A breakthrough has been made in SSD technology that could mean drastic performance increases due to the overcoming of one of the major issues in the memory type. Currently, data cannot be directly overwritten onto the NAND chips used in the devices. Files must be written to a clean area of the drive whilst the old area is formatted. This eventually causes fragmented data and lowers the drive’s life and performance over time. ...

On a standard headphone plug, the left channel comes through the outer ”tip” contact, the right channel through the middle ”ring” contact, and the ground connection through the inner ”sleeve” contact. The acronym for these so-called ”tip-ring-sleeve” connectors is where TRS Drawbot gets its name. It has no microchips or circuit boards and uses free software to turn line graphics into sound files that make almost any audio device into an on-the-go robot controller. ...

One comment’s answer was ’marketing’, which in a sense is correct; one reason we call Java a compiled language is that that’s what Sun called it from the start. Another comment noted that Java has an explicit compilation phase that is separate from having the JVM execute your Java program by interpreting the bytecodes. All of this points us towards what I feel is the real answer: In Java, bytecode is a first class object. In Python it’s an internal implementation detail. ...

The inline JavaScript solution has a subtle, but very important (and an often overlooked) performance gotcha: inline scripts block on CSSOM before they are executed. Why? The browser does not know what the inline block is planning to do in the script it is about to execute, and because JavaScript can access and manipulate the CSSOM, it blocks and waits until the CSS is downloaded, parsed, and the CSSOM is constructed and available. ...

Si tenemos un gran número de equipos con Ubuntu en nuestra LAN, nos puede interesar tener un espejo local del repositorio de paquetes de Ubuntu. Una diferencia entre esta opción y utilizar un proxy/caché de paquetes es que, en el primer caso, ya tendremos todos los paquetes disponibles cuando los vayamos a necesitar. Clonar el repositorio en local Para crear un repositorio local, podemos usar el comando apt-mirror, disponible en los repositorios. Una vez instalado, podemos editar el fichero de configuración en /etc/apt/mirror.list para, por ejemplo, cambiar el directorio donde se guardarán los paquetes (por defecto /var/spool/apt-mirror), añadir o eliminar fuentes a incluir en el repositorio, etc. Con las fuentes por defecto, hay que tener en cuenta que serán necesarios más de 100 GB para alojar el repositorio. Si optásemos sólo por incluir el “main”, se queda en 10 GB. ...

Si tenemos una LAN con varios equipos, podemos utilizar apt-cacher-ng para no tener que descargar las actualizaciones desde los repostiorios en cada uno de ellos, ya que nos permite reutilizar los paquetes que hayamos descargado. Otras opciones, como AptProxy parece que han quedado algo obsoletas. apt-cacher-ng es un proxy/caché enfocado a gestores de paquetes, que soporta las distribuciones Debian y Ubuntu, entre otras. Es una buena alternativa a montar un espejo para pequeñas LANs. ...

django-debug-toolbar es una aplicación para Django que nos muestra información de depuración acerca de las diferentes peticiones y respuestas que se llevan a cabo en el servidor: variables de contexto, cabeceras, peticiones SQL, etc. Sin embargo, hay algunas URLs para las cuales nos puede interesar que no se analicen, como por ejemplo, peticiones que se hagan por Ajax o URLs relativas a diversas aplicaciones instaladas, como el panel de administración, Rosetta, etc. ...

Una forma sencilla de crear un paquete .deb a partir del código fuente es mediante la utilidad checkinstall, disponible en los respositorios. Para aquellos casos en los que la compilación del código y la instalación sigue los conocidos comandos: $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make install Bastará sustituir el último paso por: $ sudo checkinstall Como ejemplo, podemos crear un .deb a partir del código fuente de libsodium, una librería necesaria para compilar dnscrypt. ...

This past semester I’ve been working on a directed study at my university with Prof. Wil Robertson reverse engineering embedded devices. After a couple of months looking at a passport scanner, one of my friends jokingly suggested I hack a Furby, the notoriously annoying toy of late 1990s fame. Everyone laughed, and we all moved on with our lives. However, the joke didn’t stop there. Within two weeks, this same friend said they had a present for me. And that’s how I started reverse engineering a Furby. ...

I found that the rollover text, “/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.”, is obviously false. After all there are several last names (like “Nixon” and “Bush”) that denote both elected presidents and opponents. So no regular expression could both match and not match “Nixon”. So that got me thinking: if we ignore names that are both winners and losers, what regular expression does cover the winners and not the losers? And let’s try to find a short one, although perhaps not the very shortest. ...