General on dennogumi.org

Out with the old, in with the new (??)

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: this article contains anime-style AI generated illustrations. If that bothers you… feel free to stop reading (although you might miss out… or not?).

Leave of absence?
#

Soo… the last post here was approximately four (or was it five?) years ago. What the heck happened?

An art-challenged individual's perspective on AI (anime) generated art

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:17:41 +0100

You might have heard it in the past few months: some areas of the Internet are buzzing with discussions on “generative art”, that is, artwork generated from “AI” models that were fed with an absurdly large amount of images as training as a base. There are supporters, there are critics, and techology advances: among all this, this post offers my humble experience with computer-generated imagery.

In this post, you’ll be guided by Yumiko, Satsuki, and Maya: the first two are characters created by someone else I know (who wants to remain anonymous) which I then expanded, cooperating with their creator in a certain project from a few years ago; the latter is… well, a character with an interesting history, which will be explained later.

Setting up Let's Encrypt certificates for the 389-ds LDAP server

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 21:04:52 +0200

In the past months I’ve set up LDAP at home, to avoid having different user accounts for the services that I run on my home hardware. Rather than the venerable OpenLDAP I settled for 389 Directory Server, commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server, mainly because I was more familiar with it. Rather than describing how to set that up (Red Hat’s own documentation is excellent on that regard), this post will focus on the steps required to enable encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

Partings

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:19:33 +0100

Because changes occur when one least expects them. This post is about one such change.

DIY KVM over IP with pikvm

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 09:19:47 +0100

(Note: this post also appears in Planet KDE and Planet openSUSE because I thought this might be interesting to others)

As I mentioned in some other posts, I have a small “server” which I use as a NAS to provide archiving for photos and other files of interest. As it runs in a remarkably small (and quiet) enclosure, I’ve managed to put it in an incospicuous part of the room it is in. For the most part, it runs without a hitch: but in some (rare) occasions it needs to be looked at, and sometimes either logging via SSH is not possible, or it is not enough to diagnose the problem. In other words, I need to check what’s on the display. And the position it is in means that attaching a monitor and a keyboard can be inconvenient at best. In other words, I needed out-of-band management.

Quick tips: Server Name Indication for internal domains with Turris Omnia

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 01:05:17 +0100

Omnia?
#

The Turris Omnia is quite a nice (although a little pricey) OpenWRT-based router from CZ.NIC. It provides a fairly powerful CPU, relatively unconstrained eMMC space, and quite a lot of hackability (some revisions even have GPIO ports to play with). It runs a modified version of OpenWRT, named TurrisOS.

The problem
#

A few years ago, I built a custom NAS for my storage needs, using a cheap Intel SoC (J1900 chipset) and a (much pricier) mini-ITX small form factor server tower. While I want it to be primarily a NAS, I wanted to run a few services on it, for example Nextcloud or Pymedusa. Of course, in these days it’s better to use HTTPS, and the process is both cheap and fast using Let’s Encrypt. I also wanted to use SNI with multiple subdomains (files.example.com, medusa.example.com, etc.) pointing to the same internal LAN IP (because some of the software I used is much harder to set up with subpaths of a single domain).

Fixed comments

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 02:14:57 +0100

The migration happened and well… it turns out that it was not as smooth as I expected. In particular, comments weren’t working at all due to a filesystem permission on the database (which meant nothing would get written at all). That is now fixed. Sorry for the problems.

To add problems over problems, I had a hardware failure (RAID card) last June, which wrecked the root filesystem and I had to reinstall everything from scratch. When I looked back to recover the last comment backup… Well… it wasn’t being backed up. I was able to recover the ones up to 2015-2016 or so because I had still my old Disqus export laying around.

Refreshed look

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:30:09 +0100

You might have noticed that the blog has a markedly different look than before. It has not only changed visually, but also under the hood. This (brief) post summarizes the reasons behind the change.

Why?
#

Simply put, the previous solution was unmaintainable. “But,” you might say, “it was a static site generator! How could it become unmaintainable?”.

New server: away from Kolab

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 23:47:42 +0000

Yesterday I finally flipped the switch on the MX record and moved to a new server (still aptly named after another character from アキハバラ電脳組). The machine was found through Hetzner’s server auctions and has quite a good configuration for the price paid:

Intel Xeon CPU E31245 @ 3.30GHz
16G ECC RAM (ECC was the deciding factor)
LSI Hardware RAID 1 with two 3x2T disks

Now, since the old server has been chugging along since 2011, the 5 eurocent question is why did you move at all? It turns out there were a pretty good number of reasons (to me, at least).

Hack of the day: extracting comments from Nicovideo

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 23:07:42 +0000

Header image credit: 1840151sudarshan (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)

A while ago I posted a way to download 実況動画 from Nicovideo. One of my acquaintances publishes videos there, and he wanted to collect the various comments to reply in a follow up video (what the Nico users call the コメント返し). When the comments are more than just a few, it’s hard to find where they refer to without watching them on Nicovideo itself, and its UI is suboptimal. Ideally one would check comments ordered by their position in the video. There are existing programs but their user interface is utterly confusing at best. This called for something simpler, and that’s what I tried to do.

Hack of the day: downloading VOICEROID実況 from Nicovideo

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 23:15:48 +0000

実況? Is it something edible?
#

In recent times, I’ve been watching a lot of VOICEROID実況 (じっきょう, jikkyou, literally “commentary”) videos from the rather famous (in Japan) video service ニコニコ動画, better known as “Nicovideo”. In this case, the commentary actually refers to games: they’re basically a Japanese version of the Let’s Play videos that are all around other places like YouTube.

Announcing a new project

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 21:00:00 +0000

If you look through this blog’s archives, you may notice that although Free and Open Source Software is what I write most about, it is not the exclusive topic. I’ve written on science (my day job) as well as other interests. And today I’d like to lift the wraps on another project which I take part on, unrelated to the above.

Notice for those who read my blog coming from FOSS aggregators like Planet KDE: this is fairly different than most recent topics from me, so be warned before you continue reading.

The Big Forum Cleaning

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 20:32:06 +0000

In the past week, the KDE Community Forums administrators had been discussing how to improve the current forum layout. There are a few reasons in favor of a reorganization. First of all, to reflect better what KDE is (a community that produces software). Secondly, to provide a better organinzation for all kinds of people: those that require support, those that offer support, and those who want to contribute. All of this within a (hopefully) logical structure.

GPG transition statement

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 14:39:58 +0000

(Inspired by http://viccuad.me/blog/GPG-transition-statement/)

This exact same text can be found at this location.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Sun Jun  7 14:12:39 CEST 2015

For a number of reasons, i've recently set up a new OpenPGP key, and
will be transitioning away from my old one.

The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but i prefer all
future correspondence to come to the new one.  I would also like this
new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust.  This message is
signed by both keys to certify the transition.

the old key was:

pub   rsa4096/6E1A4E79 2009-05-11
      Key fingerprint = CBD6 EEE3 7132 027A A237  9659 013F A50B 6E1A 4E79

And the new key is:

pub   rsa4096/A29D259B 2015-06-05 [expires: 2016-06-04]
      Key fingerprint = DBC1 07DC 8601 B275 835F  9178 FBE5 5AED A29D 259B

To fetch the full key (including a photo uid, which is commonly
stripped by public keyservers), you can get it with:

  wget -q -O- https://www.dennogumi.org/A29D259B.txt | gpg --import -

Or, to fetch my new key from a public key server, you can simply do:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key A29D259B

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:

  gpg --check-sigs A29D259B

If you don't already know my old key, or you just want to be double
extra paranoid, you can check the fingerprint against the one above:

  gpg --fingerprint A29D259B

If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the UIDs match
what you expect, I'd appreciate it if you would sign my key:

  gpg --sign-key A29D259B

Lastly, if you could upload these signatures, i would appreciate it.
You can either send me an e-mail with the new signatures (if you have
a functional MTA on your system):

  gpg --armor --export A29D259B | mail -s 'OpenPGP Signatures' lbeltrame at kde.org

Or you can just upload the signatures to a public keyserver directly:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key A29D259B

Please let me know if there is any trouble, and sorry for the
inconvenience.

Regards,
        Luca Beltrame
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJVdDmaAAoJEAE/pQtuGk55uKoP/1orTlEgSNC7HCIJECkkBxqR
F64VMegugEFIe2nUyTf13wjtMDXluCy6hpY7+3iaOAHfMFBCOlPe0INrUTiuqwir
GnP/PQyzXU41yDqd7ytvNKqV8UkkW6NBcL7vCx810zSbnxpSV5L1N8dDy3GG5ZkE
iUm5AH+JJHzZGA7Cn90aA5VcemGCTu5buoJTu2rWWU4ahm3WMHnpuUsYP2mCNnU3
EOc94jlayqiLUTsnjTbpiPbJ7mcxBoufhjg1RHI5uK9BU5db8aUI619nGlTdvHHE
pZ4rXYWJqAhjeuDPmAk8poIeITi8qdiY5W5UibajhV2OchAuyOBGYv/Cddx36Xnk
rUyxlupZsWXriqo79+DgXsVjTgzBjCpkz+QVnBlq3rboXpgpCh6mZWoECGPBj8dN
E0uqsO5CmDxwYv1Yv3EpTvn2rf00pKEAUTq6cfEZAZ7ZhZih7XQdB4qlve4GD8M0
42wQUpFiyRiV0WrXEjN/EyrI0CiY9Rt/wNj+JLKC7NhELyC0q4oRzjvYCJdZHMhH
ydM8YiyWVOLUX5b3Y5xqlmRwPQydmjrGv2NAI7y4z0k1yc9pn/K4m5z2sxTunmQk
jaYxQ5DkQMpoSxaIYxmAYC5vjAa7U5nlg43sfiaQHa2RCUu+THTwFJaBOd0qYR7P
I++SIct+OFU9lnwQkjgyiQEcBAEBCgAGBQJVdDmcAAoJEEDIKBSTsBwWBw4H/RBP
40aLWMqRX3imEIg3jCBmtj9fsPn3OM+D8drF1v5vq2cQHGZcwqLnnaxP9KrZA06A
5/o0ofuqY5dg4jukPWjvqx6hsUlUbEpcJVV9eg0XIlmluaUPc6eVopLJOL0bhYi8
2zk4GLZiiGt7asoJ/rjhQg0BR4aajNALw1wF1pk4oQlm68M5PfjDu9voEd6vg6nv
tILBnEGzJjgiOnXHzHcld7+MG1Kut9EmFNTNNgDasLw7HenGTHt9G/rJq5mSwPZY
0Btd7yJ/cbBlCmyC3OIViN2bd+gCeF5HYtVNyMomMaM/0yunqi9ioMxWFaGrmY1d
JJF3TtQUDXrgOoXUlD0=
=4Yho
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Isso for comments

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 12:04:58 +0000

As I said in my latest post, I wasn’t very happy with using Disqus to store my comments, mainly because I do not want my data to be hosted by someone else. Thanks to some commenters, I was made aware of an alternative, called isso.

After reading the online documentation, I decided to set it up with dennogumi.org. It was all a matter of creating a new user called isso, setting a virtualenv to its home dir, and then installing isso itself and uWSGI:

Dynamically static

Sat, 30 May 2015 09:52:40 +0000

Since 26th December 2005, I’ve been runnning this blog with Wordpress. At the time there were little alternatives and finally I had got hold of a host (Dreamhost, at the time) that supported PHP and MySQL without being overly restrictive. 10 years later, things have somehow changed.

The issue
#

The main reason lies in how Wordpress has evolved over time: no, I’m not speaking about the subjective “bloat”, but the fact that it’s been moving towards a full-blown CMS, which is not what I have in mind to run my blog. Also, performance with many plugins had somehow worsened, in particular when accessing things like the administration interface. Not to mention that plugins itself are still somewhat fragile, and upgrade could still cause harm to your whole site. Lastly, the mere fact that I had to use plugins to lessen the performance impact was off-putting.

Plasma 5 live images for openSUSE and on the default openSUSE desktop

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 08:35:43 +0000

A lot has been happening on the KDE side of openSUSE… this post summarizes what’s been going on so far.

Live media for Plasma 5
#

One of the most-often requested ways to test Plasma 5, given it can’t be coinstalled with the 4.x Workspace, is the availability of live images to test either in VM or bare metal without touching existing systems.

Danbooru Client 0.2.0 released

Sun, 22 Feb 2015 20:38:02 +0000

After my previous post, development went quicker than expected, so I’ve actually managed to get a real version out. ;) So without much ado… here’s Danbooru Client 0.2.0!

This redesigned C++ version brings a few more features compared to the PyKDE4 version, notably:

Infinite scrolling (experimental) - Just scroll down to load the next set of posts
QML-based thumbnail view

Click on the image below to have a demonstration of what’s in this release (warning: 2M GIF file):

Latest 4.13, newest 4.14 beta and Plasma 5 in openSUSE

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 05:43:49 +0000

Congratulations to KDE (of which I’m proud of being a part of) for the newest release of the Plasma workspace! At the same time, the 4.x series has seen a new beta release, and the stable branch got updated, too.

I’m betting a few people will ask “Are these available for openSUSE?” and of course the answer is yes, thanks to the efforts of the openSUSE community KDE team and the Open Build Service.

Notes to self: nginx Piwigo rewrite rules

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 08:31:57 +0000

This was inspired by this forum thread on the Piwigo forums. Set up rewrite rules in nginx where “piwigo” is the path the gallery lies in:

location @rewrite {
    rewrite ^/piwigo/picture((/|$).*)$ /piwigo/picture.php$1 last;
    rewrite ^/piwigo/index((/|$).*)$ /piwigo/index.php$1 last;
    # The following is needed for batch operations which use i.php
    rewrite ^/piwigo/i((/|$).*)$ /piwigo/i.php$1 last;
}

location /piwigo {
    index index.php;
    try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite;
}

location ~ ^(?<script_name>.+?\.php)(?<path_info>/.*)?$ {
    try_files $script_name = 404;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include fastcgi_params;
}

Lastly, add the relevant information to the Piwigo configuration (LocalFiles editor):

Unlocking KWallet with PAM

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 09:02:06 +0000

Requests to unlock KWallet automatically on login (assuming the wallet password and user password are the same), like gnome-keyring can do, have been going on for years: in fact, bug reports requesting this feature are quite old. Recently, thanks to the efforts of Alex Fiestas, a PAM module, which interfaces KWallet to the system authentication methods, has been developed. In parallel, the necessary glue code has been also added to the various parts of the KDE workspace so that it could make use of it.

Accessing Casio EX-WORD 電子辞書 from Linux

Wed, 01 May 2013 19:33:17 +0000

I’m a (happy!) owner of a Casio EX-WORD Dataplus 5 XD-A4700, a Japanese electronic dictionary. Recently I looked into updating the Japanese-English dictionary (currently the Shogakukan PROGRESSIVE dictionary) installed, because it’s not good enough: too often when looking up odd sentences (like the ones in Fate/Extra CCC) I do not find any matches.

EDICT is adequate, and while I can use it on my phone and tablet, I like the fact that the EX-WORD has a physical keyboard along with the stylus, and a very nice kanji handwriting recognition. After a bit of looking, I found the 5th Edition of the New Kenkyusha dictionary, offered as microSD card, to be what I needed (but a bit pricey, 10,500 yen on Amazon, and that’s heavily discounted!).

Test the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 and KDE Workspace, Applications and Platform 4.10 RC2

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:38:45 +0000

Following up on my previous post, a different type of image has been made by the openSUSE KDE community members. In particular, alin has created images sporting the same software from KDE (4.10 RC2) but using the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 as base.

Download links:

32 bit version
64 bit version
Release directory (in case the above links go 404; the files are named KDE4-.4.10.RC2-Live)

These images are provided not only to test 4.10 in openSUSE, but also to test part of the distribution itself, without touching existing systems. Should you encounter a bug, please report it as follows:

Just finished - Kami Jigen Game Neptune V

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 13:12:14 +0000

A few days ago I finally completed (after about 3 months) 神次元ゲームネプテューヌV, or “Kami Jigen Game Neptune V”, the latest instalment from Compile Heart in the Neptune franchise of PS3 games. It took quite a while (approximately 3 months), and I think it’s about time to wrap things up.

Making KDE applications Python 3 friendly

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:00:57 +0000

When I’m not on forum duty or handling openSUSE-related contributions, I try to improve my code contributions to KDE, even though I’m by no means an experienced programmer (I program all day long in Python, but I’m still a biologist after all). For the upcoming 4.10 release I’ve been polishing up Python 3 support.

As you may know, Python 3 isn’t the standard in many distributions (Arch Linux excluded), but despite the slow start, it is slowly gaining steam. PyKDE4 was built keeping in mind Python 3 support, so theoretically we supported it right from the start.

openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:52:04 +0000

Like everything, openSUSE is not perfect. Bugs crop here and there, or there is missing / quirky functionality that users may run into. Being a distribution of heterogeneous software, this means that bugs fall into these categories:

Upstream bugs in the software shipped by openSUSE
Bugs in the packaging
Bugs in distribution-specific setups or that derive from interactions with these setups (e.g. kernel, low level software stack, etc.)

To improve the distribution and to act like good FOSS citizens, distribution bugs need to be divided from upstream bugs: the former need to be properly fixed by openSUSE, the latter need to be communicated upstream so that everyone would benefit when they are fixed, including our favorite green distro.

What's cooking for KDE in openSUSE 12.3 - theming

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 13:04:20 +0000

Although the release of openSUSE 12.3 is yet to come, the people of the openSUSE community contributing to KDE are already at work to bring the best possible KDE experience for the new release.

Of Brainstorm, ideas and seeking help

Sun, 27 May 2012 16:01:28 +0000

Many of you know that KDE Brainstorm ideas aren’t posted straight away: they are always pre-screened to avoid repetitions, features that cannot be implemented technically, violations of the Code of Conduct, and so on. This is possible thanks to the work of the Idea Moderators, that patrol Brainstorm and evaluate the new ideas being posted.

Recently, a few of them got too busy and thus we’re experiencing a backlog of ideas staying in the Vault (the staging area for evaluation) for longer times than usual. The existing staff is already quite busy, so despite the efforts some deficencies still remain.

Want to make KDE Brainstorm more useful?

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:11:34 +0000

The recent post by Dario on the KDE Workspace Vision raised some concerns on why Brainstorm was not used. One commenter even said _Right now it feels like “Throw an idea over a wall for no-one but end users to discuss until it bitrot’s”. _

_
_

The Brainstorm section is indeed in need of help. To make it more useful, a couple of things are needed:

Statistics to evaluate which ideas are best representative: it can’t be just the number of votes per se as there are things like confirmation bias or controversies that may inflate the numbers
Integration with Bugzilla: a way to automatically (using XML-RPC) send the ideas flagged as representative to a bug report filed under “wishlist”. As it stands, the current forum team has not the time to carry out these tasks. But perhaps someone from the community can. If you thought you could not contribute because KDE was all about C++ and not about web languages, this is your chance to contribute: if you have PHP /HTML/web knowledge and want to help, hop on the #kde-www IRC channel and we’ll be happy to help you.

Unexpected Christmas gifts: THE IDOLM@ASTER

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:04:26 +0000

Sometimes Christmas presents are really unexpected, and today I found out I was given one such gift: the limited edition of _THE IDOLM@STER 2, _PS3 version. It was quite a bulky box, showing all the main characters from the game (and from the recently-ended anime) (click to enlarge):

Of course, having such a box means that there’s a lot of stuff inside. In fact, once opened, there are two game BDs (one being the actual game, the second being the first volume of Gravure for you! starring Haruka), a soundtrack (no songs, though), a booklet, a number of postcards (mine were showing Iori’s ending from episode 2 of the TV series), a booklet and also the first BD of the anime version:

I'm honestly surprised...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:49:13 +0000

By browsing through sites, I noticed that the Spanish site Akihabara Denno Gumi Universe has posted a translation of an interview the webmaster had with me through email.

Here it is (Spanish language). It feels nice to recall some memories of the past once in a while, especially since I couldn’t still believe that dennogumi.org had been such a resource back in the days…

Moving hosts!

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:48:49 +0000

After many years of (good) service, I’m in the process of moving from Dreamhost web hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service hosted by the folks at Linode. It’s definitely more pricey but I like the control and freedom that I have at my disposal. Thanks to a number of guides and some help, I was able to set up lighttpd and php-fpm to serve web pages, and Postfix+dovecot+amavisd-new for email.

I haven’t moved off a few services yet (including my primary mail), but I’m rather satisfied at the moment.

Holidays

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:18:08 +0000

Like every year, it’s finally time for me to go away and enjoy some hard-earned holidays. I’ll be spending next week traveling around France, then going to the sea. As such, my online presence will be reduced to the minimum: reports from the trip and some photos when I’m in France.

See you on August 30th!

Camogli and Portofino

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:32:32 +0000

Yesterday I’ve been in Camogli and Portofino, two small towns in the eastern part of Liguria. The weather was nice and warm, and I took the opportunity of taking a few photos:

[singlepic id=328 w=320 h=240 float=]

[singlepic id=331 w=320 h=240 float=]

Those are samples, the rest are available in the gallery.

Moving on

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:30:57 +0000

Some say that all good things must come to an end. I’m not entirely sure that this is a universal truth, but I can say that at some point in life there are decisions that need to be taken.

In this case I made my own: today was the last day in Dr.Cristina Battaglia’s laboratory, a place where I spent my three-year Ph.D. course and one year as a post-doc research fellow.

New theme and 2.7

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:02:59 +0000

As you have noticed, I have upgraded FailWordpress to version 2.7, getting also a new theme in the process. The header image is temporary, until I or someone else gets it fixed. The gallery has also changed: I ditched WPG2 and Gallery 2 because they kept on breaking every time I upgraded Wordpress (of course it’s probably Wordpress’s API and schema instability to blame).

Therefore, the gallery had been organized and most likely older posts won’t show images anymore (I’ll get to fix those eventually).

DataMatrix page up

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:14:14 +0000

Ok, ok… my definition of “tomorrow” is not like what most people use, apparently. Although I took quite a while, now there is a static page on DataMatrix. There you will find a summary of wht I wrote in my other blog posts regarding this module. Of course, it will be kept up-to-date should I release a new version.

Aside that, I put a contact form on this blog. It may be useful for reports that aren’t directly related to the posts.

Posting from KOrganizer

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:46:00 +0000

Following the instruction from Mike Arthur’s post on planetkde, I tried posting on dennogumi.org from KOrganizer (KDE 4.1.1). Lo and behold, it works! It’s always better to use an application rather than a clunky web user interface…

DataMatrix 0.5

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:54:58 +0000

At last, since it’s been like ages, I decided to put out a new version of DataMatrix. For those who haven’t seen my previous post, DataMatrix is a Pythonic implementation of R’s data.frame. It enables you to manipulate a text file by columns or rows, to your liking, using a dictionary-like syntax.

In this new version there have been a few improvements and correction to a couple bugs (for example saveMatrix did not really save) and the start (only a stub at the moment) of an append function to add more columns (I’ll also think about a function to add rows).

New PC, at last

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:24:35 +0000

All right, it didn’t quite turn out as I had expected. This post wasn’t “soon"as I predicted originally. The reason? The fact that the video card I bought died after three days of usage, and getting a replacement took a while. Finally though, I have a functional system. It’s a Core 2 Duo CPU (7200) with 2 Gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon 3870 HD video card.

I installed Linux on it, of course, but instead of Kubuntu I gave openSUSE a try. It’s quite polished, although I had to go through some hoops to enable font hinting, especially in Firefox (not that I use that browser a lot, but I still need it for some things). I’ll be keeping Kubuntu on the Eee, as there’s a larger community for customization.

I'm back

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:00:42 +0000

Sadly (for me) I’m back from the holidays. For those of you who wondered why the updates on Japan stopped: when I got back to Tokyo I didn’t have an Internet connection, so I had no means to update. The whole holiday was a blast, though, and we’re considering getting back in two years.

Aside from that, work has picked up a really fast pace immediately (why on Earth journals don’t accept LaTeX-produced PDFs?) and I expect a round of meetings and planning to start soon to plan the next three months. I had a poster accepted at the ECCB 2008 conference, but the steep fees (1200 euro for flight, registration and lodging) made me reconsider. Better luck next time, I guess.

Japan - Day 6

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:54:24 +0000

Today we went to Nar, site of the first capital of Japan, especially to see the Todaiji Temple, designated as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. We used an express train to get to Nara and then a bus to get to the Todaiji itself (actually it’s a quick walk, I just didn’t know the distance was so short). The temple lies inside the Nara-koen, or Nara park, which is famous for its 1200 tame sacred deers.

Japan - Day 5

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:51:28 +0000

It’s been a hot day here in Kyoto. And I don’t mean lame second meanings, just that the temperature was really over the top. As a consequence, we changed our plans: we were supposed to visit the so-called “path of the philosophy” but instead we set for Nijo Castle. Nijo Castle was the Kyoto residence of Ieyasu Tokugawa (I suspect to tell the emperor who was the real person in power) and it can be visited. The palace and its surroundings are truly magnificient.

Japan - Day 3 and 4

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:14:28 +0000

I was too tired to write an entry yesterday, so I’ll just sum things up here. Yesterday we went to Nikko, home of the Rinnoji Temple, the Toshogu Shrine and the Futarasan Shrine. We decided to visit it to see the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa. We took the Tobu Railways SPACIA train to Nikko then used a special pass I had bought beforehand online (the World Heritage Pass) to see the places. Nice nature and architecture, and I saw three large statues of Buddha (three BIG BUDDHA, right NRK?) in the Rinnoji temple. The Toshogu shrine was also magnificient, although the famous _Nemuri-neko _(sleeping cat) was extremely small, almost unnoticeable. Rain caught us in the afternoon so we went back to Tokyo.

Japan - Day 2

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:44:53 +0000

I’m aching all over but I managed to write this entry. Today I went to the Ueno area first, hoping to go to the National Museum: however I forgot it was closed on Mondays, so I had to go to the National Science Museum instead. It turned out that it wasn’t a bad choice after all, as the museum is rich with exhibits and has a very good presentation.

After that we moved to the Toshogu Shrine in Ueno Park, a shrine that was dedicated to the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa. It’s not an “active” shrine anymore, but you can visit it for 200 yen. As the heat was killling us, we went back to Tokyo Station for lunch.

Japan - day 1

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:00:33 +0000

I didn’t get time to write before about it, but I and my brother went to Japan for a 10-day holiday there, starting on yesterday. After a 12 hour trip, we arrived in Narita Airport and I took the chance of getting an IC card (prepaid subway/bus card) plus a shinkansen reservation I could only make in Japan (and that cost me “just” 27,000 yen).

Once that was settled, we boarded the Japan Rail (JR) Narita Express and arrived in Tokyo. From there it was a matter of finding the right subway line to get to our hotel. Said hotel is pretty clean but rooms are quite small, and for two of us even a double room is small (not mentioning we have large luggages!). After some good sleep (we arrived at around 21.00), we spent the next day going to the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace.

Digital camera

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:28:04 +0000

In preparation for my trip to Japan (I really need to write about it), I have spent a few euro on a digital camera, a Canon Powershot A590. It looks like a decent camera, has a viewfinder (essential for me), some manual customization and of course it works with Linux (using digikam). Here are two examples, depicting no less than my two felines:

Asus Eee PC here!

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:28:37 +0000

After almost a month of wait (Dynamism.com doesn’t like simple order procedures), I finally got hold of an Asus Eee PC 900 (obviously - for the readers of this blog - the 20 Gb Linux version). Read more for some quick impressions and pictures.

Wordpress SNAFU

Sun, 04 May 2008 07:35:07 +0000

Yesterday I updated _The S.T.E.A.L. Saga _to Wordpress 2.5.1. I thought the upgrade would be painless, but I was wrong. First of all, the auto plugin updater kind of confused between the various plugins, so it marked some as updateable although they weren’t. Then, some plugins (albeit incompatible), disappeared from the plugin list (the fix was downloading a more recent version).

The biggest issue was, however, the mangling of my .htaccess file due to a wrongly-generated permalink rule that was without a trailing slash (/). Such a badly done .htaccess would cause:

Eee PC interest

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:05:56 +0000

Since my work schedule is bordering on the hectic, I was thinking on buying something to get me more organized. Rather than a PDA, I’ve been rather interested in the Asus Eee PC: small form factor, SSDs and Linux preinstalled are definitely pluses. It’s too bad that at least in Italy Asus sells only the 512M RAM version (when there are more powerful options available elsewhere).

I’d like to get impressions on the Asus Eee, before considering a purchase (€ 300 are still a lot): did you try it? How was it? And if not Eee, are there other interesting alternatives?

Wordpress 2.5

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:21:13 +0000

I have upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5. As a result, there are some functions, such as the image gallery, that have been disabled due to the annoying habit of the Wordpress developers of making core changes in very little time.

Please report any problems you find, and notice that although the thumbnails look truncated in the new gallery, the full images are actually displayed correctly. I had to fiddle a bit wit the “new media manager”, not only because it’s in Flash, but because at least on Linux it gives odd results (apparently no one from the WP team bothered to check past Win and OSX?).

Back, and movies

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:14:45 +0000

I haven’t posted anything in a month or so. Quite a long time, considering I used to write at least once per week. The reasons are mainly two: first of all, my work schedule has taken a turn for the worse, which means I have to do my job a lot harder than before; secondly, there wasn’t much interesting stuff to report.

Let’s resume from the hiatus by writing about my latest Final Fantasy XI session. Given that Square Enix didn’t release a lot of content for the recent Wings of the Goddess update, I did the few (four) quests in total in one day. Although the story was quite interesting, they were far too easy. I could have done them alone, probably. I wonder, what was the point of waiting four months for that? At least some form of challenge would be appreciated.

Browser-less entries

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:27:11 +0000

From today on I’ll try to write posts without a browser, since I’m not that fond of such an approach. As a matter of fact, I’m using kblogger now, a blogging application for KDE 4 (I didn’t mention that I switched to that full time, more on that when I get time).

If you notice something odd in the way the posts are written, please let me know. Thanks.

Lamestop

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:13:42 +0000

The title clearly shows what I think about the aforementioned company. The reason surfaced a few days ago, when I tried to see if they would ship Wings of the Goddess to Italy. I had ordered from them a few times before, and although their customer service left a lot to be desired, I couldn’t complain much.

Two days ago I found that they will no longer ship anything to Italy. I mean, they will to other European countries, but not here. The big question here is why? What has Italy possibly done? I contacted their customer support and I just got a rather uninformative answer such as “we do not ship or take orders from your country”. Very nice, Gamestop.

Script to make captures of movie files

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:44:46 +0000

The other day I was thinking about how to make screencaps for the anime I watch. Windows users often use Media Player Classic, which can create a video contact sheet (i.e., a series of captures) out of a movie file. I had two problems with this:

The biggest is that it runs on Windows, and I don’t use Windows;
The frames needed to be manually cropped every time, which was slow.

Blogging scholarships!?

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:29:41 +0000

I just read from Weblog Tools Collection that CollegeScholarships.org is hosting a vote for a round of $10,000 blogging scholarships. Now, I may be a little out of the “Web 2.0” trend (actually for me “2.0” does not relate to Tim O’Reilly’s buzzword, but to real and interesting technologies like the Semantic Web), but I find this absurd.

I mean, I have no doubts that the people listed there have made interesting blogs. But I would rather give a scholarship based on merit rather than the mere act of blogging something “interesting”. Don’t get me wrong, blogging can be fun and has its uses (see scientific blogging) but for heaven’s sake, this is a little overboard.

New theme

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:13:36 +0000

After some thoughts, I switched dennogumi.org to the dKret theme. Please report any errors you may find. The header is the default image, but it will be changed soon (hint: Melissa, you already know what to do…).

Unimpressive management: Wordpress 2.3

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 19:01:33 +0000

I’ve recently upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3. While I’m interested in the new changes this release brings (like tagging support) I question the way the transition to the new version was handled.

In particular, I am referring to the (questionable) idea of breaking the database schema three weeks before the release. Given the amount of breakage that brought upon plugins, it should have been announced at the start of the 2.3 development cycle. Right now, heavily customized installations are a pain to update (that’s why The S.T.E.A.L. Saga is staying on 2.2 for now).

The Internet lynch mob

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:13:39 +0000

I was thinking about writing something on the line of what I announced in the past entry, but what has happened recently surrounding the artist who does the work for The S.T.E.A.L. Saga, that is Too, made me change my mind.

An update

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:40:40 +0000

Recently I haven’t had the time to write any decent entries. That is due to the fact that my Ph.D. thesis needs to be completed by Oct 18th, and while I’m (hopefully) on track I still have to finish correcting the Introduction and completing the Discussion section (lots of scientific literature to study…). As I’m working on that even on weekends, it means I really have little free time.

Not all’s lost. I plan writing a few posts in the next days, one regarding the recent release of Wordpress 2.3 and another on the Nanoha StrikerS DVDs.

New office

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:30:09 +0000

After little more than a year, I’ve been moved to a new office, because new people needed to be put in the room I was in. The new place is slightly bigger (four desks instead of six) and for now quieter. I spent most of the morning fixing things and setting up network connections. This is how it looks now:

Of course these distractions took time away from my thesis, but I’ve still managed to write a part of the last section, the discussion. I still have a long way to go before finishing, though.

Holidays

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:28:09 +0000

I haven’t been able to post much recently, mostly because I’ve been quite busy regarding my thesis and work and because I’m preparing everything for the holidays. I’ll be leaving on August 3rd for Rome, and after a week’s stay, I’ll go to the sea until August 26th. Unfortunately I’ll have to bring my work with me to do something as I’m a little behind in writing the thesis.

Due to the holidays, I won’t be able to update here regularly (if any), however I’ll try to post one last entry before leaving.

Transformers

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:16:20 +0000

Looks like NRK beat me to it, but I’ve seen this film myself yesterday night.

To be frank, I wasn’t really expecting a nice result. That is, because most Hollywood “conversions” from other franchises often end up being terrible (Street Fighter, anyone?). Nevertheless, having watched the animated series when I was little (it was good, despite some shortcomings), I was set on seeing Transformers since its original announcement.

Despite not being related to the TV series, I found it to be rather good. The various CG effects for the robots are really well done, especially since they’re quite integrated with the rest of the scenes. I recognized the most famous robots (Megatron, Starscream, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee) but some others not, mainly because the Italian version used different names.

A trip to the sea

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:18:52 +0000

Two weeks ago I went to a sea resort in Liguria, called Loano. While plagued by a cold, the hiliday was much needed to relax. Finally I’ve managed to scan the photos (I only had an one-use camera) and so I’ve put them online. Click on the thumbnail to get to the specific album.

tab2dokuwiki

Thu, 24 May 2007 18:16:18 +0000

Today I made a simple sed script that converts a tab-delimited text file to a format that can be pasted into a DokuWiki wiki. There is a plugin that permits to read CSV files directly, however:

It doesn’t support tab-delimited text files;
It’s incompatible with some plugins (one being DokuTexit, which I need).

Hence the need for this script. To use it, just copy and paste the code (see below) into a new file, make it executable (chmod +x) and then invoke it with

Hardware upgrades

Mon, 21 May 2007 22:07:21 +0000

At work I’ve recently got hold of two nice hardware upgrades: a portable 60 Gb HD (useful for carrying around large data) and an 80 Gb hard disk. The latter was much needed as the 40 Gb HD inside my Acer Veriton 7500G was getting rather small, both on the Windows side (which sadly I still need to use for some things) and on the Linux side (at one point / filled up, resulting in a system that would not log into X at all).I already made backups and moved the data, installing a fresh copy of Kubuntu 7.04 on the new HD. This means I’ll be able to keep my laptop at home and avoid largely nerdish settings such as this:

A change

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:10:57 +0000

Just something different, for a change. I got up this morning and on one of my windows I saw this:

(for the record, those are my two cats, Minou on the left and Matisse on the right)

Old code

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:03:05 +0000

Today I went over my old Python code, back when I first started programming. I’d say that I found what I had written to be largely amusing to say the least. Loads of ugly hacks all over the place, duplicated functions, etc… in short, a real mess.

I’m quite happy of the results I achieved in the past month, since I finally learnt how to code properly and started making my own classes (this book was immensely helpful). I hope I improve enough to be able to make a package for what I’ve made, as there is a distinct lack of annotation tools for microarray data in Python (Bioconductor steals the spotlight for everything, but I can’t stand R).

Thoughts

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:06:32 +0000

I’ve found always hard to express certain types of ideas on the Internet. I probably think that it’s due to the abuse of the anonimity that the net gives to most people (hint: think of the angsty teens on MySpace). The overall result is that some people feel put off in writing anything that is closely related to being emotional (either positive or negative), and on the other hand, other people may be annoyed after reading a lot of emotional things without real content.

A lot of work

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:57:24 +0000

Work is getting hectic as we’re finally gathering a lot of data for a new publication. This means reading a lot of literature, choosing the figures and planning results and discussion properly. On top of that, I’m starting to study pathway analysis for my thesis, and of course, seeing how I can use that to study our own data.

I also have some other non research duties to attend to, such as being the person repsonsible for data handling of our group in relation to the server that we bought recently, I need to learn more Python and do some more administrative tasks on our computers (such as upgrading a few Windows 2000 installations to Windows XP). In short, everything will become hectic rather soon… I’m sure it will get pretty interesting from now on.

A day with an Apple Xserve

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 14:19:18 +0000

Yesterday I and another person went to the server room to do the basic configuration of the Apple Xserve we have bought, along with its Xserve RAID unit. Despite the general “idea” that anything Apple does is user-friendly, our experience was plagued by problems.

There are no movies

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:37:50 +0000

By tracking the statistics of my blog, I noticed that many people came here from web pages that linked directly the old multimedia files I had on dennogumi.org when it was still an information page on Akihabara Denno Gumi. However they aren’t here anymore. I also kindly asked to avoid linking them directly when they were up, but I guess some people just don’t read.

In short, if you have come here to get movies, or music files, you won’t find them. If you want to know the reason, check the About page. I will probably have to put up custom pages to people looking for those files…

Wordpress 2.1

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:44:59 +0000

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 yesterday. Aside some minor issues with one of my plugins, that may be resolved in the future, everything went well. If you spot any quirks, let me know here with a comment.

At last!

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:40:53 +0000

I’m pretty happy. As some of you already know, the book I wrote with my brother is finally out. The preview copies I had ordered arrived yesterday, and I can see it’s pretty impressive to hold the book you have written with your own hands:

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It only needed a couple of adjustments in the drawings’ captions, so I made it available for everyone last night. All I need to do now is to wait and see the reactions…

Playstation 3

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:19:27 +0000

That’s right. Thanks to my brother, now I am an owner of this game console (the North American version), along with the game Resistance: Fall of Man. To be precise, I have the 60 Gb version (essential as I can’t use wired connectivity where it is, just wireless)I haven’t had yet the time to play well with this beast, but I managed to take (poor quality) pictures.

Editing work

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:53:19 +0000

I usually manage to write an entry or two during the weekend. This week was (almost) not the case as my computer time was spent editing and correcting the Lost Innocence manuscript. And when that was done, there were some problems with the cover files so I had to fix those, as well. Last but not least, the FAQ section of stealsaga.net needs an overhaul.

Yes, plenty of S.T.E.A.L. related work going on. It’s understandable though, as the release time getting near…

A newbie approach to GUIs

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 10:13:08 +0000

In the past two days, aside studying the Python basics, I’ve been looking to find a decent GUI toolset to develop user interfaces in Python.

Checker mark III

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 22:05:47 +0000

Reading Wesley J. Chun’s excellent Core Python Programming I realized I could definitely improve my wallpaper checker, at least internally. That’s what I did today, and aside that, I added an option to view a thumbnail of the images contained in the lists. Note that it is not meant to be an image viewer, just a way to show the images in the list (and I suggest you filter it first if it’s long). The image viewing part is my first try with Tkinter, the Python module to create interfaces using Tk. It’s ugly looking, but at least it works.

Wallpaper size checker

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 10:42:21 +0000

UPDATE: Some stupid bugs had crept in the code, so I updated the archives. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’ve writtern a small Python script to find wallpapers with right size or aspect ratio I needed, and now I’m releasing it to the public. It may come in handy especially when you download lots of desktop wallpapers (archives, torrents) and you don’t know which ones are suited for your monitor.

Final Fantasy XII

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:26:15 +0000

I recently completed Final Fantasy XII. Overall it lasted over a month of play (1 hour per day, approximately), so at least I can say that I spent my money decently. The game is **very **reminiscent of FFXI, in some areas even identical. It is also quite big, with many sub-quests and monsters to hunt. Not to mention that it is very impressive from a technical point of view. However, the main plot is awful.

Working with Genome Browser data

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:13:59 +0000

In the past two days I’ve been tackling an annotation problem. I’m trying to provide annotations for genes found in regions that are significantly altered, DNA copy-number wise (thanks to the STAC method). The idea would be to annotate those regions (that span one megabase) using UCSC Table Browser.

However, the task was impractical, so I decided to automate it a bit. I converted the data into ranges and then used the KnownGene annotation file (downloaded from UCSC) to obtain which genes were in which reagion. The last part wasn’t easy at all (at least in Python), as I had to check for ranges and adjust for consecutive regions. The code is terribly ugly, so I’ll try to clean it up before posting it.

GRUB hell

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 08:57:15 +0000

Two days ago I decided to install Linux on the new computer I had obtained, so I just got a Kubuntu 6.10 alternate CD and went through the steps. THe network card was not detected, but by reading around I found it was just a matter of the r1000 module not being present in the installation kernel. The problems arose when GRUB was installed.

Actually, that part of the installation went fine, but once rebooted I got “error 21”, which meant “disk not found”. Looking around in the Ubuntu bug tracker showed that GRUB did not support the JMicron SATA controller of the motherboard (I put the disk there by mistake, instead that on the ICH8 controller). Well, I wanted to remove GRUB, and that’s where problems started to arise.

Probably useless, but...

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:07:36 +0000

A post I wrote ended up on the front page of nodalpoint.org. I liked that, even though it may not seem a lot to many: at least it shows that some of my concerns are shared with other people in the scientific community.

Also after viewing some presentations about Web 2.0 at the EMBL, I decided to make a del.icio.us account. I find it quite handy so far to organize bookmarks and such.

New heading and other stuff

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:09:30 +0000

As you can see I have a new heading, courtesy of Melissa, featuring Saber from Fate/stay Night. Aside that, updates on this blog will continue to be slow for a little while, as I will try to rush and finish S.T.E.A.L. at last this Sunday.

A simple annotator

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:06:10 +0000

In the past two days I’ve written a simple annotator program, that given an input list of RefSeq genes, automatically determines the relevant Entrez Gene IDs and annotates them using the flat files provided by the NCBI. A direct conversion was not possible due to limitations in Biopython’s parsers, but I managed to use the GenBank parser to identify and extract the references to the Gene IDs (and putting them in a list).

Random photos

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:06:31 +0000

Since recently (thanks to my brother) I got a new cellular phone with better capabilities, photo-wise, I decided to take a few photos of my workplace. I changed office a while ago, now I’m located on the first floor of the building, sharing the office with 5 other people: Raoul, Michele, Giorgio, Roberta and Alessandro. This photo shows my current computer setup:

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Quant was running a screensaver when I took this photo: the mouse pad and that other black thing next to the keyboard are gel pads to help me with my tendinitis. The other picture I took today shows part of my “study area”:

More studying

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:31:20 +0000

EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology is having a special issue on text mining for biology. My boss wants to publish something there, and asked if I and a colleague could work on that. I’ll probably focus on evaluation methods, since I’m not an expert in text mining or language processing.

And that’s where the problem comes in: I know almost nothing on text mining. Which means this will add up to the ever growing pile of papers and books I have to study, including but not limited to Python programming, microarray analysis and XML…

PhD students

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:11:48 +0000

After discussing my second PhD year today, and after noticing that not even a single professor from the commitee was there (save my boss and a person that joined later on), I realized that the situation for students like me isn’t really the best.

A PhD program is supposed (at least here) to be a cross between a research job and a student’s position, since you should study but at the same time conduct research and (if you’re lucky) also get paid for it. But actually (and it’s really depressing), professors just “use” the students as cheap labor. Yes, cheap because they don’t pay for them, the ministry does. Who cares if they don’t follow courses, don’t go to conferences, miss presentations… All it matters is that they can do their research, only to be replaced when the three year program ends. It is really lame.

New computer

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:25:28 +0000

Wednesday I got around to assemble a replacement for largo, what used to be my old “main” desktop. I also got a new case and power supply for leon, the other desktop I own, but I need to switch things around from the “old” largo to leon and I didn’t have the time yet.

Without any more delay, here are the specifications:

Pentium Core 2 Duo 6600
NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT

Text files with Python

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:32:58 +0000

Finally I cleaned up my code enough to post it here. It’s probably still ugly, but not as ugly as when I wrote it down the first time. It’s all about manipulating text files, to be precise tab-delimited files. All the snippets are published under the GNU GPL v2 (not that I think that anyone would use them, but just in case…).

More S.T.E.A.L. related work

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:20:27 +0000

I haven’t had much time to write here as I’ve been busy fixing and arranging things for the web page on S.T.E.A.L. It appears that thanks to Too’s deviation posting and subsequent journal entry, hits have skyrocketed. This makes me happy but it also means more work and need for refinement. As a matter of fact, I wrote a little more yesterday, and today I’ll be aiming to complete chapter 4. Since I’ve been working on that for the past 3 years, it would be a nice accomplishment.

Dutch weekend

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:03:19 +0000

As the title implies, I’ve been over, along with my twin brother to my brother’s house in Leiden last weekend.

It was a fun experience overall. My brother has a very nice apartment in Leiden, big although somewhat empty (but that’s the policy of the organization that gave him the place). Aside being extremely sick on the plane, I arrived more or less in time on Friday night. The following day we had a trip around Amsterdam, which honestly disappointed me somehow: while the streets, the canals, the places look nice, it doesn’t seem that it has a thousand years of history. I’ve been to a museum, but I (sadly) couldn’t go to the Van Gogh Museum. In the night we had a nice dinner but we were too tired to go around, so we opted to watch a film. My brother’s girlfriend had a somewhat biographic one on the explorer Shackleton, made by UK’s Channel 4. While I liked Kenneth Brannagh’s acting, the extremely slow pace (200 minutes long) made me quit in advance and go to bed.

Valkyrie Profile Silmeria

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:51:29 +0000

I recently obtained a copy of Valkyrie Profile Silmeria in a language that I can understand. I’ve been playing it for a while and I can say I like it.

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The graphics look nice, but I don’t understand why tri-Ace made a fake 2D perspective. In my opinion it makes all that 3D look rather useless, since there’s little you can do depth-wise. The same can be said for the battles: while you can move around in 3D, the perspective shifts in 2D when you attack (in a manner similar to the original Valkyrie Profile). The soundtrack by Motoi Sakuraba is nice as always, especially battle music.

On Free Software and FSF

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:36:24 +0000

WARNING: This entry is somewhat political in nature.

Given the recent controversies about the GPL v3 draft, I thought I’d give my insight on the Free Software Foundation and especially its founder, Richard M. Stallman, better known as RMS. I won’t cover the GPL v3 debate as I haven’t read the license draft, though I think that the kernel developers’ standing must be at least given attention.

Kubuntu Edgy Knot 3 artwork

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:03:50 +0000

Jucato has some screenshots of the recently released Kubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 3. I like very much the new artwork, but it doesn’t seem that there’ll be Oxygen icons, at least from what I can gather. In any case I will try to play with it as soon as it hits a beta stage.

On unrelated news, I still have got some RSI issues, so I’ll have to slow down posting. Bah.

I'm back

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:52:45 +0000

I’m finally back from holidays and since there’s almost no one in the office here I thought I’d write a little mixed entry, while quant is busy compiling a patched 2.6.17 kernel (but quant as an odd overheating problem that I will describe in another entry, so I have to compile it by steps). Work is somewhat slow, as the people I need to contact are still on holiday. In the mean time, I’m reading an interesting paper on some GPLed software for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism analysis, written in Perl and R. I have some test data so I’ll soon give it a try (after reading the paper, published in BMC Bioinformatics earlier this year). It may be what I need to perform some comparison analysis between different kinds of tumor samples.

Holidays

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:43:56 +0000

That’s right, I’m going on holiday from today until August 28th. As I don’t have a proper internet connection there, my entries will be few and far in between (not that I’ve been very active recently, I’ve been busy putting the house in order). I’ll be staying in Loano, in Liguria, for about 17 days, and I’ll spend the rest traveling around central Italy (Arezzo, Perugia, Assisi, Todi, Gubbio, Siena).

As “parting gift” I uploaded a new snapshot of S.T.E.A.L., which includes Too’s fantastic art. Take a look, I hope you appreciate it. As usual, comments are welcome!

Departure

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:54:25 +0000

Two days ago, my younger brother left for The Netherlands, where he’ll stay for two years working for the European Space Agency (ESA). I hope I’ll be able to keep in touch with him.

I don’t like emotion-filled entries so I’ll just stop here.

I'm still alive

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:15:45 +0000

Yes, I’m still alive somewhat. I have a lot to write, but my stupid wrists don’t let me save a few minutes per day. I’ll probably try to wrap things up this weekend with a series of multiple entries.

Clarification

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:37:35 +0000

It was just tendinitis on both hands, thanks to a stupid table that I will have to fix soon. The good news is that I can get back on track soon, using some medicines and the so-called laser therapy to get rid of the inflammation.

Also, I will post soon about the next S.T.E.A.L. snapshot and the upcoming FFXI update (scheduled today).

RSI

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 21:36:08 +0000

I’ve got RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) on both my wrists. This means I won’t update in a while, as I’m trying to put my hands to rest. I’ll still try to write some S.T.E.A.L., though.

The power of the shell

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 08:16:30 +0000

Yesterday I was trying to adjust some files in order to make a program use Affymetrix SNP arrays data (instead of arrayCGH data like the program was designed for). I had a big (116,000 rows) tab-delimited text file and I needed to use only part of the columns there.

Image editing using FOSS tools

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 17:07:52 +0000

I’ve already explained in a previous entry that I like to tweak images, extract them from backgrounds and so on. However I didn’t like that I needed Windows to perform my actions, as I want to use that operating system as less as possible. I tried then to use FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools available on Linux to see if I could do the same job.

Widget fun

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 21:11:35 +0000

As you may have noticed the theme and the layout changed slightly. I updated the Regulus theme to the newest version, making it widget-enabled and improving the overall layout. That means I can customize my own sidebar as I please without coding using the so-called Widgets, and that’s why it changed. The only problem is that the gallery now looks a little fuzzy, but it’s ok for my tastes.

Image editing

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:44:46 +0000

I like to tinker with images. I’ve been doing this since I first started doing amateur web design, back in 1996. At first it was to create images for my own web pages (Sailormoon, ADG) but nowadays it’s like a hobby I do when I have free time. It can be fun.

Upgrade

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:51:34 +0000

I got upgrade hardin (my laptop)’s memory at least, bringing it to 1Gb, at last. However I had two 256 Mb modules installed, that means I had to buy two 512 Mb ones. Oh well, I’ll just try to sell those ones. Everything seems snappier now, and even Firefox seems not to clog the CPU when loading pages (I need to experiment more, since I have no clue why that should have changed).

Busy busy busy!

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 14:52:49 +0000

I haven’t been writing a lot here mostly because of the rather hectic work schedule I’m having. We’re nearing the completion phase of a paper that includes quite a bit of my work (and also a lot of other people’s contributions), and I’m also swamped with PhD classes (two weeks to go). Also, one of my bosses has assigned me another project which I’ve yet to tackle, and I got to help my colleague with a poster as well.

Books

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:47:53 +0000

As the terrace in my house has been finally completed after almost a year, I’m writing from there. While I’m relaxing, I’ll write about two items I recently obtained through archonia.com. This time there wasn’t a misunderstanding like with the Tony Taka book I ordered (which the description didn’t claim it was an H book while instead it was), I’m quite satisfied by what I got.

Classes and meetings

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 17:02:33 +0000

This week has been absolutely exhausting. I’ve been having PhD classes (statistics, effective writing, and more statistics) almost every day (save tomorrow) and also heaps of work piled up. I’ve got new data to work on, and also I’ve been assigned to do something else along with my current bioinformatics work.

I also need to get in touch with the Partek software representative to let him know what I think of their genomics software. In all honesty it’s quite nice, however it lacks the ability of apply Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) which is essential for our work. It’s a shame, because both the gene expression module (very fast Robust Multichip Analysis - RMA - implementation) and the copy number variation module are good, but alone they won’t justify the price.

The problem with binary only drivers

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:04:38 +0000

Today I’ve been trying to set up suspend to RAM and suspend to disk (also known as hibernate) on my laptop using Kubuntu 6.06 LTS. Both tries failed miserably, sadly. The machine would suspend and also wake up, but I’d get only a garbled screen. This means that the video driver failed to wake up properly: this is the well known fglrx driver, the binary only driver that ATI made for Linux.

Kubuntu 6.06 LTS / Dynamis-Xarcabard

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 08:52:51 +0000

Finally, the new version of Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) is out! Not that I noticed many differences since I kept it constantly dist-upgraded since I put the beta on the desktop and the RC on the laptop. I really like it so far (save minor nags with 3D acceleration that I solved by issuing a couple of shell commands). Also, KDE 3.5.3 packages are already available from 3rd-party repositories. I will be upgrading them soon.

dist-upgrade fun, DNS, drama

Sun, 28 May 2006 10:37:09 +0000

Yesterday I updated my laptop to Kubuntu Dapper RC. Overall the (long) process was quite smooth save a couple of problems (the use of NetworkManager for exaple, that caused me headaches to make wireless work) including the fact that the ATI drivers were looking in the wrong location (/usr/X11/lib/modules/dri instead of /usr/lib/dri) so 3D acceleration wasn’t working.

It seems smooth so far, though I think the idea of NetworkManager needs polishing, as some services that are started before it connects will fail (such as autofs).

Biological software and HIG

Thu, 25 May 2006 15:37:18 +0000

Today I obtained a trial license of a data analysis program. I plan on using it for the next two weeks to see if it could improve the analysis workflow in our laboratory. I noticed this software uses the Tk widget set to achieve cross-platform capability (in fact, it can run on Linux, which is a big plus for me). However, in my opinion, Tk widgets look rather ugly. I wonder why the company didn’t consider using Trolltech’s Qt widgets. Mind, I don’t have any ties with TT but I appreciate their toolkit (licensed either under the GNU GPL or a commercial license) in the KDE desktop environment.

Antispam, or inconvenience?

Sat, 20 May 2006 10:32:36 +0000

Today I found out that my own ISP’s (Fastweb) mailserver got into a spam blacklist. I can understand how it happened, since Fastweb has a limited pool of public IPs and everything is behind a massive NAT. I checked the web page of the organization that blacklisted the IP and noticed they want you to pay a fine of $50 to get removed. I can understand that perhaps this is due to spammers being on a rampage around, but those guys just blacklisted an entire ISP’s mail server because they didn’t bother to check. And now you have to pay also to remove yourself? Bah.

Stress

Wed, 17 May 2006 17:54:11 +0000

This has been a rather stressful period work-wise. Things are looking extremely confusing on the (upcoming) paper we need to write and even a small doubt can cause huge time losses (I spent the whole morning checking to see if my analysis was correct or not while in fact it was correct in the first place). I’ve been shown a new software for microarray analysis, well, at least some brochures. I’m going to inquire about pricing (the most important part) and platform availability (I’d love if it could run on Linux). I’ll also ask for a demonstration if possible.

Security breach

Mon, 08 May 2006 20:17:29 +0000

Today I found out that a computer running Windows had been “self-writing” words when an Internet Explorer window was open. This obviously led to the conclusion that there was some kind of malware running. I immediately unplugged the network cable but the typing continued - this is a good sign meaning that it was just some random program doing it. It only affected IE, no other programs. I wonder how it got there, I can only suspect the current user, as I never do any network-based activity there, only analysis (and I run a much safer Linux box - no Windows for me).

Treasures of Aht Urghan

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 13:30:50 +0000

Last Monday I got the new expansion pack for FFXI, namely Treasures of Aht Urghan. After installing (and going through the tedious update procedure), I’ve done some exploring. Some remarks:

The missions are either well hidden, or not particularly significant at this point: this in my opinion is a regression from Chains of Promathia, which had an extremely nice storyline;
The new areas are huge. Yesterday I’ve done some exploring in the Arrapago Reef area with Sechs, Eithin and Mercredi and we took more than two hours to get to our destination (including one death, and several fights inbetween);

Sickness

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 07:16:10 +0000

The main reason my posts here are so scarce recently it’s because of that. Shortly after the Easter outdoor trip I did, I got fever for the rest of the week (and some kickback yesterday since I was foolish enough to go to work), and it was impossible for me to stay in front of a screen for a long time. Luckily there are more holidays on sight so I think I can recover fast.

Outage

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:32:32 +0000

Today one of our desktops won’t turn on at all. I didn’t even see the POST lights turning on (this is a Dell computer), so I assume that the PSU is dead. I’d have already called for support but since the box has been bought in the USA (part of a bundle of our GeneChip systems) I had to request a warranty transfer (notice that I don’t even know if there’s still a warranty!). I’ll probably call support tomorrow.

Windows and Missions

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:13:28 +0000

Finally, we have windows in the office. Before that it was just a room with walls, and it looked a little claustrophobic. It took a good deal of time (4 months) to get these works done, but I think the result is worth it. At least the whole room looks a little more human, now.

I will be spending tomorrow’s work day analyzing data with an extremely bad piece of software, at least design-wise (the algorithm used inside it’s very solid, instead). It means that I’ll have to move around tons and tons of text files, take images and then compile spreadsheets (I wonder why all the reports in our laboratory are Excel-based… I’d much prefer tab delimited formats).

Upgrades

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:35:12 +0000

I’ve upgraded the theme (now it uses a non-hacked version of Regulus), the image gallery with the new Gallery v2.1, and also the new WPG 2.0. Everything should work smoothly, according to the tests I made. Also, I added a direct link to the gallery, now that I found out how to do it properly.

Mixed entry (yet again)

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:56:31 +0000

I haven’t been writing on this blog as much as I wanted, partly because of tiredness, partly because of my always-present tiredness.

Today I delivered the receipts from the Bertinoro school and also from Trieste: I hope I get a refund fairly quickly (although usually “fairly quickly” means around 3-4 months if I’m lucky). Also, these days I’m working on the DNAcopy package from Bioconductor (a series of add-on packages for R) to see if I can use the data from Affymetrix’s Chromosome Copy Number Analysis Tool to get a genome-wide view on copy number aberrations (CNAT only permits you to see one chromosome at a time). It’s quite heavy on computational resources, and for no reason quant (my work machine) reboots after a while, so I had to run it on another computer.

Bertinoro - Day 4

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:03:57 +0000

Talks, talks, talks. That’s all about this day. Some were also extremely difficult to understand, and I’m not sure I took good notes. Talks went on from 8.30 to 18.00 (excluding lunch break) and then a workshop until 19.30. I’m really beat. I retired to my room while the others wanted to play karaoke, but I was too tired.

Tomorrow is the last day, thank goodness! I’m tired of waking up at 6.45.

Bertinoro - Day 3

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:06:22 +0000

I just came home and I’m terribly tired, so I’ll be rather brief. This morning we had four lectures, including two interesting ones on protein structure prediction, though one speaker was too fast and I almost couldn’t take notes.

Then we went in the afternoon to Ravenna. I took some pictures during the sightseeing and I’ll post them when I get home. We visited the “Mausoleo of Teodorico”, the “Basilica di S.Apollinare in Classe” and the Arian Baptistery. Then we had an hour of free roaming (couldn’t see much) and then came back to our bus. Getting back to the rooms was a pain, thanks to an extremely steep slope. I was dead tired, and so were the others, but we managed to go to a nice pizzeria near our place. Extremely nice food, and I didn’t get to pay anything. It was also a great fun.

Bertinoro - Day 2

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:33:34 +0000

Today was much more tiring than yesterday. It was a full day with courses, and especially the ones in the afternoon were rather heavy on the subjects. First of all there were some talks on networks and promoter site prediction (I liked a lot the second one) , followed by some talks on microarray data analysis (I knew a bit already of this stuff). The afternoon talks featured more statistics for bioinformatics (ugghhhh) followed by a nearly non-understandable talk that lasted for almost two hours and really drained the life out of me.

Bertinoro - Arrival & Day 1

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:57:54 +0000

Finally I got hold of a stable Internet connection so I can post about my experience in Bertinoro di Romagna so far.

Random entry

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:17:25 +0000

I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I’m either doing something else, or when I want to, I find out I’m really tired (this and the past week have been very tiring for me). In any case, I’ll make a big, random entry.

I’ll start saying that I’m amazed at how badly software can be written. In the life sciences field you see very clear examples. Horrible UIs and poor documentation mostly (while the algorithms and methods implemented are usually very solid). Our friends at Affymetrix have shown me again something like that. I was trying to combine the data from two different SNP arrays (since they complement each other) and the documentation was pointing in the exactly opposite direction of what I needed to do. Shame, that costed me an hour of tries.

Migrating

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:44:51 +0000

I’ve been migrating settings and files from the old router to the new one (check my brother’s blog to understand better what I’m talking about). I noticed the free space already dropped significantly, as you can see from this:

[code]

lb@hari:~$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda1 9,2G 859M 7,9G 10% /

tmpfs 43M 0 43M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 43M 13M 30M 30%

/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/volatile

/dev/hda6 83G 8,5G 70G 11% /home

Bertinoro di Romagna

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:24:05 +0000

After sorting out the bureaucracy, finally I was able to enroll for the 6th Course in Bioinformatics for Molecular Biologists that will take place in Bertinoro di Romagna in three weeks. I’m glad I was able to, the course program looks really interesting and perhaps I’ll be finally able to learn bioinformatics in the right way, since so far I’m entirely self-taught, and sadly, it shows.

On another topic, the ceiling is going to be fixed by tomorrow, I hope, so I’ll be able to get back to my old office at last.

Ceiling

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 23:45:07 +0000

Yesterday something happened: while I was working in the office I heard a loud THUD. Then nothing happened. I kept on doing my work till the site manager arrived, asking us to go out of the room. The reason is that the steel cables that were keeping the ceiling up had loosened, and the whole ceiling bent downwards, which was very dangerous. We temporarily moved in an unfinished laboratory, and we’re still there until repairs are done (it will take a few days, I’m being told). Well, the CISI is supposed to be brand new, but then such things happen… I guess as usual in the public sector, something didn’t go as planned…

Rain

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 19:19:10 +0000

As today was almost completely uneventful (and kept on raining), I’m putting together an all-in-one entry. First of all I played more with the webcam on Linux. The exposure setting and some other gamma corrections can’t be really set in real-time yet, so it tends to get a little dark. Nevertheless I can get some decent results, here’s an example picture of my desk:

general/desktop.jpg

I also tried to update my old Mandriva 2006.0 installation on the desktop (shown in the image) but I couldn’t get urpmi to update the unofficial KDE repository. Sadly I think those packages are too broken for my tastes, I should have used direct backports from the development version. I guess I’ll reinstall the new version over the old one as soon as I get the chance. As the sidebar shows, I got Grandia III a few days ago. I’m playing it and I like it so far, I just hope it isn’t too short (Wild ARMs 4 was a real disappointment in that sense) and that the story doesn’t suck. I’m putting Magna Carta on hold because the plot (and the game system) is terribly slow. Later today I have a KS30 run in FFXI, hoping to get some good items. I also have to watch Fate/stay night #7, I’ll do that tomorrow night.

Wordpress 2.0.1

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:05:40 +0000

I’ve just upgraded my blog to WP 2.0.1. Aside a little problem with the gallery images (easily fixed) everything seems to run smooth for now. If you notice any glitches please post a comment and I’ll get it fixed.

Webcam on Linux, success!

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 14:10:20 +0000

general/webcam_work.jpg

I have this Trust Mini-Webcam WB-1200p since my younger brother gave it to me as a present for my last birthday. It’s a decent webcam, pity it has a CIF sensor and not a CCD one, but it’s still OK for daily use. Until now there wasn’t a decent Linux driver around, and so I was forced to boot into Windows (which I almost do not use now, save for Final Fantasy XI). Most of the few drivers around had little or no documentation, were binary-only, or looked completely unmantained. Then I took a look at spca5xx again. This driver was born to support the SPCA webcam chipsets (like Creative’s PC-CAM 600) but over the time it grew bigger and now supports a whole load of different cameras.

All-in-one entry

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:47:05 +0000

First of all, the strangest oddity ever. On Friday once at the laboratory I was contacted by an Affymetrix representative regarding this entry . She wanted to know why I wrote it and that it seemed that I “didn’t contact Affymetrix to see if the problem could be solved”. She wasn’t offended or anything (she will even get me in touch with someone from the software department), but nevertheless this is my blog and I’m entitled to my personal opinions. Hence, any IP from affymetrix com (and its European branch affymetrix.co.uk) is now banned from accessing this page.

Clarissa's birthday

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 22:33:48 +0000

That was the only noteworthy event of today’s work. I arrived late (took 1 hour and 30 just to get there) and then during lunch break we moved again to the LITA to celebrate. We got a sort of necklace for her which she liked quite a lot, and we got time to have a toast and eat some cake. It took way more than I expected - I was back at the CISI at around 15. I managed to get more stuff done, and so I’m more or less on time with my work schedule.

More about S.T.E.A.L.

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:22:46 +0000

Work is progressing, although at slow rate. I’ve asked the person I wanted to commission the illustration work a sketch of one of the characters and at the same time I forwarded the descriptions of the various scenes. Estimated time frame is a month - which is reasonable for me. He said the sketch will be done by the end of the week: I’m waiting so I can see what kind of style he decided to suse and if I have some corrections to make.

Badly written software, or policy?

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:40:09 +0000

Today while working I got stuck in what probably is an intentional flaw of the software we’re using. When we scan Affymetrix’s GeneChips there are a number of files produced by the GeneChip Operating Software (GCOS in short) including raw acquisition images and various analyses. Now, a certain number of people need to use those data to work (including myself), but I don’t want people to fiddle on the scanner workstation unless they know what they’re doing. So I bought a network hard drive a week ago and I decided to sync the data from the workstation to the network drive. Affymetrix has a proprietary solution to access data in a centralized fashion, but it costs € 65,000, plus the MS SQL2000 Enterprise Edition license and not including the actual server machine! They also have a stand alone tool (Data Transfer Tool) but it doesn’t support unattended operations (obviously). I thought by copying over files and using one mode of operation of this software to transfer data to the other machines (some data are stored in a database, that’s why you can’t just copy the flles over).

Of life and pets

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:19:20 +0000

Well, it mostly seems that my cat has reached the end of its life. It’s being slowly consumed (apparently it’s not absorbing much of the food it eats) and it’s way too weak to keep on. Rather than seeing it dying of starvation, we asked the vet to end its life (on Friday, probably).

It’s odd… I’ve seen a lot of animals die, many by my own hands (due to my past work - I’ve sworn never to do that again), but when it comes to my pet I can’t help being sad about it. I guess I grew attached to it, even if it was “just” a pet. Friday is going to be tough somehow on this aspect, everyone in the family is feeling sad to some extent. I hope I won’t see it in its last moments.

The end of Wild ARMs 4

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:12:23 +0000

I finished it two days ago. It’s got to be the shortest RPG I’ve ever played: a week is definitely too little (and I played only in the evenings for a couple hours). The game system is good indeed, but the story sucks completely. I’ve rarely seen characters that are so badly developed, or not developed at all. It’s a shame because the game system is good.

Wild ARMs 3 had much better character development and was also longer. Oh well, let’s see what will happen with Wild ARMs - The Vth Vanguard…

Wild ARMs 4

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 10:37:37 +0000

I got this one last week. Now that I’ve been 20+ hours into it, I guess I’ll write down some impressions. First of all, I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of the translation. XSeed has done a much better job than Agetec (who did Wild ARMs - Alter Code: F), and they preserved the voices and the opening song (even if redubbed).

I like the game system, it’s fst enough and there are platform-like parts that help in breaking up the monotony of dungeon crawling and fighting. I’m not too impressed with the story, though. The characters are really 2D personality-wise - they don’t really have any depth and the plot seems hole-ridden so far.

Office, take 2

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:01:36 +0000

Now that the office is more or less in working order (if we exclude the lack of chairs) I thought I’d post something about it. I finally finished setting everything up (including the 250 Gb network drive) today, so I can finally resume my real work next week (that is, bioinformatic analysis). I plan on buying a cheap chair this weekend so I can get at least a place to sit: there are two chairs only for 6 stations.

Moved

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 21:15:18 +0000

Finally today there was the (largely) anticipated move from the LITA to the CISI. I actually showed up at the CISI first, to do some research work, then after the lunch break I and a colleague went to the LITA to pack things up. We almost looked like robbers (and for sure got some funny looks from people as we moved to put things in the car): we had four computers, four monitors and keyboards, lots of cables, my notebooks, and more. It took an hour to pack things, and another 30 minutes to unpack them at the new location. That is, they’re in place but they’re not actually working - I’ll have to do that tomorrow (and I hope everything works).

Always needed

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:44:17 +0000

I haven’t been able to write because I always end up extremely tired from work. Since I’m moving to the CISI next week, it looks like everyone needs me. I managed to study a bit, then I had to help a couple people with a protocol, then work on the firewall/router migration (we’re restructuring our Intranet once I move a few computers there) then help with a software, etc. And tomorrow looks the same. Guess I’ll have to bear with it.

Money oddities

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 14:55:57 +0000

Some things strike me as being really odd. Regarding the commission post I made: it’s not the first time I try doing this. After I realized that asking for free was not really going to help (because many people don’t have time, or the will to do such a project) I already tried in the past about offering money. And in the past I didn’t get any responses. Perhaps I chose the wrong channel of communication? I’m not sure. Perhaps people were too busy? A simple “no” would have been better. But I think it all boils down to the bad habits of people on the Internet. And having read around about Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) offering money to help the GIMP project and then being forced to withdraw it, perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. Nevertheless, I’ll keep on trying.

Cats and finances

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:52:12 +0000

The two items in the title aren’t really related but they sum up today’s entry. My cat had to be visited by the vet, that diagnoesed renal insufficiency and strong dehydration. Something to be worry about, but it will be at lest kept under control soon. The second part of the entry deals with the fact that I’m trying to find a decent finance program that works under Linux (no thanks to any program on Windows, sorry): I tried KMyMoney but aside the fact that it doesn’t have any Italian template, it’s a little confusing. I’ll keep on looking for something similar that works under KDE.

New Year

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:11:24 +0000

And so it comes again. I personally didn’t want to celebrate, but I had some people over at home anyway. At least it was more or less calm. There were fireworks in the distance, and some landed up right in my terrace (no damage luckily). More or less, a decent night, though I still personally think that celebrations like that (with the exception being Carnival, which is worse) are more or less pointless. Well, mostly because I’ve seen some people even struggle to show that they would be celebrating.

Up and running

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:23:14 +0000

It’s up at last, though the header image is still missing. I’ll patch it up so I can use one I was provided (but that has text I’d like removed). This marks the return of dennogumi.org, in the form of a (mostly anime-oriented) blog, as there’s really no more demand for web pages that provide information (sadly). UPDATE: Oops, I forgot about link pages. I’ll have to ask Melissa to fix the logo.

General on dennogumi.org

Out with the old, in with the new (??)

Leave of absence? #

An art-challenged individual's perspective on AI (anime) generated art

Setting up Let's Encrypt certificates for the 389-ds LDAP server

Partings

DIY KVM over IP with pikvm

Quick tips: Server Name Indication for internal domains with Turris Omnia

Omnia? #

The problem #

Fixed comments

Refreshed look

Why? #

New server: away from Kolab

Hack of the day: extracting comments from Nicovideo

Hack of the day: downloading VOICEROID実況 from Nicovideo

実況? Is it something edible? #

Announcing a new project

The Big Forum Cleaning

GPG transition statement

Isso for comments

Dynamically static

The issue #

Plasma 5 live images for openSUSE and on the default openSUSE desktop

Live media for Plasma 5 #

Danbooru Client 0.2.0 released

Latest 4.13, newest 4.14 beta and Plasma 5 in openSUSE

Notes to self: nginx Piwigo rewrite rules

Unlocking KWallet with PAM

Accessing Casio EX-WORD 電子辞書 from Linux

Test the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 and KDE Workspace, Applications and Platform 4.10 RC2

Just finished - Kami Jigen Game Neptune V

Making KDE applications Python 3 friendly

openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days

What's cooking for KDE in openSUSE 12.3 - theming

Of Brainstorm, ideas and seeking help

Want to make KDE Brainstorm more useful?

Unexpected Christmas gifts: THE IDOLM@ASTER

I'm honestly surprised...

Moving hosts!

Holidays

Camogli and Portofino

Moving on

New theme and 2.7

DataMatrix page up

Posting from KOrganizer

DataMatrix 0.5

New PC, at last

I'm back

Japan - Day 6

Japan - Day 5

Japan - Day 3 and 4

Japan - Day 2

Japan - day 1

Digital camera

Asus Eee PC here!

Wordpress SNAFU

Eee PC interest

Wordpress 2.5

Back, and movies

Browser-less entries

Lamestop

Script to make captures of movie files

Blogging scholarships!?

New theme

Unimpressive management: Wordpress 2.3

The Internet lynch mob

An update

New office

Holidays

Transformers

A trip to the sea

tab2dokuwiki

Hardware upgrades

A change

Old code

Thoughts

A lot of work

A day with an Apple Xserve

There are no movies

Leave of absence?
#

Omnia?
#

The problem
#

Why?
#

実況? Is it something edible?
#

The issue
#

Live media for Plasma 5
#