Accessibility, Crazy (Event Gripping) Ideas
Did you want to build a Docker container, which will run Android Studio for you, for example because your PC does not run GNU/Linux Ubuntu 14.04 but another Linux distribution?
You can find suitable scripts in the GitHub repository tddpirate/androiddocker
האם רצית לבנות Docker container שיריץ לך את Android Studio, למשל מפני שמחשבך אינו מריץ GNU/Linux Ubuntu 14.04 אלא הפצת לינוקס אחרת?
ניתן למצוא סקריפטים מתאימים בגיטהאב: tddpirate/androiddocker
I found the hard way that the API exported by the Python module ‘magic’ differs among different versions of the module.
The version installed when installing the Debian package ‘python-magic’ expects the following API:
import magic
mymagic = magic.open(magic.MAGIC_MIME_TYPE)
mymagic.load()
mtype = mymagic.file(inpfname)
print("The MIME type of the file %s is %s" % (inpfname,mtype))
The version installed using ‘pip install python-magic’ expects the following API:
import magic
mymagic = magic.Magic(mime=True)
mtype = mymagic.from_file(inpfname)
print("The MIME type of the file %s is %s" % (inpfname,mtype))
The following code allows the rest of the script to work the same way with either version of ‘magic’:
import magic
def build_magic():
try:
mymagic = magic.open(magic.MAGIC_MIME_TYPE)
mymagic.load()
except AttributeError,e:
mymagic = magic.Magic(mime=True)
mymagic.file = mymagic.from_file
return(mymagic)
mymagic = build_magic()
mtype = mymagic.file(inpfname)
print("The MIME type of the file %s is %s" % (inpfname,mtype))
During the last few weeks I developed an Android application for helping people prepare for the Israeli driving theory test. The application uses the questions database available from http://data.gov.il/dataset/249 (and the corresponding ones for Russian and Arabic). It was a nice and fun exercise, which helped me master more parts of the Android development platform.
The application is now at version 0.1 and is working. Its look and feel is not polished, yet; and some missing features have been identified by comparing it to three other applications available from Google Play doing the same thing.
Today the source code has been released under the GPLv3 and is available from https://github.com/tddpirate/teuria and if you are looking for an Android developer with few weeks worth of experience and known quality of work, you may have a look at the above.
After not having dealt with Slackware for several years, I needed to create a virtual machine with Slackware. I had to solve two problems, and am writing below how they were solved for the benefit of future Slackware based virtual machine builders.
Virtual machine parameters:
Problem 1
When trying to boot from the DVD in order to install Slackware 13.37, the hugesmp.s kernel failed to boot.
I found the following bug reports:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/246067
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/kernel-panic-on-virtual-box-installation-its-driving-me-nuts-901223/
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=44598
Some of the above bug reports had the suggestion to turn on VT-x/AMD-V acceleration. However it was already turned on in my virtual machine. I tried several combinations of flags in Settings/System/Processor and Settings/System/Acceleration but of no avail.
The problem was solved by changing the IDE controller type from PIIX4 to PIIX3 in Settings/Storage/IDE Controller/Type.
Problem 2
The initial reboot after installation failed. From the stack trace it seemed that the problem was due to unknown kernel options. I found some bug reports, but they were not directly related to this.
I successfully rebooted the virtual machine when entering the following as LILO prompt:
Linux pci=routeirq acpi=off pci=noacpi
Then, the problem was solved by editing /etc/lilo.conf as follows. The line
append=” vt.default_utf8=0″
was changed to
append=” vt.default_utf8=0 pci=routeirq acpi=off pci=noacpi”
And then /sbin/lilo was run (without arguments).
Time has passed since the Nov. 2007 council elections (with no publicity to the results of the pilot of computerized elections), and since the Dec. 2008 Taldor fiasco.
And it turns out that in their infinite wisdom, the Israeli government decided to continue to cater to the impatient, “want to know the results right NOW!!!” segment of the electorate in future elections. Having learned from the experience of other countries, a system based upon near-field RFID tags was chosen for development and deployment.
However, according to http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/%7Eyash/evoting-relay-rfid2010.pdf, the chosen system suffers from serious vulnerabilities.
It seems that the real agenda of the politicians here, like everywhere, is still to get the populace to accept ballot systems, which allow the elections to be rigged.
Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.
If what Alan Carter says in his The Programmers’ Stone blog is right, then the way our society treats software developers is like requiring surgeons to operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help from other doctors and nurses.
Yesterday, the primaries election of the Labor party in Israel was aborted and postponed to a later date due to serious malfunctioning of the voting machines deployed for this purpose.
The provider of those machines was Taldor LTD.
Sources (in Hebrew):
The other day I stumbled upon the Website http://copyfree.org/, which advocates a software licensing model somewhat similar to LGPL.
See the Website for arguments in favor of this licensing model.
I would, however, stick with GPL/LGPL due to the following reasons:
An essential part of integration of Scheme (as implemented in Guile) and Python is allowing Python code to call back code implemented in Scheme. It is also desirable to be able to access data and invoke methods on otherwise-opaque objects created and managed in Scheme. The specifics of opaque object access should also be independent of the specific object system being used in the Scheme-written part of the application.
When implementing in PyGuile the proxying scheme, in which PyObjects serve as proxies for SCMs, the following need to be taken into account:
A Python callback can be expected to receive positional and keyword arguments, and return a result of any type. Therefore, templates (possibly trivial) for converting between PyObjects (Python data types) and SCMs (Guile data types) need to be associated with each callback.
In the case of objects, we need to associate, with each attribute getter, a template for converting the value from SCM into PyObject. With each attribute setter, a template for converting the value from PyObject into SCM needs to be associated. With each method, which can be invoked on the object, minimum two templates are needed. Three templates should be provided, in case the object needs to be manipulated by an interface, which expects both positional and keyword arguments in the object’s methods.
All the templates needed to work with a SCM (as a callback or as an object) are associated with it when it is wrapped as it is being passed from Guile to Python.
PyObjects, which wrap SCMs, are not expected to be seen by Guile’s garbage collector. Therefore, we need a mechanism for protecting SCMs referenced by PyObjects.
Due to efficiency considrations, Guile’s scm_permanent_object, scm_gc_protect_object or scm_gc_unprotect_object should not be used on every SCM passed to Python. The solution is to create a set object in Guile, protect it using scm_permanent_object (a single call) and then register in it all wrapped SCMs. When a wrapping PyObject’s __del__ function is invoked, one of its actions is to remove the corresponding SCM object from the set. The set will be implemented using a standard hash table, whose keys will be indexes and the data – the SCMs themselves.