Skip to main content

Michele's Blog

Italy's been going down for the last 15 years, just nobody noticed

So this pathetic little country I live in, thought that spending 45 millions of Euros in a ridiculous marketing web site called www.italia.it (no need to link it, it's not working anymore) would be a good investment. It would make for a good image or something... Heck, not even in the pre dot-com-bubble-burst they were that idiotic. Yet Rutelli and his gang topped them out. This was a year ago. This morning I stumble on this great news : Italia.it shuts down due to little interest and too high costs.

Now I would have a little more hope for this banana-land if the guys behind this (Rutelli and his crew), would leave the political scene forever and go play marbles at the beach (or better, go to jail for too evident stupidity). Yet, we'll have to keep seeing his ass-face all over the place. Bleah

Detailed site about this scandal: http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/

Watermarks with Perlmagick

Since in a couple of days I'll forget it all, here's a snippet to do watermarking with Perlmagick:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Image::Magick;
my $text='ABCDEF 123';
my $x;
my $null=Image::Magick->new;
my $img=Image::Magick->new;
$null->Set(size=>'340x170');
$x=$null->ReadImage('xc:white');
warn "$x" if "$x";
$x=$null->Annotate(text=>$text,
  geometry=>'+10+20',
  font=>'/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera/Vera.ttf',
  fill=>'black',
  gravity=>'North',
  pointsize=>50);
warn "$x" if "$x";
$null->Rotate(degrees=>45, background=>'white');
$null->Set(alpha=>'Activate');
$null->Transparent(color=>'white');
$x=$img->ReadImage('base.jpg');
warn "$x" if "$x";
$img->Composite(image=>$null,
  compose=>'Dissolve',
  gravity=>'Center',
  caption=>'TEST',
  opacity=>'30%');
$img->Write('test.jpg');

Dec 9 2007

Have to mark this day as the day I switched completely to a graphical e-mail client (Evolution). Goodbye to my trustworthy mutt after about 7 years of honored service. Now let's see if I can actually not look back ;)

The new Free ATI Radeon drivers

Some time has passed since ATI released specs and since the initial free and open version of a new driver was announced. So I thought I'd take a look since most of my boxes are all ATI based.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
make &&  sudo make install

Then just change your _xorg.conf _file for the new radeonhd driver and be done with it. Works like a charm here, congrats to everyone involved ;)

The cousin of Godwin's law

We all know Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

I hereby declare Michele's Law: "As a discussion with an economist about organization grows longer, the probability of ending up talking about Toyota approaches one."

Openvpn "Error opening file"

Chased down oddities in openvpn on Windows... This patch (against svn/trunk) proved rather useful:

--- ssl.c       (revision 2435)
+++ ssl.c       (working copy)
@@ -1097,8 +1097,9 @@
char password[256];

/* Load the PKCS #12 file */
+      errno = 0;
if (!(fp = fopen(options->pkcs12_file, "rb")))
-        msg (M_SSLERR, "Error opening file %s", options->pkcs12_file);
+        msg (M_SSLERR, "Error opening file %s %s", options->pkcs12_file, errno != 0 ? strerror(errno) : "");
p12 = d2i_PKCS12_fp(fp, NULL);
fclose (fp);
if (!p12) msg (M_SSLERR, "Error reading PKCS#12 file %s", options->pkcs12_file);