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Using WSL and Vagrant+Hyper-V together
[Really dull post about virtualization in Windows] For the last couple of months, I’ve been (on and off) working with others in a project to migrate development environments so that we developers can use both virtual machines with Vagrant+Hyper-V AND WSL. -
Python 3.11 in Ubuntu Xenial 16.04
Deeplens, is it dead? I’ve got a Deeplens. It was a gift that I received when I left my previous company. I played with it for a while when I got it. -
Fix timeout in ClusterInfoUpdateJob
A really small post to document a fix to an issue. We were getting the following error in the logs of a docker container running elasticsearch that was being used by Graylog. -
Low-background steel and AI
A few months ago I heard for the first time the term low-background steel. It seems steel produced before the Second World War is more valuable for certain applications. The reason is steel produced after the first nuclear tests was contaminated with traces of nuclear material from those tests in the atmosphere. -
Higher loss with Tensorflow-metal, especially with ReLU
A few days ago, while working on my post about how y=x3 might be a good activation function, I discovered an issue with tensorflow-metal, the python package to use your GPU in Tensorflow on a Mac. -
x^3 as a non-linear unit
UPDATE: It turns out it was not crazy at all. These days I’m trying to learn Machine Learning(once again). I’m more interested in understanding the fundamentals than running the race of prompt engineering and “ChatGPT” (and what is called LLM). -
I'm no longer a Monzo client
A happy user I joined Monzo in 2016. Ex-Monzo user 4956. I even interviewed with Tom Blomfield, former CEO of Monzo in 2014 when he was still with Anne Boden, former CEO of Starling. -
Improving Windows build times in EKS
Improving Windows build times in EKS I cannot believe a year has passed since my last annotation (which was also EKS and Windows related). One of our most recent projects has been moving most of our build infrastructure to the cloud. -
Windows 2022 in EKS with packer
Windows 2022 in EKS Update: This article is no longer relevant. AWS already has Windows 2022 optimized images Update 2: Thank you John for your kind message If you are using Windows in EKS, you are probably eagerly awaiting for an Windows 2022 AMI. -
Debugging windows nodes in EKS
Debugging windows nodes in EKS After a couple of days dealing with windows nodes in Kubernetes AWS EKS, I thought I would provide a quick write-up of what I’ve seen. For two reasons -
Single instance with persistent EBS
Single instance with persistent EBS Sometimes you only want a single instance in AWS. But you know that everything fails, and you assume that your machine will fail too. You have your backups in place, but you have some data on disk that you would rather keep. -
NAT Gateway is expensive
NAT Gateway A quick intro in AWS networking In AWS, it is very common to create your own isolated network, in what is called a VPC (from virtual private cloud). The official (more like general perception) way of doing it, involves having multiple public and private subnets. -
Product, technology and magic
New trend My daughters call me a senior and boomer. I’m more a GenX’er, but I pick my battles. They are finishing their first year at uni, so they are in the perfect spot to all the new trends. -
Create an AWS account from the command line
This post is a basic copy of this AWS page on how to create an AWS account. But it took me a while to understand all the steps (because I cannot read), so I’m just writing so that the next time I can remember. -
EDITOR variable as a script
I’ve decided I’m going to start writing again, even small things. This week I was trying to create a Kubernetes cluster using Kops. In the end it didn’t work (mainly because it uses a Classic LoadBalancer and we don’t have public IPs in that VPC) -
Coronavirus in the UK
[This is mostly a translation of this other article in Spanish that I wrote for people in Spain. I’m not a politician, nor epidemiologist. If you live in the UK you may find better info elsewhere. -
Dock disappeared in MacOS Catalina
Yes. I feel your pain. That little bar at the bottom of your screen is no longer visible after you upgraded to macOS Catalina. Well, here I am, to help you before Apple does. -
Metadata abuse in AWS
Introduction A few weeks ago there was an attack on Capital One’s AWS infrastructure that lead to the compromise of personal information on around 100M people. AWS is putting great effort in avoiding S3 buckets configured for public access. -
Configuration in AWS is difficult
I’ve been doing some research on credentials compromise and abuse in AWS. In the process, it was obvious that the main mitigation would be (is) to minimise the permissions assigned to the EC2 instance profile, applying the “least privilege principle”. -
Demophilus wrote this…
These days I’m reading a fascinating book on Roman History called SPQR. And I’ve discovered Roman History is full of lessons for today’s world. As a small token, a line from Plautus, a Roman writer, that appeared in some of his books. -
Trivial error with Bitbucket API
UPDATE: A few days after publication, the documentation now includes some examples. Well done, Atlassian. Most people in the software industry know Jira. For better or for worse, it’s the most used product for managing tickets, requests, bugs… -
Daily lessons from London trains
For many people not living in the UK, it will come as a surprise that the railway system in London is quite expensive and provides a really bad service. Train service is not a theme park. -
King George III and the “rebellion”
I enjoy buying books. I read physical books too. I enjoy starting them. Honestly, finishing books is more difficult for me. But I’ve been trying to improve on that. I was very excited when I bought ‘1776’ by David McCullough. -
Launching a business: why?
I’ll start sharing a secret. I want to launch a business.Yes, I know many people in the tech industry are in the same situation. They’ve got some burning idea to launch or some dream to fulfil. -
Why I’m not considering your role
Dear recruiter, Thank you for contacting. At the moment I’m not looking for a job. Kind regards, Gonzalo This is a bit impersonal. I know. I’m sorry. The alternative is the above email for everyone. -
Google Duplex and robocalls
You’ve probably seen the video presentation about Google Duplex, the new assistant created by Google that can make phone calls that sound totally human interactions to the human on the other side (and to anyone listening). -
AWS CloudWatch alarms
One of the things less obvious for anyone trying to setup Cloudwatch alarms is the treatment of missing points. You create an alarm, to detect too many 5xx errors in your ELB. -
Bad recruitment example 323234
This is a story for my friend C. He didn’t know what was behind this old tweet TFW when after two months of silence the guy contacts you, promises to send an email immediately and fails to deliver. -
Jack Ma and laughing at ourselves
If you don’t know who is Jack Ma, he’s the founder and CEO of Alibaba, the marketplace and reportedly the richest person in Asia. I must confess he’s always amazing me. -
Virtual Reality in macOS (II)
TLDR; VR on macOS means beta, crashes, unusable WebVR, and no games. But you get to learn a lot. This post explains my experience. It seems this time I’m one of the few non-professionals that has bought an HTC Vive and a Mac after June’s keynote. -
Virtual Reality in macOS (I)
I have a two year old mid-level Android phone (Moto G 2015) not capable of using Google Cardboard. My tablet is an iPad Mini “1” with iOS9 because it can no longer be upgraded. -
Junior PHP developer
For the last month or so I’ve been running a small experiment in my Linkedin profile. I had been receiving contacts from recruiters offering roles, and from recruiters offering developers. -
Bubble!!
In the late 90s there was some craziness in the air. Everybody perceived Internet was going to transform our lives. But we didn’t know how. Companies tried to grow at all costs, setting up what looked like crazy ideas. -
Disruption in Financial Services
For many people, disruption in Financial Services are new banks that are building the platform from the ground up. Not being tied to legacy systems, make those banks easier to operate. -
Netflix against the user
I like Netflix. I really do. But there are a few things in their user interface that drive me crazy. You cannot remove a movie from continue watching. You’ve already watched a movie, don’t want to see the credits, but Netflix thinks you haven’t reached the end. -
When the CTO is not management
Tech startup founded by non-tech founders. Founders know little about technology, so they hire a CTO like they would hire an accountant. CTO is not part of management. Technology gets isolated. -
LetsEncrypt, Paypal and selling fear
There is a new report that associates Let’s Encrypt with phishing. So lots of people in Twitter started screaming because they read phishing and Paypal in the same sentence. Let’s Encrypt is a foundation that gives certificates away for free. -
Thoughts on the S3 outage
It’s in the news. Amazon S3, the popular object store crashed yesterday in one of their regions and affected multiple other sites, including Slack and GitHub. So here are some comments about it: -
“Serverless” in three minutes
Imagine you are interviewing some guy for an IT role and she says that he doesn’t get that of “going to the cloud because everybody knows there are no datacenters in the sky”. -
Switch off your servers
Werner’s keynote — https://youtu.be/65unhiJNaok?t=2692 A few months ago, I went to AWS Summit London 2016. One of the takeaways for me was that the cloud is not only the ability to scale up, but also down. -
A flow for containers
Why One of the issues in a container-based architecture is how painful it is going from code to deployed containers. Initially you can think it’s only two steps: build an deploy. -
Fintech: Dinosaurs are doomed
I’m sick and tired of reading articles describing how the banks are going to buy the new players in Fintech. Yes. It is going to happen. It has already happened. BBVA has already bought Simple and Atom. -
AWS ELB in Apache logs
So you are using AWS Elastic Load Balancer in front of a set of Apache httpd servers and you’ve discovered that your Apache logs are full of garbage. Here comes a set of tips to improve your logging: -
Consumers need to understand…
Today I was reading this article about excuses from banks for crap services. Then I got to this sentence: Consumers need to understand that the balance you see is not necessarily your actual available balance because there are so many moving partsNo. -
I hate my bank
Yesterday I was using my bank account, taking money out using a debit card. No way to see the operation since the feed only has old/settled operations. Since the available balance was below what I considered safe, I moved back the money using the same card. -
AWS Summit London 2016
Today I went to AWSSummit London. It’s a free event dedicated to Amazon Web Services. The event took place at Excel London, excellent venue except for the occasional noise due to planes taking off from the nearby London City Airport. -
Chess, trading and Bregret
When I was child, I used to play chess. From time to time you would find somebody that just had learned a special kind of opening and had decided to practice no matter what. -
Now I remember why I left “security”
Around the year 2000, I was doing some consulting work for the ISP branch of a Spanish bank. I was creating dynamic web pages (not many people in the IT industry will remember the word CGI) -
Snapchat: I’m getting old
In the last couple of months I’ve been able to see a growing trend with Snapchat. More and more people I follow in Twitter are testing Snapchat waters. Around a month ago, I installed the app, started registering, think twice… -
AlphaGo, AI, and Philosophy
I’m fascinated by AlphaGo. I truly am. A week ago I knew nothing about go. Now, I’ve read the rules but I haven’t played a single game. So I’m left to commentators. -
Self-healing software
7 am in the morning. Some notifications in the mailbox and on Slack. Big demo today and part of the system had gone down. And had gone back up too. With no human intervention. -
My take on #RIPTwitter
There is some outrage in Twitter because it has started to implement some changes to its product. There was a change from stars to likes. I think I prefer stars because it conveys a different meaning: when I read something sad, I cannot click in Like, but I would click in star. -
Deploying docker
“Thou shall not pass” “docker exec, lets install wireshark”This is my account of some experiences deploying docker (or should I say messing/faffing with docker). The path has not yet finished, but I wanted to share our experience in case it can help others. -
Storytelling
A few days ago I was listening a podcast about the importance of being able to tell a story, not a lists of jobs when asked about you. In a spirit of practising, I’m going to share two stories of my early life that affects who I am. -
Mobile apps
Platform stats for the UKWe’re recruiting a Product Manager for our team, and this week we’ve been doing some interviews. One of the recurrent topics in those interviews has been mobile apps. -
A different Scala is possible
Scala, for those who haven’t heard about it, is a programming language. It allows different ways of programming (functional programming but also object oriented programming) It can generate code that runs like, and interoperate seamlessly with, Java. -
The Netflix of books
Broken Kindle anyone?A couple of months ago, we were flying back to London after the summer. My 12 year old twin daughters, usually eager video watchers or passionate console players, were avid readers at that moment. -
Evolving or dying
A friend of mine sent to me a job offer. It caught both her and my attention because it shows a problem very common in Internet companies. The company in question is quite successful in its niche. -
Prepare for FireOS
I was considering about buying one or two Amazon Fire, when I discovered they’re unlikely to come before Christmas. Granted, the price is amazingly good. 50 quid was already good, so 35 is almost incredible. -
Gifts
Black Friday is next Friday, so that means Christmas is coming. All around will push us to buy things: food, clothing, gifts. A couple of weeks ago we started receiving some catalogs from several different NGOs. -
Love your users
A few years ago, I was leading a small team in charge of developers’ tools and framework. We discovered a bug, and the easiest way to solve it was to make a change in a different piece of functionality that wasn’t technically right, but was being heavily used. -
Agile is not Standups
Last Thursday I went to a Microservices’ users group meeting. Wonderful venue and reception. And very interesting talks. However, as in many of these events, the better part was meeting people. -
DevOps is so 2010. NoOps is the future
Cup cake or fairy cake. It doesn’t matter as long as we know what we meanTechnology moves so quickly that people who work in it are always at risk of being obsolete. -
Dear recruiter
Dear recruiter. Don’t take it personal, but I’m not interested in the role you’re trying to recruit. I receive lots of messages from recruiters. I get offered to participate in events so that companies can offer me new jobs. -
Banks and users
A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion in Twitter about how a Spanish Government body (AEAT, the equivalent of HRMC in the UK or IRS in the US) was offering different “services” in two different websites. -
React-native: some context and a few wrinkles
React native is a way to build iOS applications using Javascript. The idea is not radically new, since you are probably aware of PhoneGap/Cordova and others like that. I myself played with something similar long time ago. -
Think big
A few weeks ago, I’m not sure why, one of my daughters proposed to create a system to find cars inside garages at the shopping center. The car would locate itself using a GPS and then it would emit via radio. -
Developers - The neverending story
A year ago I vaguely new something about Scala. Today I’m not an expert, but I’m reasonably proficient in Scala, with some experience in Lift, Slick, and some incursions in akka. -
Technical tests
In March 2014 I was made redundant (business unit closing). I needed to get a job and I participated in loads of selection processes. Sometimes I received feedback, sometimes not. But I remember two specific processes because I received completely different feedback from “technical tests” in a matter of days -
New Spanish eGovernment law
I was a Spanish Civil Servant from 2006 to 2012 (technically I’m still a Spanish Civil Servant on leave). I’ve worked for different branches of the Spanish Government from September 2000 to November 2012. -
What recruiters taught me about looking for a job
There are good recruiters. And there are bad recruiters. The good ones help you to find a job. The bad ones teach you how to look for a job. If you are looking for a job, be sure to do just the opposite of what the bad ones do. -
Developers are from Mars, users from Venus
From 2008 to 2012, I was the project manager of a project with very special users. The kind of project was in the field of digital signature for the Spanish Government. -
Future
More than six years ago I started this blog. I wanted to practice my English so that I would improve it. Four years later I came to London and sort of abandoned it, thinking that working in an English speaking environment would be enough to practice. -
Happy Christmas
Happy Christmas and a wonderful 2015 to all of my readers. -
I'm a geek
A few weeks ago, I bid and won a PowerEdge 2650 server for three quids (plus another 6 of renting a car and collecting it). It´s an old piece of hardware (32 bits double Xeon, 4gb of RAM), bulky as hell (or so does my back says) and noisy as a diesel generator. -
Agile is about managing risk
It is not easy to explain what is agile or the need of agile practices in software development. Agile is not only about releasing early a valuable product even if it is the highest priority. -
Jetty
Lately I’ve had three different issues with Jetty. Two of them were those kind of issues that are not directly related to the problem. The third proved to be a bit more tricky. -
Scala: First impressions
A couple of months ago I started working for a different company. I’m quite happy there for many reasons. But one of them is having the opportunity to learn a new language: Scala. -
Android 4.4.3: Sony Xperia U
A few months ago, I upgraded the firmware for my Sony Xperia U. It turns out that the place I used to download the firmware updates from, wasn’t providing new updates, so sometime ago, I migrated to a new source of firmware updates. -
Maximizing Macbook Pro's battery
I have an old Dell Vostro 1720 and an Acer Aspire One AO110. Both are usable (and used), but have no battery. So when I got my shiny brand new Mac, I decided I had to look after the battery. -
Good examples
I was made redundant at the end of March. It was a very stressful process but it ended up very well, as I’ve been in my new job for almost a month and I’m very happy. -
PDOException
Small and uninteresting post. But I’ve been dealing with an issue for hours and maybe somebody can benefit from this in the future. While trying to index using Sphinx, I was getting the following error -
Acquisitions
Today I wanted to talk about two acquisitions. On one side, Facebook and Whatsapp. $19 billion. There are many different opinions. Craziness. Logic. IMO the money paid is crazy, but the deal has a lot of logic for Facebook. -
Optimizing
A few days ago I went to a meeting and we were discussing (among lots of different topics) various optimizing mechanisms for a web application. After the meeting had ended, I came to the conclusion that, implicit in all the conversation, I was not fully aware of the most obvious step previous to any optimization: -
Tipping point
I’m happy. I was developing a feature that allows to export from my showcase project Whendoigo to TripIt. I was using a gem from TripIt. A gem is kind of a library for Ruby (sort of jar for Java). -
I was sure it was my fault...
… but it wasn’t. In the last week or so, I’ve been hitting against a wall because of two different bugs. I was sure that both bugs were my fault. It took me ages (of a scarce spare time) trying different things, searching for similar problems, until in both cases I finally came to an issue in different tools. -
Community managers: The day after
Yesterday I followed on Twitter a case where the community manager for a -well known and with very good reputation- Spanish moving company literally screwed up their reputation. He/she threatened to sue a customer that was expressing a complaint on Twitter, because the client had used the hash tag “vergonzoso” (shameful). -
Multithreading: Warning lights
A few days ago I went to an interview which included a pair programming session. The session was a great experience, but the result wasn’t quite as good as it should have been, because of some difficulties understanding on what was being asked. -
It's great when your idea is a good one. But...
Since I came to London, more than a year ago, I’ve been travelling a lot back to Spain. I used to schedule trips in advance, and once I discovered I had two different reserves for the same trip (fortunately I was able to change one of them). -
Firmware upgrade for Xperia U in Linux (II)
[Long post] Edited (08th-Jun-2014): Updated the firmware download site. In my previous post I explained that one of the things that made the installing process more difficult was the lack of a general picture of the process. -
Firmware upgrade for Xperia U in Linux (I)
About a year ago I received some wonderful presents from a group of friends :D. One of them was an Xperia U. Sony Xperia U (ST25i) has a stock Android 2. -
Companies, developers and recruitment
A few months ago I reported my business unit was offered for sale. Not much to report about it (I know very little and I can write even less) Obviously, most of us in the business unit, decided to brush up our Linkedin pages and get into the job market, just in case. -
One year
A year ago I was in a plane flying into London. I was in whirl, nearly panicking. My life about to change. I’m somebody who loves being in his comfort zone. -
Changes
A few days ago my company sent out this press release. It seems to be rather unimportant, but for me it means changes. I work for that specific business unit. I cannot write too much. -
IKEA vs Greenwich
This post started as a way of comparing different ways of managing customer relationships. It ended up as rant, but I’m not going to delete it. But I will write another post in the future with some suggestions. -
Escrache
Imagine you´re a Member of Parliament. And you have decided you are not going to give your support to something. And then you get a group of people protesting against you. -
Spanish budget deficit, 3Q2012
From time to time I visit the page where the internal comptroller in Spain posts its budget deficit figures. Last week there was a link to the calendar of future publications. -
Spanish Budget Deficit. What if ...?
EDIT: I’ve done again the calculations and are more unbelievable even. I won’t update this post but IMO it is quite reasonable to hit the target. From time I tend to write about the Spanish budget deficit. -
The most popular video in Spain this Christmas
Below you can see the ad that in my opinion will end up being be the most popular video in Spain this Christmas It depicts Fofito (a clown very well known in Spain) with other well known comedians, actors and even journalists, sending parcels to “important people”: from Angela Merkel and IMF to Moody’s and Standard&Poor’s. -
Driving in the UK
Today I rented a car for a few hours. I used to drive in Spain, but I hadn’t driven since I came to London. I wanted to practice in not too stressful conditions before my family comes to visit me. -
The future of this blog
When I started this blog, I had a goal. I needed to practice my English, because I wanted to go abroad. Months (or even years) later, more reasons appeared. First, I discovered that writing about solutions to job related problems could give people a way to solve their own problems more easily. -
Relocating to London
In two weeks I will be working in London. I know I was expecting to continue my last post about Spring persistence. I have lots of things to write about the incredible experience of finding a job abroad and relocating. -
Crash course on Spring MVC, transactions and persistence (I)
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to do an assignment for a selection process. The task was trivial for expected 2-3 hours, and mentioned that the final project would end as a Web Application based on Spring and Hibernate. -
OptionalDataException while reading JMS message
We’ve been dealing with another bug in JMS code. The symptom was blocked queues and the following exception: javax.jms.JMSException: getObject [...] Caused by: java.io.OptionalDataException at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1325) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(ObjectInputStream.java:348) at java.util.HashMap.readObject(HashMap.java:1066) In trying to reproduce the issue people in the team introduced a non-serializable object, but they got an exception sending the message (Caused by: javax. -
June deficit was 8.54%
From time to time I write about politics in Spain in general and in particular Spanish deficit. Sometimes I try to do some simple estimations and comments. More recently there has been some comments in Spain regarding the publication of regions’ budget deficit up to second quarter. -
Weird IE9 bug
This last two weeks I have dealt with a weird bug in IE9. The problem appeared in a legacy web application. The issue reported by the user was a combo that didn’t drop down. -
Techzing wives
I tend to listen Techzing podcast. It’s a podcast about very different topics, recorded by two geeks, (or developers, and entrepeneurs). I don’t remember when I started listening them. I do remember I started because I wanted to practice English and it was great (Justin is an Englishman and Jason is American). -
My first Chrome extension(II)
In last post I wrote why. In this post I want to explain how I wrote my first chrome extension. First. The Chrome Extensions developer’s documentation is quite good. Second. A chrome extension is a zip of a folder with an crx extension instead. -
My first Chrome extension(I)
This afternoon I was preparing an interview I expect to have next week, and came to an interesting page with information about job selection process and companies inside information. However, after surfing a bit, the inevitable, “become a registered member” started to bug me. -
The best eclipse tip ever
How to disable auto close for the XML comments. Preferences->XML Files->Editor->Typing. -
Calisthenics
I didn’t know about object calisthenics. They are a set of rules to help develop better: One level of indentation per method< Don’t use the ELSE keyword Wrap all primitives and Strings First class collections One dot per line Don’t abbreviate Keep all entities small No classes with more than two instance variables No getters/setters/properties Some of them are a must, with some others I have some doubts. -
No more applets
For more than three years I’ve been managing certificate-based digital signature applications. One of the main source of pain always was and is generating the signature on the user browser. As it needs access to the user’s keystore, the browser alone didn’t have access to it, and was needed some kind of component (either ActiveX, usually a Java applet). -
Little robot (IV): Ruby version
Besides the console faking and the dependency inversion issue, my code in Ruby was pretty rough. You can see here the version I sent. One obvious problem is the use of string instead of symbols. -
Little robot (III): Dependency inversion
As I wrote some posts ago, I received an assignment, and I decided to do both in Java and in Ruby. When doing in Ruby I wanted to make sure I was able to test the UI, and not only the engine. -
Rails in Ubuntu
I’m planning to make a newbie post about rvm, bundler and the rest. But just in case you’re starting with ubuntu, here comes a piece of advice. There is some controversy about editor to use for ruby. -
Faking the console in Ruby
A few days ago, I was preparing an assignment for a job process both in Java and in Ruby. While doing in Java, I decided to test the engine. But in Ruby I wanted to test the whole application, including the communication via standard input/output on the console. -
Little robot (II): Java version
As I wrote in a previous post, I was asked to design a software managing a robot inside a board of 5x5 cells. The typical commands were PLACE X,Y,F -> Places the robot in the x,y position facing F MOVE -> Move the robot 1 cell in the facing direction LEFT -> Changes the facing counter-clockwise RIGHT -> Changes the facing clockwise REPORT -> Shows the current position and facing and the main requirement was that the robot didn’t fall outside the board. -
Little robot (I)
While applying to a position a few days ago, I received an assignment trying to test my coding style. IMO, assignments are quite a good way to get a peek on the coding style of someone. -
Savon.rb and sequences
As I wrote in my last post, I’ve recently learned it is important to be able to show what you’ve been doing. So I’m trying to increase the posts on a number of small problems I find in my daily job, and in my hobby projects. -
A great experience applying to a position (II)
In my previous post I explained a great experience applying for a position. In this post I wanted to share what lessons I’ve learnt from that experience. Selection: Be very selective about what you apply for. -
A great experience applying to a position (I)
I wrote in my last post about lessons I’ve got from bad experiences looking for a job. In this post I’m going to tell you about a good experience I had last week, how much I learnt from it, and the lessons I got from it. -
Bad experiences
For some time I’ve been applying to different positions. I have two daughters and I want for them (and for me) to live in a different culture and language. After a few experiences, I’m tempted to say something about bad experiences: -
Xerces, Xalan and Saxon, more recipes
In a previous post I proposed some tips for trying to manage and control the hell of XML and XPATH parsers. However, as one reader pointed (EDIT: This was in my original blog), those tips sometimes are not enough. -
Why LinkedIn breach is so important?
It’s widely spread that there has been a security breach in LinkedIn. At least there is a file with passwords in that social network. Even LinkedIn acknowledges it and suggests it will try to alert users whose passwords have been compromised. -
Google, where are you going?
I’ve been Google fanboy for a long time. I remember the invitation for Gmail I received around mid-2004. Gmail was a revolution. From 50MB mail space at the time, they offered 1000MB (1GB). -
Javascript all the way
These days I’m playing with NodeJS. And today I was thinking about the fundamental change in Javascript. A few years ago it was a darn language for the web. Now someone could query a database using Javascript (CouchDB), create the server portion of a web application using Javascipt(NodeJS), create the browser portion of a web application using pure and fast Javascript, and even create a pure mobile interface using Javascipt (Appcelerator Titanium). -
Estimating Spanish budget deficit
This is one of my political/economical post (nothing related with computers) I write from time to time. Past February, Spain published its estimation of whole year budget deficit. Many well respected analysts suggested or explicitly wrote that maybe new Government was increasing 2011 deficit so that it could blame previous Government, and also in order to make it bigger so that it was easier to make it smaller. -
The synchronized silver bullet
I lead a team that is transitioning a 9-year-old internal framework from a somewhat Struts based to Spring IoC and Spring MVC based. However in the meantime we keep hunting old bugs, which needs to dive in the code. -
Xerces and Xalan: Recipes for the win
OK. I have explained why Xerces and Xalan are a source of problems, and I have explained why you shouldn’t use System.setProperty to resolve them. In this post I wan’t to give a few recipes to resolve Xerces and Xalan problems. -
Things about Xerces, Xalan and Saxon I didn't know (III)
In my previous entry, I tried to explain why Xerces and Xalan are so complicated. In this entry I want to focus in System.setProperty. Because, as I said that is the usual solution you are going to find when you need a specific parser for whatever reason. -
Things about Xerces, Xalan and Saxon I didn't know (II)
I said in the previous post that Xalan and Xerces sometimes look like magic. So what are they and why are so complicated?. Xerces is a Java library that helps parsing, validating and managing XML documents. -
Things about Xerces, Xalan and Saxon I didn't know (I)
These days I’m getting very proud of myself. I’m acting less as a project manager and more as a true Scrum Manager. I go to the scrum, listen, and a great deal of my work that day is trying to solve problems for the team. -
Notes to a newbie spring-mvc developer
Activate log4j. Without it you’re lost Look through the log to see if you’re getting the RequestMapping through Spring. If you are not despite correct annotations, see this post. In particular if you’ve got Spring Security installed, for Goodness sake, don’t forget these lines: -
Budget deficit
Disclaimer: I’m talking about public data. I don’t have any unpublished data. In Spain there is some buzz recently about tax increases approved on December 30th. The government had changed and the new one said it was necessary to raise taxes because data said budget deficit where 8% GDP. -
When companies just don't get it
I have a two years old Symbian cell phone and a second generation iTouch. I guess that’s enough to explain that until very recently I didn’t pay any attention at all to mobiles apps ads. -
My first mobile application
I’m learning some technologies. I’m tempted to write new, but they’re not new. I’m learning Ruby on Rails and mobile development. I still have to keep learning Java, and Grails, but I have a project in mind and I wanted to separate clearly from my day to day job, for lots of reasons. -
Thoughts about a death
Sometimes you start to write because you need to write but you don’t know what you want to express. This is one of those times. A couple of days ago, a pregnant woman was killed, and another woman was wounded by a man in a church in Madrid and afterwards the man committed suicide. -
The rain in Spain(II): Government
Let’s start with politics. I guess it’s less known abroad, but it’s probably more important than the economic situation. First the government. Forget about the past. Let’s start by the end. -
The rain in Spain(I)
I love this video: A few days ago I received a message from one of my tweeps about the weather in Europe and in particular in Spain. This summer, the weather has been a bit strange so far. -
State of Emergency: very serious
It’s in the news. Spanish Government has declared “State of Emergency”. This declaration gives special powers to the government like the ability to limit the circulation of people, commandeer things or even enter in private properties (but not homes). -
Civil service: Why me?
A few days ago I promised to explain why I chose to become a civil servant, and why I keep being one. I was going to write about the challenge of a competitive examination, how challenges motivates me, and how my job keeps being interesting even though sometimes is a bit tough. -
Flying, flying, flying
I’ve been to Rome this weekend. I used to fly a little more before my children’s bbirth, but since then I haven’t flyed for quite a few years. Train and car a lot. -
Civil service: How to improve
A few days ago I promised to explain some of my ideas to improve the civil service in Spain. Of course there is no silver bullet. Instead, as you can see the links, all the bricks are in place: -
Corruption
Wow. It seems Wikileaks is going to publish some documents showing implication of some world leaders in corruption practices. I don’t have any other information but the Reuters piece of news. -
Spring course
I’m attending this week to a Spring Framework course. It’s a very small class: the teacher, my boss and me. I don’t consider myself slow, and neither is my boss. No, he doesn’t read this blog. -
Copyright protection
You know something is broken with copyright when: You buy a “Barbie and three Musqueteers” DVD and you can’t play in your DVD player because it’s piracy protected. But… You download the same film from a P2P network, save to a CD and you can play it everywhere. -
Lots of old friends
Yes. I know I was supposed to write about Civil service in Spain. But I’ve promised myself to write a blog post Monday through Thursday. Nobody reads this, my head is full of memories, and I’m not able to write about the planned topic. -
Civil service in Spain: Productivity
I wrote yesterday about why job security is a good mechanism to protect civil service from corruption. But I also explained that it’s a mechanism that makes difficult to punish slackers. -
Civil service in Spain: Job security
I’m a civil servant. Civil servants in Spain can’t be fired. Well, in fact they can be fired, but only because of extremely serious infringements, and after a complicated procedure. -
Scrum for myself
Yesterday I explained I have attended recently a couple of courses. One of them was about Scrum. The course was very interesting, although, as I explained in the evaluation, there were times when I wished there were only one teacher instead of three. -
The passionate programmer
The last few weeks have been really intense with respect to my career. I’ve attended two courses, given some presentations, launched a few projects at work, and read some books. Sometimes I’ve been under a lot of self-imposed pressure, but overall I’ve learned a lot of things. -
Starting over
6 months since last post. These have been amazing ones. Lots of work to do. Lots of challenges. We left Mantis, now working with Redmine. Learning Ruby on Rails. And learning Grails for fun and for the job. -
Some thoughts about Tecnimap 2010
I’ve been a couple of days in Zaragoza (Spain), participating in Tecnimap 2010 last week. Tecnimap is a conference on IT for the Public Administration in Spain. I had presented a paper about one of the applications I manage: DocelWeb. -
More Mantis problems
I have been fighting with PHP, Mantis and SOAP since my last post. Now I think I have discovered a bug when uploading via Mantis SOAP a binary file. It’s great being able to debug a PHP application. -
Mantis on SQL Server
[Technical post] I’ve been busy last couple of days trying to make Mantis work with a Microsoft SQL Server database on a Windows Server 2003. Many people would ask why to use MSSQL instead of Mysql, a much better DBMS, not mention the OS election. -
God help us
It turns out that I was wrong when I wrote last week’s post. Well, maybe I came to a rather good end result but for the wrong reasons: Income data from May 2009 (and probably June) was tricky because taxes returns were accelerated so that people could vote with their money back in the pocket. -
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Disclaimer. I’m not an economist or a statician, and I don’t have any governmental internal information. I’m only a spaniard. I’ve just read a piece of news about Moody’s considering Spanish outlook stable. -
New Year's resolutions ... in August
I’ve been on holidays, and I’ve had some spare time to stop and think. Last couple of months have been special. Some events have affected profoundly. One of those events has been the death of a collegue. -
Netbook Operating Systems
A few months ago I got a new Acer Aspire One A110. It’s an Atom N270 with 512 MB RAM and 8GB SSD hard disk and 8.9’’ screen. It came with a personalized version of a Linux distribution called Linpus Lite based in Fedora 8. -
What can I do for my country
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you— ask what you can do for your country. A couple of weeks ago Jose Manuel Campa was nominated new Secretary of Economy in Spain. -
Three months later
Yes. It’s been three months since I wrote my previous post. When I started to write this blog I knew it could end like other blogs I have started. But I didn’t think I was going to stop writing so fast. -
Yahoo: A declining star (II)
I wrote on the previous post that for a particular combination of search terms, Yahoo seemed to offer better results than Google. I read long time ago that in fact search was turning to be a commodity. -
Yahoo: A declining star(I)
I like products coming from Google, and I’m usually less critic with Google’s errors than with others’. I use Google search, Gmail, Blogger… I even have a ridiculous financial position on Google (8 shares). -
Gmail and the future
As I said on my last post, I think that integration of Video and voice chat could be part of a greater strategy. What would be that strategy? In my opinion it should have two parts. -
'The day Skype died' revisited
Sometimes you realize you’ve written a weak post too late. It was my case with yesterday’s annotation. I thought nobody would even read it. But it seems that, because of a trackback at Gmail Blog, I was wrong. -
The day Skype died
I read it first on Google Operating System, but I haven’t seen too much buzz on the blogs I follow. For me today is the day Skype has definitively died. -
MobuzzTV
I heard about MobuzzTV for the first time long time ago. I don’t watch news on TV, (I prefer to read than watch), so much less watch on the Internet. I didn’t pay much attention then. -
Jobs
Sometimes I read a couple of posts not directly related, and I start to think about a topic I didn’t expected. This time, it all started with a post of Enrique Dans. -
What is this?
Starting a blog it’s a difficult task. It’s not nearly as difficult as keeping updating it, of course. I have started a couple of blogs. Both are abandoned. Not a good track.