The Day We Fight BackToday, 11th of February 2014 (anniversary of Aaron Swartz death) a lot of national and international organizations are showing a black banner with a big text saying: the Day We Fight Back.
Mass surveillance, like that conducted by the NSA, is always illegal. Privacy is a fundamental human right, and is central to the maintenance of democratic societies. It is essential to human dignity and it reinforces other rights, such as freedom of expression and information, and freedom of association, and is recognised under international human rights law. 7 min read -
Feb 11, 2014
The pale blue dot from Mars (and more)In 1990 the Voyager 1, already at 6 billion kilometers from us, turned around to take a picture of our little world from the boundary of the solar system (thanks Carl Sagan for making it happen).
The picture, in which the Earth is just about as big as 0.12 pixels, was named Pale Blue Dot and I really suggest you to have a look at its Wikipedia Page to know something more about it. 3 min read -
Feb 7, 2014
Edward Snowden interviewed by the NDR channelFew days ago the German TV Channel NDR did an exclusive interview with Edward Snowden.
I find it quite interesting, both for getting to know Snowden and have a fast overview of many of the scandals that were made public by some of the published leaks.
I was very disappointed the last time I went back home in Italy to know that nobody cared and almost nobody knew about what was and is happening. 2 min read -
Feb 5, 2014
Ghost 0.4.0 is outand the ghost update script has been updated to mirror the changes in the update procedure. You can find it here: https://gist.github.com/mseri/7059958
Updates for purity to support all the new features are going to be released very soon.
As you can read from the official announcement, the new release of Ghost comes with a huge amount of features and updates:
Static pages. You can now toggle any post to be a “page” from within your post settings menu. 1 min read -
Jan 13, 2014
Convert djvu files to a decently small pdfDespite there are few decent djvu readers, they are not as comfortable as the pdf readers. Moreover, it is not really possible to open djvu files in eInk ebook readers.
Additionally, if you have ever tried to convert djvu files to pdf (or ps), you should have noted that the output is either corrupted or unbelievably big.
There is an hack that could come in help. Open your .bashrc (or . 1 min read -
Dec 22, 2013
Again on zshI already wrote about the great pleasure of moving to zsh in a previous post, but I feel that I should update you on the progresses.
From the last time I moved from Oh-My-Zsh to Prezto, a different dotfiles framework. I’ve found it much lighter and faster than oh-my-zsh, despite not having the same amount of plugins and themes.
In fact, as far as I understood, prezto was born as a fork of oh-my-zsh and was later completely rewritten to be more zshish and better optimised. 4 min read -
Dec 18, 2013
Shasumming files in rubyComputing SHA-* hashes of files in ruby is in principle very easy.
You can either use the OpenSSL module or the digest one and the sytax is almost interchangeable. I am using the digest module just because it seems to be slightly faster (I timed it and on my machine it takes few milliseconds less).
My first code was
require 'digest' filename = '/path/to/the/file' Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(File.read(filename)) Then I made the hashes for a folder containing files of different sizes. 2 min read -
Dec 13, 2013
Brute force attacks and fail2banEven a nearly unkown server like mine receives every day a number of brute force attacks. Usually I have an instance of fail2ban monitoring the logs of all my services and readily banning the attackers after few attempts.
Not tonight…
Let’s move a step backwards. What is fail2ban and how does it work?
Reaching out the home page of the software you can read
Fail2ban scans log files and bans IPs that show the malicious signs - too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc. 3 min read -
Dec 12, 2013
On iTerm2 and solarized darkThis weekend I’ve spent some time to understand Z Shell. I admit that I’ve should have done it ages ago. I actually regret not having done it ages ago, I would have saved a lot of time.
Moving your .bashrc to your new .zshrc is almost just copy and paste. And you suddently find yourself with a shell that makes you feel in the future!
If you additionally install oh my zsh, the only thing that your shell will be missing is the capability of making coffee. 2 min read -
Dec 7, 2013
On the differential logistic equationThis fall I am teaching Mathematical Methods for Scientist. This week we started to talk about differential equations and for the lecture I was looking for an example of a broadely used first order ODE: my final choice has been the logistic equation.
It is a fairly simple differential equation that is used to describe the growth (and saturation) of populations in environments with competition for limited resources. Before entering into more details I think it’s time to digress slightly and talk about something simpler. 4 min read -
Dec 6, 2013