28 Aug 2011 
Matteo Mattei 
python pyside qt thread 
In these days I started studying PySide. After some days spent in reading lot of stuff, I thought that a real example could be useful for who intends to start learning PySide as well. In this example I can show you how you can implement a custom signal (MySignal) together with the usage of threads with QThread.
The following code creates a window with two buttons: the first starts and stop a thread (MyThread) that runs a batch that prints a point in the stdout every seconds continuously. The second button lets you only start another thread (MyLongThread) that prints an asterisk in the stdout every second for 10 seconds.
This example uses the api version 2 (introduced with PyQt 4.5) to connect signals to slots.
For more information you can look at:
27 Jul 2011 Matteo Mattei c/c++ linux python If you have root access but you need to run some applications/scripts with some other user credentials you can do it with
su - username -c "command to execute"
But if you need to do it within a C/C++ program you need to write something like this:
This is how to compile and execute the above code:
[root@barracuda ~]# gcc mysu.c -o mysu
[root@barracuda ~]# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) gruppi=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel),19(log)
[root@barracuda ~]# ./mysu matteo /bin/bash
[matteo@barracuda /root]$ id
uid=1000(matteo) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),3(sys),10(wheel),14(uucp),91(video),92(audio),93(optical),95(storage),96(scanner),97(camera),98(power),108(vboxusers)
The same result could be obtained also in Python with a very little effort:
20 Jun 2011 Matteo Mattei relax hard disk jokes security Since a REALLY secure Hard Disk erase procedure does not exist, the only way to clean every private data from a storage device is to use a powerful tool. Today we experimented the secure data cleaning on a 2.5” HD with an hammer. Yes, you have understood, an HAMMER!!! What’s more powerful than an hammer?!
This is the result of our experiment:
Any further feedback is really appreciated!
10 Jun 2011 Matteo Mattei linux vmware 
Few days ago I spent some times trying to shrink my Ubuntu 11.04 appliance with root partition formatted with EXT4 filesystem.
The main problem is that the current VMware tools (8.4.6, build-385536) does not support the ext4 shrink. If you run sudo vmware-toolbox, your root partition is formatted in ext4 and you try to execute the shrink, an error message like the following could appear.
Anyway there is a trick to streamline the final vmdk size. Run this command within a shell into the guest system:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero.raw bs=20480
rm -f /zero.raw
Then, shutdown the virtual image and download the vdiskmanager tool from VMware website.
Now run the vmware-vdiskmanager with the -k parameter:
vmware-diskmanager -k /path/to/image.vmdk
This operation will take a while, but at the end you will get a considerable smaller vmdk image file.
