https://www.durdn.com/ Recent content on @durdn - nicola paolucci Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2021/3/february-2021-link-roundup-and-notes/ Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2021/3/february-2021-link-roundup-and-notes/ February 2021 Links Roundup and Notes Being a curious person and a voracious online reader, I collect a lot of material every given month. I bookmark almost everything but rarely sit down to organize the really insightful things I found. Let’s see if I can make it a habit to review the most notable things I learned or collected in the month. If you find any of these pointers useful, please do let me know @durdn. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2018/10/breaking-silence-and-updating-the-blog-stack/ Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2018/10/breaking-silence-and-updating-the-blog-stack/ Breaking silence and updating the blog stack So this is how it feels to write again on one’s blog. Good, it’s a good feeling. In the past week I’ve spent a few hours brushing up - aka rewriting - the engine this blog runs on, streamlining, optimizing, porting. I wrote similar updates in 2014 and 2012 respectively, things have evolved, check out my previous two rewrites - one and two - and cringe at will like I did. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2014/03/25/new-design-and-tweaked-tech-stack/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2014/03/25/new-design-and-tweaked-tech-stack/ New Design And Tweaked Tech Stack I have been working on an off a polish/redesign of my static blog for a while now. I think I am done for now. I have shifted the tech stack a bit further and I am pleased with the result. The blog is now fully responsive, the markup is semantic and the templates are very neat and polished. For the curious here the updates: https://www.durdn.com/blog/2013/05/03/life-as-advocate-more-git-than-ever/ Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2013/05/03/life-as-advocate-more-git-than-ever/ Life As Advocate: More Git And Hacking Than Ever Posts have slowed down on this blog not because I don’t have more interest in writing or because I finished the topics to write about but because the content I am producing appears now on Atlassian’s Blog! In March I gave a drastic shake to my professional career: I gave up my very profitable stint as contractor and I accepted a position as Developer Advocate at Atlassian with the awesome task of writing about git, DVCS workflows, hack on cool technologies and talk at conferences, meet-ups and the like. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2013/01/14/10-git-tips-and-workflows-round-2/ Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2013/01/14/10-git-tips-and-workflows-round-2/ Git Tips And Workflows, Round 2: basics, stashes and other bits You’d think I fired all my bullets with my previous round of curated tips, but no, I have plenty more. The new year has just kicked off and I am happy to be back with more findings, shortcuts and workflows to enhance your git experience. I also humbly anticipate the optimizations and corrections that you guys will feed me back. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/12/05/git-12-curated-git-tips-and-workflows/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/12/05/git-12-curated-git-tips-and-workflows/ Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches My Evernote tech-tips folder and my Notational Velocity stash have been collecting a huge list of git tips, many of which I have to look up again and again. Until I finally give up and create aliases for them (by the way you can find some of my more advanced git aliases explained in my previous post). I expect many git practitioners will find them useful as much as I do. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/11/22/must-have-git-aliases-advanced-examples/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/11/22/must-have-git-aliases-advanced-examples/ Must Have Git Aliases: Advanced Examples Over the course of a few years I piled up a long list of git aliases. This post will assume you know what aliases are and you have defined a few for yourself. I rely on many of them dozens of times a day. And maybe some have slipped your radar. Maybe you’ve never thought you could do some of these useful things with an alias. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/11/17/blog-redesign-as-static-beauty-with-markdown/ Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2012/11/17/blog-redesign-as-static-beauty-with-markdown/ Blog Redesign As Static Beauty With Markdown I have finally completed the redesign of my blog to a completely static setup. Following the more recent blogging trends of course I setup a website static generator and migrated all my wordpress posts to markdown. And took great care of the readability and minimalism. Technology landscape Here is the technology platform I used: Middleman as the beautiful static website generator. Haml and Sass for templating. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2011/07/06/using-git-with-subversion-tips-that-will-make-your-life-easier/ Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2011/07/06/using-git-with-subversion-tips-that-will-make-your-life-easier/ Using Git with Subversion: Tips that will make your life easier In the last couple of years I’ve been working on various projects that unfortunately - still use Subversion as their version control system. I moved to git already a few years ago and I wanted to keep using it as much as possible. Luckily git-svn is an incredibly complete tool to interact with a Subversion repository without leaving the comfort of the git power toolset. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/10/07/how-to-setup-pinax-with-nginx/ Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/10/07/how-to-setup-pinax-with-nginx/ How to setup Pinax with nginx Tonight I spent sometime getting Pinax - Django swiss army knife - to work on nginx via fastcgi on my Ubuntu 9.10 box. Here is a step by step guide. First of course we need to install nginx, pretty easy with Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install nginx Create a new file called appname in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ like the following: upstream djangoserv { server 127.0.0.1:8801; } server { listen 80; server_name alkemic; access_log /var/log/nginx/appname. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/08/16/i-love-staring-at-branches-and-shuffle-reorder-and-squash-commits/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/08/16/i-love-staring-at-branches-and-shuffle-reorder-and-squash-commits/ I love staring at branches and shuffle, reorder and squash commits I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s inherent to human nature to strive for and to create order. Maybe it’s just me. But I love staring at branches and I love cleaning up my commit history until it shines. This is of course possible and encouraged with git and it’s only possible if you haven’t shared your code with anyone else publicly (pushed to a shared remote repository). https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/22/link-dump-from-a-conversation-entrepreneurs-social-media-cool-products-random-awesomeness/ Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/22/link-dump-from-a-conversation-entrepreneurs-social-media-cool-products-random-awesomeness/ Link dump from a conversation: Entrepreneurs, Social Media, cool products, random awesomeness Every once in a while I have wonderful conversations about life, technology and everything. Many times I end up talking about a myriad of topics. For example today I had lunch with Jonathan Greenwood (you should follow him on twitter here) and learned a great deal about many interesting things. I am always intrigued and delighted to rediscover that not everyone has my same brain, interests, browsing habits. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/02/how-to-integrate-compass-into-your-default-pinax-project/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/02/how-to-integrate-compass-into-your-default-pinax-project/ How to integrate Compass into your default Pinax project Lately I’ve been really impressed and experimented joyfully with Compass and Sass. They make css/layout design fun again for me. Even if the whole tool chain is in Ruby you don’t have to touch any Ruby to use them - don’t misunderstand me: I like Ruby and I’ve been a Rails early adopter; my brain is very well tuned in with Python, that’s all -. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/01/my-desktop-during-an-intense-coding-session-using-xmonad/ Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2009/07/01/my-desktop-during-an-intense-coding-session-using-xmonad/ My Desktop during an intense coding session using XMonad Here is what a coding session of mine looks like when I am in full swing. This is specifically the coding screen. That’s a 1920x1600 resolution screen-shot :D. I obviously also have a browsing screen not shown. In the image above I am immersed into integrating Compass into Pinax (full post on that will follow). When developing under Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment) I have settled for a long time now on the ultra-productive tiling window manager Xmonad. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/26/vim-mind-share-soaring-roundup-of-10-vim-articles-recent-and-older-gems/ Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/26/vim-mind-share-soaring-roundup-of-10-vim-articles-recent-and-older-gems/ Vim Mind Share Soaring: Roundup of 10 Vim articles, recent and older gems Am I the only one to notice that there is a lot of vim love in the airwaves recently? I saw the trend very clearly, spanning from reddit to news.yc and let me say that the material that came up recently is very good; those neat posts prompted me to improve my vimrc dramatically and I really like what I learned. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/21/idea-for-a-useful-tool-for-a-web-entrepreneurdeveloper/ Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/21/idea-for-a-useful-tool-for-a-web-entrepreneurdeveloper/ Idea for a useful tool for a web Entrepreneur/Developer This is the scenario I was thinking about: I want to interact with a graphic designer remotely, who is very very good with Photoshop and HTML/CSS but who might have trouble setting up the Linux environment needed to run my web app. What I would like to build (or find if it already exists) is a custom CD that when inserted into a Windows or Mac OSX box does the following: https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/18/a-webapp-in-1-week-part-2-the-source-of-data/ Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/18/a-webapp-in-1-week-part-2-the-source-of-data/ A webapp in 1 week (part 2): the source of data In the first installment of this series I’ve spoken about a set of technologies that can speed up the time to market quite a bit. Read about it here if you missed it. This time I want to talk about where to get the content for your niche web app - if you need a source of content, that is. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/18/testing-out-tuttivisti-widgets/ Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/18/testing-out-tuttivisti-widgets/ Testing out tuttivisti widgets One of the first things I implemented for tuttivisti - to add just a hint of viral marketing to the project - was a widget that you can import on your own blog, maybe on the sidebar, to show the latest movies you either want to see or just watched. Let me test it here for you (and for me :D): <since removed> How does it work? https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/12/linux-one-liner-to-extract-email-addresses-from-a-django-log-file/ Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/12/linux-one-liner-to-extract-email-addresses-from-a-django-log-file/ Linux one liner to extract email addresses from a Django log file Say something bad happened and your application sent emails that it shouldn’t have (ahem who? not me…) and you want to collect the emails to apologise. So you just copied the output of a log file in a text file (wrong.txt) like the following: sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email1@test1.com sending message 'Confirm email address for example. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/09/one-liner-to-list-ubuntu-packages-you-installed-recently/ Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/09/one-liner-to-list-ubuntu-packages-you-installed-recently/ One-liner to list Ubuntu packages you installed recently Quick one liner to list the ubuntu packages you recently installed on a machine. I needed this to copy the configuration of one of my production boxes onto a dev environment: sudo cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep \ installed | awk {'print $5'} | xargs mysql-client-5.0 mysql-server-5.0 ... apache2` 9 November 2008 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/09/tools-for-rapid-prototyping-a-webapp-in-1-week/ Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/11/09/tools-for-rapid-prototyping-a-webapp-in-1-week/ Tools for rapid prototyping: a webapp in 1 week First things first. My new webapp tuttivisti is live! This post is about how it came to be. In just one week. One person team. Crazy working hours. So I was there immediately after receiving the news that YC did not select my team for this round. I thought I would feel depressed. I thought that the put down would ruin my mood. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/23/recovered-all-my-blog-posts-since-2000/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/23/recovered-all-my-blog-posts-since-2000/ Recovered all my blog posts since 2000 Ah that’s just great. Through a tense but harmless procedure I managed to recover access to my entire blogging history since the beginning. In the records it appears that my first ever blog post is dated May 8th 2000. A long time ago! I’ll go even further and embarrass myself quoting it in full: Hello there ! This is just my first experiment with Blogger. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/17/running-for-ycombinator-2009-and-having-a-blast/ Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/17/running-for-ycombinator-2009-and-having-a-blast/ Running for Ycombinator 2009 and having a blast It’s been a crazy ride these past few weeks. My partner in crime - nocivus - and I have been working very hard on our submission for the 2009 Winter round of Y Combinator. It has been a lot of fun. Creative energy is like a drug. When you’re under its effect you can’t stop working and fleshing out ideas. We’ve been coding like crazy. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/07/using-gmail-for-outbound-smtp-on-mac-os-x-leopard/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/07/using-gmail-for-outbound-smtp-on-mac-os-x-leopard/ Using Gmail for outbound smtp on Mac OS X LeopardI had problems setting up postfix to run properly on my macbook pro. Then I found this very clear, step by step how to. And now everything works like a charm. The only drawback is that I can now basically only send email from my Gmail account. Well that will do it for now. 7 October 2008 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/01/one-line-search-and-replace-in-a-folder-osx/ Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/10/01/one-line-search-and-replace-in-a-folder-osx/ One line search and replace in a folder (OSX) Beautiful tip to search and replace all occurrences of a string in a given folder. I had to change it slightly to make it work under OSX so here it is for future reference: find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/Old/New/g' {} \\; 1 October 2008 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/09/27/recent-developments/ Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/09/27/recent-developments/ Recent Developments So “what have you been up to?” you ask. I am back in Amsterdam since the beginning of September. I didn’t blog publicly much so far, but It’s time to resume. I feel my path as entrepreneur has started with the right foot (which is a free translation of an Italian saying that means things have started well). I rested and accumulated a lot of creative energy during my month long trip to Italy. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/14/futility-moment-my-new-wallpaper/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/14/futility-moment-my-new-wallpaper/ Futility moment, my new Wallpaper Hang on because this blog post is very dense with content. Last summer I bought a cool t-shirt similar to this one while in US. For some reason I was freely browsing the web tonight and that logo came back to me. I was kind of bored of the glorious wallpaper that served me well till today and was looking for something new. I looked for a wallpaper with the Metal Mulisha logo mentioned above but the wallpapers on their website were all very much related to a motorbike team. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/08/arrived-to-my-summer-head-quarters/ Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/08/arrived-to-my-summer-head-quarters/ Arrived to my summer head quarters Arrived this morning at my summer head quarters. For the next 3 weeks coding sessions will be enhanced with sunbathing therapy and Marche’s food. Wonder where is this? here. 8 August 2008 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/02/business-cards-have-arrived/ Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/08/02/business-cards-have-arrived/ Business Cards have arrived I am excited, my new business cards have just arrived. The guys at moo.com are very good and the quality of their stuff is awesome. 20 euros including shipping and I got these 50 multicolor business cards. I felt the pain quite a few times at conferences because I did not have proper business cards. I learned my lesson. :D For your viewing pleasure the different backs I chose (they have beautiful ready made designs): https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/30/setting-up-osx-for-some-erlang-development-yes-with-emacs/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/30/setting-up-osx-for-some-erlang-development-yes-with-emacs/ Setting up OSX for some Erlang Development - yes - with Emacs I’ve decided to dig a bit into Erlang. The setup has been painless. I first installed Macports (look here for a step by step guide). With this installed, to install Erlang is a single command: sudo port install erlang Then I looked up the recommended development environment. What a surprise: a lot of people suggest Emacs. And so I followed the instructions of lisp Guru extraordinaire Bill Clementson on how to setup Emacs to develop in Erlang. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/25/my-emacs-setup-for-python-development/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/25/my-emacs-setup-for-python-development/ My Emacs Setup for Python Development Recently I tried to give some other Python editors/IDEs a chance. I tried pydev for a while and found it good enough, but not perfect. Truth is I have been using emacs for a long time for development. And I found myself quite comfortable to develop Python code with it. With a proper shell on the side, be it ipython or pycrust I thought my setup was good enough. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/16/on-the-law-of-the-mirror/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/16/on-the-law-of-the-mirror/ On the “Law of the Mirror” Life is like a mirror, if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting. - Jim Morrison So tonight I had a very interesting conversation with Chiara about many things. At one point the “law of the mirror” came up and I think it’s so deep and true that I feel like sharing it. I’ve been reading a wonderful book that has a chapter on it. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/14/i-bit-the-bullet-and-bought-a-macbook-pro/ Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/14/i-bit-the-bullet-and-bought-a-macbook-pro/ I bit the bullet and bought a Macbook Pro Right. Given the fact that July 31st I’ll have to hand in my company laptop I’ve decided to invest a fair chunk of my last salary to buy a new one. One powerful enough to stand heavy coding sessions and running multiple virtual machines at the same time. One beautiful in design and with a solid OS … alright I bought macbook pro. https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/13/time-has-passed-and-explanation-for-the-tentative-title/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.durdn.com/blog/2008/07/13/time-has-passed-and-explanation-for-the-tentative-title/ Time has passed and explanation for the (tentative) title Time has passed since last time I wrote a blog post. I kept a blog for a few years, few years ago. I almost forgot I did actually. If I find the motivation I might get around reimporting all that old stuff at one point. But I warn you my old blog was in Italian, so maybe it’s better if it stays where it is.