bodom_lx at task3 dot cc

About a year after the creation of bd-theme-zen Wordpress theme, I decided to switch to a new theme. The new theme is monochrome

The reasons behind are simple: unfortunately, 2009 has totally been not a Zen year for me. Many things have not gone as I thought they should have been. Many other important things have been melted. Lot of things have changed.

I hope 2010 will be the year of the Phoenix, in which everything aggressively changes again and turns better. For everyone, for sure.

Therefore, I decided to switch to a new theme, monochrome by mono-lab.net. This theme is very modern, yet minimalistic and elegant. And surely, more nice-looking than those themes written by me.
I’m still happy with bd-theme-zen, I liked its initial orange version and I appreciated the glacial blue one I decided to switch to around August (the color switch was also significant for me).

But this is not time for being Zen. It is time to be reactive.

I wish everybody a fucking explosive 2010.

For those of you asking if I was spending my time to write this post on 2009-12-31 at 00.00: I wrote this post on 2009-12-26 and scheduled the publish to the beginning of the new Year.

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I love to be back to Slackware, my very first distribution. However, there are a couple of things that I’m missing from the other more comfortable distributions. From among them, I totally miss Network Manager.
I saw many people asking in forums on how to install Network Manager in Slackware 13.0. There is Wicd, already present in Slackware “repositories”. Every Slackware maniac will tell you that it does the same job of Network Manager, but I don’t agree. It does not always work and is more complicated to be configured than NM.

Anyway, I’m going to explain to Slackware newbies the dirty way to have a fully working Network Manager on Slackware 13.0. This method is totally against Slackware philosophy and will also replace some important libraries of the system! Anyway, the packages being replaced are prepared from the guys behind GNOME SlackBuild, a project to bring Gnome in every Slackware release.
You have two way to have Network Manager in your Slackware: either install the entire Gnome from them (or any other similar project) or use slapt-get against their repositories and just install Network-Manager. Here are the instructions. All the following actions must be performed as root user:

1. Download, install and configure slapt-get. Instructions are provided on their website.
2. Update your system with:
   

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –dist-upgrade

3. Add GNOME SlackBuild repository in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc:

   SOURCE=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gsb/gsb-current/

4. Update the list of available packages and replace some system packages:

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –add-keys
   slapt-get –install –reinstall alsa-lib bluez glib2 gtk+2 libwnck

5. Now install Network Manager and its GTK applet:

   slapt-get –install NetworkManager network-manager-applet

6. Be sure that dbus, hal and NetworkManager daemons will be loaded at boot time:

   chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus /etc/rc.d/rc.hald /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager

7. Add your user to the plugdev group. Edit /etc/group, find the line

   netdev:x:86:root

   Add your username after root (bodom_lx is my case)

   netdev:x:86:root,bodom_lx

8. You are quite finished now! Log back as normal user and create a startup script for network-manager-applet:

   cd ~/.kde/Autostart/

   Create a file called nm-applet.sh with the following content:

   #!/usr/bin/bash
   nm-applet –sm-disable &

   Give it execution permission:

   chmod +x nm-applet.sh

   .

Reboot your system. Everything should work fine now.

To uninstall Network Manager and restore the system as it was before the installation follow these instructions, as root::

1. remove any GNOME SlackBuild package using:
   

   removepkg /var/log/packages/*gsb

2. Comment GNOME SlackBuild entry in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc:

   #SOURCE=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gsb/gsb-current/

3. Update your slapt-get sources and re-install the replaced Slackware packages:

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –reinstall –install glib2 libwnck alsa-lib gtk+2

4. Toggle execution permission to the auto-started network-manager-applet. Log back as normal user and type:

   chmod -x ~/.kde/Autostart/nm-applet.sh

Feel free to comment any suggestion.

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My second physical meeting at SoNET – FBK is about to end. Today we discussed about applications that implements Dynamic Carpooling Systems on mobile phones. The list is hosted on the following Wiki page: http://www.opensocialcapital.com/dynamic_carpooling/wiki/index.php?title=Systems_Analyzed.
We also discussed about a protocol to be adopted for defining rides, to be used by the system in message passing. We took a look at the draft of OpenTrip Core, which currently defines the data structure only. There is also a tiny proposal of Dan Kirshner at his dynamicridesharing.org Wiki, called OpenDRS. We are also looking at Google Transit, because there is also the idea of starting a prototype that offers public transport rides, to help us reaching a critical mass.
An idea could be a merge of those proposals into a fork of OpenTrip Core, that is currently stopped and misses lots of features.
Next time we will discuss about our system, called temporary Dycapo, and I will prepare some software engineering documents.

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While I am waiting for my wiki to be setup, I’m updating here my first week of work. I read lots of papers regarding dynamic car pooling and friends. Most of them are listed on this MIT website and on dynamicridesharing.org. The second site is maintained by Dan Kirshner, the author of three (unlucky) experiments regarding dynamic car pooling.
I actually selected 13 publications for my scope. I’m going to publish the list as soon as I’ve got my wiki. What I’m going to do is to review them, comparing my work with the excellent one done by Hannes Zimmerman and Yann Stempfel (Current Trends in Dynamic Ridesharing, identification of Bottleneck Problems and Propositions of Solutions).

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Summary

Pomotux is  a C++ activity manager for the Pomodoro Technique created by Francesco Cirillo, a member of the XPlabs crew. The program focuses on the basic features of the technique. It does not focus on advanced techniques, such as the prediction of the number of pomodoros needed for an activity.

About the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that can be used for any kind of task. For many people, time is an enemy. The anxiety triggered by “the ticking clock”, especially when a deadline is involved, leads to ineffective work and study habits which in turn lead to procrastination. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable ally in accomplishing what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and to enable us to continually improve the way we work or study.

The Technique is heavily explained on a 60+ pages book published on the website. Please visit the official website for more explanations.

A running Pomodoro

Get Pomotux

Pomotux has been developed for the Software Engineering Project course at the Free University Of Bolzano by Daniel Graziotin, Riccardo Buttarelli and Massimiliano Pergher. We decided to release it under the GPL 3 license and host the code on Google Code. Everybody is free to contribute and join the project.

Pomotux is hosted on: http://code.google.com/p/pomotux/

Source code is available on: http://code.google.com/p/pomotux/downloads/list

The wiki contains more information and installation instruction, and a better description of the of the system implementation and Software Engineering outcomes

Activity Inventory Sheet

Technology Overview
The System has been developed using

• C++ programming language (coding standard)
• QT framework (4.5)
• SQLite Database library
• LiteSQL Object Relational Mapper framework

Useful tools used during development:

• CXXTEST Testing Framework
• CPPCHECK code analyzer
• Artistic Style code formatter

Project Status
The project succesfully passed the exam with a maximum degree. It has been developed under Gnu/Linux and has only been tested under Gnu/Linux (various distributions). It should be cross-platform. The only component that brakes cross-platform is LiteSQL, that should work on any *NIX system but not Windows. We are looking for testers and people to port it under Max Os X (and possibly) under Windows

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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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