Why privacy matters by Glenn GreenwaldI am so sorry that I needed so much time before watching this wonderfully inspiring TED video.
I really admire Snowden, Greenwald and all the people that are fighting to denounce the dangerous path that we are following.
It’s time to take action, even the smallest one coubl make a difference. Maybe we don’t see the threat now, but we cannot now what will happen in the future. 1 min read -
Oct 19, 2014
Fix WiFi on OS X by tweaking the MTUAfter I had installed the first developer beta of Yosemite I started experiencing serious WiFi issues at home, with the connection dropping after few seconds of activity. Only apparent solution was to disable and reenable periodically the wifi until it started working.
The issue was not present whene I was in my office or using public wifi’s around. And removing the network setup to have them reset to default didn’t help. 3 min read -
Oct 15, 2014
On Advanced Functional ProgrammingIn few days, tomorrow if I’m not mistaken, you will be able to attend the new Erik Meijer’s introduction to Functional Programming on edX. If you have any interest in mathematics or programming, I am sure that this is something that you have to watch.
I am saying new because a similar course was held in 2010 by the same person, you can still watch it here: Erik Meijer’s MSDN Channel 9 lecture series on functional programming 2 min read -
Oct 15, 2014
Piping with SwiftLately I’ve been playing with Apple’s newborn Swift quite a lot. I have to say that I am really impressed, and except for few things that I hope will be smoothed in the next months (years?), I find Swift really enjoyable and readable.
However, there is one feature that I really miss. Something that I daily use with slightly different syntaxes in Sh, Haskell, Julia and Elixir: the pipe!
# Can we implement a kind of pipe in Swift? 4 min read -
Jun 16, 2014
Implementing Either type in SwiftIt has been only a couple of days since Apple announced and released Swift. It has possibly been the most important and interesting announcement of Apple in the last few years and started an amount of discussions around the web.
With the hours passing, we’ve found out that there was at least another Swift in the history of programming languages (with a similar icon) and that Swift is under development since 2010 and its father is Chris Lattner, creator of clang and LLVM. 3 min read -
Jun 4, 2014
Fix Hombrew on OS X YosemiteIf for some reasons you’ve been crazy enough to install the first developer beta of Mac OSX 10.01 Yosemite, you’ve probably noticed that Homebrew stopped working.
One possible fix is to delete homebrew and reinstall everything but I am too lazy and too attached to my list of installed packages to accept it.
The first error I’ve got while running brew update was related to missing system ruby 1.8. This appears because OSX finally updated to ruby 2. 2 min read -
Jun 3, 2014
Move to ghc 7.8.2 on MacOSXLately I’ve been playing with some functional languages: haskell, lisp (in particular the scheme dialect, see e.g. chicken or racket) and elixir (I very much like it and I really appreciate that it runs on the erlang VM).
Each of those has something pretty unique and I believe is very worth learning. I cannot stress how much material you can find both online and in libraries to learn them (except for elixir but its website does a really good job and there will be plenty of books very soon out) and how strong thay can change your way of programming. 6 min read -
Jun 1, 2014
Modern Art in SpaceWell… the title is a spoiler, but is this a painting? Are those falling meteors? What is that?
The first time I’ve seen it, out of context, I tought it was a crop of some decaying taken from LHC.
In fact, this is a picture coming from the Hubble Space Telescope. But a quite unusual one. Scientists suspects it’s the result of the choice of a bad reference point in space for tracking/stabilization. 1 min read -
Apr 20, 2014
Installing Scientific Python 3 libraries on OSX (and julia with IJulia)In a recent post, I tried to explain how to install scientific python libraries on OSX and get rid of the most common errors. In that case everythong I did was for python 2.7.
Yesterday I decided to fully move to python 3.4. I’ve removed my python installation via homebrew and with it all the installed packages.
Moving to python 3 is straightforward if you have done the procedure described in my previous post, it all really reduces to replace every occurrence of python in that post with python3 and every occurrence of pip with pip3. 4 min read -
Apr 15, 2014
Installing scientific python libraries on OSXFor a recent project, I had the necessity to install (or update) some of the scientific python libraries that I use for computation (and to avoit matlab). I was aware of a not too recent tutorial in regard that left me quit unhappy at the time, in particular I strongly disagree with their practice of changing OSX official symlinks to point at the new Python install.
Given that I am not alone in the project, I decided to write a short tutorial trying to include all the necessary steps for a successful installation of python, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, ipython and qutip. 4 min read -
Feb 19, 2014