Older blog entries for esteve (starting at number 9)

Romani ite domum!

I must confess, I hated Perl since I fixed a serious security bug[1] I found in the software that ran Barrapunto.com, a Spanish-speaking site that used to run a modified version of Slashcode, some years ago. alvaro did a great job at writing clean code, however Rob Malda et al are simply mad. Although alvaro missed to check user input.

Since then, I fell in love with Ruby. However Damian Conway is evil. fxn showed me Lingua::Romana::Perligata and changed my feelings towards Perl again. It's beautiful!

I saw myself remembering those boring Latin classes at high school. Learning how to decline "pueri" and trying to understand what the heck "dative" means.

You know, it's this kind of things that makes geeks be proud of themselves! "Why do we do this?" "Because we can, of course!"

fxn is a lucky person. If I'd seen L::R::P at the beginning of the course, he would have had to check all my exercises in Latin ;)

[1] That bug allowed me to post/delete stories and change permissions anywhere in Barrapunto.com, pretty serious, IMHO.

Music and stuff

Me First and the Gimme Gimmies, have released a new album. After listening to "Over the Rainbow (The Wizard of Oz)", "Don't cry for me Argentina (Evita)" and "My favourite things (from The sound of Music)" covered by these guys, you won't see things the same way. I hope this new album is at least as good as the last one (Blow in the wind).

Find a security hole, get a job?

Some days ago I found a security hole in one of the services that my university runs (UB - University of Barcelona).

I contacted them, and guess what: they listened to what I told 'em!

Well, the problem is solved and now I have a new job. The guy I approached was nice enough, to tell me there was a project to build a website for the catalan chapter of the World Year of Physics. It's just a two-week job, so it won't let me quit my other job (I'll talk about it another day) :( I hope to get a better one and kick it...

So right now I'm learning ASP.NET. I was given the choice to build it either in ASP or ASP.NET (I *do* hate ASP, it wasn't a framework but a nightmare), and since I never looked an ASP.NET line I decided to learn it :)

From what I'm seeing, ASP.NET is really cool, IMHO, Microsoft took it seriously (for the very first time, I guess) and made something that stacks up against J2EE. Java^WC# looks very familiar :>

I'm using Web-Matrix (not so bad), however I'll see if I manage to get mono-xsp running on my NetBSD box (BTW, NetBSD 2.0 will rock)

Good ol' Dilbert... Drop dead funny! ROFL

Computers

Yesterday, I talked to cerquide about my final project. He pointed me about some things he had in mind.

A special topic hooked me on: game theory and machine learning.

So, I couldn't wait for cerquide to send me some links and began to look for info. I asked the oracle and it gave me:

Machine Learning in Games and

Machine Learning, by Tom Mitchell

Today I'll be buried in UB library, looking for Mitchell's book and others about the same topic.

I'm tempted to call this WOPR and teach it to play tic-tac-toe against itself, I think I won't be able to resist ;)

Would You Like To Play A Game, Professor Falken?

Books

Finished reading Madrid en guerra, pheeww. Really exciting. Some days ago, I "borrowed" The Magic Circle from my couple's bookshelf, looks promising.

Computers

Found a security hole at a travel site while looking for a cheap ticket and I reported to them. I hope they are nice people and won't give me rude response, if they don't take it seriously I will simply forget it all.

Note to myself: ALWAYS doublecheck user input when writing code.

Life

Today was a very embarrassing day. fxn: I didn't meant to be rude and I apologize for looking arrogant. Also, my excuses to advogato community, I simply got excited for solving that puzzle.

Esteve, you didn't even started your classes and you have already been warned by your teacher... keep on this way...

fxn: sorry. It wasn't my intention to spoil :( I'm deleting my last entry.

This Gmail thingy is getting boring...

This is getting too repetitive:

10: surf to your favorite blog site

20: read (yet) another story of how someone got his über cool brand new gmail account

30: that person gets 5 new invitations some days later and plans to give them away

40: goto 10

Why are people raving mad about getting a GMail account? Some might say "gee, I'm a chosen one"... yeah, you were chosen to be a beta tester of a product so Google receives your feedback for free and you're even grateful about that!?

And yes, I have a GMail account, got one some weeks ago. Yes, it has a really neat interface that surpases almost every other webmail service and seems to work reasonably well (its spam filter looks nice).

Aside from that, Google is just another corporation that offers a product, nothing else. They simply want to earn money, it's their raison d'etre, nothing wrong about that. It's simply the fact that some people forget that and think they're nothing without a (INSERT PRODUCT HERE) what disturbs me.

Looking for a Ruby IDE

I'm developing (yet) another project in Ruby and got tired of using Vim

I know it is still a somewhat unknown language and younger than other ones, however there are two promising IDEs:

FreeRIDE:

based on FOX (quite fast, much faster than GTK+), thus multiplatform

written in Ruby

seems to be THE standard Ruby IDE

Ruby Development Tool:

based on Eclipse

Being based on Eclipse is its most valued feature, to my taste (and the only remarkable one :P), since you can combine it with other plugins, such as Eclipse SVN plugin (instead of CVS)

I recently tried CDT (C/C++ Development Tool) and found it quite nice. Eclipse is getting better and better, and it is looking as a very interesting platform for building an all-language framework

Initiation (as if this was some kind of secret order)

Pheeeew! My very first entry! Never liked blogs too much, in fact I don't know why I'm writing this, maybe this is a result of feeling very bored right now :P

Books

I'm reading Madrid en guerra, by J.M. Figueres. It's a nice book about the battle of Madrid during Spanish civil war. A very interesting point of view, since it collects several articles by journalists from both sides.

Computers

Today I've been hacking Dansguardian AV Plugin and made it pluggable, that is, now anti-virus engines are chosen at runtime (dlopen stuff from C++ et al) and allow much more flexibility. Don't know if they will accept my patch, but gave me the opportunity to remember my C++ knowledge, has been a long time since last time I wrote C++ code in a serious manner.