bodom_lx at task3 dot cc

As promised, Dycapo 0.0.2 is out.

Dycapo will be an open client (mobile)/server system that will improve travel experiences of users in a city. The system will let people to define a destination on their mobile phone. DyCaPo will suggest and arrange trips by either using the Public Transport Service or Carpooling volunteers.
That is, DyCaPo will implement full Dynamic Carpooling functionalities as well as static approaches.

More information and download on the official page.

Here are the release notes and the changes since 0.0.1:

RELEASE NOTES
***************
2010-01-10 Daniel Graziotin 
Dycapo 0.0.2 is just for _showing_out_some_functionalities_ of the system and testing the underlying technologies. Dycapo 0.0.2 incorporates and shows:
* OpenTrip Core adoption and OpenTrip Dynamic data structures proposal (in Django Model format)
* Use of XML-RPC with Django (rpc4django over HTTP and HTTPS)
* (Sort of) integration of Dycapo models with Django and rpc4django
* Authentication
* Insertion of a trip by a driver
* Start of a trip by a driver
* Search of a trip by a rider
* Send a ride request to a driver
* Let the driver accept the ride request
No one exported XML-RPC function will surely be included in the final API! No one exported XML-RPC function is either optimized or completely working!
Code is (somewhat) documented. Expect a completely better work for 0.1.0 

CHANGES SINCE 0.0.1
***************
Some refactoring to make the code cleaner.
Lots of bugs fixed.
Test suite rewritten and (finally) fully working.

models.py:
- added utility methods (i.e. __unicode__ and to_xmlrpc)
- use of OpenTrip id proposal instead of Django id
- addition of fields to Participation model, regarding a ride request and a request accepted

trip.py:
this module has been splitted in four files:
- driver.py - holds all the XML-RPC methods that a Driver needs.
- rider.py - holds all the XML-RPC methods that a Rider needs.
- commin.py - will hold all the XML-RPC methods shared by Rider and Driver
- utils.py - holds some utility functions.

driver.py (formerly trip.py):
- added check_ride_requests(trip) - checks for ride requests
- added accept_ride_request(trip, person) - for accepting a Rider

rider.py (formerly trip.py):
- added request_ride(trip) - sends a ride request to a trip

tests/:
- Cleaner code and better organization
- Added test_all_simple.py - creates a Driver and a Rider with the same destination as target
- test_all.py - creates 3 drivers and 5 riders with random locations as target

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• Update: first UML diagrams, some implementation thoughts (0)
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It’s a pleasure for me to announce Dycapo-0.0.1, the very first release of the project.
Dycapo-0.0.1 is part of the pre-alpha-dontuse releases, to only illustrate some functionalities.
Here are the release notes:

2009-12-26 Daniel Graziotin <daniel DOT graziotin AT gmail DOT com>

Dycapo 0.0.1 is just for showing out some functionalities of the system and
testing the underlying technologies.
Dycapo 0.0.1 incorporates and shows:

• OpenTrip Core adoption and OpenTrip Dynamic data structures proposal (in Django Model format)
• Use of XML-RPC with Django (rpc4django over HTTP and HTTPS)
• (Sort of) integration of Dycapo models with Django and rpc4django
• Authentication
• Insertion of a trip by a driver
• Start of a trip by a driver
• Search of a trip by a rider
• Accepting a ride

No one exported XML-RPC function will surely be included in the final API!
No one exported XML-RPC function is either optimized or completely working!

Code is (somewhat) documented. Expect a completely better work for 0.1.0

You can read much more about Dycapo and download it at Dycapo official project page. Project page also hosts installation instructions and configuration steps.

The research behind Dycapo (Dynamic Carpooling system) is illustrated here.

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Today I was able to remotely call methods of Dycapo using HTTPS and HTTP basic auth. Can’t wait for the next version of rpc4django! 0.1.6 should give us the possibility to also access the authenticated user object inside the exported functions.
We are also waiting for Django 1.2 that will give us the possibility to validate our models at the models level instead of the current forms level.

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BD-review is a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. The project is the outcome of the Internet Technologies course at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano.  The requirements of the project were to build a website using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

Therefore, this project is not really meant for production use. It was made as a strong, working and correct base for studying JavaEE academically. It should be useful for every student (also non-student) willing to have an overview on JSP and study it. The code is well-written, uses MVC, and the whole project is documented in detail in a 20+ pages report.

A screenshot of a Review

I encourage to read the PDF report of the project. It contains detailed information about the analysis and design phases, as well as the architecture description, screenshots, problems found etc. Please read also the README file. It contains configuration instructions.

There is a running demo located on the evaluation server of the course, but I think it will be removed soon.

Quick Jump:

Vision

Requirements Implemented

Technologies Overview

Download

License

Vision

The aim of the project is to build a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. Users will be able to signal interesting materials and review them, while other users will be able to comment the reviews, too.
This web 2.0-oriented application should allow unknown talented musicians to achieve a higher notoriety but also to improve their productions.

Screenshot of the personal user page

Requirements Implemented

I report here the requirements of the course, all implemented by BD-review:
What BD-review implements is:

• User Management
  • List existing users of the system
  • Creation of a new user
  • Deletion of the existing user
• List and modify access rights of the users
  • check boxes with some capabilities (min 3)
• User registration and login to the system
• Items management
  • Users add, edit or remove items
  • Users comments or reviews items
  • Administrator can manage the comments (edit,remove, add)
• Personalization
  • Salutation for a returning user
  • List resources that are new from the last visit
  • Customization of the layout for a class of users.
• Techniques – MUST be used
  • Static HTML
  • CSS: all the look and feel must be in CSS files
  • Javascript: check input and manage menus
  • Servlet: Reading (parameters and headers) and writing headers and resulting page
  • Servlet: Session management with cookies and session object
  • Servlet: Redirect the client
  • Servlet: Forward to another page or servlet
  • JSP: Expressions, scriptlets and declarations Beans
  • DBMS access trough JDBC
  • Integration of JSP and Servlets (forward and include) using MVC pattern.

In addition, BD-review implements two Filters and plays with Regular Expressions.

Technologies Overview

• J2EE technologies (JSP, Servlets and JavaBeans)
• Database support (PostgreSQL 8.3) through JDBC 4
• XHTML Strict 1.0 + Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 for presentation
• Apache Commons for conversion and Bean population routines
• Some utility methods found on Books and Internet (their provenience is cited in the sourcecode)
• Javascript for confirmation system and form validation
• Regular Expressions
• TinyMCE rich WYSIWYG HTML editor

Screenshot: modifying a Review

Download

PDF report of the project
Complete Source Code and Documentation (as Netbeans Project)

The Future

There will not be future developments for the project. It was not a real-life project but I will be very proud if you find it an useful example for learning JSP. You can also use it as a basis for developing a real project (also a University Project). You can do anything you want with BD-review, but please respect the license. I would be happy if you send me an email about your experience in using BD-review.

License

BD-review is released under The Gnu Affero GPL version 3! This is different from the license of the contents of the blog

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program. If not, see < http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/ >.

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For people having Intel graphic chipset under Gnu/Linux, performance using 3D applications or Compiz-* window manager effects has always been a problem. Intel drivers for Xorg never gave problems but have also never been brilliant. I always looked around searching for xorg.conf tuning configuration entries.
Today I was simply browsing Ubuntu Wiki and discovered the UxaTesting page. I wanted to know something about UXA and Intel drivers, so I found a Wikipedia definition:

In computing, UXA is the reimplementation of the EXA graphics acceleration architecture of the X.Org Server developed by Intel. Its major difference with EXA is the use of GEM, replacing Translation Table Maps.

Yeah cool, the official Xorg Wiki Intel Graphics Driver page Gives also some more information, so if you’ve got one of these chipsets (you can verify using lspci | grep VGA ):

• i810 and variants thereof
• i815
• i830M
• 845G
• i852GM
• 855GM
• 865G
• 915G and variants (GMA 900)
• E7221
• 945G and variants (GMA 950)
• 946GME
• G33
• Q33
• Q35
• 965G/Q
• G35
• G41
• G43
• G/GM/Q45

You may want to try out the new acceleration method by adding this line


Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"


To your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, in section “Device”.

Please note that:

1. UXA is not yet stable as EXA. Try it out, signal your experience on the Ubuntu wiki page and fill out a bug if necessary
2. You will need at least Xorg server 1.6.0
3. You will need at least xf86-video-intel-2.6.2 drivers
4. I don’t think this is mandatory, but please tell me if you encounter differences when updating to 2.6.30.x kernel. I already have 2.6.30.0 on Sid so I don’t know if with a previous version this is working

On Debian Sid I just had to add the Option line to my xorg.conf file.
The performance differences are noticeable and incredible. Everything runs faster and smoother.
My glxgears output went from 60 FPS (using EXA) to 425 FPS (using UXA).
This is a 700% performance improvement!

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Unipoli is a simple simulation of the very popular board game Monopoly by Hasbro. Unipoli is the Java outcome of the Programming Project course I followed in Academic Year 2007 – 2008.

I don’t know for how long the official project page will stay on Unibz servers, therefore I’m keeping this page on task3.

Project Members

• Riccardo Buttarelli
• Daniel Graziotin
• Martin Leitgeb
• Massimiliano Pergher

Mission Statement

This document was the first step made in facing the project:
The project will provide a simple simulation of the very popular board game Monopoly. Unipoli will allow a multiplayer experience (up to 8 human players) on the same machine but not over a network.
We will implement the classical Standard (Atlantic City version) Monopoly game board layout, produced by Charles Darrow, and later by Parker Brothers.
However, by virtue of being a virtual implementation of the real game, Unipoli will overtake some aspects of the real Monopoly game, giving to the players unique visual experiences. As example, we will highlight owned lands with the color associated to their owners. When a player decides to sell a property, the board will be obscured, leaving the lands owned by the player well visible.
Like in the original game, the purpose is to dominate the competition against the opponents, and be the last to survive. Due to time problems, we will not implement all the rules and game features. For example, hotels will not be included in our game version.

The GUI will consist of two main components:

• A 2D top view of the game-board, that will occupy about the 80% of the window.
• A sidebar containing information on players and the dice.

Players will be able to buy lands and build houses in case of monopoly. The opponents have to pay rents if a land is owned. There will be both factories and railroads.
Our game implementation will also feature the so-called Chance Cards.
There wonʼt be the possibility to play as the Bank. Money will just be considered as a number which increases and decreases. Therefore, a graphical representation of paper money is not scheduled.

Screenshots

Unipoli - Board Overview

Unipoli: user choices

Documentation

• Vision Statement (pdf)
• Vision Statement Presentation (pdf)
• User Stories (pdf)
• Noun Extraction (pdf)
• Product Backlog (pdf)
• UML Classes, Hierarchy and Relations (png)
• UML Classes in details (huge png)
• A more precise Class Diagram (huge png)
• Javadoc (browsable)

Source code and Javadoc

• Unipoli 1.0 source code (tar.gz)
• Unipoli 1.0 Javadoc (tar.gz)

Binaries

• Unipoli 1.0 with splash-screen (jar, jvm 1.6)
• Unipoli 1.0 (jar, jvm 1.5)

License

Unipoli is released under the GPL v. 3

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

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