A small tale with a topological soul, with the aim of providing a very high level intuition for the notion of density and dense set in topology. Smally Open was…
A/B testing on WordPress: a framework for developers and tutorial
Some months ago, I changed one link in the menu in my website postpaycounter.com. After that, it looked to me more people were purchasing products, i.e. the conversion rate had…
Numpy histogram density does not sum to 1
During a Computational Vision lab, while comparing histograms, I stumbled upon a peculiar behavior. The histograms pairwise kernel matrix – which is just a fancy name for the matrix holding…
The Distributional Hypothesis: semantic models in theory and practice
This was the final project for the Data Semantics course at university – A report on distributional semantics and Latent Semantic Analysis. Here is the nicely-formatted pdf version (with references). What…
Brute force a crackme file password with Python
I was to reverse a file for a challenge, MD5 hash 85c9feed0cb0f240a62b1e50d1ab0419. The challenge was called mio cuggino, purposefully misspelled with two g letters. It asks for three numbers. The…
The one time pad and the many time pad vulnerability
The scope of this article is to present the one time pad cipher method and its biggest vulnerability: that of the many time pad. The one time pad: what it…
Getting started with Binary reverse engineering: an example
For a challenge in a university security class, I was given this file to crack: reverse1. I started with reverse0, which was considerably easier than the second one. In this post I…
Base conversion in Ubuntu (decimal to binary)
Need to convert a base 10 integer in a base 2 one? Or, at any rate, convert a number from one numeration system to another? In Ubuntu, the bc utility…
Does C++ delete operator really free memory?
Well, I have been wondering about this for quite a while now, and I have tried to run some tests to better understand what’s going on under the hood. The…
Looking for help with Post Pay Counter development
Post Pay Counter provides an easy way to manage authors payments on a WordPress website. Three years ago was completely redesigned to meet the demands of its growth, and shortly after…
Tips and advice on being a freelance in Information Technology
What follows is Javier Silva’s interview to me. The interview is mostly focused on how what it is like to be a freelance in the IT field and how to…
WordPress function url_to_postid not working with Anspress
With the Anspress theme/plugin, using the WordPress native function url_to_postid() on a question permalink returns the page ID of the base page. For example, url_to_postid( “www.website.com/questions/question/this-is-the-question”); would return the page…
bbPress – Anonymous Subscriptions
This add-on plugin for bbPress will allow anonymous users to subscribe to topics and get email notifications when a new reply is posted. The notification email includes an unsubscribe link.…
A method for calculating pattern relevance in a text
This article aims at presenting a method for computing the relevance of a given string (pattern) in a text. This algorithm is at the core of my WordPress plugin Smart…
New System76 Lemur 2016 review (6th gen Intel core)
On December 2016 I purchased the System76 6th gen Lemur. These are more of impressions than a real review, but may be helpful if you’re interested in buying a new laptop and…
IPSC 2014: Imagination is more important than knowledge
From 12th to 17th May I took part to the International Public Speaking Competition (IPSC) 2014 in London, representing my country, Italy. The topic was Imagination is more important than knowledge, and…
Tutorial: Use PayPal Adaptive Payments API (with Embedded Lightbox)
There are two things I am currently working on: School Integrating my Post Pay Counter WordPress plugin with PayPal, so that site administrators can pay their writers directly from their…
Posts To-Do List: keep track of writing ideas
I worked for several blogs and websites. In most of them, we often felt the need to share hints and ideas about future posts, about what each of us stumbled…
When you start a new project, think big!
As you may know, I am the happy developer of a WordPress plugin called Post Pay Counter. I dare say that that has been my first serious coding project, well…
Have I told you we should abolish Facebook?
Yesterday it was my birthday. My family phoned me or just met me. Then there has been a handful of people who texted me on my mobile, mostly in the…
