Paolo Bernardi’s Weblog

Happy Easter, everyone.

P.S. I think that remembering and celebrating the fact that Jesus overcame death and that ultimately we will overcome it too is especially important after the last happenings here in Italy.

The last night, at 1:32 UTC (3:32 local time), a very bad earthquake happened in the center of Italy. As official sources (link in Italian) say it was 5.8 (or 6.3) magnitude on Richter’s scale and the ipocentre was 8.8km deep. The epicentre was near the city L’Aquila, a bit more than 100km from where I live, near Terni.  Many buildings of L’Aquila and nearby towns have been destroyed, especially these that hadn’t been built with earthquakes resistance in mind; anyway, many buildings built with anti-earthquakes criterion in mind have also been damaged. The last news report more than 90 victims,  hundreds people injured and about one hundred thousand people that can’t go back to their homes.

Update (19:15 UTC / 21:15 local)

The victim number keeps growing, now it’s more than 150. During the day several tremors happened, the population nerves are really tense. Some jackals started to exploit the chaos. Also, the hospital, which should have been built following the anti-quakes laws directives (it is 13 years old, such laws are about 20 years old instead) is severely damaged as well.

Update April the 7th (6:00 UTC / 8:00 local)

During the night several corpses have been found, now they’re 179 in total. The night passed away with some minor quakes, the strongest being 4.8 on Richter’s scale. It rained during the whole night, which didn’t quite help.

Update April the 7th (18:00 UTC / 20:30 local)

At 17:42 UTC (19:42 local) there was another tremor estimated around 5.7 on Richter’s scale; it caused some additional building’s damage and at least another victim, the cathedral of L’Aquila went completly down after that. So far, the number of dead people is 228.

Update April the 8th (20:10 UTC / 22:10 local)

The number of victims grew up to 272, he first funerals have been celebrated. The hope to find alive people lowers more and more, but tomorrow the search for people will continue.

Update April the 9th (19:45 UTC / 21:45 local)

The number of dead people is not 281. I just felt another tremor from where I live (near Terni, Umbria, 100km from L’Aquila): it was as strong as the strongest ones of these days but shorter, about 10 seconds. I still have no official news about this one.

Update April the 11th (9:15 UTC / 11:45 local)

This will be the last update, unless something unexpected happens; by now the situation seems stable enough. The number of victims is now 291, and yesterday there have been funerals for 205 of them.

I will probably write again about all this in future, but for now that’s all.

Have you ever had to regularly use a network with Captive Portal-like authentication? If you did, you surely know how annoying it can be, especially if you have some sort of automatic scripts to be executed right after connecting to the Internet.

Ok, maybe it isn’t a common situation but this is my case: at Perugia’s Mathematics and Computer Science department we have a wireless network that uses ZeroShell’s Captive Portal for authentication and I heavily use Arch Linux network facilities to run some scripts right after the connection. The problem here is that normally you have to authenticate yourself manually, via a web browser, before being able to access the Internet: only after this step the scripts would be able to to their job…

Luckily thanks to this little Python script by munhoz  I can now authenticate myself automatically and my scripts can run normally. Thank you man!

Welcome to my blog! For the sake of clarity, in this entry I will explain why I have chosen to create this blog.

Briefly: to help me being a better reader and writer, among other things.

Obviously maintaining a blog helps exercising writing skills. I have chosen English because I have less occasions to use it than Italian, my native language. I chat or write emails in English quite often, but using it for a blog is much more challenging because it will be potentially readable by a lot of people (scripta manent ). Since this is an exercise in writing, please feel free and most welcome to correct me, even in a “grammar nazi” way; really, I will appreciate that. This will also be a good exercise in modesty because I tend to be real picky myself about written Italian!

This blog will also help me being a better reader. I read practically every day, both English and Italian texts; mostly I read articles related to computing science that I find on the Internet or texts that I must study for university. While I often read just for fun and pleasure, there is a lot that deserves attention and deeper thought in those readings. From my study experience I have found that summarizing important concepts that I have read by writing them down is the better way to fix them in my memory. So, part of the content of this blog will be considerations on other people’s work that I find interesting.

I probably will write about topics that I am working on, mostly university projects. I hope that doing this will give me a better insight on such topics.

Maybe I will also write down some ideas or inspirations that will occur to me from time to time, maybe I will cover other topics too rather than computing science alone; time will tell.

Phew! There goes the ritual first post.