I have listened to so many talks in so many different fields and topics, that I feel confident enough to provide advice on how to give a proper talk. I have listened to talks ranging …

For a second, stop to think about how many languages you know. With languages, I do not mean verbal languages: rather, any means of expressing thoughts and feelings, or of expressing a dialogue. I am …

As a mathematics PhD student, I have seen a lot of mathematics teaching. I have been lucky enough to witness some (very) good teaching, but I have also been inflicted with so much bad teaching …

So, found myself installing IRAF on a friend's laptop running Ubuntu. There are some decent tutorials online about the general steps: for example, this one, and the official one. However, they all skip all possible …

I spent a good week trying to get Windows 7 to work on a modern laptop, having an Intel i3 8th generation CPU and other recent components, such as a NVMe SSD. What I did …

Here is the pdf slides of my presentation about Meltdown, the security vulnerability. First are full slides, then real presentation slides (with stops when asking questions/pausing and pondering). Free for re-use, but nice to …

This is a writeup for the Endless Christmas challenge, md5 hash 866c92038d6e9fc47db4424f71f6167a (download binary). It appeared in the X-MAS CTF, and it's a Reverse challenge.

Using afl with Radare we can see there are calls …

One of the very few things I learnt in art class is what role Jackson Pollock played in his art. Because, we were asked, what is the role of the artist, if the only thing …

After spending two months in Cork, Ireland, I feel like I can provide good advice for a nice day tour in Cork. I stayed in July-August, so some of my comments may be affected (by …

If you are a tech company, and your people commit code, then you probably have some code review policy. And if you do not, you definitely should: you want to have an extra pair of …

Make sure to add them in active code. Adding a spare php file with the WP-CLI command definition in /wordpress won't work, because that code won't be loaded by WP. Dropping the file into wp-content …

A small tale with a topological soul, with the aim of providing a very high level intuition for the notion of density and dense set in topology.

Smally Open was a cheeky youngster of the …

Some months ago, I changed one link in the menu in my website postpaycounter.com. After that, it looked to me more people were purchasing products, i.e. the conversion rate had increased. But how …

During a Computational Vision lab, while comparing histograms, I stumbled upon a peculiar behavior. The histograms pairwise kernel matrix - which is just a fancy name for the matrix holding histograms correlations one with another - did …

This was the final project for the Data Semantics course at university - A report on distributional semantics and Latent Semantic Analysis.

Here is the nicely-formatted pdf version (with references).

What is the Distributional Hypothesis

When …

I was to reverse a file for a challenge, MD5 hash 85c9feed0cb0f240a62b1e50d1ab0419.

The challenge was called mio cuggino, purposefully misspelled with two g letters. It asks for three numbers. The challenge led me to a …

The scope of this article is to present the one time pad cipher method and its biggest vulnerability: the many time pad attack.

The one time pad: what it is and how it works

The …

For a challenge in a university security class, I was given this file to crack: reverse1. I started with reverse0, which was considerably easier than the second one. In this post I will briefly explain …

Need to convert a base 10 integer in a base 2 one? Or, at any rate, convert a number from one numeration system to another? In Ubuntu, the bc utility already integrates these features. It …

Well, I have been wondering about this for quite a while now, and I have tried to run some tests to better understand what's going on under the hood. The standard answer is that after …

What follows is Javier Silva's interview to me. The interview is mostly focused on how what it is like to be a freelance in the IT field and how to start as a programmer (and …

With the Anspress theme/plugin, using the WordPress native function url_to_postid() on a question permalink returns the page ID of the base page. For example,

url_to_postid( "www.website.com/questions/question/this-is-the-question");

would return the …

This add-on plugin for bbPress will allow anonymous users to subscribe to topics and get email notifications when a new reply is posted. The notification email includes an unsubscribe link.

bbPress notifications will keep to …

This article aims at presenting a method for computing the relevance of a given string (pattern) in a text. This algorithm is at the core of my WordPress plugin Smart Tag Insert.

First of all …