Twittear Until some weeks ago, I used to have my Android device unlocked, just swipe to unlock, this basically because I'm the only one using my device, well, my daughter uses it from time to time to play, and sometimes Cristina use it to review the pictures I've took, nothing to hide, so no reason to lock.

Until I realize that in the case of loosing my phone the one that finds it will be able to see my pictures, my emails, enter to the sites I use (Thank you Google for syncing my passwords across devices ;-)), then I encrypted my device.

This means that I'm always asked for a PIN at the lockscreen, I'm not that happy with that but I need to get used to that. The problem comes when you want to flash the device with a custom rom.

It is a problem because most of the rom managers (recovery) require to mount the "/sdcard" mount point to get the zip file or image to flash. Since the device is crypted there is no way to decrypt it and then can't flash the thing.

Luckily I have the recovery (ClockWorkMod) installed and it let me flash the device by using the "sideload", with this, all I need to do is plug the device to the computer and using the android sdk push the zip to the device using :

And the recovery will get the update and install, since the OS partition is not encrypted you can change the whole OS or just part of them, like the kernel.

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Facebook, the same as twitter or Google depends on us o get the data they use to be so attractive, on that part I'm okay, but Facebook has cross the line with Home, the problem, it is a real issue on privacy, I don't know if Mr. Zuckerberg didn't really think about this or just the dollars on the ROI make him forget about it.

I live in a country where people don't usually respect the property of each other, I mean, if you see a phone alone in a tablet is quite possible somebody is going to take it. I've seen stories like that with USB Memories, why stop with cellphones?.

The problem is that if you are using Facebook Home in the very first moment you turn on your phone your timeline is available at the lockscreen, no need to unlock the phone to read posts, see pictures even comment on other people. That's a potential issue I don't want to deal with.

There are many other issues related to the GPS and knowing where your home is, but that is something that we have to deal with (and we can disable the location services for that), but letting people know what your friends do and comment on their posts without even unlock the phone is something... well, somebody have to be fired.

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Quick post, this is an ancient method to speed up ssh connections, I'm just leaving it here.

When we use SSH mostly all the times we create a new connection, even if we are connecting with the same host at the same port with the same user. I've been using SSH for a long time and to me this was fine, at the end the connection is "pretty" fast and the delay time creating the connection is just ok.

The problem is when you are editing a file that is in the server, whenever I can I use ssh and with that use vim to edit remote files using "scp", with this I can test the file in the remote server without worrying to sync the file (rsync/scp) manually. At the end I just write back the file in my hard drive if needed.

This is kind of… annoying, vim+scp creates a new connection every time you want to save the file, and it mean a lot of time when editing a file, more if you are like me, saving the freaking file every time I stop writing. So, how can I improve that?.

Well, it turns out its pretty simple. ssh can create a socket (in a predefined place) when connected to a server, with this socket any other ssh instance for the same server+user+port can use this socket and avoid the connection delay. To enable this just add this lines in your ssh config:

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Many of you may know that I'm a big fan of the PlayStation 3. I was not a fan of the Play Station 2 (was fan of the Nintendo GameCube) neither of the PlayStation or PS One (I still have my Nintendo 64 working ;-)); but I'm fan of the PlayStation3 and I think I will be a fan of the PlayStation 4.

Wii was a tremendous and revolutionary game, the controls had to be copied by Sony and Microsoft had to do something new with Kinect just because Nintendo really invented a new way to play, but at the end Sony and Microsoft did a better job keeping the users.

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I have to tell you, I'm in love with django, I've been playing around with django by now for several years, let me say it again, playing, I had not take it so serious until now.

So, why I'm working with django now?, well, I have a couple of personal projects now that require me to work on a web page, I was a PHP user for this before, but since I've been doing python stuff for and I don't really think PHP fits with me anymore django was the obvious way to do stuff in less time.

But what's great about django?. Well, first, and you know this, it is written and work with python, but there are other great things like the database abstraction and the way you create models, the way you can create class based views (instead of using just functions) that simplify a lot the work with forms, the way you can create modules and distribute them, I mean, you can create a site as modular as you wish, and you can write your program (or modules) in an event based way, yes, django supports events!, there are a lot of things that makes django the best.

Of course, there are drawbacks, the first and the same with any framework, you have to rely on the framework developers, you may hardly improve speed unless you use something else, I think this is not a weak in django. Maybe the most important issue with django is that it may not be supported on all web hosting services, not like PHP.

Back with the good things, I like a lot the manage.py script, which let you create custom commands, this helps you to work with the models without having to access via web, let's say, do a periodic check or stuff in cron. Also, very useful to create an updater ;-).

So, I think that just to say that I love django, this is enough, I'll be writing more on this topic as I'm learning. If you like it please comment and if you have doubts also let me know I'll try to figure out and together we can from them.

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Definitively the Open Source Software.

Computers have changed a lot in the last decade, but one of the things changed the mosts is the way the software is created and distributed. In the early days of 2000 all the software you needed had to be installed in your computer, now you can access to it using a web browser or the so called web app.

Also, a decade ago, most of the software in a average user was proprietary software, in the form of paid software, shareware software or freeware software, I used to get most of the software, new and updates, by buying PC Magazine.

Of course, by then Linux and the whole Free Software movement was already here, but was not that popular. Internet made it really popular, again, internet was already there, but the internet speed that we have now and the easy access to it was not.

This draw a really bold line between the proprietary software and the Free Software, later the Open Source initiative started to vanish that line. I remember when the only proprietary software installed in my computer was the nVidia Linux Driver and possibly StarOffice, no more. This of course, the lack of proprietary software in the Linux environment didn't made it popular on the average user, why would they look at Linux if they couldn't use Photoshop?, where is WinRAR?, what if I want to edit a MS Office document?.

There was Mac then, I think the success of the Mac OS, aside from being a UNIX derivative OS which inherits a lot of good things from Unix, is the fact that it did ship with proprietary software and wasn't expecting the users to reject closed source apps. For many years this was the motto on the Linux community.

Today, there is a Linux distribution that is doing this, is Ubuntu, they started to sell apps in their software center some time ago and now they are attracting some other proprietary software vendors like Valve with its super famous Steam and even the Microsoft Office is rumoured to be in the plan to be in Linux. So, the mix between OpenSource Software and proprietary software is a fact and result in Free Software and its values to be forgotten.

I mean, average users don't care if the software is privative, if it have a permissive licence or if it is totally free and they don't realise what their rights are, sad, but true. So the winner is Open Source

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WTF!. Okay, Javascript is a popular programming language because of the boom of the web page development with frameworks like jQuery and others. It is okay to give a web page a more dynamic look, but, to be honest, I don't thing Javascript is the best programming language for a desktop.

The main reason is that Javascript is not that standard, I mean there are several implementations that may be very different not only because one is faster than the other but methods being available. Also, the programming language is ugly, it lacks of several advanced stuff you would like to have in a modern language, it does handle objects, it does handle arrays, integers, but they are at the end a very very basic implementation of the real ones. How well does it works when parsing text?, are there some implementations to do crypto stuff? I don't think so, you would end with C or some other better language.

Of course, the GNOME guys made it clear, use Javascript for front end apps, but use C to create libraries. To me this will make GNOME a lot slower, capable to run on newer computers but forget to use it in older computers. Actually by now you can't use GNOME in computers where the video card can't support compositing, the fewer, but there are still some.

I don't understand this, GNOME is a big project with a bunch of hackers around it, the programming language has (IMHO) never been the problem, the freaking problem is the radical changes (GNOME2 vs GNOME3) and the unavailability of GTK+ in other platforms.

Yes, GTK+ plays a very important role here. GTK+2 was available on Windows, so, you can create apps that carefully written could run on Windows and some Unixes (Linux, BSD), they may also run on Mac (using the X server) but no integration at all.

By now GTK+3 have no implementation on Windows or Mac which makes very very difficult to write a multiplatform applications, an area where KDE with QT has taken advantage.

So, I think GNOME3 shouldn't default to any programming language to write applications, C is fine and instead of creating the tools to write apps using javascript just help the GTK+ guys to create a really multiplatform GUI toolkit, that would benefit the application environment, not only GNOME.

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I don't know if you notice it, but I'm no longer in instagram, a picture service that I liked a lot but I realise that at the end it was not for me, I don't know if you really care, but this is why I'm no longer using instagram.

So, as I've said before, I liked instagram a lot, it was funny to create those vintage squared pictures, they look pretty if you see them in the phone or even in a small laptop/pc screen. They are just "fine".

The problem with instagram, aside the legal situation with its EULA is the picture quality is just "fine", well, to be honest is not a decent quality. The pictures are resized to be uploaded quickly to instagram servers so people can enjoy them, also the servers suffer a lot less by having to serve really light pictures. I'm not sure if they do, but I think they remove the Exif information of the pictures, which means, no location, no exposure, camera info and other things that may matter to somebody that think is a photographer.

Well, there is also a poorly developed website. I mean, there is the app, but what if you are not in your phone, you are at your desktop and somebody share to you a link to a instagram page, well, you see it in the browser, but you weren't able to see any other picture about that user, so, at the end you have to open the freaking app in your mobile device to see somebody else pictures.

You can't take it seriously to store your pictures, and this is the most important, you'll upload your pictures in a small crapy resolution, no Exif info, and there was no way for other to easily view your pictures.

On the other side, I've been a Flickr user since.. let me see, since 2005, it creates several versions of the pictures I've taken one with a different resolution, there is an API that I can use to extend the usage, it connects with Twitter and Facebook the most important social networks by now, talking about twitter, it uses the twitter pages to show your picture in twitter timeline, I mean, it is not just a link, it shows your picture and counts in your picture views. Ha, by the way, you can upload pictures using the flickr app (if mobile), the web page if in desktop or any other uploader, a picture editing app like iPhoto/Aperture, or just by email.

Also, I have a PRO account since 2006 which let me have a ton of sets, upload any amount of pictures and small videos (which I don't do) and let me set the the copyright of my pictures, I mean, my pictures are not public domain and does not belong to flickr, the pictures belong to me

So, having all that stuff in flickr, Why the fuck should I be wasting my time using instagram?

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Sofia loves to burn them, one of the few inoffensive gunpowder based toys that kids can use without issues, of course always under supervision.

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This has been my key holder for a long time.