ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

I was getting messages like the following form the MTA of my ISP(Alice/Telecom Italia) when sending email to some addresses:

I've added an IPv6 Greeter block on ao2.it in order to greet the IPv6 users, and to inform the others about the existence of the new protocol.

RAI, the Italian public radio/TV broadcaster, is using Silverlight and Smooth Streaming to serve most of the media content on its website, Smooth Streaming is the Microsoft interpretation of Adaptive Streaming technology over HTTP, which was firstly introduced by Apple for its mobile platform; check out the IIS Smooth Streaming Technical Overview for further details on Smooth Streaming.

It looks like Santa came early this year.

KernelLabs sponsored me for a Kinect sensor device unit so I can experiment writing a Linux kernel driver for it.

So in the next weeks I'll be working on a gspca driver for this device. For now the code is going to be hosted in the gspca_kinect repository, as an out of kernel module, this will ease compile/test cycle; if it comes out that changes are needed to gspca itself, then I'll decide whether hosting these changes as patches, or switching to a kernel clone repository; suggestions will be welcome. The driver is working already, but currently you can just use the sensor as a normal WebCam.

I had this raw audio stream in a file, with no header, just the encoded data, but I knew the data properties from somewhere else than the file; in order to make any media player to recognize and play the audio data I decided to rebuild a WAV header for it, that worked fine, even for a compressed audio format.

Lately I've been fixing some defects in the hidraw interface in the Linux kernel (commits d20d5ff and e42dee9), simple issues like these NULL pointer dereference are a good example to show how to analyze a Linux bug trace in order to spot the defective code. So let's take a look.

I was looking for a way to search raw content (before input filters are applied) in my Drupal blog using regular expressions, à la grep; I googled to see what other people had come up with to solve the same problem and I found an article about Searching the Drupal Database by Regular Expression, which pointed also to the scanner module, however those solutions have both some limitations: ad-hoc Drupal scripting, only MySQL supported, and I didn't want to have a module installed for that anyways; so I tried the Drush way and I found it the most convenient one.

When submitting a patch for review we want our readers/reviewers to be able to read it as easily as possible, and when you make changes to code involving some definitions in a header file you definitely want header files to be listed first in the patch, so that the reader can follow the changes to the code logic knowing already the new definitions.

Changing the order of files in a patch can be done very easily using the -Oorderfile option offered by some git commands.

Some days ago I bought this USB Hard Drive and when I first plugged it in, the mounted filesystem showed up in the File Manager with a custom icon, so I thought I could use my own custom icon instead and it turned out to be quite easy.

Recently both OSnews and Slashdot pointed out some experiments about context-aware UIs done by Christian Giordano at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux), and the first results are somewhat interesting. As you can see in the good video demo from the original article the effects are nothing mind blowing, but they serve greatly to illustrate the concept, and by building on that something more useful would come out eventually.

That reminds me of another (never realized) old idea of mine from when I was attending the Operating System course at the university, I wanted to bind system responsiveness —at a lower level— to user presence, by tuning scheduler parameters according to the user being at his/her computer or not.