Vortexmind: free your mind

Some news for all the World War II Aviation enthusiasts out there. As you may know, I’m the admin & webmaster of The Great Planes, a site dedicated to the best warbirds and aircrafts that fought during the last world war. Well, I’m proud to announce that the forum has been upgraded and expanded into The Great Planes Warbirds Community, a place where you can share your knowledge about the topic and discuss with other aviation enthusiasts. The board is free to join, you will discuss about historic planes and even modern jets.

In web application development, today we can get huge benefits by using frameworks, as they help with code reusing, generalization, templating and dealing with best pratices and design patterns.

While many people has moved toward Ruby on Rails, I’am more interested in learning Python, and using python-based frameworks. I’ve played a little with Django, but I was disappointed when I discovered that at present it doesn’t support multiple-fields primary keys in your data models. So I looked around a little and i stepped into Turbogears. It seems to me that this framework is undertaking a lot of refactoring, but it still seems to me a good choice because of its modularity and interchangeability (while Django is more monolithic as I can understand).

As I’m learning, I will write some tutorials about Turbogears, hoping next people will get some help with issues I’ve encountered. I must say that, while I have a strong education in IT and programming languages, I am not an experienced python programmer, but this is surely not a problem (at least, in this tutorial’s context ) . In this tutorial, I will show you a basic project setup: we will use Turbogears framework (1.0.4.4), Elixir (0.5.x) for data modeling & access, and Genshi for templating.
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Yup! I’ve tried it, but experiment has failed! It seems that installing 300 plugins in Mozilla Firefox causes a real mess to the poor software! The idea has come from Splasho (100 plugins) and CyberNotes (200 plugins). When I’ve read that, I immediately thought : Why not try to install 300? Read more about the experiment! Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick tips for all folks out there that are getting mad on this

Problem: if you are trying to install JINI in Gentoo Linux, after you downloaded the installer starter kit you may start it and find errors like this:

grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This seems to happen if you have compiled your glibc libraries with nptl and nptlonly USE flags. You will be unable to install JINI (and I have read that this problem could happen to other java installers. But there is an easy solution for this! Read the rest of this entry »

As seen on sanbaldo I’ve just discovered Review Me, one of the new thriving services that link together bloggers and advertisers. Taking the next step from targeted ads, Review Me let bloggers subscribe to thier network and get a popularity ranking for their blog, based on Technorati, Alexa and RSS readers stats. If your blog is accepted, you will get a pricing (derived from popularity stats) and then you could be contacted by advertisers to write a review of their products and/or services. So, you get paid for writing reviews. The idea is cool (not new, but cool): the only concern is about the review contents: as I get paid to write a review, you can think that my review will be biased. Even this post is a paid one, as Review Me let you write your first review on themselves. But guidelines on their website are pretty clear on this:

Can advertisers require a positive review?
We do not allow advertisers to require a positive review. The vast majority of reviews are measuredly positive, although many do contain constructive criticism. We view this as a bonus: how else can you quickly and cheaply get feedback on a product or service from influencers?

So, I must second sanbaldo’s negative feedback: why only 50% of the share goes to the blogger? My blog was rated 60$ , but I only take 50% on this (30$). I think that bloggers should get more of the cake, as we do the most important part in the system.
If you want to advertise your product/service on vortexmind just follow this link.

Since I opened my invite only flickr group Outstanding Shots, I was wondering about writing a program that could automatically sweep the pool searching for invited photos to speed up the moderation process (checking code, adding tags and so on). As I knew it could be done with flickr APIs, I was just waiting to find time to do this … but DrewMyers has already done a great work with his Invite Pool Sweepr application. It requires .NET framework and once installed you should give it proper authorizations (like any other flickr program), but it’s great! It saves me a lot of time and I can concentrate on photos instead of boring tagging and moderation duties You just have to set it with the proper codes you use for invitation, then you can let it run and sweep the pool (”pages” or “photos since date …”). It can also tag automatically photos with group tag, and provide many shortcuts to any other action you may take versus uninvited photos. Well, you should try it out! Keep in mind that is still a public beta version, so you should use it at your own risk! I have tried it and I’m satified with it!

(In fondo la traduzione in Italiano) Sandboxie is a nice little program that helps you protect your PC from the harms that could come from the internet. What is a sandbox? Essentially, it means that you are running programs in a virtual environment that is “separated” from the physical environment, thus any operation you do while you are in a sandbox is not going to impact on your system. For example, many network administrators may decide to maitain a “sandbox” PC in the LAN: this way, they can send and execute there potentially harmful programs, so that they cannot damage the sensible nodes of the network. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’m getting back on programming, I’m currently re-skilling myself on this duty. Having not programmed Java in a while, I’ve found myself on trouble on this simple topic: Java concurrency and threads. I will insert on the blog some “quick tutorials” about various subjects. I’ve found that programmers sometimes need a fast solution on a given problem. They could surely get it by looking at the API’s and so on, but it costs valuable time. So I will go straight to the problem.

• Problem: I need to do a fixed job on some data in a parallel fashion.
• Solution: using a multi-threaded model, I have two classes Controller and Worker. Worker is essentially a thread that does the fixed job and reports the data to the Controller
• Main issues: is it better to “extends Thread” or to” implements Runnable“? How to accessing shared variables concurrently and avoid race conditions? How to pass data from Worker to Controller?

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Actual UNIX commands and responses…

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% got a light?
No match.

% sleep with me
bad character

% man: Why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% rm God
rm: God nonexistent

% make ‘heads or tails of all this’
Make: Don’t know how to make heads or tails of all this. Stop.

% make sense
Make: Don’t know how to make sense. Stop.

% make mistake
Make: Don’t know how to make mistake. Stop.

% make bottle.open
Make: Don’t know how to make bottle.open. Stop.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

% make light
Make: Don’t know how to make light. Stop.

% date me
You are not superuser: date not set

% man rear
No manual entry for rear.

% [Where is Chandra Levy?
Missing ]

% “How does Gary Condit rate as a liar?
Unmatched ”

% If I had a ) for every dollar Reagan spent, what would I have?
Too many )’s.

% * How would you describe Bill Clinton
*: Ambiguous.

% %Vice-President
%Vice-President: No such job.

% “How would you rate Reagan’s senility?
Unmatched “.