A fractal spectrum of tales

• Ghost 0.4.0 is out

  and 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. This will remove it from your post feed. About / Contact / Terms galore!
  • Unsaved changes notifications. We’ll now give you a heads up when you’re about to lose unsaved changes. So you can, you know, save.
  • Featured posts. You can now mark posts as featured, and style them accordingly from within your theme.
  • Sexy new loading bar. Always know when Ghost is doing something, a little blue bar crawls across the screen to let you know!
  • Quick edit post urls. You can now slap /edit/ on the end of any post URL and, boom, you’re editing it.
  • Date based permalink support. If you like that kind of thing.
  • SSL support and a more secure password reset process.
  • Over 100 bugfixes and minor improvements!
  • Much, much more

  Don’t waste time. Update your ghost!!

  
  1 min read - Jan 13, 2014
• Convert djvu files to a decently small pdf

  Despite 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 .zshrc if you use Zsh) and define this new alias (i.e. add this line somewhere, say at the end of the file)

  
  1 min read - Dec 22, 2013
• Again on zsh

  I 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 ruby

  Computing 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. For some reasones I checked them with shasum and with my great surprise I’ve discovered that some hashes (namely the ones related to files bigger than few hundred megabytes) were wrong! Remarkably, the same happened with different SHA functions, and using openssl.

  
  2 min read - Dec 13, 2013
• Brute force attacks and fail2ban

  Even 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. Generally Fail2Ban then used to update firewall rules to reject the IP addresses for a specified amount of time, although any arbitrary other action (e.g. sending an email, or ejecting CD-ROM tray) could also be configured. Out of the box Fail2Ban comes with filters for various services (apache, curier, ssh, etc).

  
  3 min read - Dec 12, 2013

• On iTerm2 and solarized dark

  This 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. The official description is literally true:

  
  2 min read - Dec 7, 2013
• On the differential logistic equation

  This 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
• Deploying Anchor CMS on OpenShift

  Some of you may already know that installing ghost on OpenShift is extremely easy (and free). You can check this post if you don’t believe me.

  I was wandering how is it with other small and less known CMS. Given that I was already making some local tests with [Anchor CMS](https://anchorcms.com" _target=“blank) for a friend, and given that there is almost nothing around about its deployment on Open Shift I decided to give it a try and write about it.

  
  8 min read - Nov 8, 2013
• The beauty of mathematics

  After having watched this video I hope you will agree with Bertrand Russell:

  "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music."

  — Bertrand Russell

  And this is just a scratch of the surface of the mysterious wonderful world that is hiding behind those fascinating symbols.

  A video by Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux.

  
  1 min read - Nov 5, 2013
• A great workaround for targeting links in Ghost

  When I am reading something, I hate to click on some link (that I will supposedly read later) and be redirected to the new page. I’d rather prefer the links to open in background in a new tab.

  You may say that it is enough to click while pressing Command or Control and the page will be opened in a background tab, but it’s not the same. What if I accidentally click for example?

  
  2 min read - Oct 29, 2013

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6