6/Feb 2011
By Jesús Roncero
3 min. read
If you follow recommended practices you should have a strong and unique password on every single website (or service) you visit or use, so that access to the rest of the other services is limited if one of your password is guessed or captured in some way . While this all very well, it’s quite hard to do in practice. We are either lazy and tend to repeat same passwords all over again in different websites or we just try to use variations of a few passwords so that we can keep them in our memory .
6/Jul 2010
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
Get annoyed by them? Me too. A lot. And it seems you can’t disable them by using their interface. Or at least it doesn’t work for me. Hot to fix this? Well, just like with any of these things, they usually load a javascript file. So, let’s just not load it: First of all, edit /etc/hosts and add a line like 127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com: sudo vi /etc/hosts which should end like: 127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com Better now!
16/Nov 2009
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
I’ve found two themes for firefox and thunderbird that I’m so pleased with them I have to promote them a bit :-). They are Charamel and Silvermel created by Kurt Freudenthal. I discovered them thanks to Chewie. So, what I like about them is: Works with newer versions of Mozilla firefox and thunderbird (Including version 3 beta 4) It’s got really nice colours and a nice layout. It works fine under linux and Mac OS X.
15/Oct 2009
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
Last week I move a blog I’ve got in Spanish to wordpress.com. Basically I really like wordpress.com and I believe it’s really worth it in terms of freeing my time from administering a wordpress installation and keeping up with the security fixes etc. And today, having a little bit of time I was tweaking my old website to redirect to the new site using an HTTP permanent redirect header. This is what I found in the HTTP headers: [golan@mars ~] % HEAD http://roncero.org/blog/ 200 OK Cache-Control: max-age=260, must-revalidate Connection: close Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:35:09 GMT Server: nginx Vary: Cookie Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Last-Modified: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:34:29 +0000 Client-Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:35:09 GMT Client-Peer: 76.74.254.123:80 Client-Response-Num: 1 Link: ; rel=shortlink X-Hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
1/Oct 2009
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
I’ve got two invites to Google Wave that I’m happy to give away. The first two persons that leave a comment including their email address (which will not be published) and their website, will get them :) Update: The invitations are gone.
8/Sep 2009
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
I generally like my ISP, BeThere, they are nice, offer a good internet package and they are friendly with techies. This is another reason why I love them, they publish problems with their routers on their blog and how they are going to fix it. Whether having issues with the router it’s not nice, I like this approach where they admit the fault and show that they are taking the necessary steps to fix it.
29/Aug 2009
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
For those of you who might have come here everyonce in a while you might have noticed that this blog is now hosted in wordpress.com, which would enable me to pay less attention to hosting my own wordpress and keep up with the security fixes. Not that I update this blog too much, but well, less work for me. Every link should work, even considering the URL schema has changed a little bit (removed the /archive/ bit), but it’s handled perfectly.
26/Jan 2007
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
Try this in firefox: Go to any page with lots of images. Delete the URL bar Substitute it with: javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300;y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0) Press Enter and enjoy!!! :-)
17/Jan 2007
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
I first knew about internet radio by listening to Soma FM back in 2001 or 2002. It was pretty cool by then. Lately I’ve been using Last FM quite a lot. I find it quite nice the way they have everything set up. They have a nice mp3 player with which you can listen to the music they are constantly streaming. Not only that, you can listen to different kinds of music at any time, searching it by artists or by music tags.
13/Dec 2006
By Jesús Roncero
3 min. read
A few days ago I wrote about setting up a subversion repository using svnsync. On that entry I was using svn+ssh authentication, but there are some gotchas to take into account to avoid having a security issue.If you recall correctly, we had a unix user with which people will access the repository. If we haven’t taken any extra protection, that means that anyone that has their ssh key on such a user’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file can log into the system.
4/Dec 2006
By Jesús Roncero
2 min. read
I’ve been trying to speed up an installation of trac over the last few days. The web interface took ages to display each of the directories or files within the subversion repository. But this one wasn’t too big. The only change to the subversion repository is that we started using a vendor branch imported into our main repository using svm So, after a few hours trying different solutions, and reading trac’s source code, I think I got where the bottleneck was.Well, it was http://www.sqlite.org/download.html which was causing the bottleneck.
30/Nov 2006
By Jesús Roncero
5 min. read
With the new version of subversion 1.4 you have a new tool called svnsync with which you can maintain mirror repositories quite easily. I’ve been working on one at work and would like to share with you my findings in case it interests anyone :-) Understanding the problem In order to have a mirror repository, it is important that commits only happen on the master and then they are synchronized to the mirror using the svnsync program.
9/Nov 2006
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
Just read this on the irc channel #netbsd on freenode. Found it funny :) <alphawaves> how can I become a unix guru? <alphawaves> is it only possible? <sqweek> do you really want to? <alphawaves> uhm y eah i try to several years * AccessExcess has quit (Remote closed the connection) <sqweek> do you still want to after i tell you that aside from general understanding it requires rote learning of countless quirks and inconsistencies between tools/distros/systems?
16/Aug 2006
By Jesús Roncero
4 min. read
Some of you may know that I run a website for displaying the temperature in Seville which has many visitors, mainly from Seville. I’ve run that website since 2001 and it is actually number one when you perform a google search on temperatura en sevilla. I find it quite useful. Eversince I have implemented various related services, basically playing around in my free time. Some of them are a RSS service and a jabber service (which you can subscribe by adding sevillatemp@jabber.org to your jabber application - even Gtalk -).
9/Mar 2006
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
So, Google is preparing another web application for all of us to enjoy. A web calendar to keep track of all the things you could put on your calendar, like iCal or simmilar. It looks like it’s going to be possible to sync them from your favourite calendar desktop application. There are some good screenshots of this Google Calendar here. The cuestion is, if google is owning your email, being the internet search master, and deploying a bunch of other interesting services (Google Talk and Google maps among others)… Isn’t having all this information about you too much?
9/Mar 2006
By Jesús Roncero
4 min. read
As part of another assignment for the Distributed System course at the University of Sussex we have been doing some research on Chord, a distributed hash lookup primitive, and, in the end, implement part of what is called a chord ring in java. The idea behind Chord is a research paper in which a distributed protocol for adding nodes to the system, insert data into it, retreive it and drop from the system is described.
5/Feb 2006
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
So, they did it Fon has just announced it would get 21.5 million dollars from Google, Skype, and Sequoia Capital. Something I already talked about a couple of days ago. Amazing. Just waiting for comments right now!.
29/Jan 2006
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
As part of my studies in my e-business course at the University of Sussex, I have been asked to write a report of a company that is somehow involved with e-business (e-commerce, use of technology to become more profitable or efficient, etc.). So, I have decided that I am going to do some research on FON, a company created by Martin Varsavsky who is famous for founding Jazztel and Ya.com, one of the biggest phone companies and ISP in Spain.
27/May 2005
By Jesús Roncero
1 min. read
So, finally, the new guadalinex is going to be made by emergya, the company I worked for last year. It”s going to be made in association with some other companies: Yaco, Interactors and, also, Canonical, the creators of the Ubuntu linux distribution, on which the new guadalinex is going to be based on. Good luck to them! ‘