A fractal spectrum of tales

• Modern Art in Space

  Well… 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. Quoting from the official page:

  
  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 OSX

  For 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
• The Day We Fight Back

  Today, 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 channel

  Few 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. Not even the small discussion apart the very light hearted: “It’s been always known that they control everybody”.

  
  2 min read - Feb 5, 2014
• 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

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