bodom_lx blog and things|

As I promised about 4 hours ago, here is my introduction to Hyper Text Transfer Protocol in form of a mind map.
It is to be intended as a really short introduction to this protocol. Like the previous one about computer networks, the mindmap summarizes materials copyrighted by Tanenbaum and also material taken from Wikipedia.

The topics covered are:

• Scope of the protocol
• HTTP connection
  • HTTP/1.0
  • HTTP/1.1
• HTTP request methods:
  • GET
  • HEAD
  • PUT
  • POST
  • DELETE
  • TRACE
  • CONNECT
  • OPTIONS
• Message Headers
  • Request Headers - all
  • Response Headers - all
• Status Codes:
  • 1xx Information
  • 2xx Success
  • 3xx Redirection
  • 4xx Client error
  • 5xx Server Error
• Sessions:
  • Cookies
  • Server-Side sessions
• Secure HTTP - HTTPS:
  • By URI scheme
  • HTTP Upgrade Header
  • SSL/TLS

You can browse an HTML version online.

You can download:

• Mindmap source file (Freemind)
• An export in PDF format
• An export in PNG format

As always, you are free and encouraged to contact me in case of errors or anything else.
Hope you like it!

For job purposes I had to learn a lot of JavaScript, including AJAX related stuffs. Like every lazy (but intelligent) developer, I looked around for frameworks that could help me doing my work. I knew that prototype existed, but I never looked at it because of lack of interest. Well it's great, it's really great! Nowadays everybody should use frameworks, as their abstraction permits a rapid development without worrying about things like platform compatibility, in our case browsers. Prototype also has a very nice and clean syntax that overtakes functions not compatible with every browser.

In this post I'm going to report a very nice function I implemented for limiting Form input fields, like textarea and input of type text. You have to call it via onkeyup and onkeydown events. The function accepts 3 parameters: field, limit and counterDesired.
The first is the field object, you should use the keyword this for a value.
The second parameter is a limit value, the number of characters that the field should contain at maximum.
The third parameter is optional, false as default. It permits to add a visual counter after the field, like the one you see on YouTube, for example. You can either tell to the function to add the counter for you (put inside a <span> block) or to put it inside another block you've already defined. In the second case, the block must have an id of the form 'fieldID_counter'

This is the compact version, see below for some examples and the expanded, explained version:

(more...)

I've never been a big fan of rpm-based Gnu/Linux distributions, since I've always preferred the stability of Debian and Debian based distros, with their great dpkg system.
The problem with Debian on Macbooks is that I do not see both the stability and performance anymore, as I have to use Lenny/Sid. Etch is too old and I don't have the time (*sic*) to play with it to make it work well. Lenny should be next to be released but I don't feel the very famous stability AND lightness of Debian distributions on this release, like I was accustomed in the past years. Is this because I own a Macbook? Maybe, but a Macbook Santa Rosa is nothing more than an Intel-powered notebook with some strange input devices and a strange non-bios system

Regarding Ubuntu, I believe that this distribution has become naff and really slow. See this Slashdot discussion on this topic.

Yesterday I stumbled to Scientechie review of Fedora 10, which convinced me to try it out.
The software shipped with Fedora 10 is aligned with the one provided with the other distributions: Gnome 2.24.0, kernel 2.6.27.5, NetworkManager 0.7.0 (svn) and so on. Read the release notes for more information.

Fedora 10 really surprises me, as it is the first Gnu/Linux distribution in many, many years that makes me feel again the great stability and performance of the Penguin. Therefore I'm writing this review that is also a how-to, as it contains some fixes for Fedora 10 and Macbooks.

(more...)

I've finally found the time to make the necessary fixes and improvements to the theme of my blog.
I decided to not name it a final release just because I could not test it with Internet Explorer 6. I believe that the differences with this beta release and the final one will just be some test with that browser and a better code cleanup
Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Yes, this is the theme you're actually seeing in the blog.
You can go and download it!

(Sorry about the use of the Italian language on this post. If you're not Italian, then you are not interested about the content of this page, anyway)

Lettera aperta ai visitatori:

Caro Visitatore,

Se sei uno studente di Design alla LUB e sei capitato alla mia vecchia pagina intitolata "Un messaggio da quelli di design?", vedi di leggere bene il contenuto della pagina e di distinguere ció che scrivo io, unico autore del blog, e ció che scrive qualsiasi altra persona. Trovo infantile il modo in cui alcune persone si siano accanite su di me confondendomi con ció che hanno scritto altre persone sotto forma di commento.
BD-things.net é un blog/sito che raccoglie articoli e pensieri informatici, soprattutto in inglese e che non hanno quasi mai a che fare con la Libera Universitá di Bolzano. Men che meno con la Facoltá di Design, che si é meritata un mio singolo post. E proprio per niente con sclerate contro gli studenti di Design, persone che non ho mai giudicato male.

Se sei uno studente di Informatica e ce l´hai coi designer della LUB, leggiti un articolo informatico del mio blog o prendili per il culo per i fatti tuoi da un´altra parte se ci tieni, a me non interessa prendere in giro le persone che frequentano design. Ci sono altri blog che lo fanno, non il mio.

Sei sei una qualsiasi altra persona che capita su quella pagina, evita di sparare a zero su studenti di design o su studenti di informatica applicata. Se hai critiche costruttive scrivi pure.

Grazie,

L´autore del blog e unica persona che lo gestisce

Daniel Graziotin.

I really like (and miss) Linux Mint Menu (mintmenu), so I installed it on my Debian Sid box and here is how I managed it:

• Install mintsystem and mintmenu deb packages, either by adding mint repository to yout sources.list file or by downloading them from mint packages or simplier, by grabbing them from my blog
• Help it to recognize your applications by symlinking some files in /etc/xdg/menus (as root):
  

  ln -s gnome-applications.menu applications.menu
  ln -s gnome-preferences.menu preferences.menu
  ln -s gnome-settings.menu settings.menu

• Add mintMenu to your Gnome panel..

et voilà! Here are the two deb files I'm using:
mintsystem_61_all
mintmenu_4.2_all

Here is an updated screenshot:

MintMenu complete under Debian Sid

If you also want to enable beagle or tracker, be sure to add the correct search command in the preferences of mintMenu (see the screenshot)