Politreco

Parallelizing

Sometimes we discover that we don’t have to parallelize only the software. We must also parallelize the way it is written.

Thus, one of the last days of my graduation in Computer Engineering:

One day of hard work

Almost finished!

Welcome Windows 7

Welcome from a Linux user…

Python, bpython and my university’s email

Almost a year ago I posted in my past blog (in portuguese, automated translation) a tutorial on how to use greasemonkey to workaround the ugly interface of my university’s webmail. More specifically, in Firefox it looses the ability to select all emails. I took that just for an example… the real goal was to delete all emails since I access them through Gmail and periodically I get the email:  “your mailbox is full…”. So, how could I delete them without having to download them all? Simple: connect through POP3 and issue the “dele” command. I could do that even with plain telnet, but I decided to come back to python, since it was awhile I didn’t use it.

In the same week I saw two interesting posts in my RSS reader:

• the first came from BR-Linux, and it’s about bpython, a better CLI to python. It’s amazing!! You can get a lot of IDE-like functionalities in your command line. You can view a short video made by its author.
• The second is about pydev and came from “Linux Today”. With PyDev you can use Eclipse to edit your python code and get all functionalities you may out of an IDE. I still didn’t use it (and I think I’ll continue with vim) but it’s an interesting post to read as it talks about IDE vs vim/eclipse/other_text_editors.

And now, the really-stupid-delete-all-mail-from-poli.py:

#!/usr/bin/python
 
import getpass, poplib
 
strServer = 'pop3.poli.usp.br'
user = raw_input('user: ')
server = poplib.POP3(strServer)
server.user(user)
server.pass_(getpass.getpass())
numMsg = len(server.list()[1])
while True:
    resp = raw_input('%d messages in Inbox. Delete all? (yes/no) ' % numMsg)
    if resp == 'yes':
        for i in range(1,numMsg+1):
            server.dele(i)
        break
    elif resp == 'no':
        break
    else:
        print 'Answer yes or no\n'
 
server.quit()

It will ask the user and password to connect to pop3.poli.usp.br, show the current number of messages and ask for confirmation.

Trissa – update status

Just to let you all know some updates to Trissa: currently it’s in a hold state, waiting for next stable Ogre release, which is version 1.7. So until they release this version I’ll hold Trissa in a beta status, although it’s working great right now and all fixes for 1.0 are in place.

The biggest problem with current version of Ogre is that it doesn’t have proper support for multi-threaded games, or better, only one thread is able to make calls to Ogre functions which change the rendering states. In the design of Trissa this is not currently possible as both core’s and player’s code may change the rendering.

Also, I’d like to clarify a thing about the name: in contrary to what I said, “trissa” does not mean “tic-tac-toe” in italian. The right name in italian is “tris” as a friend of mine told me some months ago. However I decided to keep the name, because I liked it, it’s now properly indexed by Google and the game is not the original tic-tac-toe.

TinyOS

As I did with previous projects I had at my university, I’d like to share another one: it’s a project using TinyOS. It’s mainly intended for education purposes, so if you are trying to learn TinyOS, it’s a good example to look at.

What does it do?

It’s a platform to monitor temperature and humidity of various rooms in a house. All sensors must collect data every X seconds and send them to sink, a predefined node. Sink can also change the value X and sensors may not reach sink in a single hop, so nodes have to use their own routing protocol to send forward data from other nodes to sink.

If you are interested in this project, send me an email and so I could help you to understand it. I think it’s a good exercise to look at source code and discover which routing protocol I was talking about (before reading the README file).

As I think I won’t modify this code anymore, rather than put it in my git repository I made a .tar.bz2 which is available here: House Monitor source code.

Testando o google translate com o último post

Escrevi o último post em italiano e queria testar o Google Translate. Aqui está o link do último post traduzido para o Português.

Não digo que foi ruim para um tradutor automático. Em geral creio que dê para entender, mas algumas partes foram bem divertentes. Um exemplo é a frase “Eu e meu amigo fomos para Mateus Pomatt”, tradução de “Io e il mio amico Matteo  siamo andati a Val Formazza”. Perdeu-se todo o sentido, que seria: Eu e meu amigo Matteo fomos a Val Formazza.

De qualquer forma achei legal poder manter a forma do site só traduzindo-o com o Google Translate. Antes quando precisava de uma tradução eu copiava e colava o trecho que queria traduzir.

Val Formazza!

E’ da un po’ di tempo che non scrivo niente sul blog, ma è perché era un po’ preso con le cose dell’università. Spero poter aggiornarlo più spesso ora.

Questo post è sulla passeggiata che ho fatto un mese fa. Io e il mio amico Matteo  siamo andati a Val Formazza. E’ stato davvero spettacolare. Non posso immaginare una persona ritornare dall’Italia senza essere andato al meno una volta in montagna. È ancora più difficile da capire che tanti italiani non siano mai andati. Me lo raccomando a tutti!

Vi lascio qualche foto.

Prima foto a Val Formazza

Spettacolare!

La marmotta, che pochi sono riusciti a vedere così vicina

Io e Matteo

Camminando sopra un ghiacciaio

La discesa

Sono tante foto belle. È difficile da scegliere quale mettere qui. Allora vi lascio anche il link dell’album se voleste guardare altre: Montagna.

L’ultima foto che vorrei lasciare qui è della famiglia di Matteo. Vorrei anche ringraziare loro per avermi accolti così bene. Peccato che mancano un suo fratello e la sua sorella.

Matteo's family

Una frase che sentivo spesso in Italia era “beati i brasiliani per avere le foreste, le spiagie, ecc…”. Io però vi dico: beati gli italiani per avere, tra altre cose, le montagne bellissime!

Countdown restarted

Por motivos de força maior, a contagem regressiva foi reiniciada. Nova data: 27 de setembro.

12 dias, e contando…

Suse studio

I was really impressed about the demos I saw in last Novell’s announcement : Suse Studio. So last week I applied to have an account since it’s not open for everybody. Today I received the following email:

Thank you for your interest in SUSE Studio, a new service that makes
it quick and easy to create and test software appliances from your web
browser.  We are pleased to invite you to try SUSE Studio.

To accept this invitation and take SUSE Studio for a spin, please
visit this link:

****************************************

Alternatively you can go to http://www.susestudio.com/account/invitation and manually
enter your invitation code there.  Your invitation code is:

**********************

We hope that you will enjoy using SUSE Studio.  If you encounter bugs,
have general feedback or want to discuss SUSE Studio you can reach us
at feedback@susestudio.com.

Have fun using SUSE Studio!

Best Regards,
The SUSE Studio Team

Woww… amazing!! I’ll try it out and let you know what I think of it in a few weeks. In the meantime you can see some screencasts on their website or on youtube.

Do you have an account?

The final countdown

Em 30 dias estarei pousando no Brasil!!

A contagem final começou.

Preparem a picanha que eu estou chegando.