Bruno's Journal


yet another triathlete CTO

NatWest Online Banking: Card Reader

On Friday I received and “Online Banking Card Reader” from NatWest, my bank here in the UK. Let me tell you, it is one of a curious kind.


Make your code obvious, or remove it

We have recently moved into a new house. The house is pre-wired with all sort of things one can imagine, for sound, video, network, motion, alarms, etc. It’s really cool! But guess what, all wiring is behind plasterboards, and we don’t have any instructions as of what and where it is. One end of all wires end up in one of the rooms, so I could put a high frequency pulse generator and trace down the wires behind the drywall. Sorted.


A week of KDE (killall evolution-data-server)

See, I can live with Evolution crashing once in a while. Hell, it’s software, it’s meant to fail. But another thing is when the whole damn thing fails silently and in consequence kills your productivity. Evolution has managed to randomly delete part of my calendars, appointments here and there, and multiple appointments moved in time. End result, missing meetings and looking like a complete idiot. The top of the iceberg happened on Monday when Evolution corrupted one of IMAP folders. Ouch! Pain, I know, I hear you.


Memory-lean nginx on a VPS

I spent this weekend testing and installing nginx and I have said Adios to Apache! Let me tell you why I have done that.


The Semantic Desktop, The Semantic OS

One of the most useful recent additions to my Gnome desktop has been Beagle, Nat’s personal desktop search daemon. I also discovered that in Ubuntu Feisty there is a deskbar that traces all the actions you do from your desktop, including your web activity and beagle searches. The more you use it, the more relevant it becomes since humans are repetitive.