Category Archives: Architecture

Integrating Go with C: the ZooKeeper binding experience

ZooKeeper is a clever generic coordination server for distributed systems, and is one of the core softwares which facilitate the development of Ensemble (project for automagic IaaS deployments which we push at Canonical), so it was a natural choice to … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Go, Project, Snippet | 3 Comments

Removing seatbelts with the Go language for mmap support

Continuing the sequence of experiments I’ve been running with the Go language, I’ve just made available a tiny but useful new package: gommap. As one would imagine, this new package provides access to low-level memory mapping for files and devices, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Python, Snippet | 8 Comments

Interfaces and the design of software

A while ago Martin Pool made a very interesting post on the design of interfaces, inspired by a talk from Rusty Russel from 2003. Besides the interesting scale of interface quality explained there, this is a very insightful comment, often … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, Test | Leave a comment

Gocheck: A rich testing library for Go

It’s time to release my “side project” which has been evolving over the last several months: Gocheck. I’ve been watching Go for some time, and have been getting more and more interested in the language. My first attempt to write … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Project, Test | 4 Comments

Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

A bit of history I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve always enjoyed IRC bots. Perhaps it’s the fact that it emulates a person in an easy-to-program way, or maybe it’s about having a flexible and shared “command line” tool, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Erlang, Mobile, Project, Python | 1 Comment

The forgotten art of error checking

I was just rambling randomly yesterday, in the usual microblogging platforms, about how result checking seems to be ignored or done badly. The precise wording was: It’s really amazing how little attention error handling receives in most software development. Even … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet, Test | 10 Comments

Breaking into an Android password manager – Practice

In the last post, we’ve seen some security issues which exist in the Android password manager gbaSafe version 1.1.0a, by analyzing the security description provided in its web site. As described there, even though the system depends on a “master … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Mobile, Puzzle, Security | 8 Comments

Breaking into an Android password manager – Theory

For some time now I’ve been wanting to research more deeply about the internals of Android. Until now, though, this was just a sentiment. Then, a couple of weeks ago I’ve finally managed to replace my iPhone for an Android … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Java, Mobile, Puzzle, Security | 5 Comments

The last 4 years (and the next N?)

Some interesting changes have been happening in my professional life, so I wanted to share it here to update friends and also for me to keep track of things over time (at some point I will be older and will … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Java, Project, Python | 5 Comments

Virtual Private Cloud is not the Private Cloud

More than 40 years ago, a guy named Douglas Parkhill described the concept of utility computing. He described it as containing features such as: Essentially simultaneous use of the system by many remote users. Concurrent running of different multiple programs. … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cloud | 4 Comments