GoLang vs Python: deep dive into the concurrency

Introduction In the last months, I worked a lot with GoLang on several projects. Although I’m certainly not an expert, there are several things that I really appreciate about this language: first, it has a clear and simple syntax, and more than once I noticed that the style of the Github developers is very close to the style used in old C programs. From a theoretical point of view, GoLang seems to take the best of all worlds: there is the power of high-level languages, made simple by clear rules - even if sometime they are a little bit binding - that can impose a solid logic to the code....

January 17, 2018 · 16 min

Elasticsearch over My home Network Attached Storage

Introduction I always owned a lot of hard drives: I don’t know why, I always used and still use to look for space to save my data. In the years, I started using disks, then I assembled a HP Proliant to be a Synology Based System - I don’t want to go the cloud because I’m stupid - and… in the last week, I decided to make order in a huge amount of files....

January 13, 2018 · 8 min

Jails: confining the omnipotent root

Preamble Recently I became nostalgic and fascinated with stuff from the past, so I decided to create a Vagrantfile to work with FreeBSD1. Why FreeBSD? Because as a developer, I really like Docker and I started looking in the past to find its historical birth: in fact, as a concept, Docker is no so recent as you think, and I think it exists also because of the works of some other bigs from 80’, such as Poul-Henning Kamp2....

January 8, 2018 · 10 min

A journey through the network - Layer 1

A journey through the network - Layer 1 Before the Christmas holidays, I wrote an article about the network: yes. The network is that part of computer science that is no longer considered fundamental as it should, and I must admit that I learn it every day at my expense: as an old friend always says to me “the network is the concept on which everything is based, describes how the body works: after that, you can also become a gastroenterologist, but you will always need to know how the body works”....

January 5, 2018 · 28 min

My first textual game

A beautiful childhood I’ve never been a fan of videogames, neither as a child nor today: do not get me wrong, as many guys of my generation I also owned and played with the legendary PlayStation 1 (1995)1 and PlayStation 22 by Sony and the Nintendo Game Boy3. It was fun, but not so much as playing to videogames born a few years before I was born. In the 80s, there were not yet the powerful graphics chips that today can be found with a few hundred euros....

January 2, 2018 · 19 min

Best wishes for Christmas holidays!

Merry Christmas by nerds Here we are!! Christmas holidays are coming and it’s time to collect nerd greetings for nerd friends! In this article I have collected some of my favorites: starting from css to the most unhealthy c code in the world, I hope you enjoy these repositories / snippets / gist / sketch! Best wishes for happy holidays! CSS While I was looking for some cool css stuff to share with you, I found this fantastic gist that show the kind of magic a web expert can do with a bunch of css lines....

December 24, 2017 · 2 min

The Doomsday rule

The Doomsday rule A few months ago I came across the name of J. H. Conway: you’re wondering who the hell he is. Well, Conway is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics and he is the invention of the Game of Life. Ah, I was forgetting one last thing: he is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey1....

December 23, 2017 · 9 min

A journey through the network - Introduction

A journey through the network - Introduction During the last year I understood one thing: sooner or later everyone should review network notions, so I decided to start writing articles about network fundamentals. As a main source I would use Computer Networks and TCP/IP Illustrated. In this article, I will talk about two important network architectures: the OSI reference model and the TCP/IP reference model. These two model has opposite characteristics, in particular:...

December 22, 2017 · 15 min

Predix Machine and how to configure them

Predix Machine and how to configure them In September, waiting for a contract proposal from the company where I currently work, I wrote a tool for the (more or less) automatic configuration of Predix© Machine. Predix©1 is the platform created by GE for Industry 4.0, powered by CloudFoundry2, to securely connect machines, data, and analytics to improve operational efficiency, help you develop, deploy, and operate industrial apps at the edge and in the cloud....

December 21, 2017 · 7 min

Build a multilayer perceptron with Golang

History We can date the birth of artificial neural networks in 1958, with the introduction of Perceptron 1 by Frank Rosenblatt. It was the first algorithm created to reproduce the biological neuron. Conceptually, the easier perceptron that you might think of is made of a single neuron: when it’s exposed to a stimulus, it provides a binary response, just as would a biological neuron. This model differs greatly from the neural network involving billions of neurons in a biological brain....

December 20, 2017 · 17 min