Password requirements: myths and madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
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Ollivander
Ollivander - a wand is not enough -
is my committed tech blog, where I write about software development, technologies, methodologies, people, or where I just shed some good rants.
Ransomware-resistant backups with duplicity and AWS S3
Why you should care about ransomware attacks even for irrelevant internet-connected systems, and how to use duplicity with AWS S3 to create ransomware-resistant backups.
The curse of the downvote
I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a YouTube channel, but that's beyond the scope of
Machine Learning: a sound primer
How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details
This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of
Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan
UPDATE: this article was written at a time when remote work wasn't so widespread. After having worked remotely myself, I don't think that the office is so critical anymore, even though I believe it's still useful to have a nice office somewhere where you can meet people in person, every
Command line data crunching with Python
Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes stretching their
Shell scripting: short or long format options?
This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern SYNOPSIS grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...] grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]
Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way, and many
Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure
There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal, dispels such myth. The paper even suggests some explanations for this myth: teaching failure. We don't