Sunday, November 29, 2009
Letterina
Caro Babbo Natale,
lo so, sono tanti anni che non ci sentiamo, ma in quest’anno di crisi economica e paura influenzale sento più forte il bisogno del conforto dello scrivere e del comunicare con qualcuno che sia un punto di riferimento, un confidente, un amico.
È stato difficile decidere a chi scrivere, ma alla fine ho scelto te, caro vecchione la cui bianca barba è segno di vita vissuta e di esperienza delle cose del mondo.
Data la mia età non sono qui a propinarti le solite liste di balocchi per mocciosi da cui sei purtroppo sommerso ogni anno.
Le mie richieste sono quelle che ti potresti aspettare da un adulto serio, lavoratore e padre di famiglia, che ha un chiaro senso della realtà in cui vive:
- La pace nel mondo
- La fine della povertà
- Il Pisa in A
- Elezioni anticipate
- Niente meduse la prossima estate
- Un papa nero
- Mangiare senza ingrassare
È anche vero che un paio di cosettine più terra terra ce l’avrei anch’io da chiederti e visto che m’avanza spazio te le dico, poi fai te, caro amico che non lascia mai un preghiera inascoltata.
Allora, mi garberebbe avere, PER PIACERE (visto che educazione?):
- Una sveglina ganza
- Una cuffia di quelle grandi che stanno intorno all’orecchio e isolano dai rumori esterni
- Un microfono USB
- Un logger GPS con bluetooth (da usare per fare geotagging delle foto e navigazione)
…ce ne sarebbero tante altre, ma sono una personcina col senso della misura e quindi mi fermo qui.
PS: Nota come ti ho fornito dei comodi link(s) per acquisti online.
PPS: alcuni amici mi dicono che tu non esisti, se questo fosse vero gli stessi amici sono pregati di sostituirsi a te e adoperarsi per la spunta degli elementi dalla lista, specialmente la seconda parte.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Seminar slides on the PP-Index
On May 2009 I gave a seminar on the PP-Index data structure for approximated similarity search. These are the slides.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Sunday fun: light painting
Got a rainy Sunday morning? Let’s do some light painting:
Ingredients:
- a dark room (but not too dark, to avoid tripping over the camera)
- a small light (I’ve used my wife’s night reading light)
- a tripod
- a camera with “B” exposure, or at least 10 seconds exposure (Canon 1000D)
- a remote shutter with exposure lock (hand made)
- a three years old daughter (fun guaranteed :)))
Parameters: ISO 100, f3.5 - f10, manual focus set with light on in the room.
Additional fun: use colored films to change light color (saved for the next rainy Sunday morning).
Sunday, November 8, 2009
SSH server for Windows, and the winner is…
I’ve spent part of the weekend testing a pool of candidates for serving as SSH servers on a Windows XP machine (the OS is not chose by me, and cannot be changed).
Requirements:
- The server will be accessed using ssh clients, scp command, sftp, and svn+ssh.
- The server has to be free (as in beer, but open source solutions are preferred).
As I just said, the winner is Copssh, while the losers are freeSSHd and KpyM. Let’s go now to the motivations:
Both freeSSHd and KpyM have simple and intuitive installation processes and user interfaces which made me think they could be easier to handle with respect to the openssh/cygwin solution, but…
Copssh is a wrapper package that wraps an openssh/cygwin installation, and it plays its wrapper role very well.
The installation process requires just a few clicks on a wizard-style interface. Copssh also adds a start menu group with the options for adding and removing ssh users. The add user program allows very easily to create and properly place the private/public keys for public key authentication.
This two features (simple setup and simple user management) are the only thing that were missing from the original openssh/cygwin solution, and copssh completes this gap.
The additional configuration parameters can be changed by modifying a clearly-documented text file.
For example, in order to disable password based authentication, thus leaving active only the public key authentication, one can set
PasswordAuthentication no
in the sshd_config file, and it is all done.
With respect to the quality of the SSH server, I think that it wins hands down on the competitors, with a special mention for the responsiveness of shell and file browsing. On freeSSHd I’ve experienced a number of issues while remotely browsing files from Ubuntu, and also to get public key authentication to work. The fundamental issue with KpyM is the choice of the author of requiring a serial key in order to remove a five second nag screen displayed at shell login.
Do you know any other alternative to test?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Good news from LTC 2009 and SAC 2010
In the last days I’ve been notified of two accepted papers!
The first one “Enhancing Opinion Extraction by Automatically Annotated Lexical Resources” is a study on the effects of using sentiment-oriented lexical resources in order to enrich text representation, with a special focus on automatic opinion annotation.
It is a work for Fabrizio Sebastiani and me, and it will be presented at the 4th Language and Technology Conference, in Poznan, Poland.
The second one is a work from Stefano Baccianella, Fabrizio Sebastiani, and me.
The title is “Feature Selection for Ordinal Text Classification”, and it proposes a number of feature selection methods specifically designed for the problem of performing ordinal text classification.
It will be presented at the 25th Symposium On Applied Computing, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on March of the next year.