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Technology and Internet

An heavy chat application

Following up the quote I pointed some time ago in an entry entitled “Bloat”, I will let here one good example. I know Slack it is a great application and it has some complex features, yet I don’t see any reason for any chat program to steal almost 900 Megabytes of my computer’s memory. Note: […]

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Technology and Internet

Newsletters for Python web developers

The amount of new information that is added each day to the web is overwhelming, trying to keep up daily with everything about a given topic can be a time consuming process. One good way I found to tackle this problem and to avoid wasting a good chunk of my day searching and filtering through […]

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Technology and Internet

Getting started with GPG

Last week I gave a small workshop during the lunch hour (the famous Whitesmith’s “Lunch’n Learn”) about openPGP. It only covered the most basic aspects so that non-technical people could be introduced to this tool, something that can be very useful when someone is sharing or working with sensitive information (either personal or work related). […]

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Technology and Internet

Integrating security tests into web applications

Today I published a blog post about how to easily run and automate security tests while developing your websites and web applications using Zed Attack Proxy. The example uses Ruby on Rails framework but it is independent of any stack. I’m planning to write a follow up article on the same theme, so any feedback on […]

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Technology and Internet

“Bloat”

Last week I’ve read a great post entitled “Web Design: The First 100 Years“, it is a long one but definitely worth reading. I will just leave here a quote (3 short paragraphs) because it puts into words something that already crossed my mind multiple times. “A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat. […]

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Technology and Internet

Disable Firefox’s pocket integration

Firefox has been my browser of choice for quite some time now. However recent decisions made by Mozilla are increasing my desire to change soon. They added “ads” on the “new tab page”, changed the UI to just look like chrome, decided to include DRM directly into the browser (more on that), etc. The last […]

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Random Bits

European Copyright Madness

After seeing many countries applying taxes to storage devices (as it will happen in Portugal from the 1st of July on) to compensate copyright holders (I’m still trying to understand how they will know which one, and not fill the pockets of some opportunist) the news today gave me one more prof that we are […]

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Technology and Internet

Plasma 5

Upon the release of the new version of Kubuntu, I decided to update my Ubuntu machine and move from the rock solid KDE4 to the new Plasma 5 desktop environment. In this post I do a small overview of my experience with it until now. I first started with the version 5.2 since it is […]

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Movies Portugal

Capitão Falcão

Last week was (finally) the premiere of the film “Capitão Falcão“, the first Portuguese super-hero. Since I was one of the “few” that saw the pilot, when this project was supposed to be some kind of TV show, I had high expectations for it (believe me, the pilot was good). The film is supposed to […]

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Random Bits

Folding@Home

Recently I’ve started “folding” again, to give a small contribution to science and research on important topics such as Alzeimer’s disease among others (as the above video shows). After 2 previous failed attempts (the old computer could not handle it), I’m currently on my longest streak and have just completed the first 100 work units. […]