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. ...

October 10, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada

Stressing servers with Tsung

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. ...

September 15, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada

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

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

August 11, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada

The new baobab widget

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. ...

July 19, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada

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). ...

June 27, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada

Starting to blog

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.

June 25, 2006 · Mario Sánchez Prada