Jun 122013
 

linux-playstation2

Thanks to all the Indie games, Steam and Humble Bundle recently the market of games for Linux has become most active than ever and so I’ve bought some arcade/action/platform games.

Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t like too much to manage around 10 different keys on the keyboard and remember all the combo that I’ve to do with them, a joypad it’s a much simpler way to play that kind of games, and what’s the best joypad around ?

In my opinion Playstation joypads are some of the best you can find around, probably Xbox are good too, but I’ve an unused playstation 2 and so I’ve choose to go in that direction.

And I must say that with a great surprise everything worked fine without too much problems !!

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Jun 092013
 

PDFtk or The PDF Toolkit is an open source cross-platform tool for manipulating PDF documents. pdftk is basically a front end to the iText library (compiled to Native code using GCJ), capable of splitting, merging, encrypting, decrypting, uncompressing, recompressing, and repairing PDFs.

If pdf is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and x-ray-glasses.
pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with pdf documents. keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

  • merge pdf documents
  • split pdf pages into a new document
  • decrypt input as necessary (password required)
  • encrypt output as desired
  • fill pdf forms with fdf data and/or flatten forms
  • apply a background watermark
  • report pdf on metrics, including metadata and bookmarks
  • update pdf metadata
  • attach files to pdf pages or the pdf document
  • unpack pdf attachments
  • burst a pdf document into single pages
  • uncompress and re-compress page streams
  • repair corrupted pdf (where possible)

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Jun 042013
 

While installing a new computer (soon a post on my new arch-linux laptop) I’ve re-discovered a command that I don’t use frequently, but that can be really useful : lsblk

lsblk lists information about all or the specified block devices. The lsblk command reads the sysfs filesystem to gather information.
The command prints all block devices (except RAM disks) in a tree-like format by default.
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Jun 032013
 

Recently a colleague of mine should run multiple parallel jobs on a server (around 20 in our specific case), every job does “an elaboration” and this can take a time longer or shorter in respect of the others, once a job finishes its task it must read from a text file the first line that indicate the ID of a new job, it removes that ID from the top of the text file and starts to elaborate it.

Problem: On a long run (a run of 50K+ jobs) it happens “frequently” that 2 jobs finish at the same time and so both take the same ID causing problems to the whole process, we tried to use a simple lock file “touched” just after the job was opening the file with the list of ID, but it seems that this operation it’s too slow and we had some case of failed concurrency again.

The solution was to use the bash function flock

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May 252013
 

keepcalm
[email protected]# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 (wheezy)
Release: 7.0
Codename: wheezy

I’ve spent the last 30 minutes (more or less) in the upgrade of my VPS from Debian 6 to Debian 7, in short this has been a great success just 1 conflict with some packages and some old WordPress module of another website that are not compatible with php 5.4, total downtime of the website : 8 minutes.

And now some detail of my experience.
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