(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
June 5, 2017
Lately I have been programming quite a bit and - for the first time - I have used Golang doing so. Go is a very nice language and really helped me with the development. One of the reasons why I have enjoyed this much Go is the standard library, which is amazing. I would like to share today the easiness of creating a basic Certificate Authority and signed certificates in Go.
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January 3, 2013
Have you ever had to develop a script in UNIX that has to send an email?
If you have, probably you have used the “mail” function since this program is the standard program to send e-mails in UNIX environments if you are using the CLI (Command Line Interface).
The manual for mail reports this as mail usage prototype:
mail -r [sender] -s [subject] receiver-1[,receiver-2,...,receiver-n] > [File with the body]
I think all the parameters are pretty straightforward except the “File with the body” one. This has to be an ASCII file (ie: .txt) with the e-mail body content in the text-only mode.
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May 19, 2012
This book starts with a little introduction and with the instructions to setup the environment. After this, the book starts at full speed with “the Recipes”. The structure based on Recipes is what I liked the of this book. Every Recipe has the structure:
I think that this is a very powerful structure because in this way we can learn from the obstacles that each one of us can encounter in his way while coding. Also, this structure, gives to the reader the choice of what read when. In fact, is possible to read this book from the first page to the last or to pick the single arguments that are useful to him in that precise moment. Another thing that I really liked about this book is the fact that Jamie Munro uses in the same time PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile so you can learn two libraries in the same time and you can learn immediately to write an application that is nice to see and use. I really liked this book and I would suggest this book to everyone is interested in using the PhoneGap framework to develop Mobile applications.
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April 24, 2012
This is not the typical O’Reilly programming book and you can find it out very easily when you have the book in your hands, since it does not have any code inside The author, in fact, tries to create a software development science. This left me very puzzled since:
Apart of these five points, I think that the book has reasons to live. It is a really fast and superficial presentation of the subject. I think it would be appropriate for students who are approaching for the first time the subject or for people that for working reasons have to deal with the subject but not in first person (like a project manager). I would not suggest this book to people with real world programming experience or necessity.
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April 17, 2012
jQuery has very interested me in the last period. I think that it is the best JavaScript library for me. jQuery UI is a set of functions that allow you to improve the graphics and the functionality of your websites with very few lines of code.
My jQuery level was pretty close before I took the time to read this book. I’ve found this book amazing and really interesting even for fast-learner as I am (knowing a dozen of languages and libraries I tend to go really fast when I’m studying a new language or library). I think this book is mainly for beginner or intermediate users since it focuses the reader on the main parts of jQuery UI leaving aside some real-world and advanced coding details that may be crucial in the real world development.
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April 9, 2012
This book is weird, I’ve to tell you. I was expecting a book with some examples and some text. Well, I ended up with a book that, at the first sight, seems more a book for kids rather than a professional book since is 90% images.
The book is clearly organized, each chapter covering one specific aspect.
After a little while, I learned how to learn (a lot of) good patterns and bad patterns (anti-patterns) from this book. The downside of the approach the author kept is that all the arguments are not deeply analysed, while the main information are given. For each topic, Neil shows some patterns pointing out for each one a good use of it and the possible risks using it. The last chapter (the one about the anti-patterns) is, in my opinion, the most useful. Here some anti-patterns are analysed pointing out why they are anti-patterns and how to improve them.
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April 1, 2012
jQuery Mobile is a library that allows you to develop mobile apps using jQuery. Is even possible to use a jQuery Mobile program as a native app, thanks to programs like PhoneGap.
This book assumes that you already know jQuery and I think that this is good since the author can focus only on the main topic in this way. I think you should know or study jQuery before even starting this book. I do know that’s possible to understand jQuery code even if you don’t know anything of JavaScript if you have rock solid programming knowledge, but I discourage it.
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July 5, 2010
Two days ago, with an email to the Python Announce mailing list, Benjamin Peterson announced the release of Python 2.7.
This moment is of historical importance for the Python project since 2.7 will be the latest major 2.x release. From now on, only the Python 3.x branch will have additional development. To ease this change, Python 2.7 will get full support for five years.
The changes between 2.7 and 3 are easy to apply for the majority of codebases, but I suspect that many projects will not make the deadline. The main reason for my skepticism is that open-source projects have a horrible track record for those changes. The main reason this happens is that many libraries, used usually by many other projects, are unmaintained or so lightly maintained that such an effort will be hardly doable. Also, until the libraries get ported, there is no way the applications or other libraries that depend on them will be ported.
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January 20, 2009
Last week, Sebastian Nyström (Vice President of Qt Software) announced that Qt would have one additional license from the next release: the LGPL.
This is a huge change from the previous Qt licensing policy and a good step in the path that Qt started many years ago.
We shall not forget that until 2000, Qt was released in a double Commercial/QPL license, and while the QPL name is Qt Public License, it was not considered Free Software by the Free Software Foundation. In 2000, they added the GPL license to the mix, which solved all issues for the open-source community but still forced the non-open-source customer to buy from Qt Software.
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December 21, 2003
Toward the end of last school year, my Computer Science teacher asked the class if anyone would have been interested in a C Course. I submitted my interest in the topic. So, at the beginning of October, we started the C lessons and this past week we had the last lesson.
Previously, I only knew QBasic, so that is my term of comparison.
I’ve found C to be way more elegant, probably due to the usage of curvy parenthesis instead of END, NEXT, and similar keywords to delimit code blocks within cycles and control structures.