New toy: Ubiquity

There are so many toys in the ‘net and so little time to play with!  I first read about this tool from here almost a month ago.

Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin that let you perform a great variety of operations, simply by typing a command. You can , for example, search on the most famous search engines, send a mail or translate a word.You simply have to activate it with it’s hot-key (ctrl-space) and type what you need.

This alone would make of Ubiquity an handy tool, if you do not like put your hands off the keyboard to search what you need in menus and bookmarks using the mouse,  what makes of Ubiquity a really enjoyable toy is how easily you can write your own commands.

Just type “command-editor” to get a simple but effective web based editor where you can write your Ubiquity commands with Javascript. No compiling or deploy is needed you can run your command in Ubiquity as soon as you have written it.

Here is my own ubiquity command to reverse a stringselected or passed as parameter. It’s only a step beyond a ‘hello world’ program but it shows quite well how Ubiquity works.

More details about programming with Ubiquity on its wiki.

Installed CVS

I’ve just installed CVS on PIII 550. I don’t really write so much code to need a versioning system at home, but it’s still an interesting experiment and also an easy way to share sources between laptop and desktop computer. I did it mainly following instructions from this howto.

first I installed CVS and XINETD with apt-get command:

 then I added to xinetd the cvs configuration file

here is the file content

service cvspserver

{

     port = 2401     

     socket_type = stream

     protocol = tcp

     user = root

     wait = no

     type = UNLISTED

     server = /usr/bin/cvs

     server_args = -f –allow-root /var/lib/cvs pserver

     disable = no

}

after restarting xinetd:

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd start 

I added two users to the machine (for the two computers that are going to use CVS) and added them to the src group.

(adding only CVS users would be safer but this is only a home network server so why worry about it?)

sudo adduser –no-create-home eeepc900

sudo adduser –no-create-home sempron2400 

sudo addgroup eeepc900 src

sudo addgroup sempron2400 src

and, at last, I configured Eclipse to use the CVS server

Generating random people with PostgreSQL

I just installed PostgreSQL on my PIII550 linux ’server’ and I used the SQL example from my last post to do some test. Only the random select query and the procedure needed some little rework due to the different syntax:

Here is the random selection query

SELECT NAME, SEX,

                   CURRENT_DATE - CAST(RANDOM()*365.25*100 AS INTEGER) AS DOB,

                  (SELECT SURNAME FROM SURNAMES ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1) AS SURNAME

FROM NAMES ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1;

 Here is the procedure:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION FILL(IN NUM INT) RETURNS VARCHAR(1) AS $$

    DECLARE

          N INTEGER;

       BEGIN

              N:=NUM;

             WHILE N > 0 LOOP

                  INSERT INTO PEOPLE(NAME,SEX,DOB,SURNAME)

                  SELECT NAME, SEX,

                                     CURRENT_DATE - CAST(RANDOM()*365.25*100 AS INTEGER) AS DOB,

                                   (SELECT SURNAME FROM SURNAMES ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1) AS SURNAME

                 FROM NAMES ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1;

                N := N - 1;

       END LOOP;

       RETURN ‘T’;

END; $$

LANGUAGE PLPGSQL;

(Update)

Forgot to say it takes about seven seconds to insert ten thousands rows … quite faster than MySQL.