Author: mattions

Appeal for Berlusconi’s Resignation

January 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

1. Resignation.
We call upon Silvio Berlusconi to resign immediately from his post as Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri. In no other democratic country would a Prime Minister, faced with such serious legal accusations, remain in office longer than a few hours. All Italian citizens, of whatever political persuasion, must realise that the image of their country is profoundly tainted if Berlusconi remains in office.
2. Attendance in court.
We call upon Silvio Berlusconi not to defend himself on television, using his substantial mediatic power to discredit the magistrates, but to present himself in court and seek to defend himself there, as would any normal citizen. Once in court, he can in any case hope to benefit from the services of the highest paid lawyers in the country. We sincerely hope, for his sake and that of the country, that he is able to demonstrate his innocence. If he and his supporters reply that the judges are irremediably biased against him, we would like to point out that on more than one occasion in the past he has been given the benefit of the doubt by the courts. In the Mondadori case, for example, the court judged in 2001 his position as Head of Government to be part of the ‘extenuating circumstances’ which in his case alone allowed the crime to be prescribed.
3. The role of the President of the Republic
In a situation in which two of the principal powers of the state – the magistracy and the executive – are on a head-on collision course of considerable danger for the future of the Republic, we call upon its President to observe closely the situation and to be prepared to intervene actively, naturally within the limits of the powers ascribed to his office by the Constitution.
4. The opposition parties
We call upon all the parties of the opposition to put aside their differences and to abandon any jockeying for position, uniting instead their voices in a single request of a single word: RESIGNATION.
5. Civil Society
We invite the many associations and the hundreds of thousands of members of civil society to do the same, pooling their resources and joining hands on a single line of action. We would particularly appeal to Catholic civil society to deplore the hesitations and silences of the Vatican on so important an issue of public ethics.
6. The friends of Italy in the world
We have written this appeal in English as well as Italian in order to reach all those abroad who are friends of Italian democracy. Do not despair of Italy! The country needs your solidarity and help.

Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Paul Ginsborg e Sandra Bonsanti per tutta Libertà e Giustizia

I completely agree and I repost it here. Original on the “Libertà e Giustizia” website.

Retroffiting with style:the cinquino elettrico

January 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Pietro Cambi is the president of the Eurozev, an association which promotes the conversion from endothermic engine to electric. He converted his own ‘cinquino’ to an electric car, manteining a lot of the original specs (like for example the clutch!)

cinquino picture

Cinquino and the kitegen prototype in the back. At the right side of cinquino Pietro Cambi, at the left side Massimo Ippolito, the kitegen's inventor

 

There is a video on youtube when the cinquino hit the 100 Km/h (the endothermic cinquino was never that fast 🙂

This is pretty cool and I think the way to go.

Sei stato nominato

January 11, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Allora sembra che il nuovo nome del partito di B. si chiami Italia. Si avete letto bene. Almeno secondo quelli dell’agenzia dire.

Ora, oltre al fatto che già con Forza Italia era stato rubata la possibilità di tifare la nazionale (specialmente quella del rugby), ed ogni volta che vedo una partita la cosa mi imbestialisce un pò, adesso addirittura il nome del paese è il nome di un partito politico.

Si sospetta che il nome sia stato scelto utilizzando il generatore casuale di metilparaben

Questo era una delle possibilità e non ho capito perchè sia stata scartata…

Profiling python app

January 1, 2011 / / 1 Comment

If you have to profile application, in python for example, it’s good to read this blog post which I found very useful information.

The profile is used to compare pytables, a python imlementation of HDF5 and pickle, which is a classic choice which you ran into if you are dealing with saving big files on the harddrive.

The best tool so far seems to be the massif profiler, which comes with the valgrind suite. How valgrind works:

This will run the script through valgrind

valgrind --tool=massif python test_scal.py

This produces a “massif.out.?????” file which is a text file, but not in a very readable format. To get a more human-readable file, use ms_print

ms_print massif.out.????? > profile.txt

So I’ve run some test to check the scalability of HDF5.

[sourcecode language=”python”]
import tables
import numpy as np

h5file = tables.openFile(‘test4.h5′, mode=’w’, title="Test Array")
array_len = 10000000
arrays = np.arange(1)

for x in arrays:
x_a = np.zeros(array_len, dtype=float)
h5file.createArray(h5file.root, "test" + str(x), x_a)

h5file.close()
[/sourcecode]

This is the memory used for one array

 

profile_one_array

Profiling one numpy array

This is for two arrays

profile_two_arrays

Profiling two numpy arrays

Four arrays

profiling_four_arrays

Profiling four numpy arrays

And this is for fifty

profile_fifty_arrays

Profiling fifty numpy arrays

As soon you enter the loop the efficiency is preserved in a really nice way
Summing up:

  • one ~ 87 Mb
  • two ~ 163 Mb
  • four ~ 163 Mb
  • fifty ~ 163 Mb

So the problem is not on pytables, but it lies somewhere else..

Crowd power on steroids

December 31, 2010 / / 0 Comments

This is not a news, but I think there is a big shift happening in the society.

I guess the idea of community sharing is becoming bigger. Opensource movement was a precursor in this regard, I think and a loose collaboration is able to get things done.

This will raise with the creation of more peer to peer networks which have a strong focus and an objective. Collaborative consumption will be the next stop.

Another trend which is worth of noticing is increase of collective intelligence. Making data available to people is opening up a lot of possibilities. From opengoverment to opendata to openknowledge.

I still remember the Time cover with You. Next year I bet it will be “we”.

Happy New Year,

I guess it will be full.

Fixing a bug. The power of opensource

December 31, 2010 / / 1 Comment

 

If you used gnome 2.30 and used two screen, cloning the smaller in the bigger one,  you were annoyed by this bug. At least I was really annoyed. Nothing too bad, just the image was not drawn correctly. In my case was drawn twice at different resolution, one on top of the other. However this was a regression from gnome 2.28 where this was not present. The bug was up for a long time and was also reported upstream at gnome side.

I did some research on it and I had nailed down where was the problematic code, however I was unable to propose the solution because C is no my cup of tea.

Yesterday Florent proposed a fix which was tested by Thomas, which was kind enough to give the instruction how to recompile the package, making a deb out of it and install it. Therefore I just give it a try. Finally, I have the desktop fixed!!

The patch it’s already on the gnome bugzilla and everyone will get this back as it supposed to be.

The thing that I want to underline is the anarchic collaboration:

  • somebody open the bug,
  • other people reported it and the bug was confirmed
  • somebody else found which part of code was interest
  • somebody proposed the solution
  • other people tested on different system

This is the beauty of opensource. Just give an hand if you can and enjoy it.

Stand your ground

December 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The story, picked up also by the guardian here is rather interesting. In few words, a student @Darwin College at the University of Cambridge has published, on his personal website a MPhil thesis about how to construct a device which shows a flaw on the credit card system, which makes possible to make a transaction with a stolen card using any PIN.

The bankers has asked to take this information down. Now think about it for a moment. Instead to fix it, they asked to take it down.

I can foresee your objection.. They should give them time to act and then disclose the flaw. They actually did, because the problem was reported in 2009 (yes, last year) as said on this letter.

In the letter they also write why they will not take it down:

you seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values.

This the right way to go. Full disclosure. Fix the problem, don’t hide it. It was also the position expressed @ the Moka Olografix. (An Italian camping about security which I went ages ago).

Hat tip to Ross Anderson and Omar Choudary.