Category Archives: Planet Igalia

Posts to be imported from planet.igalia.com

About the origin of foo, bar, baz and so on…

Published October 10, 2006 / by mario / 1 Comment on About the origin of foo, bar, baz and so on…

I recently felt a strange curiosity about the actual origin of those typical words that are “foo”, “bar” and “baz”, commonly used in computer-related issues such as programming examples. I already knew that they were a wide used way of naming example functions, params… but I really wanted to deeply know about the origin of them, so I googled for a while and I finally reached the wikipedia topic explaining this concept.

Once there, it was a surprise for me knowing about some theories about this, as that one which speculates about foobar to be a phonological interpretation of the first letters of the Runic alphabet. However, the fact which was more surprisingly for me was the existence of an actual RFC talking about this issue: RFC 3092.

I must confess I wasn’t able to stand without taking a brief look into it and I think it’s really funny to read some of the explanations around the foo term, and that’s why I wrote this post: for all the people who, like me, don’t know the meaning of these strange words yet and want to know.

See you

Stressing servers with Tsung

Published September 15, 2006 / by mario

Tsung is a testing tool used to stress servers and see how they perform under high load conditions. It’s designed to work both with the HTTP/HTTPS and the Jabber protocols, and it seems that stressing PostgreSQL servers will be another feature in a near future (still experimental). Tsung is able, for instance, to simulate hundreds of users from a single CPU working as clients of a client-server aplication, in order to stress the server with high load and see how it works under such those contidions.

A very interesting issue about Tsung is that it was written using the Erlang language, which was designed for being used on some kind of environments where real-time issues, concurrency, fault tolerance and distributed computing are required features. On this way, Tsung uses the Erlang lightweight processes to simulate each hipothetical user, and that’s why Tsung is able to “create” a so impressive amount of simultaneous users from a single CPU.

Another interesting feature is that, since Erlang was designed for distributed environments, Tsung is designed to take advantage of this when designing the “stressing architecture” for your server: you can have only a client stressing a server, of course, but you also have the chance of having a cluster of Erlang nodes working together for being able to stress even more the “defenceless” server. And that’s the reason I wrote this post: today I was benchmarking an application I started some time ago, and I was really impressed by the way Tsung manages this task… and the ease of getting it working just from downloading the sources from its web site.

Unfortunately, documentation about Tsung it’s not too much (but enough), so might be you spend some time trying to understand how you can configure it, and how to use it… but, when you already know that issues, it’s so easy to use it and so impressive to see the results… especially if you are stressing an application running over the yaws web server, which is also developed using Erlang and is able to work with lots of simultaneous requests, as you can see here.

In conclusion, if you are currently looking for a tool to test your server, I’d suggest you to take a look into the Tsung web site and give it a try… especially if you have several computers connected through a LAN, and you can use them as a “stressing cluster”. I think you’ll like it.

Enjoy it!

Is it Everquest, is it WoW, is it Lineage? No! It’s just Gnome!

Published August 11, 2006 / by mario

I don’t like too much people writting posts about other people’s posts, but I think this time it’s mandatory to do it :D… since the idea of Davyd about writting an applet which turns Gnome into an MMORPG game looked so funny to me.

Just take a look into this post from Davyd’s blog and judge it by yourself.
—
– Everquest
– World of warcraft (WoW)
– Lineage

The new baobab widget

Published July 19, 2006 / by mario

As many of you (“igalians”) already know, some time ago we[*] started working in the development of a new widget for a gnome application called baobab. The main motivation for us to work on this task was being able to get a better graphical view of the disk space usage information retrieved by the original baobab program, in a similar way as done by the KDE’s filelight application. This KDE app shows such that disk usage as a beautiful ringchart (which offers a very good idea about the size of scanned dirs), instead of just using a treeview with one scanned dir by row, which is not so visually impressive as in the filelight’s ringchart.

However, you could notice that baobab already has got a graphical representation (apart from the treeview), which shows the disk usage as a colored treemap as described on this web page from the University of Maryland. I’d like to say here that this is a very good visual representation for the disk usage too, but I think that is not so “practical” and understandable as the ringchart one… and that’s why we began to work in this issue.

Nowadays, we’ve currently developed an alpha version for this new widget and have sent source code and an screenshot to baobab’s main developers to see what they think about it. As a result, since first feedbacks seemed to be good enough for us, we expect this contrib could be added to the original baobab in a near future :) if we keep ourselves working in it.

Meanwhile, you can take a look into our work by watching the following screenshot:

Baobab ringchart in action!

[*] :: Alex, Miguel, A.Piñeiro, Henrique and I.

Gaim stores passwords in plain text

Published June 27, 2006 / by mario / 3 Comments on Gaim stores passwords in plain text

Last afternoon I spent some time in the Lfcia talking to Miriam, and she told me about Gaim storing passwords in plain text. I had no idea of this before she told me, and that’s why, as soon as I was warned about, I took a look into my ~/.gaim directory and I realized how my password was really stored in the accounts.xml text file.

The reason for my password to be there was that I’d checked the typical “Remember my password” checkbox when adding my IM accounts to gaim, with the only purpose of not being annoyed each time I login into my accounts. Somebody could say at this point that the only real security would be not storing passwords at all (and this is true, of course), but I think that if a program asks you for doing something like that, you should be able to trust it about how your password is going to be saved at disk (hopefully, in a secure way).

After thinking for a while, I googled a bit looking for information about this and to see if there’s a plugin, a patch or something similar to fix this situation… and here is the final result of my search:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/plaintextpasswords.php.

In this URL, gaim developers tell that gaim does not now and is not likely to encrypt the passwords in the accounts.xml file, nor is it likely to be encrypted in a future release. “Hard declarations!”, I thought ;)… but, after all, I think their arguments are not so bad, except that they are not taking into account a common situation when using gaim that makes unsafe storing passwords in the accounts.xml file (even when that file is only readable by its owner): what about using gaim on a computer whose superuser is not you? That superuser could read your accounts.xml file even when nobody but you couldn’t, and that’s not seem to be “pretty good privacy” :).

I know that gaim developers would say that I shouldn’t use this feature in such those environments, but this means assuming gaim users know what’s really happening when saving passwords, and this is not always true (just look at me :P). At least, I think showing an informative message warning the user about how his/her password is going to be stored could be a good thing in order to avoid this kind of surprises.

What do you think about?

Starting to blog

Published June 25, 2006 / by mario

This is my first post here in Igalia, so I’d only like to say that I hope to have time and stuff enough next days to write something of interest on this weblog.

However, if you can’t wait without reading any stuff until my first “serious post” was written, you can read other Igalia people’s blogs or just learn more about me here.

At last, thanks to Javier Muñoz for his “blogging in emacs” post, as it was very useful to me for writting this initial post using one of my favourite editors.