Hello, my name is Matteo Mattei and this is my personal website. I am computer engineer with a long experience in Linux system administration and web software development.
30 Jul 2011 
Matteo Mattei 
linux mysql php backup dump 
The following PHP code is intended to be used to export a MySQL table in CSV format in order to be used with MS Excel.
27 Jul 2011 Matteo Mattei c/c++ linux python If you have root access but you need to run some applications/scripts with some other user credentials you can do it with
su - username -c "command to execute"
But if you need to do it within a C/C++ program you need to write something like this:
This is how to compile and execute the above code:
[root@barracuda ~]# gcc mysu.c -o mysu
[root@barracuda ~]# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) gruppi=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel),19(log)
[root@barracuda ~]# ./mysu matteo /bin/bash
[matteo@barracuda /root]$ id
uid=1000(matteo) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),3(sys),10(wheel),14(uucp),91(video),92(audio),93(optical),95(storage),96(scanner),97(camera),98(power),108(vboxusers)
The same result could be obtained also in Python with a very little effort:
20 Jun 2011 Matteo Mattei relax hard disk jokes security Since a REALLY secure Hard Disk erase procedure does not exist, the only way to clean every private data from a storage device is to use a powerful tool. Today we experimented the secure data cleaning on a 2.5” HD with an hammer. Yes, you have understood, an HAMMER!!! What’s more powerful than an hammer?!
This is the result of our experiment:
Any further feedback is really appreciated!
10 Jun 2011 Matteo Mattei linux vmware 
Few days ago I spent some times trying to shrink my Ubuntu 11.04 appliance with root partition formatted with EXT4 filesystem.
The main problem is that the current VMware tools (8.4.6, build-385536) does not support the ext4 shrink. If you run sudo vmware-toolbox, your root partition is formatted in ext4 and you try to execute the shrink, an error message like the following could appear.
Anyway there is a trick to streamline the final vmdk size. Run this command within a shell into the guest system:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero.raw bs=20480
rm -f /zero.raw
Then, shutdown the virtual image and download the vdiskmanager tool from VMware website.
Now run the vmware-vdiskmanager with the -k parameter:
vmware-diskmanager -k /path/to/image.vmdk
This operation will take a while, but at the end you will get a considerable smaller vmdk image file.
22 Mar 2011 Matteo Mattei python Today with my friend Nicola, we were looking in Internet for the implementation of the X9.19 algorithm in Python. Unfortunately we didn’t find it anywhere, so we made it ourself:
06 Feb 2011 Matteo Mattei mysql php 
For my client I needed to create a PHP script that can export a full MySQL database schema in another database. This script also need to keep and set constraints.
You only need to configure $DB_SRC_* and $DB_DST_* variables to fit your environment.
Here below you can find the code I created for this purpose:
Update 2016-10-14: The code below has been rewritten using PHP mysqli driver (thanks to Richard Maurer).