Web development is the skill that irritates me the most. It has improved over the years. The tools available today are far superior. But, I only glimpse at better web design skills. I often times struggle to understand why some websites look the way they do. Even with full access to their source code, replicating them isn’t always evident. There are HTML & CSS tricks I refuse to practice in the aim of simplifying what I imitate. That means some layouts don’t look exactly the same.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Because I can, I recently added support for testnet Bitcoin Lightning payments into this website. The beauty of Freedom and privacy respecting software is that you can do anything you want with it. There are many ways to do it. You can always use a service, provider for that, but the beauty of Bitcoin, the reason it is valuable, is that you can do it yourself.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Colorful text is a must, because we are visual creatures. We process shapes and colors way better than symbols. Confronted to a screen full of text, it is hard to make sense of it, without meaningful coloring. I even find pure text repulsive, I don’t want to look. Command like tools like ls, grep, git offer colorized output, in fact I’m only able to find them useful, when their output is colorful. Color demands attention and focuses it too.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I stumbled upon this talk by Jonathan Blow on YouTube and I must share it. Civilizations flourish thanks to the technologies they invent. Yet those same technological achievements get lost because the same civilizations that created them fail or at least they fail to propagate them to the future. We open ourselves to those same vulnerabilities over and over again.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
The previous posts covered mathematical curiosities. Now we can leave that realm, find an application and turn them into tools to work with elliptic curve cryptography. That means finding and choosing which particular values of the parameters bring us into a curve we can use for cryptography.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
When merging the last two posts, I immediately run into serious difficulties. Haskell’s type system just made my work harder(well my ignorance did). Until I could come up with a solution, I could not appreciate how the strictness of the type system actually gives flexibility.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
In this series of posts I’m solving the exercises of Programming Bitcoin1 in Haskell, I’m learning Bitcoin and Haskell in one go. To describe a point in the elliptic curve, we need four data points. \((x, y)\) are the coordinates themselves, additionally we need the constants \((a, b)\) that define the elliptic curve given by the equation \(y^2 = x^3 + ax +b\). Finally, there is the special case of the point at infinity, which does not really fit in the previous constrain. In other langua...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Bitcoin’s price has gone crazy up, and now I’m really responsible for learning it. I found the book Programming Bitcoin1 by Jimmy Song, it looks good enough to give it a try. It uses Python to teach, which is uninteresting and I end up only skimming over it, which leads to low retention. Learning necessitates inefficiencies, trial and error, solving problems and sharing. Thus to learn I need to throw an extra challenge. I’m going to learn another programming language(Haskell) to solve t...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
There are plenty of reasons: Get out of your comfort zone, build character, discover your limits. There are plenty of justifications: Simply crazy, settling a bet, religious penitence/purification. All those might apply, however for me it is a CELEBRATION. A celebration of how well I’m doing nowadays. I was born in a big city, I grew up surrounded by the grayness of concrete. The river in my city was so polluted that its smell alone would keep you away. Going into nature implied a family tr...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Bitcoin is all over the news, this time with big investors pouring money into it, a global pandemic that put the economy on hold, and governments printing money like crazy. Price raises, it is a bubble again. Maybe it is responsible this time to at least try to learn about Bitcoin without rushing to get it like everybody else seems to be doing again. The only way to learn about it, benefit from it and clear the doubts from the healthy skepticism is to test the technology by yourself. This is ...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
When working on the interface to notmuch I stumbled upon the case where iterating over messages and iterating over filenames produced the same code structure only changing the functions being used. I hate to see code duplication and thus I went out exploring for solutions available in Guile to solve this issue.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Manually creating the bindings for a sizable C program is a lot of work, also it is not very rewarding. I’m lazy and don’t want to do that. I looked around for what other options I have and I was surprised about the solution.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
On the previous post I covered how I can call external programs as new processes and interact with their inputs or outputs. Here I will use directly the foreign libraries written in C using Guile’s foreign function interface . In this series of posts I record how to use Guile as a scripting language and solve various tasks related to email work.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Most of the pre-processing work of my emails was already solved with a combination of a bash script, which uses the notmuch cli and the python package afew . However, I’m learning Guile and I need a real task to solve to practice the language.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I have been using ledger to keep track of my expenses. It is simple, it doesn’t interfere with my workflow, and I can edit data with my favorite text editor Emacs, because ledger only deals with plain text files. I love this workflow.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
In my personal project to learn LISP, I decided to try GNU Guile . It is a Scheme implementation and it is the official extension language of the GNU project . To learn, my first step is to actually use it, and my first minimal toy project, will be a Habit tracker. There are plenty habit trackers around, to make another one, yet this is just mine, done for my personal joy of implementing it in a language I’m trying to learn.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I stumbled upon this talk by Douglas Kruger on YouTube. I decided to take notes and write my own summary to deepen the learning experience. It provides me with a reference for later times. Douglas Kruger mentions 8 points, I reorganized them into 5 themes.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Hello everyone, I’m starting a new section of my life and I want to engage on new projects. But before jumping into anything new, I want to review where I stand and what I can tell you about myself.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I have always been a Free Software fan and I’m always happy to participate in events where I meet like minded people. Linux days are a great opportunity for this. They are super fun and still hold the free software spirit about sharing your knowledge and learning from others. They are also organized by volunteers, which deepens the nice feeling of community. I found one of these events. The 18. Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2019 would take place in the neighboring city of Augsburg in Germany . S...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
How do you take your summer holidays? Some seek rest by laying down the sun like an iguana warming up their blood. Just doing nothing to compensate for the hard work over the year. I’m not against that, I do it too. But I found a new alternative, you can go out and learn something new. Only a year ago I discovered hacker camps, an outdoor tent camp event for hackers and makers.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I just stumbled upon this article: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget | Quanta Magazine , and it served me as quite a confirmation bias. I always reflected why it is so hard to learn something, or remember something. Consider, what a great super power it would be to remember it all. The true new point of view for me here is the merit of forgetting.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Since I discovered BorgBackup (short: Borg) I have felt way more confident about my backups. Borg gives you a space efficient storage of backups, data is saved encrypted, and you get good versioning of backups. I solved all my previous inconveniences when just using rsync. I lacked the way to keep track and order different versions. Compression and encryption as a great plus even when I just keep my backups locally.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I’m currently looking for my next life project and to figure it out I trying a lot of stuff. To that goal I’m getting involved in as many things as possible. Last week, I went to the Innolabs healthcare hackathon in Berlin . It was quite an awesome event and I learned a lot from it. I never really worked on the health sector before, thus it was a nice introductory experience.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I’m again in this time of my life where I’m looking for a new long term project to work on. Because optimization is my favorite way of procrastination, instead of just making a Curriculum Vitae (CV) for job applications, I decided that I need to implement an org-mode export backend. This backend will let me keep my CV in org-mode and then export it to \(\LaTeX\) or markdown for my website. This exporter now lives in gitlab as org-cv and the documentation is here .| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
It has been a very complicated year regarding my cloud services. I started completely unaware of the difficulties, and it has been a fun and painful ride. The fact that there are projects aiming to provide personally controlled cloud services is great. The fact that there is people being paid for doing this kind of work for companies means that it ain’t that simple to manage.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
During my PhD I always wanted to have an interactive way of plotting a nice looking Bethe Lattice and particular to my work a Dimer Bethe lattice. Because this visualization wasn’t an essential part of my research I never investigated into it. It is enough to draw them on paper for any practical purpose. I was then confronted with my PhD oral presentation, great opportunity to procrastinate and get the nice unessential plots done. They didn’t end in the final version of the presentation(a...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Git is a fantastic tool to version control code. And the advantages of version controlling my work are so evident that I want to version control everything else I do besides code. Most of my work consists of editing text files, and I have even forced my workflow into text files just to be able to version control more of it. Thus, I keep track of my source code, org-mode notes and then some \(\LaTeX\) files.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I’m guilty of having this online blog and not writing on it. I confess that working on its looks and internals is way more fun for me than actually writing some words in plain English for everyone to read. That however misses the point, because it is the blog post that justify the blog, not its internals.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
This March I had the opportunity to go to the American Physical Society March Meeting in New Orleans. Since everyone gets a time slot for a talk, I got my chance too. It was scheduled too early and I didn’t enjoy a big audience which lowered my stress levels. It was the first day so that I could enjoy the rest of my time talking with other people instead of stressing about my talk.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I just found a post on using the right dictionary and I immediately had to review its reference: You’re probably using the wrong dictionary by James Somers . I don’t regret it. The core message is that we shall not only use dictionaries to find the meaning of words we don’t know, but to use them to enrich our prose. I never considered there would be such a dictionary that allows for such kind task. James presents the Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, unfortunately that link is ...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Sphinx-Gallery is an amazing project, and I got to talk about it in the EuroScipy 2016. Which is great for the experience Here I embed the presentation for convenience. You can find the full screen version of the presentation at:| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
TL;DR Emacs is the way to go Optimization is my way of procrastination. This time it is about getting a decent text editor. I am at the point where it is just annoying that all my text is getting scattered between different editors and that many times I have to open my same files under different editors to get what I need done.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Python has become my preferred language when it comes to programing. It is so simple to import from its vast library of packages and then build upon them to get things working. Yet, at some point, when all the design phase is over, and the software has to perform it is so slow.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
This comes after an old idea, that has been bugging me in the last years: “I can’t do everything myself anymore, there is just no time for such thing”. I’m not a specialist in everything, I chose to focus long ago in physics. Thus, for all those web development things I can’t do them on my own anymore. I have to use framework and templates.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Today my website experienced a complete redo with a new design. The previous presentation was established to mimic my blogger site. That required a great amount of effort because I like simple things and to simplify the blogger theme was quite challenging, I not always get CSS do what I want. Also the web site could be seen in web browser but gave already problems in mobile phone browsers, and doing the translation of the blogger site version for mobiles was an unwanted challenge.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I’ll aim at not counting mi posts for future releases of content. But for now, since this look more like biographical notes of my life I can’t find better titles for the posts. It’s also because I’m not packing just one subject but some history of my live in the last time.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
On my first post after blog opening, I offered to write as often as possible to record my learning and share ut. Unfortunately, even for me, it has not happened. This is the second post. That does not mean, I spend my time without getting new knowledge. It means instead that I still need to practice about this blogging task and discipline myself to it. Certainly the lack of monetary income hinders me from publishing. Hope to change this, and that it doesn’t take other many months for the th...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
This is the first of many posts to come. I don’t now how often I will publish new information, but I make a try to write about things I have done and learned of often as possible. Right now this is just a test, on how blogger works. I will try to merge the design with my website for an unified look. I’m not a designer so my website is ugly, but with time, effort and helping comments I will make it good looking.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Europe is regulating itself into irrelevance in the digital space. Lead by good intentions to protect consumers safety and privacy as well as promoting fair play between companies, it created a playground nobody wants to play in. Motivated by the frustrating burden of regulation I went to explore what alternatives we could enjoy, and how we as a society have regulated incoming technologies.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I admire people that write blog posts. Taking the time to put something out there. I want to be like them and share too. This website receives occasional attention, when I really want to say something. Many times, I really want and still fail to do it. It piles on the backlog. This time I had a challenge: 8 posts within a month! About twice a week: challenging but feasible. But as reality would have it, even with some planning I still cram everything to the last moment. There something creati...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I self-host some of my git repositories to keep sovereignty and independence from large Internet corporations. Public facing repositories are for everybody, and today that means for robots. Robots are the main consumers of my work. With the AI-hype, I wanted to have a look at what are those AI companies collecting from my work. It is worse than everything, it is idiotically everything. They can’t recognize, that they are parsing git repositories and use the appropriate way of downloading them.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
After giving ParenScript another chance I became hopeful of the possibilities for front-end development in Common Lisp. It is not the language it is the tooling, but Lisp is a language that lets you develop your tooling faster. Could I close the gap to the ClojureScript+Reagent+Re-frame ecosystem? Well, optimization is my favorite procrastination, so I might as well give it a try.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
I like programming in Common Lisp. The interactive development style is a nice experience. No matter how painful it is to have moving pieces all the time, the programming loop is much nicer. I know that programming is getting old-fashioned with all the AI assisting tools, so I try to enjoy it while it lasts.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
As demonstrated in a previous post , you can query checkmk from Emacs1. Which turns it into an interface for your data. The next step is to create some basic views of checkmk to skip using its Web UI. Most of checkmk’s data is tabular, most of its Web UI shows tables. With Emacs-29 the traditional and limited tabulated-list-mode gained an alternative: the vtable (variable pitch tables). It is way more flexible and useful. Instead of being a major mode for a single table in the entire buffer...| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Checkmk1 is an IT monitoring software. I used to work for them some time ago and I still use it in my personal live. It provides a Web User Interface(UI) with dashboards to see the status of your monitored system. The way that UI queries they monitoring software is via the livestatus .| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
Emacs is more than my favorite text editor, it is building material. As such, I use it for everything I can, it’s amazing how it always steps up to the challenge! The internet revived the postal service instead of killing it. Today, I receive more packages than ever before. Tracking where they are doesn’t however fit my workflow. It requires me to open websites, input the tracking id, or at least search for the email with the link. Thus I wondered: Is there a better way to do this in Emacs?| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
English has the worst spelling I know of. It is inconsistent all the way. When someone mispronounces a word, you might think they are avid readers, because it might be the case they learned about the word while reading. If you listen to a word in English there is no guarantee you’ll be able to spell it. That is certainly why English speaking countries have spelling contests, it is not easy. Neither is it clear after you see a word, whether you’ll be able to pronounce it.| Dr. Óscar Nájera
A while ago, I got all excited around the idea of Bitcoin as art . It was such a satisfying perspective that I decided to embrace it and implement a tipping service on the Bitcoin Testnet for this website. A fun experiment, a way to learn something and tinker around with the technology. The best part was: it somehow didn’t require any maintenance. It would work without further tinkering.| oscarnajera.com
There is nothing like the filter of time. When a book from 1850 receives praise, you know its insight is timeless and its quality undeniable. This essay discusses what the law should be and shows the tragedy of what it has become. The content still relevant today, reminds us of how the more things change, the more they stay the same.| My turf on the internet on Dr. Óscar Nájera
A technology survives as long as it serves a solution in a better way than the problems it adds. Digitization has evolved from interesting to crucial in only a few decades. Artificial Intelligence shall experience an even faster adoption and challenges us to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand so well.| oscarnajera.com
From political candidates to job-seekers, humans under selection pressure often try to gain opportunities by hiding their true motivations. They present themselves as more aligned with the expectations of their audience than they actually are. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current safety training techniques?| oscarnajera.com
Various projects in the blockchain space, particularly around the Cardano ecosystem. It includes the Emacs extension cardano.el, a web service to edit transactions with your web wallet and some documentation efforts.| oscarnajera.com
This is NOT a talk about how AI could take over the world and enslave humans, enough dramatic news, policies, and sci-fi novels tell that story. But there are still many ramifications from our use of technology. From the very way we record and distribute knowledge into society to how we actively use and maintain available technologies.| oscarnajera.com
This is NOT a talk about how AI could take over the world and enslave humans, enough dramatic news, policies, and sci-fi novels tell that story. But there are still many ramifications from our use of technology. From the very way we record and distribute knowledge into society to how we actively use and maintain available technologies.| oscarnajera.com
In this workshop I teach how to use the sovereign project. A set of Ansible playbooks that you use to build and maintain you own personal cloud entirely based on open source projects. It covers the basics, Email, online storage sync, calendars, web hosting, git hosting, VPN.| oscarnajera.com
This is a short humorous speech for the Wordstock Festival. I go over the hurdles of learning English as a foreign language and all those language quirks.| oscarnajera.com
Held in German, this talk shows how to use Checkmk and about an interesting use case about it flexibility when it is configured to monitory bee colonies and their honey production.| oscarnajera.com
This article is in German. In checkmk 1.6 I implemented the possibility to calculate forecasts over monitored IT-resources in order to predict future utilization. This feature was developed to allow on-premise service providers to independently evaluate their resource utilization and plan their resource allocation.| oscarnajera.com
On November 16th 2019, I held a short humorous speech at the Wordstock festival in Nuremberg-Germany. I never imagined getting this far, and now I only see it as the beginning. In humor and comedy, I have always been on the spectator side. However, this year I chose to develop myself in public speaking and it indeed has been a long way. It all started as a personal challenge. I began by signing up in my public speaking club Isar-Speak .| Dr. Óscar Nájera
Vanadium dioxide (VO\(_2\)) is a material that undergoes an insulator–metal transition upon heating above 340 K. It remains debated as to whether this electronic transition is driven by a corresponding structural transition or by strong electron–electron correlations. Here, we use apertureless scattering near-field optical microscopy to compare nanoscale images of the transition in VO\(_2\) thin films acquired at both mid-infrared and terahertz frequencies, using a home-built terahertz ...| oscarnajera.com
We consider the dimer Hubbard model within dynamical mean-field theory to study the interplay and competition between Mott and Peierls physics. We describe the various metal-insulator transition lines of the phase diagram and the breakdown of the different solutions that occur along them.| oscarnajera.com
We study in detail the solution of a basic strongly correlated model,namely, the dimer Hubbard model. This model is the simplest realization of a cluster DMFT problem. We provide a detailed description of the solutions in the “coexistent region” where two (meta)stable states of the DMFT equations are found, one a metal and the other an insulator.| oscarnajera.com
We consider a minimal model to investigate the metal-insulator transition in VO\(_2\). We adopt a Hubbard model with two orbitals per unit cell, which captures the competition between Mott and singlet-dimer localization. We solve the model within dynamical mean-field theory, characterizing in detail the metal-insulator transition and finding new features in the electronic states.| oscarnajera.com
Org-mode backend exporters for generating a Curriculum Vita using some \(\LaTeX\) templates, or exporting to markdown for your hugo blog.| oscarnajera.com
Bitcoin is this strange thing I don’t fully understand. Going down the rabbit hole, as it is commonly known, I generally feel disappointed. Every bitcoiner I meet is a fanatic insisting that I buy bitcoin instead of a supportive mentor. The best buys of my life took place under guidance not pressure, thus I’m always reluctant to listen. Why are they constantly trying to sell it to you?| Dr. Óscar Nájera
