Zeta-Puppis.com

A couple of days ago I finally had my Google Wave sand­box account. Given that I just fin­ished devel­op­ing my very first robot, I thought I’d share some impres­sions on the whole thing. From the user-​side, things are far from being ready. Some impor­tant fea­tures are still miss­ing, just to name one you can’t remove user from a wave once they joined (or, alter­na­tively, there’s no way to ignore a wave). Indeed, given that I joined sev­eral waves to try other people appli­ca­tions, I’m get­ting con­tin­u­ous noti­fi­ca­tions. But anyway, the whole thing is to me like a great devel­op­ment play­ground where I can make all the sorts of experiments.

(Con­tinue reading…)

I came back yes­ter­day from the third Ital­ian PyCon (aka pycon3) which was held in Flo­rence and all I can say is that has been an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. I had the chance to meet a lot of new great people as well as the BDFL (which won’t be back in Europe for quite some time, as he said). Here fol­lows a resume of what I think were the most inter­est­ing talks.

(Con­tinue reading…)

This is more a remain­der for me: in order to make the sur­round work for mp3s with the CA0106 driver with alsa (for me it’s a Sound Blaster Live! 24 bit), here’s the .asoundrc that should be used:

pcm.!dmix {
   type plug
   slave {
       pcm surround51
       channels 6
   }
}
pcm.!default {
   type plug
   slave.pcm "dmix"
   slave.channels 6
   route_policy duplicate
}

I have a love/hate rela­tion­ship against the hello mes­sages shown in all the world lan­guages on flickr. That’s why this morn­ing I was talk­ing with a friend on IRC about this and a bad idea jumped in my mind: do an IRC bot that says hello in many lan­guages when some­one joins a channel.

It’s from sev­eral years that I don’t do any­thing IRC related, but this time I had two spe­cial weapons in my back­pack: python and twisted. The final bot is ~90 lines of code, half of the which are for the hello list and the entire coding process took less than 20 minutes.

(Con­tinue reading…)