In order to make the usb drives be mounted with writing permissions to all the user of the system I’ve modified the /etc/udisk-glue.conf as following (in bold are the part that I’ve added:

filter disks {
 optical = false
 partition_table = false
 usage = filesystem
}

match disks {
 automount = true
 automount_options = { sync, noatime, <strong>"dmask=0", "fmask=0"</strong>}
 post_insertion_command = "udisks --set-spindown %device_file --spindown-timeout 1800 --mount %device_file --mount-options sync,noatime,<strong>dmask=0,fmask=0</strong>"
}

And I had to let udisk-glue run as root as following:

# udisks-glue
#

description "udisks-glue for udisks"

start on started dbus
stop on (runlevel [06] or stopped dbus)

expect fork
respawn

#exec su - pi -c "udisks-glue"
exec udisks-glue

(I’ve changed udisk-glue such that It’s run by root)

Since there are a lot of folks out there that are using this distro I think it’s is worth sharing this knowledge. If some dev is reading this, please consider to propagate this changes (or do equivalent ones) to the distro in order to increase flexibility.

Update

<VirtualHost *:443>
 <proxy>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </proxy>

  SSLEngine On
  SSLCertificateFile    /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

  ProxyPass        /  http://127.0.0.1:9091
  ProxyPassReverse /  http://127.0.0.1:9091

</VirtualHost>

If you have ever used OpenVpn you know that a lot of filtered network do not allow to connect to other ports rather than 80 and 443 TCP. If you have your OpenVpn server in the same machine alongside with a Webserver this may be a problem because you want to use port 80 and 443 for your webserver and also the openvpn.

OpenVpn developers are smart people and they knew that this situation is not so odd so they invented a special option to deal with it. Thanks the article at raniersblog.org I found the port-share option that just redirect all the packets that are not vpn ones to another host:port pair. This allows to run your webserver in a different port, let’s say 8443 and make OpenVpn run on the 443 TCP. If packets are not for the vpn they will get redirected to the 8443.

To do so just configure your webserver to listen to port 8443 and add this configuration to the openvpn configuration file (usually /etc/openvpn/server.conf):

proto tcp
port 443
port-share 127.0.0.1 8443

Then restart openvpn and your webserver and you should be all set.

bunch = Bunch(a = 7, b = 3, c = 'hello')
In [5]: bunch.a
Out[5]: 7
In [6]: bunch.b
Out[6]: 3
In [7]: bunch.c
Out[7]: 'hello'

But it’s also more powerful than this:

In [9]: d = {'a.b.c':1, 'a.c':2}
In [10]: bunch = Bunch(**d)
In [11]: bunch.a
bunch.a      bunch.a.b.c  bunch.a.c
In [13]: print bunch.a.b.c
1
In [14]: print bunch.a.c
2
In [15]: print bunch['a.b.c']
1

You can also use the dot notation to describe an hierarchy of objects and the Bunch object will take care of it

It’s not a dream, I’ve just implemented this python Bunch Object and this is the code:

class C(object): pass

def rec_getattr(obj, attr):
    """
    Get object's attribute. May use dot notation.
    """
    if '.' not in attr:
        return getattr(obj, attr)
    else:
        L = attr.split('.')
        return rec_getattr(getattr(obj, L[0]), '.'.join(L[1:]))

def rec_setattr(obj, attr, value):
    """
    Set object's attribute. May use dot notation.
    """
    if '.' not in attr:
        setattr(obj, attr, value)
    else:
        L = attr.split('.')
        if not hasattr(obj, L[0]):
            setattr(obj, L[0], C())
        rec_setattr(getattr(obj, L[0]), '.'.join(L[1:]), value)

class Bunch(dict):
    def __init__(self,**kw):
        dict.__init__(self,kw)
        self.__dict__.update(kw)
        for k,v in kw.iteritems():
            rec_setattr(self, k, v) 

Comments, suggestions, patches are welcome :)

scp -r server1:"directory1 directory2 directory3 ..." .

Which is easy with simple filenames but as soon as you need directories in different paths or long named directories it will be pain. And you don’t have shell completion. You could say: “Set up key authentication and you will have shell completion on the remote server”. Well, I don’t wanna set up keys for a server and I want a more practical way to solve this.
I wanted to connect through ssh from nautilus (just type ssh://server on the path bar), surf my remote directories, then download what i need to a second server. Well I did a python program to do that.
It’s pretty straightforward. You connect with nautilus to a server, select all the directories you want then copy them. Open the shell of another server, then do: python3 download.py -s server1 CTRL+V
The CTRL+V will copy all the filename absolute paths straight to the shell. Just hit enter, it will ask for password, just give it and you are done. It will start downloading all the list of directories of files you want from server1
This is the python program that makes this possible.

<pre>
#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
'''
This programs allows easy copies of remote directories to the local path using scp

        usage:
                python3 download.py [options] list-of-files

        options:
                -s, --server server:set the server instead of deducing it

@author: Vincenzo Ampolo <vincenzo.ampolo@gmail.com>
'''

import sys
import os
import getopt

import urllib.parse

def shellquote(s):
        """escapes the given string s such that it can be used safely in a shell
        """
        return "'" + s.replace("'", "'\\''") + "'"

def main(argv=None):
        if argv is None:
           argv = sys.argv

        opts, extraparams = getopt.gnu_getopt(argv[1:], "hvs:", ["help", "server"])

        verbose = False
        server = None

        for o, a in opts:
                if o == "-v":
                        verbose = True
                elif o in ("-h", "--help"):
                        print(__doc__)
                        sys.exit(0)
                elif o in ("-s", '--server'):
                        server = a
                else:
                        assert False, "UnhandledOption"

        l = []
        for path in extraparams:
                url = urllib.parse.urlparse(path)
                if not server:
                        server = url.host
                quoted_path = shellquote(urllib.parse.unquote(url.path))
                l.append(quoted_path)
        files_to_download = ' '.join(l)
        cmd = 'scp -r %s:"%s" .'%(server, files_to_download)
        os.system(cmd)
        return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())
</pre>

Back in the 70′ through the 00′ Apple was a very good company. It was surely one of the best technology innovator in the world. Remember the Apple I, the all-wood computer that made the personal computer being real? It was amazing. I never saw one for real but It’s in the hall of fame of the computer history.

Do you remember the Apple II, one of the best Apple products, the one that was able to sell $79m in the old 1979? That was innovation. In a world dominated by large scale computer they found a new market: personal computer. Do you remember 1984? There was this commercial:

I just saw that and I see a company that would like to make genuine innovation, compete with products not with lawyers. Another company was very good at it, and it’s called Microsoft.

Yesterday I read that Apple wins sales ban on Google galaxy nexsus. It seems that after Steve’s administration Apple turned to be much more like Microsoft. They stopped competing with products and they choose to compete with lawyers. It seems that the fuel that made Apple be one of the best tech companies of the world is gone with its beloved founder Steve.

I think that was a very bad move. It seems like Apple is maybe going to be an empty box without any sort of innovation trying to make money out of awful patents acquired during time. I’m so sorry for all the Apple fanboys, these moves are hard to be defended in terms of technology innovation.

I’m just curious, was Apple really thinking that it could defeat android with this move?

Installing pymatlab was a bit tricky. I had to install matlab on Linux, then install the python-numpy package and then install pymatlab with this sets of commands

sudo -s

export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/MATLAB/R2011a/bin/glnxa64/

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/MATLAB/R2011a/bin/
 export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/local/MATLAB/R2011a/extern/include/
 apt-get install csh
 pip install pymatlab

Then I was able to run matlab inside my python programs.

• John D. Cook from 2009, a bit out of date, about the limits of IronPython http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/02/26/ironpython-is-a-one-way-gate/
• IronClad about patching some of the IronPython limitations, mainly the ability to run python C modules http://code.google.com/p/ironclad/
• Zenon Ochal about calling python code from C# and vice versa http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/dynamic-language-integration-in-a-c-world/
• Microsoft on IronPython architecture and differencies with CPython http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc300810.aspx

Run python from C# and vice versa

But thanks to .Net 4.0 It seems that a lot of troubles have been resolved introducing the new dynamic type in C#. With that type I can finally do some work in python then export any class to my C# world.

There are still some issues in using any python module: Ironpython is not compatible with the normal python interpreter, or CPython. You can use Ironclad to make Ironpython run C CPython modules but they don’t support Python 2.7 yet and the last update from their release is from  07/2010.

Install IronPython

After installing IronPath you have to modify windows PATH system variable such that you can execute ipy in a shell and get a IronPython console. To do so you have to add the following two lines at the end of your PATH variable on Windows:

;c:\Program Files (x86)\IronPython 2.7\;c:\Program Files (x86)\IronPython 2.7\Sciprts

Install Setuptools

Tried to install distribute. Of course it didn’t work. It crashed. I’ve successfully managed to setup setuptools but their support is broken and i’m unable to install simple python eggs due to multiple error.   These are the steps that I’ve followed

c:\Users\vinz\Desktop>ipy distribute_setup.py
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/d/distribute/distribute-0.6.2
7.tar.gz
Extracting in c:\users\vinz\appdata\local\temp\tmpanru2x
Now working in c:\users\vinz\appdata\local\temp\tmpanru2x\distribute-0.6.27
Installing Distribute

Process is terminated due to StackOverflowException.
Something went wrong during the installation.
See the error message above.

Use setuptools instead http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

Open a priviledged shell http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/run-a-command-as-administrator-from-the-windows-vista-run-box/

ipy ez_setup.py

Since there is no support to zlib in ironpython you cannot install any egg anyway even if you installed setuptools.

Install an egg

I’ve managed to install setuptools, however installing a simple package fails because .pth files are not managed correctly. So the best way of installing eggs is just to take their source, maybe unpacking an egg since it’s just a zip file, and copy directly on the IronPython site-packages directory. I’ll still describe the process I did just in case some reader sees that I’ve done a mistake.

To install an egg, just unzip it and run:

ipy -X:Frames setup.py install --user

The –user will install the package for user only. To install the package system-wide you have to install from an administrator shell.

The best thing to do to install an egg is just to unpack it, it’s a zip file, then copy the directory of your library in C:\Program Files (x86)\IronPython 2.7\Lib\site-packages . That directory will be included in sys.path of every ipy interpreter.

First problems

Just run a first example which uses ElementTree and i got:

NotImplementedError: iterparse is not supported on IronPython. (CP #31923)

Surfing a bit the web I found that It’s a bug from Dec 2011 http://ironpython.codeplex.com/workitem/31579

So I’ve downloaded and installed elementTree, It will install on normal Python’s site-packages, so you have to move the folder unver IronPython’s site-packages. After doing so, when you need to import etree just do:

import platform
if platform.python_implementation() == 'IronPython':
from elementtree import ElementTree
else:
import xml.etree.ElementTree

This code will import the just installed elementtree library or the system library one depending if you are on normal Python interpreter (CPython) or IronPython.

Conclusions

From this experience I’ve learnt many things:

• IronPython is not a full python interpreter: it lacks many basic support like the one for setuptool and distribute
• IronPython is very bugged, even the standard library is bugger. Thus import as external module everything you need.
• IronPython cannot use the vast majority of python modules because to support .NET jit it breaks CPython compatibility

Thus. Keep away from it! It’s just crap. Microsoft’s dream of .Net simply doesn’t work for python. Yeah, you can access Python functions and class from C# but you miss the goal that makes people use python: a very huge amount of libraries and packages that are easy to install and integrate. Sorry Microsoft, it’s yet another #Fail

Today I had to simply share a local repository with a collegue. It was pretty easy, just do:

cd MyGitProject
git daemon --reuseaddr --verbose  --base-path=. --export-all ./.git

the reuseaddr option will reuse connection, verbose will let you see what will happen, base-path is for using relative paths and export-all is to export all the repos in the .git folder. Easy, isn’t it?
Tell your friend/collegue to do

git clone git://your-ip-address-here/ MyGitProject

And it will start downloading the new repo :) Amazing, isn’t it ? PS: do not use bad GUIs, they will mess the command line to get the repo. just open a shell, even on windows, and type that command.

Doing so is prety easy. Just unpack the aptana package you just downloaded from aptana.com in whatever folder you like. I usually put this kind of custom apps in ~/Apps . now enter into the newly created aptana folder and create a file named aptana.desktop.

Put this content into that file:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
StartupNotify=True
Name=Aptana
Comment=Aptana Studio 3
Icon=/home/goshawk/Apps/Aptana_Studio_3/icon.xpm <- replace this whit the ABSOLUTE path in which you unpacked aptana
Exec=/home/goshawk/Apps/Aptana_Studio_3/AptanaStudio3 <- the same applies here, replace with the ABSOLUTE path
Terminal=false
Categories=Development;IDE;

Give that file executable permissions. A chmod +x aptana.desktop should be fine. You can also right click on the file from nautilus, go to properties and then flag execute. The icon of the file will change and will be the aptana icon. Your launcher is now ready. Just drag and drop it to the dock and right click on it and select lock to launcher. Well done.

If you want it to be also accessible from the unity text launcher (the one that appears when you press the windows logo on your keyboard) just copy the aptana.desktop file to ~/local/share/applications. Your aptana will be also available from the text launcher now.