hack - MadBob (Page 2)

MadBob

hack

A collection of 44 posts

Scaling Websockets in PHP

Scaling Websockets in PHP

I have to implement some kind of sub-system for a larger platform, able to handle realtime communications (such as chat, notifications, and a few other things). And this means: websockets. And, as the platform itself is implemented in PHP/Laravel, this means: websockets in PHP. So I get back to

Progressive PDF Loading

If you have large PDF documents to serve into a website, probably you don't want those are fetched entirely before showing to the user. And if you host them in AWS S3, you may also be concerned about bandwidth usage and costs. Mozilla's PDF.js handles

Cropping Videos

Today, for the second time, I've published something on Dribbble: a demostration of the previously mentioned scrollable calendar. And, as I encoutered the same problems occourred at the first time, here I take some note for the next one. As I've not (yet?) received an invite

Scrollable Calendar

In a web application of mine I've added a simple calendar to display time-based informations. Classic month view, colored cells, implemented with FullCalendar. Then, a user asked to not limit the view to a month at a time, but just display the current week and the next three

Symbolic Links in FTP

Note for future myself: FTP doesn't supports symbolic linking, when you have to create a link in a folder just create a PHP file in the same folder as <?php symlink('original_file', 'link_file'); and run it through the browser.

Authenticating SPARQL

Recently I'm playing a lot with SPARQL and PHP, using Virtuoso as triple store and EasyRDF as client library. The only problem was that Virtuoso pretends (of course) some kind of authentication to write data into the store (this is not entirely true, you can also permit write

Material Navigation

Recently I wanted to use the navigation transition suggested by the Material Design guidelines (the element into the list growns when selected) into a web page, but I've not been able to find any working example online. So I've managed to provide my own implementation. This

Check the Checkbox

I often use the "add and remove rows from a grid" pattern to permit handling groups of data, but today I had to manage a particular use case. Given a simple table <table> <tr> <td> <input type="text" name=

Map Drop

I wanted to recreate the Flickr's feature to drop photos on a map to geolocalize them. Like this: So, hacking on a MapBox canvas, I obtained that: Here we have * a <div id="map"> used to instance the MapBox map * many <div class=

SAMLStorm

SandStorm is a cool solution to host simple web services and let users use them easily. It can be installed with a few commands, but still has an issue that bothered me: it is not possible to have a publicly accessible instance, as all of the involved login methods imply

Mails into the Web

Requirement: "Given this Mailchimp newsletter, embed the latest issue in that Jekyll static website". Mailchimp offers many APIs, but this approach requires too many complications. Instead my solution relies on RSS: given the RSS feed of your newsletter (you can obtain it with the "RSS" link

More Work Surface

I usually work on a laptop with an external monitor, but given the abundance of monitors at home I've looked around for some way to use a RaspberryPI as "wireless video interface" and further extend my display real estate. I've not been able to

Reuse: Sounds Good

I like to listen at streaming radios all day long while working and hacking, but I was annoyed by plugging and unplugging the speakers' audio jack from my laptop every time I have to move it. Some time ago I attached speakers to a RaspberryPI, so to obtain an

Hard Style Sleeping - Lazy Edition

More than one year ago I managed to put a RaspberryPI and a pair of speaker on my bedside table, programmed to loudly play a dubstep music stream at a given hour to wake me up on the most brutal and effective way. It worked, but recently I had to

DNS, The Masquerade

Scenario: a RaspberryPI primarily acting as access point, assigning IPs by DHCP and catching all DNS requests to redirect all HTTP traffic to himself, which may eventually switch to connect as a client to an existing wireless network (and delegating DHCP and DNS to another access point). 90% of this

Signed in Blood

As I'm now a business holder under the Italian laws jurisdiction, I had to ask a legally recognized "digital sign": a USB key containing some spare applications, libraries and a set of public and private certificates to produce recognizable digital signs identifing myself. The certificates are

Lazy Developer Portfolio

I'm a professional freelancer, and it is useful to highlight my activities for self-promotion. Most of my peers have some kind of online portfolio listing previous works and personal projects, and so I do on my website. But I'm also a lazy developer, and often I

The Perfect Object Storage

Me: Will this stuff be hosted in AWS? $Customer: No, we are going to host on infrastructure of $PopularTLCOperator! $PopularTLCOperator: Yes, come to us! Me: Fine. Do you have an Object Storage? $PopularTLCOperator: Errr... Nope... In this way I started my review of existing solutions for DIY files storage and

CryptoLocker vs Photorec

A very short note about a very hot topic: ransomware viruses spreading across the Internet. Some day ago a man bring to me a USB disk infected by one of those malicous applications, asking to recover the many family photos collected there (of course, stored in single copy). I had