eliminate it, elsewhere tesseract will generate an empty file…
Just install imagemagick and from a shell do this steps:
convert inputimage.tif inputimage_tmp.pbm
convert inputimage_tmp.pbm inputimage_ok.tif
Original solution founded here.
Now we are finally ready to launch tesseract on our tif image.
Just do
tesseract inputimage_ok.tif outputfile
and tesseract will generate outputfile.txt with recognized text.
ps. The packaged version under karmic is 2.03 and not the last one, 2.04, that, as advised on this page, fixed it. So if you prefer, remove old version and install the new version from source.
* Solved. In Gimp is possible to remove the alpha layer. Just go to
Layer (Livello) -> Transparency (Trasparenza) -> Remove alpha layer (Rimuovi canale alpha)
In these months i have worked on an ecommerce project with a lot of products’ list. Since the customer had asked a carousel solution to show her products, we have chosen for jCarousel, an amazing plugin for jQuery.
jCarousel is great and highly configurable but it has a small lack: it does not remember the position of the carousel when a user came back to product list page after a quick view of a product detail.
I came out with a simple but practical solution that solves this problem using the support of cookies.
To do this we need few lines of Javascript. Read more…
A few day ago I began to use Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 beta on my laptop.
It’s look very fine and also work great but yesterday I’ve found a big problem for me and all developer that use Eclipse as preferred IDE.
The problem is that Eclipse Galileo doesn’t work right with the new version of gtk (gtk+ 2.18), and therefore all the Eclipse GUI is unusable.
In particular I’ve noted that click of mouse are not intercepted correctly and also some interface redraw (for example if I change perspective or move some bar) doesn’t work.
Now, this morning I’ve found the bug and also a workaround for the moment.
Just open a terminal, then give this command export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true and finally launch eclipse from the same terminal.
Open Source community it’s amazing!
Update
Now eclipse packaged in Ubuntu official repository work without above trick. Simply install eclipse 3.5.1-0ubuntu7 (or later) from the Ubuntu archive.
Eclipse version in the official eclipse site doesn’t work right yet. (See #28 in this bug for a complete explanation of this Eclipse bug)
Great article by Colin Guthrie, a Pulseaudio hacker (read it as developer), about the actual state of sound stack in GNU/Linux.
Many improvements are done to ALSA and now the code is better and cleaned in the kernel driver while the userspace library it’s rather complex, for backward compatibility. Pulseaudio, the sound server, go forward, and manage some new requirements of an actual multi-user, multi-source desktop environment, like, quote Colin:
So, GNU/Linux users stay calm and contribute everyone in your manner to the FLOSS world.
Also the sound stack is an a good state 
I have recently discovered Evolution Mirror, an interesting Thunderbird add-on that aims to mirror Thunderbird calendars to Evolution Data Server. This lets me to manage my calendars with Thunderbird as usual and to see my events in the Gnome Clock applet.
It is still in development but it is a great intitiative of Teester because it’s a good way to integrate Thunderbird with Gnome.
The plugin is written in Python, and it needs the python-evolution binding. Now i will explain you how to install it. I am using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 64 bit version.
Obviously you need on your system Thunderbird and its calendar extension: Lightning.
Open Synaptic and install these packages and their dependencies:
python2.5-dev, python-gtk2-dev, libecal1.2-dev, libgdk-pixbuf-dev, libebook1.2-dev
or using a terminal:
sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev python-gtk2-dev libecal1.2-dev \ libgdk-pixbuf-dev libebook1.2-dev
Download the evolution-python binding from Conduit site.
Open a terminal and digit:
tar zxvf evolution-python-0.0.4 cd evolution-python-0.0.4 ./configure make sudo make install
Well done, now evolution-python bindings are installed. Now download Evolution Mirror add-on and add it to your Thunderbird Add-ons.
Open Evolution, create an account. You have to do this because it creates some basic data such as the Personal calendar.
Now open your Thunderbird and start add Tasks or Events and you’ll see them on the Gnome Clock applet.
As i have already said, the plugin is still in development, for now it does not add events and tasks that has been already inserted before. It also merge all calendars’ data in one unique Evolution calendar. These are some missing but i think and hope that they will be fixed soon.
Anyway is a great work! I hope to have time to help the developer in this add-on, also because it will be very useful with my still-in-development tool called SyncIt. Take a look on my Trac to know something about it even if it is not updated and poorly documented.