medecau

A reason to read

pr — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I'm not smart.

Yet, I'm not dumb either. And sometimes I say, write, and think pretty cool shit.

This is important.

Once in a while I go back to reading things I have written months or even years before and surprise myself. Sometimes it's the level of eloquence in which …

Notes on Boilerplate Detection using Shallow Text Features

pr — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Humans are good at distinguishing content from navigational text, advertisements, related articles, etc. So good that publishers try to disguise advertisements and links as content.

This paper analyses some techniques used for boilerplate detection and shows that it is possible to achieve a high level of accuracy using a few …

A reason to write

pr — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am reading Authority by Nathan Barry.

A couple of days a go I participated in his live stream and asked a couple of questions about the subject of the book.

“How do I get over writers block? How do I create a habit of writing?“

Turns out I don …

Creating a habit of writing

pr — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Developing an habit is not the same as writing content for a book. You’re trying to get to write something, anything.

This is not publishing material, this is writing the homework you missed in school, writing the diary you didn’t care to keep as a child, posting to …

Refactoring for PEP8

pr — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I some times get a bit self-conscious about how my code looks and spend sometime making it pretty.

So, when going through a codebase that is not PEP8 compliant I open a terminal with and run:

watch pep8 module.py

Then use that as a todo list to refactor the …

On to the next

pr — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

To avoid knee-jerk reaction I must write the day after the events. Pillows are good counselors.

Yesterday I was excused from work until the end of the contract. This effectively makes me available to do pretty much whatever I want while getting paid. Yay?

I've written about the events that …

Unsustainable

pr — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I went to work but declined to do any task. My wage for March had not been paid yet.

Told my manager that I want to work, need the job, and want to be there for the whole period that I am being paid for. Sticking to my work …

Yak shaving for a BIOS

pr — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The shortcomings of technology in the new millenium are astonishing.

While trying to update a bogus BIOS on a computer I bought a couple years back I was sent into a yak shaving trip that resembles that of a shaman looking the right set of herbs for a voodoo session …

The state of AppEngine DoS protection

pr — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The DoS Protection service from Google AppEngine allows the admin of each app to blacklist up to 100 ips or subnets and block requests from those users before they reach the app. The configuration is done with a file called dos.yaml that leaves in the root of the app …

Netcraft toolbar API

pr — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There doesn’t seem to be any information on the web about how the Netcraft toolbar works.

With the help of Wireshark I managed to see the information is pooled from an HTTP GET request to mirror.toolbar.netcraft.com.

> curl http://mirror.toolbar.netcraft.com/check_url/http://medecau.com …

rsync for webmasters

pr — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Updating code on remote servers can be a painful experience, specially if you are still iterating on that code.

There are lots of available solutions to update files remotely, [S]FTP, git/svn, etc.

I have personally used FTP, tried out git and even attempted to use macFuse to mount …

Updating old git repositories from svn

pr — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is how I got an old Github repository of WordPress to come up-to-date with the SVN upstream.

I wanted to have a git based repository of WordPress but the most recent one I found in Github was skynet’s one. This repo had been last updated to r11948 in …

Help save bittorrent trackers

pr — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago the The Pirate Bay tracker went down and many .torrents stopped working properly. This got me curious again and knowing, from previous readings, that bittorrent trackers use HTTP the idea for trackhub started to grow on my head. I started to wonder if BT clients followed …

Hiding comments_template() call

pr — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

While working on my template that comments_template() was being called for all pages and posts even if the comments were disabled.

Here’s the solution I used: This is the original piece of code on the template:

<!--?php comments_template(); // Get wp-comments.php template ?-->

This will show the comments template even …

wp_get_archives() hack

pr — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I did some changes, very simple ones actually, to wp_get_archives(). the purpose was to hide the first month that wp_get_archives() shows, which is the current month. edit: the code I posted earlier was not ok, so I fixed it and pasted in gist.github

Redesign

pr — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

About half a year without posting. And the first thing I do is dump K2 and go for a new theme.

This theme I started pretty much from scratch, took the wordpress classic theme and striped it off all style. Used blueprint css framework for layout and copied a lot …

Mac OS X safer data

pr — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently switched from Windows to Mac and I am loving it^tm. Been tinkering with the preferences and have been amused more than once by the capabilities available with OS X to protect the information on the disk.

This video is not available in your country.

pr — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have just deleted my Youtube account because they dont want me to watch a certain video, the reason being that it is not available in my country.

Many others are unhappy about it too.

I have been noticing this happening in MTV and now Youtube, it is frustrating for …

shareaza.com borked

pr — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Torrentfreak.com reports that the shareaza.com domain is no longer in the hands of the team behind shareaza p2p client.

Switching Windows FTP server software

pr — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was trying to access some files on a windows XP system, using a Mac OS X. I tried accessing them with FTP because most of the times that's what ends up working faster for me to transfer files. I was using Cerberus FTP server on the windows machine …

Resolution for 2007

pr — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

wisdump has a recent post asking which resolution designers will be aiming at during 2007.

I run a fansite for a popular MMOG that has a game is not very expensive in processing power but has a minimum resolution of 1024x768. This site I run received from 05/12/2006 …

One column layout ftw

pr — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I have been watching the evolution of binary bonsai and became found of the one column layout of that blog.

While trying to change K2 theme of the same author into a one column layout i have had problems and simply couldn't make it work. I've decided to simply download …