ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

After my cool non-sense story about Android 5 I wanted to get back again to the Altoids theme and expand a bit on it.

Some interesting and inspiring things I stumbled upon this month:

I was having a hard time getting the Acer C110 USB pico projector work when connected to the BeagleBone Black, it wasn't showing up on the USB bus at all, no sign of it in the kernel messages and consequently no sign of it in lsusb.

Tweeper is a web scraper which extracts the most recent public tweets of a given user from their home page on Twitter.com and formats them in RSS, so the information can be conveniently accessed and collected by a feed reader.

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.