ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, attacchi teoristici

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.

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.

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.

No matter how much careful we are when writing code, whatever changes we are making to a piece of software we must test them before production, even Donald Knuth once said: Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. :).

Moreover, if the software we are working on is targeting an embedded system and needs cross-compilation and depends on other software, then testing can be more tedious: we have to prepare patches/archives and instruct the target SDK to pick our latest code, or we could code directly in the SDK working tree, but that would not be very clean. If you use git and OpenEmbedded there is a very neat way to build directly from our own working directory on the filesystem.