Personal

Motivated by my friend KM here (sorry, Italian link), I decided to buy a Linksys NSLU2, a Micro-[en:NAS] based on [en:Linux]. Linksys (owned by Cisco) released since day one the source code of the tuned Linux Kernel, instantly allowing the Open Source community to hack this device in a million of ways. My requirements are very simple: I need to share something like 6 external HD using either Samba or FTP+HTTP. I first tried to use the “out-of-the-box” NSLU2 with the latest firmware, but it’s unable to manage more than 2 disks (on an HUB, it just see the first HDD attached). I then decided to use Debian/NSLU2, a very rich distribution for [en:ARM] that is just amazing. The only problem? It seems too much for an hardware like NSLU2, plus, after a normal apt-get dist-upgrade something related with [en:SELinux] and vsftpd happened and I didn’t managed to put it all back to work. I should have disabled selinux passing the parameter selinux = 0 to the Kernel at boot time but… there is no “easily modifiable” [en:Bootloader] to pass parameters to the kernel at boot time (at least, as far as I know). I suppose that I should modify the kernel, recompile and then re-flash it. Too much for something I want to finish in max 2 days. And the NSLU2 is slow. Very slow. It took something like 12 hours to make the full installation of Debian and flash re-flash the firmware. Besides, for what I need to do, it’s not worth it to do all this. ...

2.2 miles ~= 3.54 kms This time I was running with Luca: we pushed a bit the speed… but we practically died at the end of Blackfriars Bridge: still good, but next time I need to slow down to last more. Wish me good luck. I will run on the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge on July ;)

2.05 miles ~= 3.3 kms Today I took it a bit easy: John was with me and he has a problem with his knee, so we decided to do only 2 miles to start. Very beautiful day: looks like full summer, with a very strong sun smiling to us. We passed through a big festival/party/something in South Bank: a lot of people enjoying ice creams, watching shows and other stuff for kids. I tried to google for it, but I didn’t manage to know what’s going on up there.

2.79 miles ~= 4.49 kms Almost to 3 miles. On Monday we will see if I can do that.

Fancy $PS1 setting The code to make the Bash prompt looks like mine is (~/.bashrc): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 case $TERM in xterm*|rxvt*) TITLEBAR='\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]' ;; *) TITLEBAR="" ;; esac; PS1="${TITLEBAR}\n\[\033[0;0m\][\033[0;32m\]time: \ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\t\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-\ [\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]host: \[\033[0m\]\ \[\033[1;31m\]\h\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-\ [\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]user: \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\u\ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-[\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]bash: \ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\v\[\033[0;0m\]]\n\ \[\033[0;0m\][\[\033[0;32m\]cwd: \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\w\ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]# " Thanks to Bash Prompt HOWTO.

Yesterday, waiting for Morfeus (the God, not the Blue-Pill-Red-Pill Freak) to catch me and bring me to sleep. I had this movie in my beloved iPhone, “Lars and the Real Girl”. It’s pure gold. A movie about a guy, Lars (Ryan Gosling), who has a very strange mental disease, that needs a Girlfriend but is unable to catch-and-kiss the classical Next-Door-Girl (Kelli Garner) that loves him… also if she is aware of his sickness. ...

I was looking for info about [en:MapReduce] and I thought that would have been a good idea to take a look at the Tech Talks published by Google. Here we go. Title: 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Geographic Data Sets Location: Google Tech Talks June 23, 2007 Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google Inc. Abstract: MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle challenging distributed computing problems such as data distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the context of geographic data. ...

My iPhone is now more “mine” ;) I’ll proudly show you as soon as we meet. What? Ah, yeah. Thanks to PwnageTool from the GREAT DevTeam! Carry on guys! PS Yes, I’ll use it also with my Wind SIM ;)

Dopo che la Chiesa l’ha ammonito per essersi elevato al rango di “Salvatore”, si e’ auto proclamato Papa: potra’ ‘si farsi “Encicliche ad Personam” per permettere al Papa di rappresentare ufficialmente la reincarnazione di Cristo. […] A beautiful, romantic country of olive-dappled landscapes and cobblestoned piazzas famed for its food, fashion and bella figura, Italy is today a land awash in corruption, economic decay, political ennui, rampant impunity and a fast-declining standard of living. Inflation is among the highest in Western Europe, growth the lowest. Record numbers of people report feeling poorer than ever. […] ...

> Title: Matrix (11/04/2008) L'appello di Silvio Berlusconi Un mandrillo fino alla fine: lui che la TV italiana l’ha praticamente creata (a modo suo), e’ caduto sullo sgambetto di un suo stipendiato. Che bella figuraccia finale.