Finally an update!

The last post was in 2013, and the one before that inaugurated 2012 with a "Happy New Year!". That's several Happy New Year's since then, and much has changed in the meantime.

I moved from Dietikon to Zürich in 2014. New apartment, new roommates. I completed my Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Software-Systems in 2015. Finally.

I started working for a great company in 2013, iniLabs Ltd., a spin-off from the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) here at the University of Zürich, that works on neuromorphic hardware, specifically bio-inspired vision sensors. Had the opportunity to work with IBM's TrueNorth development team on integrating the sensors with their platform in 2013-2014 as part of the DARPA SyNAPSE project. Met lots of great people, went several times to California (US), partecipated in the 2015 Telluride (Colorado, US) Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, met even more awesome people. Two fun years working on embedded hardware, low-level C libraries, VHDL FPGA logic and Java GUIs, everything I ever wanted. And it's all set to continue, as we're currently expanding our offering of neuromorphic devices.

On the open-source front, I started contributing to usb4java in July 2013 due to my work at iniLabs, where we use it extensively in the jAER project to talk to the vision sensors in a performant and platform-independant way, as well as in the Flashy project, a tool to update firmware and logic on our sensor devices. Also almost all of the code I've worked on is available openly from the jAER project or the iniLabs GitHub pages. In 2013 I moved my own projects from self-hosted SVN to Git & GitHub, including the source for this blog. Great service.

After over a decade of self-hosting, I moved everything over to Google Apps. Very happy with not having to care about any of that anymore, I just didn't have the time for server maintainance.

Photos of San Francisco, Colorado, New York, Yellowstone, London and other places I visited can be found in the new gallery, powered by Google Drive. I took most of them during the 2015 road-trip through central US with my good friend Diederik Moeys, a PhD here at INI.

I've gone through all the pages in the blog here and updated them, so they should reflect current reality better. I'm hoping to keep the blog more up-to-date in the future. I've promised myself I'd use it to document the resurrection of my oldest hobby: N-scale model trains. More on that soon.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 01 Oct 2016 at 18:00
Categories: Website, UZH, NTrains, usb4java, Trips, Longi, iniLabs, Software Comments



New blog based on Blogofile

As some of you may have noticed already, my blog suddenly looks very different.
I've abandoned Serendipity in favor of Blogofile, which is a Python-based static-site generator. This means I write posts as text-files, they get processed, merged with templates, HTML gets generated, and a fully static site is the result. In fact the only dynamic thing remaining are the comments, which are now powered by Disqus over JavaScript. This allowed me to ditch PHP and MySQL, and reduce the load on the server quite a bit. Search is powered by Google. I've also overhauled the template to look nicer and be fully XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. Thanks to Free CSS Templates for the design!
I've also added a few more parts to the site, now it's not only a pure blog, there's a welcoming page, one about UZH and one about me. As well as a better media gallery. Everything is available via HTTPS, as usual. At the bottom I link to my projects, as well as interesting blogs I follow.
If you find anything not working, be it a link or post, please tell me right away, so I can fix it, thanks!

UPDATE: I've written an ebuild for Blogofile, you can get it from my overlay. It pulls in all required dependencies to run. For my own blog, I also needed dev-python/imaging for the gallery controller.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 09 Nov 2011 at 20:00
Categories: Website, Gentoo Comments



27C3: Day 3

Today we slept in even longer and arrived at the Congress past 12:30...
Found a nice place upstairs, facing Alexa. Ate lots of awesome Belgian butter waffles!

  • 14:00 "Cognitive Psychology for Hackers", awesome talk on psychological "hacks" on humans, biases and so on that influence our decision making, very well done, great examples, I'll probably buy the book he cited at the end, as I'm very interested in this too, and he even mentioned "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", a fan-fiction I've been following, as being very much spot-on in its explanation of rational thinking.
  • 16:00 "Console Hacking 2010" was gearing up to be great, presenting results on hacking the PS3 now that you can't run Linux on it anymore by default, but I had massive problems with the stream, it continued to die on me (I'll have to download it later!), so I started playing with the LigHTTPD installation that powers this blog, setting up SSL (so now you can also use https:// to access it) correctly, with a real certificate (at least on Firefox), thanks to StartSSL, great service there. I also fixed redirection from other subdomains/domains, so now www.longitekk.com or test.longitekk.com automatically redirect you to the blog.
    I also now serve my Trac installation over HTTPS on dev.longitekk.com, thanks to mod_proxy.

Between exploring Lighty's configuration syntax, eating a very good curry&rice from the BCC's catering and getting more waffles from Alexa, I missed a few talks in the evening.

  • 21:45 "Zero-sized heap allocations vulnerability analysis" gave an interesting introduction to a problem not every programmer is aware of, and then went off into verification land, so I switched to "Fnord-Jahresrückblick 2010", which was hilarious, as usual.
  • Around 23:15 "Hacker Jeopardy" started, which is disputing its final round as I'm writing this, it's a cool game to play with your colleagues, some incredibly tricky and funny questions in there.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 30 Dec 2010 at 01:25
Categories: Website, Longi, CCC Comments



Linode++

I've now been hosting my blog here on a Linode 512 vserver since January, and I'm really satisfied with it, I've never had any problems or outages, the performance is quite good, and their control panel and other resources really rock! Satisfied customer here, I'd recommend them to anyone searching for a good vserver offer.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 24 Sep 2010 at 17:47
Categories: Website Comments



Back to blog!

Well hi! :)

I've just set up this blog now on chtekk.longitekk.com, a server much faster than the old chtekk.homelinux.net (wich now anyway redirects you here), and hope it will be added to the Gentoo blog aggregator soon.

Yup, I'm officially a Gentoo Dev now, with a chtekk@gentoo.org email address et all, I must say this makes me really happy, and I hope to be able to contribute to Gentoo a lot, working mainly on PHP (especially the new dev-lang/php & co. packages) and also on Apache and Web-Apps.

I usually hang out in #gentoo-apache on irc.freenode.net, so that's where you can reach me most of the time, or via email. Well, I'll close this "intro" blog post now, stay tuned for more exciting news! ;)

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 24 Oct 2005 at 19:29
Categories: Website, Longi, Gentoo Comments




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