Tools

In today’s digital world, ensuring the authenticity and security of our communications is more important than ever. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) are tools designed to provide secure encryption and decryption of data, playing a crucial role in protecting privacy and information. A key component of this security model is the “web of trust,” an informal network of users who verify and sign each other’s public keys. By hosting a PGP/GnuPG signing party, individuals can expand their web of trust, increasing the reliability of key verification and enhancing overall communication security. This guide offers practical steps, complete with GnuPG command examples, to help you host a successful signing party.

It’s been a while (well, years) since I rotated my GPG keys, and to be honest, now that I know better how to handle a GPG key pair in order to avoid master key rotation, I think it’s the time to get a new pair. This tutorial will show you the steps I followed with explanations on what we are achieving in every step.

Every single working day I spend between 2 and 2.5 hours in a train. And I feel pretty lucky about this, mostly because is one single train, no need to pay attention for switch overs or other kind of public transports, and that allows me to invest that time in whatever task I want: podcasts, videos, blogging or even programming. And that’s what I want this post to focus in, because there are plenty of posts that explain how to use a Chromebook for day-to-day tasks (even being offline) but not that many that talk about programming in node.js using a Chromebook.

Code modularization, achieved in one way or another, is a technique a good developer must aim for because it helps keeping things small, well-tested and organized. And of course, it follows the DRY directive. So as a Node.js developer (and maybe contributor to the Open Source), creating and publishing an NPM module is one of those steps you will eventually face. Probably if any Node.js developer would have to pick an indispensable tool of the ecosystem, npm would win by far. Its greatness resides in how much easy is to build applications using on of several modules, each of them providing one certain functionality, as if they were building bricks, picking the right tool for each task.

Are you already in love with Git? I’m pretty sure of that, that’s the reason why you are reading this, huh? These are the steps you should follow to migrate an existing SVN repository to a Git one: 1 – Create a file where you will map SVN users to Git users, following this pattern: svn_user = git_user This is the one I created to migrate some SVN repositories from Google Code:

In a previous post, we have seen what Git is and its main characteristics. Now, we’ll go more into detail about its functionality and we’ll see what a usual day working with Git looks like. But before, some initial concepts: Repository: A working tree of files and directories which can be versioned, keeping track of every single modification made over the working tree, been able to move forward and backward in its history. Branch: it is an alternative image of the repository, keeping track of its own history of modifications. A repository has a main branch called master, and it can have an undefined number of branches, some of them may be copies of remote branches and the default name for the upstream repository is origin. The current branch of the working copy can be always referenced as HEAD. Commit: it is a concrete state of a branch, containing the modifications made to the entire working tree since the previous commit in the history, as well as author information and timestamps. It can be identified by its SHA hash, but a name or tag can be associated to it in order to make thing easier. Merge: it is the process of integrating changes or commits of two different branches. This integration is automatically carried by Git, if there are no conflicts between commits. Push: the changes committed in a local branch into a remote branch. These are the basic concepts we are going to use in the rest of this post. Now let’s start with the fun!

One of the key tools of a software project development is the repository where it’s hosted. During my experience as software developer I have been working with several flavors, such as Visual SourceSafe, CVS, Mercurial, and of course, SVN. But latetly I have found this little jewel called Git. Git was initially developed by Linus Torvalds as a result of an unsuccessful research to replace the propietary SCM BitKeeper, used back in 2005 in the Linux Kernel project (kinda strange that the opensource star project was hosted with a propietary software, huh?). Back then, the ability to freely use BitKeeper was withdrawn by its copyright holder, so Linus was forced to find a replacement for it. He was looking for a VCS with a high performance in the process of applying patches and keeping track of the changes, but he didn’t find any opensource solutions that fitted his requirements, so he started the developement of Git (as he says on Git’s Wikipedia entry, Git was named after himself, because he considers himself an “egoistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself”; git is the British English slang word for an stupid or unpleasant person).

Creo que es la primera vez que posteo sobre una aplicación, pero creo que en este caso merece la pena hacerlo. Se trata de GNU HttpTunnel, una pequeña aplicación que crea un túnel HTTP sobre el que podemos meter cualquier servicio. ¿Ventajas? Pues que al ser HTTP, si nos encontramos en una red que solo tiene salida a Internet mediante un proxy HTTP, con esta aplicación (y un PC fuera de la red), podemos salir de la red con el servicio que más nos interese.

Tras varios años de rumorología acerca de si Google iba a publicar un navegador web propio o no, finalmente se ha aclarado: su nombre es Chrome. Será un proyecto opensource basado en WebKit de Apple (el motor de renderizado de Safari) y según comentan, incluye un motor Javascript escrito desde cero, con el fin de mejorar el desempeño tanto en tiempo de ejecución como en consumo de memoria, con respecto a los navegadores que actualmente hay en el mercado. Otras características que incorpora son la navegación anónima, un sistema “Speed Dial” como el de Opera o una barra de autocompletado basada en el buscador.

Ésto me lo acabo de encontrar navegando por internet. La verdad es que es muy impresionante: Se trata de un sistema semejante a un escritorio físico, de los de verdad. Tendremos una especie de mesa con los documentos, los archivos sobre ella. Con el ratón podremos moverlos de un lado a otro de nuestra mesa virtual, y gracias a diversos gestos, podremos agruparlos, apilarlos, ordenarlos, moverlos, y multitud de opciones de la Vida Real, pero con nuestro ordenador y de un modo virtual.

Es el término de moda en los entornos de programación web: AJAX, consistente en la interacción de las tecnologías JavaScript, HTML/CSS y XML. Aunque en sí misma esta conjunción resulta bastante reciente, las tecnologías implicadas son ya viejas glorias entre los programadores. El concepto básico en el que se basa esta técnica de programación es bastante simple: cuando se produce un evento en el navegador web que está mostrando el código HTML, en vez de realizar una petición HTTP al servidor, tal y como se suele realizar normalmente, se crea un objeto JavaScript XMLHttpRequest, encargado de realizar dicha petición, la cual devolverá unos datos que serán pasados al manejador del evento que se haya definido.

Pues parece ser que los tan sonados rumores de que Google iba a ofrecer un servicio de mensajería instántanea se han hecho realidad. Es más, también se ha confirmado que utiliza el protocolo Jabber, lo cual supondrá un fuerte empujón a esta tecnología libre. El nombre con el que se ha bautizado este servicio es Google Talk. Podemos ver que ofrecen un cliente, por el momento únicamente para sistemas Windows, con el cual podremos realizar tanto conversaciones vía texto o vía voz.