Julia (computer language)

Installed Julia, just to take a look at it. (A filler article follows…)

Android Lollipop annoys me (a little bit)

There's a way of thinking that worries me: a “new operating system” must look graphically different from the previous version of the same operating system. Premise: I have been upgraded to Android (so-called) Lollipop. (Second premise: I own a Samsung Galaxy S4 — something I regret, but it's too late and I'll keep it till I die or till it breaks — whatever happens first).

Type-generic functions (overloading) in C11

As per Michael Stoffregen suggestion in the comment, I've tried to move arguments outside and it worked (even with gcc 4.9.2)! So I can finally say C(11) has Fortran-like function “overloading” — type generic functions.

I have often wondered why C hasn't any kind of function overloading. The typical answer is that we don't want to live with name mangling in C — the hell of the C++ — that would break a lot of things which must stay as they are. I agree… except that you don't need to implement it the C++ way when you have a bright example like Fortran.

Two puzzles from an italian magazine

There's an italian weekly magazine (La settimana enigmistica) that once in a while publishes “A puzzle with Susi”. Susi is a cute and smart girl who accepts to solve challenges her friend Gianni is used to throw to her.

In one of my italian blog I've tackled two (so far) of these puzzles using Prolog and Haskell.

Security through obscurity and secrecy?

Are you using VanDyke's SecureCRT? Let's suppose you have forgot a password of one of your configured sessions: you can still log-in, since SecureCRT has stored it, but if you need to use that password from elsewhere and you can't remember it, what can you do?

SNUSP esolang and an interpreter in Go

While Golfrun specifications are becoming foggy day by day (month by month, year by year…) and C++11 implementation of a Golfrun interpreter is still far to come, I am experimenting with the Go language, as done in the previous post. Thus I have decided to implement an interpreter of an esoteric programming language I liked very much: SNUSP. In the past I have already written a C interpreter for Modular SNUSP: it was my first contribution (as far as I can remember) to RosettaCode; then, I uploaded it to SourceForge too.

Now I have implemented an interpreter for SNUSP using the Go language. You can find GoSNUSP code on github.

GoSNUSP can interpret (bugs apart…) Core, Modular and Bloated SNUSP.

Coroutines or goroutines?

I have already skimmed the topic with two posts:

• Crumbs of coroutines and
• Particles of coroutines.

The next promised post should have been about the same matter, tackled using D.E.Knuth's MMIX, mainly because of the GO and PUSHGO instructions.

Something about certificates, CA, SSL and alike

Disclaimer: this article is not about security best practices nor contains advices about how to set-up a secure and trusted communication between two peers or a correct and working PKI. Its aim is to give a general picture of a broader topic, whose surface is slightly scratched by this text.

Swiftly, Swift

And so, Apple is pushing Swift 

an innovative new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch

From blog posts to "html" to editable document

I received the following request: having a blog, I want to put every post altogether into a single document (a word-processor document), keeping just the title, the published date and the content. Can you help me?

I did as follow.

• Retrieve the full atom feed of the blog… Since the blog was hosted at blogspot, this link was helpful. But I had to add  “?max-results=500” to the url, since otherwise it stops at 50 posts.
• Now, it is nothing but an xml, so a proper XSLT should be enough. And in fact… I have built upon this, removing everything I didn't need and adding the published date — the date, then, was the only reason for a post processing, since I had no idea how to transform it as I wanted, therefore I have put it raw (almost raw, indeed) into the output html (generated by xsltproc), and then…
• I wrote few lines of Perl to transform every date from YYYYMMDD to “Weekday name, DD Month Name YYYY” in the generated html;
• Loaded the html into LibreOffice Writer, then exported to odt.

The result is not perfect, but mainly it's the content's fault, for it is sometimes from a Microsoft Office text (i.e. the entry was written in Microsoft Word, then copy-pasted in the blogger text editor area).

Just to keep this post longer than it could be, here the few lines of Perl code I wrote to reinterpret the dates.

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
while (<>) {
    if (/##(\d{8})##/) {
      my $r = `LC_TIME="it_IT.utf8" date -d$1 +"%A %d %B %Y"`;
      s/##\d{8}##/$r/;
    }
    print $_;
}

In the generated html, the sequence ## was used to mark the date, extracted as YYYYMMDD (using properly substring). I had to set LC_TIME since I am used to set my locale to en_GB.utf8 (I try to keep my system consistent about the language and avoid the mixture that happens when you use locale-aware and locale-unaware softwares), but I needed italian names for week days and months.

Simply silly, but now this post can come to an end. (No, not yet: why do you ignore the export feature? since I have no access to the blog indeed, but I was able to ask for the necessary blogID).