ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

Some funteresting stuff I've run into in the past months:

Writing even a simple multi-threaded program is a complex problem, synchronization issues are always around the corner, causing race conditions which can lead to deadlock or resource starvation; and the stress of not being sure that our program works correctly is another component of the complexity.

Some relative of mine forgot the password to access their e-mail account, but they were still remembering the pattern they used to pick it up, and that pattern could be easily represented by a regular expression. They did not have a backup email address to be able to use the password-reset mechanism.

A blood pressure meter with a USB port happened to land into my hands, only Windows was supported for downloading data to a PC, and I wanted to see how the device interacted with the software and try to “free” it so that it could be used elsewhere.

I've uploaded a simple wrapper around sudo, for executing commands as another user with full access to the X display (GLX works too); I call it xudo.

I've put on-line a brief tutorial of my first experiences with Android apps from the command line interface, IDEs are just not really in my line.

Some interesting stuff I've run into in the past months:

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C. C is simple, and I surely like simplicity.

I use RSS/Atom feeds a lot, they are a relatively efficient way to follow stuff around the web, and they are also privacy-friendly tools to a certain degree: I can follow my friends and family on Youtube, Flickr, and even Twitter (at least as long as API 1.0 is up and running, bah...), without having to explicitly tell the companies behind those sites whom I am friend with. Privacy is not only about “what you do”, but also about “whom you know”.

Have you ever typed suod instead of sudo? I do that quite often; maybe I am becoming typing dixleysc, who knows.

Support for the Digicom Digitune-S DVB-T USB stick will land in linux 3.9, the patch I sent was accepted along with other small refactorings.

Attached files: 

Firmware for the vp7049 DVB-T USB stick

Digicom Digitune-S UsbSnoop dump