20090528 Seven: not Apple’s lucky number

My laptop is running Mac OS X 10.5.7 –i.e., the seventh revision of their overhyped operating system– and Apple still doesn’t know how to deal with network issues properly. If it’s not the dreaded “Your wireless network has been compromised” error, it will be this new and absurd behaviour: you close your laptop’s lid, leave [...]

20081216 Why aren’t we all using SFTP, HTTPS, SSH et al?

Were you to decide, what would you choose? FTP or SFTP? Plain e-mail or signed encrypted mail? e-mail over an unsecured connection or using TLS encryption? BitTorrent unencrypted or encrypted connections? use your default e-mule port number or change it? http or https? telnet or SSH? automatic log-in or having to enter your user name [...]

20080221 Data portability

It’s some months since I began to meditate about the concept of data portability. You might have read already my concerns about proprietary file formats, but the data portability stuff I am referring to is slightly different; it’s not about an specific proprietary program that you use for writing the greatest bestseller ever, but rather [...]

20080129 You and me in Babel

Imagine an English-speaking website, where everything is written in English. The author might or not speak another language, as well as the visitors, but all of them normally write in English when replying in that website, enabling them to communicate. Then there comes the odd visitor which decides to write in his/her own language — [...]

20070717 The perversion of popularity ranks

A couple of years ago, when digg was launched and wasn’t anywhere as popular as now, it was quite interesting to have a look there. It was more or less like an assortment of random stuff, quite oriented towards technical matters, so was an easy way of reading different things without having to jump from [...]