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Tweaking Opera for safer Web browsing

2012-03-04 por alvarezp

Sometimes I deeply hate the Opera browser, as with its RAM consumption behavior, but most of the times I just love it.

One of the reasons I do is because it allows me to pretty easily tweak my browsing safety.

There are several aspects to browsing safety. When working on your own computer the most important one after having an updated browser is JavaScript.

JavaScript is really useful, as it allows you to make websites interactive, but it can be easily misused to do all kinds of bad stuff, from personal tracking to attacking IRC networks, passing through personal information stealing, cross-site scripting, clickjacking, etc., even if you use Linux, Mac OS or any other non-Windows operating system. Although not strictly necessary, most of the new browser-related attack vectors require JavaScript to work or be useful.

stail-notify.bash

2011-11-29 por alvarezp

El siguiente script hace que cada línea nueva que aparezca en un archivo remoto, salte en mi pantalla como notificación. Con pocas modificaciones se puede hacer lo mismo para un archivo local. Se puede colocar el comando en el arranque de sesión, pero se va a bloquear para pedir la contraseña. Se recomienda tener acceso … Leer más

The «RAM is there to be used» fallacy

2011-07-14 por alvarezp

There seems to be a common misconception around some user forums. Maybe you recall this phrase:

RAM is there to be used.

This phrase is true within a particular context. It is used to let the operating system cache as much disk as possible into RAM, as RAM is significantly faster than hard disks.

However, within the context of a user-space application it is actually a fallacy. Some users (and even some developers) don’t know much about the inner workings of their computers, and use this phrase outside of its proper context. What is worse, sometimes they don’t even care much about RAM consumption. They don’t care about memory leaks, or think that if memory leaking occurs only once, it’s fine. Or they think garbage-collected frameworks or languages will take care of everything by magic. Without knowing, they end up using the aforementioned phrase as the equivalent of:

RAM is there to be wasted.

Superkb: then and now

2011-03-28 por alvarezp

This is how Superkb used to look back then in the 0.10 version. It used direct calls to the Xlib library which doesn’t support antialiasing. Back then, text was also rendered using Xlib. The icons were loaded and painted using Imlib2. Version 0.10 was released on September, 2006. I didn’t include an even older screenshot because I considered it to be «still too experimental».

Superkb 0.22 released

2011-03-18 por alvarezp

Superkb 0.22 has been released! This is a minor release. Do you want to know what’s new? Take a look at the 0.22 page on the Superkb Wiki.

Superkb is a shortcut-based launcher with on-screen graphical hints. It is written in C using Xlib, with the help of Cairo graphics, Pango, Imlib2, Xinerama, etc. and the source code is managed using Git.