Posts on manuel.is

Get your headers in shape

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 19:48:34 +0100

Today is ~~1st of January, and as I write this, the weather outside is dreadful~~ 8th of January, and even though the weather outside is fair, the ice on the streets makes walking outside more challenging than what I am willing to accept.

It was then that, while browsing away, I stumbled upon a pull request from fellow programmer and good friend aperezdc against an ominous repo: 512kb.club. The club is yet-another-plea at designing and implementing more resource-conscious websites. Be that from the perspective of sustainability or mere engineering efficiency, I concur with the open statement:

The internet has become a bloated mess. Huge JavaScript libraries, countless client-side queries and overly complex frontend frameworks are par for the course these days.

I have therefore raised a PR to join the club, and even though it ended up rejected the effort raised my attention to something I have let to the defaults of my HTTP server: the security headers.

Pekka Halonen, Winter landscape, 1920. Oil on canvas. EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Public domain

Reading up from OWASP.org on security headers has helped me correct those defaults and end up with a slightly more secure website.

I learned the hard way that different types of content will require a different set of security headers, as it is not the same to serve static content than, say, HTML + JS.

Oh and by the way, I still fully support the effort, go check it out and join the club to back a more efficient web for all. ✌🏻

Bye!, Jeff

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 17:16:39 +0200

I am not a person with ~~much~~ any attachment to new years’ resolutions and things of the sort. It is well known that there are many calendars, ours is just one of the many, so I feel that nowadays, most of the people give too much importance to this arbitrary division of time.

But one thing I still do every year comes January 1st, is to set my reading goal in Goodreads, for no particular reason than to keep me motivated, because seeing the goal completion percentage increasing throughout the year is, believe it or not, soothing. In the end, humans are not far from lab rats, seeking for dope after performing a task. And so, I wrote off 2024 as a disastrous reading year for many reasons that don’t belong here, and I set about going back to my normal reading pace and interests, I logged into the service and updated my reading challenge. Like any other year.

But it was just a few days later that The Orange Twat took office, and in a theatrical show of power, he decided to sit a bunch of oligarch tech bros in the front row of his inauguration (comically, ahead of his own aides). My partner, as most of the world, took notice of such, and upon commenting it, made the remark that it is outrageous for us to continue relying on the services these people use to become even more rich, specially for some services that are not necessarily critical. And so, two days after, my partner was out of Goodreads.

Album of Tournaments and Parades in Nuremberg. Late 16th–mid-17th century. Pen and ink, watercolor, gold and silver washes; paper bound in gold-tooled leather. Rogers Fund, 1922

I know very well that there’s been an alternative out there for while (6 years, to be precise): The StoryGraph. By many standards it is better than Goodreads, even for its short life. The statistics, the flexibility on book tagging and cataloguing, its simplicity, the focus on tracking your reads, etc. I knew it from few years back, when I first tested, but somehow, similarly as it happens with the balkanization of IM protocols, I did not want to jump into another service and leave my friends behind. But this time, my partner’s words resonated stronger than before given the context we are in.

If there is anything, for small the gesture might be, the times are proving that we must do it. We must take every chance to send the message that we don’t want to be part of their machinery. Even if it is just taking our reading data away from a service. And hope that other people will do the same, after all, the effect of explaining (here or in person) why I am moving away from an Amazon-centric service is more important than any (non-existing) monetary loss that I might cause to Jeff.

And so, here it is my (for now public) profile in StoryGraph.

It was only after I did the switch, that I learned the person behind StoryGraph is Nadia Odunayo, a black woman who I think is also deeply involved in the software behind it, at least judging by the updates in the publicly available roadmap.

Thank you, Nadia, for your work 👏.

Power vs Justice

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 18:24:14 +0200

Sauna Tour — Hermanni

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 18:37:26 +0300

As I have stated earlier, my journey at Compensate, as that of others, came to an abrupt end in May. But I admit it, I am in a very priviledged position: figuring out my future (professionally) required just a bit of patience, due diligence and finding out where I could help. It was a matter of time.

And so, once my future was cleared (more on that some other day), I had plenty of time in my hands, so I did what every other wise person would do, ~~I used it wisely~~ I procrastinated.

While trying to figure out how I could better spend my time and relax for the upcoming gig, my partner had a good suggestion:“why don’t you try all the saunas around?” was their suggestion. So this is how the “Helsinki Sauna Tour” came to be. I will make a review of each and all of the public saunas in Helsinki and publish it here as a post during this Fall. First stop: Hermanni.

Hermanni

As my first sauna sample in the tour I decided to start by one I have never been to before: Sauna Hermanni.

As the name hints, this sauna is located in the Hermanni neighborhood, part of the Vallila district. Its name comes from a free lord (?) named Herman Sigfrid Standertskjöld-Nordenstam, who owned a manor —Kumpulan kartano— in the area.

Magnus von Wright, Kumpulan kartano, 1861. Oil on canvas. Helsinki City Museum 2005. p. 54. Public Domain.

Moving on in time, the neighborhood came to be dominated by a large complex that served as abattoir from 1933 all the way to 1992, which, given how relatively centric this neighborhood is, feels quite shocking. After the murdering of innocent animals for meat stopped, the area turned into a lively complex hosting restaurants, cafés and even a local distillery of strong alcohol.

Suomen Karjakeskuskunnan teurastamo, Lautatarhankatu 4, 1933. Film paper. Helsinki City Museum. CC BY 4.0.

In the late nineties, gentrification came knocking at the door, but the prices for housing space were already quite high by the time the refurbishment was completed, something not suprising given Hermanni is bordering with Kallio and its sky-high rents.

The sauna

With a tram stop nearby, several bus stops close by and conveniently located in the upper part of Hämeentie (one of the main arteries of the city), accessing Sauna Hermanni by public transport, on foot or by bike, as I did, is fairly easy.

The sauna is capable of hosting 30 men and 20 women (separately) with a mixed shift on Thursdays. It is nicely maintained, claiming they’ve been in business since the 50s (!). It is an electric-heated sauna and the feeling I got was that of a bit dry sauna (typical from the electric-heated ones), although this perception might have been due to having entered the sauna a bit late with not so many customers having thrown enough steam at regular intervals before me.

One of the things that grabbed my attention was the pricing. Be it thanks to a class-conscious ownership, a good marketing stunt or a reminder of the times when their clientele were mainly local workforce with limited resources, accessing the sauna can be made at a discounted price for unemployed people. This was a perk that I was happy to find out.

Hermanni Sauna collage, 2023. Photo collage. Own archive. CC BY 4.0.

The facilities are stuffed with memorabilia from different decades, from old newspapers, to Super8 film cameras hanging from the walls, old magazines, and aside from the out-of-place-and-time cover girls, the changing room feels like a small museum worth a visit. The time between sauna shifts can be spent sipping a beverage and browsing said magazines or outdoors in the small courtyard, covered from peering eyes by a cute vine and chatting away with other sauna-goers.

Very recommendable, and a very good start to my Helsinki Sauna Tour.

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

Acknowledge the Science

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 22:59:52 +0300

Show your stripes. Creator: Ed Hawkins. Licensor: University of Reading. License: CC BY 4.0

Acknowledge the facts. Acknowledge the science.

Avoid. Reduce. Compensate.

Divest. Boycott.

Rage. Rebel.

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

Cul-De-Sac

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 15:03:11 +0300

According to the dictionary, a cul-de-sac is:

a blind diverticulum or pouch.
a street or passage closed at one end.
blind alley.

In other words a no-way-out. And this is precisely what Compensate, the company I helped to build and grow, had to face lately.

Our mission was clear and ambitious: push for a systemic change in the way people and companies take responsibility for the climate. Make everyone acquainted with the impact of our actions. Price them, beyond the value of the given service or product. And finally, ensure that said money goes into cleaning the mess we leave behind with the maximum impact possible. No greenwashing. Really doing it properly, and even going beyond, knowing that we have to clean two centuries of craze and running forward.

Alexandre Hogue, Dust Bowl, 1933, oil on canvas, 24 x 32 5/8 in. (61 x 82.8 cm) , Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation, 1969.123

But we could not continue. I collected my thoughts and posted them elsewhere, the transcript below:

What a ride. 🎢

For the past six months at Compensate we have been working relentlessly with the goal to secure funding and continue our mission to provide high quality carbon compensation to both consumers and businesses alike. It was just few weeks ago that Compensate’s customers reached 5M€ invested into carbon projects, an equivalent 306 128 tonnes of CO2 captured from the atmosphere. 📈

Unfortunately, we could not reach our goal of expanding our operations, for this reason, we have decided to “drastically scale back operations”, which is business speak for “we are all unemployed now”. This was a hard call to make, but a needed one, and in my humble opinion, the most dignified one for the legacy of Compensate, a forerunner in high quality carbon compensation services in Finland, and arguably in the whole world. 🌍

From this experience I take with me many learnings, both professional and technical, but above all and by far, it is the interactions with the team the ones I will cherish for life. That feeling of finding like-minded people working for the common good. Joining and expanding a team that made me rethink what work is supposed feel like, all while contributing to deliver world-class services and customer experience, and all towards making this a livable planet for all living things. 🌿

So what now? 🤔

After more than 10 years building software for different industries, I would really love to have a break, but the truth is, I cannot afford it. The global atmospheric CO2 readings from NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration say we are at 418 ppm, and in an upwards trend. With a “safe” limit of 350 ppm to keep global warming below 1°C, there simply is no slack. Climate change surely is the most important problem worth solving of our lifetime, but it is not the only one worth solving. This is why I feel I cannot afford to take a longer break. 📚

My main goal is to continue working in the sustainability industry, but Compensate’s bar for sustainable, science-based and credible solutions was left very high. If you are in the know of a firm that needs a software engineer to make this a better place to live either in sustainability or other fields, please get in touch 😊

I am left full of joy and gratitude for having been part of Compensate since (almost) the beginning, a truly remarkable group of people. Thank you for the opportunity to grow and for believing in me Annikki Laine and Antero Vartia; thanks to Atte Kojo for all the learnings during and after your tenure at Compensate. I am also grateful for having had the chance to work and have fun while working with my mates Ben Marsden, Joe Smallwood, Lennart Binscheck and Jonas Aaltio; and to Katri Kallio-Koski for the excelsior work you put forward, always with a smile. Grateful to Susanna Laanikari for enabling me to grow personally and professionally. Last but not least, thank you to all the team at Compensate that made magic happen. 🙏

Compensate’s blog post about scaling down operations.

HS Visio article with insights from Antero and Niklas (in Finnish)

Global Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide from the Global Monitoring Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Here I link some of the profiles of the world class team mates I had the pleasure to work with.

It is a sad situation, and we saw it coming. Like deer in the headlights, we stared at the event, defenseless and let it hit us and wash us ashore.

Now we need to get out of this cul-de-sac.

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

2022 a Year in Review

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 14:05:08 +0200

We are well into the second month of 2023, but I still want to record what have caught my eyes and ears in the past year.

Music

My past year’s scrobbling history shows something clearly: the global pandemic took its toll on the amount of hours of music I listened in 2022. In my case, the amount shrank and I blame for it not being able to attend live gigs, and thus my appetite decreasing. I also found myself revisiting carefully, album by album things like Led Zeppelin, and more recently Pink Floyd. I suppose these are early signs of a middle age crisis of sorts.

But if I am to highlight a discovery, that would be Malamute and Ginebras (thanks @bertogg!).

Although not as visible in my Last.fm profile, I have listened to music genres I have not listened before before, people like Bejo a guy from Canary Islands whose use of Spanish language is mesmerizing.

Books

Last year was my first not reaching my goal of reading a certain amount of books within the year. Not sure why, to be honest, but likely the extended time I spent outdoors might be to blame.

One book and author rose above all: Adrienne Buller and her The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Reading it was a definitive eye-opening experience. Adrienne brings an engaging narrative and good combination of analysis and synthesis to dissect the global capitalist society we take part on and how we are confronting the climate crisis.

Basque Celebration (dance at El Antiguo, San Sebastián) (circa 1890). Darío de Regoyos. Public domain.

Series

Many people have cheered The White Lotus. Yes, the second season was definitely good, specially with regards to character development. But that aside, I took a dive back in time and revisited Parks & Recreation. What a good series it was!, and how full of details every episode is!.

Movies

I had the opportunity to watch As Bestas already back in September, and I liked how the story was told and the characters and cast, and it seems it got good praise. But for me, the best came one of the last days of the year: Triangle of Sadness is a masterpiece of satire that connects directly with the topic I have been interested in for the past few years. And what an act does Woody Harrelson put up.

This year, as the pandemic seems to be receding, I am hoping to experience plenty more of live gigs, movies and other such events. I’ll make a mental note and record those here.

Bring My Voice Back

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 17:55:48 +0200

In the beginning, it was the blog…Well, not really. In the very beginning it was BBS, but I was too young for that, it was all that came after what influenced me. It was the email, the newsletters and then, the blogs. An explosion of people that had a fairly good access to internet combined with a little knowledge on how to put a website up, and suddenly everyone had a blog. Communities mushroomed everywhere. It was beautiful to see and take part of.

And then Twitter and Facebook landed, hand in hand with the raise of smartphones and free of charge, it gave a voice to even more wider group of people. They removed an already quite low barrier to have your thoughts out there on the internet (after WP, Blogspot, etc came up). And they changed everything, they even helped sprang revolutions.

But everything that has a beginning, has an end. In the case of Facebook, the time came when they sold users’ data to a British consulting firm and helped decide the American elections of 2016 in favor of you-know-who. It was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. By then (2018 when Zuck appeared before US Congress), I was long gone from this platform due to privacy concerns.

Gail Anderson on Marian Wright Edelman. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. © Gail Anderson.

In the case of Twitter, the community had long been complaining about rampant racism, sexism and general toxicity of the website. But the final showdown came with its acquisition in late 2022 by that-who-shall-not-be-named. In this case, the combination of toxic community, little benefit and large distraction was what pushed me to leave it behind in late 2018. But it is now, after the show that followed the acquisition has quieted down a little, when I reflect on the trends around content creation. The newsletters are the thing nowadays, I suppose, but some have claimed that 2023 will be the year of RSS and therefore, weblog-based content. Although, to be fair, this has been predicted over and over again in the past years.

For these past years, I have taken for granted my voice on the internet. I have traded independence for convenience. In light of the state of things, I think it is time to claim my own voice back, regardless if there is anybody who wants to hear (read) it. This will be for me the year to start blogging again. It will be here, and no, I won’t be providing comments or pingbacks, if you really want to get in touch with me, you can do it via email.

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

My New Rss Setup

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:35:07 +0200

I was not there when the first specification of RSS came out in March 15th 1999. But as soon as I got my hands on a steady internet connection, I got hooked at having the information I wanted delivered to me as soon as it came out. I recall being on my first shared student apartment featuring lovable people and an internet connection measured in kB/s, not MB/s. I was interested in the development of that new browser that was going to revolutionize the world: Phoenix, later known as Mozilla Firefox. But also addicted to the — nowadays defunct — Spanish Slashdot; the Galician blog community known as blogomillo and some other local alternative news sites like Vieiros. All of this information could come to me, instead me going after it every time, thanks to syndication standards such as RSS and Atom.

RSS logo, licensed under Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 (MPL)

I must have started with a stand alone client like Sage or something of the sort, then moved to Google Reader and after it was killed in 2013 I found myself pretty orphan of a good client, and relied in forgettable browser plugins.

Few years ago I decided to put some money in tinkering and bought myself some space on the internet — you are seeing part of it —. Apart from some personal projects and other shenanigans, I decided I would setup something to read feeds. I had two options:

Make a mess of the server and install a bunch of packages to get a functioning RSS server, something like TT-RSS.
Just install a client and SSH into the machine to use it.

The first option had many pros, like being able to see the feeds from my phone. So I went for it…just to leave it aside few weeks later even though it had all the bells and whistles. I discovered all I wanted was my own reading time not just carving some time while commuting to read half of an entry before jumping into a metro. So I started to look for minimalist clients that would require me to actively set time aside and sit to read the feeds. The second, more minimal option looked better now. Then I found the perfect candidate: newsboat. Newsboat was and still is perfect in many ways. It is simple, handling feeds is editing a plain text file, it is fast and it immerses the user into the reading experience. I chose it also because, due to career shifts, I was spending more and more time in front of the terminal, so it felt more natural.

Fast forward few years and I got myself into the garden-universe that is Emacs for reasons I explained elsewhere. Emacs is not an IDE it is the kitchen sink. But for some reason, I refrained from setting up any RSS client on my configuration. It was a change on my environment, dropping iTerm, ZSH — all Mac OS X in short —, that got me closer to this idea; I could no longer open URLs by clicking on my terminal emulator — in hindsight a bad idea, as it might be a security issue —, so I decided to give a go to elfeed. And oh boy!, do I like it. Now I have another experience integrated in my environment, alongside mail client, multi-purpose programming environment, blogging tool, etc. My configuration for elfeed is as follows:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c e") 'elfeed)

(use-package elfeed
  :ensure t
  :bind (:map elfeed-search-mode-map
   ("m" . elfeed-toggle-star)))

(use-package elfeed-goodies
  :ensure t
  :after elfeed
  :config
  (elfeed-goodies/setup)
  (setq elfeed-goodies/entry-pane-position 'bottom
        elfeed-goodies/switch-to-entry nil
        elfeed-goodies/feed-source-column-width 25
        elfeed-goodies/tag-column-width 27))

(use-package elfeed-org
  :ensure t
  :after elfeed
  :config
  (elfeed-org)
  (setq rmh-elfeed-org-files (list "~/feeds/rss.org")))

(use-package elfeed-dashboard
  :after elfeed
  :ensure t
  :config
  (setq elfeed-dashboard-file "~/feeds/dashboard.org")
  ;; update feed counts on elfeed-quit
  (advice-add 'elfeed-search-quit-window :after #'elfeed-dashboard-update-links))

This gives me a dashboard from where to glance at the feed counts, the RSS functionality nicely integrated with Emacs (i.e. n for next, p for prior, s to invoke the search filter, etc); some positioning and tweaks made with elfeed-goodies and lastly the ability to manage my feeds in org mode files with elfeed-org, making it dead simple to share and version. My feeds are available in Github, by the way.

I chose to write about all this precisely today, 11th of January, because it is a rather sad, but worth remembering date. Today marks 8 years without Aaron Swartz. Aaron was a wickedly talented guy, two years my junior that accomplished more than many people do during their entire lifetime. He fought for open access to information (see United States v Aaron Swartz); collaborated with Wikipedia becoming a voice of dissent against Jimmy Wales; got his hands dirty as a campaigner for Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA); created a collaborative online library — Theinfo.org — at 13; became core contributor to the RSS working group defining the first standard for the technology at age 14 (!); he contributed to the Markdown specification; helped Lessig architect Creative Commons; and was original founder and coder of web.py the engine behind Reddit; the list goes on.

Aaron Swartz at a Creative Commons event. Fred Benenson, 13th December 2008. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Above all, Aaron was an empathic person with a huge heart geared towards the common good. Being cornered by lawyers in the case for open access to research publications, he committed suicide 8 years ago today.

We must keep remembering Aaron. Take your time to browse through his writings posted in his website, or get your hands on a copy of “The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz”, a posthumous collection of his writings introduced by Lawrence Lessig.

P.S.: If you are interested in following this website, here is a link to the RSS feed for manuel.is

EDIT Mar 8: Minor edits

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

The Year in Review

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 18:48:19 +0200

I am taking a rest after Boxing Day’s dinner, and leaning on the sofa. On the background, the TV is on, screening a re-run of a movie I have not seen since my childhood: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The movie brings plenty of memories, and oddly enough, I decide to pick up the computer and reflect how this year has been for me.

I will not fall into rating how good or bad this year has been, or start lecturing other people what to do with their extra time. I don’t brag, and the internet is packed with people with recipes for a happy life, but that’s not available here. Instead, just a reflection.

And so it is, 2020 is almost over. I keep on thinking, but cannot find a way to thread a coherent summary. It started with tears: I lost someone important in my life. My grandfather vanished suddenly on the last days of 2019. He was 90 years old and had taught me a lot, amongst the most important things, to always keep the authority accountable. Something I will always be grateful for.

But I also experienced sweet moments: we have moved to a bigger home, that has proven to dub perfectly as office space, allowing me to bang on the keyboard and doing my work from home in a safe manner. This is something I am extremely grateful for as well. I have helped my better half to re-locate her own business to a more suitable place, and managed to keep conducting normal daily life in the same neighborhood of Helsinki that I have been living and loving, Kallio.

Demonstrators with flags in a freezing day in Hakaniementori (Feb 1971) by Rista Eeva Ser. CC BY 4.0

At the end of 2019, an irk started to grow in me. As basic needs have been covered for several years, I took on reflecting how or what was I doing to make my environment a better place and realized that apart from my contribution to some local NGOs, I was not being of real help. At the same time, I was feeling my work could be better used in a different manner, or in a different place. I soon realized both frustrations were interconnected when I came across an article about a local foundation aiming at saving the world (article pay-walled). Said article led me few months after to land a job as the first engineer working for Compensate, a non-profit foundation fighting climate change in the most direct way possible there is: removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Italian Landscape with Umbrella Pines, Hendrik Voogd, 1807. Public Domain

I took less pictures than what I hoped at the beginning of the year. Or, better said, less digital pictures, as 10 rolls of film are waiting in a box to be developed 😓. I acknowledged few months ago being stuck with my photography, and I even asked for advice on Instagram, to which I received many answers from kindred photographers stating to, instead I can focus on just seeing. Just being aware of my surroundings and with eyes wide open to just appreciate light, shapes and colors. And that’s what I have been doing.

Being away from the camera has not meant less time wandering. I am very grateful to have the friends I have, always willing to get out for a walk, be that in the woods or roaming through the city. Together we have ruminated the goods and the bads of this year. But not only I have walked the streets and woods of my neighborhood, I just checked with my Suunto and this year I have done nothing less than 220h and 47m of a rather wide variety of sports. Mostly running and cycling but also swimming, kayaking and a little bit of skiing (even though the lack of snow). In total 150 activities, which is close to half of the days of the year doing sports in some way or another. I can just but hope for good health and keep adding up to those numbers.

Party at home, woman dancing. Väinö Kannisto, 50s. CC BY 4.0

A year full of good and bad things. I look forward to see what is around the corner.

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

OS X, Ruby, OpenSSL, Homebrew and RVM as special guest

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 18:41:37 +0200

Scary, uh? Well, it is, but not in the daunting way. More in the nightmare way.

I am an OS X user. I have been for over a decade, and since OS X is a flavour of Unix, and I have been working with those for a good 15 years, I guess you could assign to me the power user label. Surprise! this title did not help.

At the beginning, there were very few choices to incorporate 3rd party software to your Apple machine in a sustained way (that is, reproducible, maintained, etc.) I tinkered with Macports, but it didn’t convince me and I recall having support for few libraries and few pieces of software (it did not occur to me to check how stable it was, I just wanted new shiny things to play with).

Then, somewhere around 2010 or 2011, I came across Homebrew, a package manager built in Ruby. I guess that is the main reason why it was spreading like a wildfire; at that time everybody was writing Ruby (or trying to get away from PHP) and at the same time the community needed specific pieces of software to support their development. I decided to adopt it for that reason alone (yeah, I know, how short-sighted). The amount of libraries and new shiny Open Source software that it was enabling was growing by the day. Already back then I reckon browsing through the forums and seeing the despair with my own eyes. This didn’t deter me though.

Fast forward a decade, finished my studies and now using these machines for a living. And there I was, this past Friday, about to wrap up for the weekend ahead.

For a reason I cannot recall, I needed to upgrade a package installed with brew and I went berserker and issued a brew upgrade. All these years suffering system-wide brew upgrades, but it seems that I did not learn my lesson, or that I just forgot from the previous incident with brew. In any case, I went ahead and upgraded a bunch of libraries and pieces of software. At first everything was going alright, but then I tried to command RSpec to run specs for me and a mischievous message warned me of the weekend ahead fixing the mess:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/libssl.1.0.0.dylib

I learned few things from the above message and all the tinkering across different Ruby versions. And now, I would like to share it here for you. Or for me, to remember.

If you are a Mac OS X and Homebrew user, chances are that you have installed OpenSSL, either directly or as a dependency of some other package. Recently, Homebrew removed OpenSSL 1.0 from their offering, somewhere along this deprecation process, Homebrew set OpenSSL to be openssl@1.1 by default, that is, set an alias for whenever a user does brew install openssl to install the heir to the throne under /usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1, instead of OpenSSL 1.0 (openssl 1.0.0t in my case). In the case of a Ruby development environment setup built using OpenSSL 1.0, issuing a brew upgrade will install the version 1.1 of said library and remove the previous version, breaking the environment. More in detail, given a Ruby version with a gemset (a collection of gems) built with the previous version of the SSL library, gems that make use of OpenSSL will expect the library mentioned in the error above, but after the upgrade, OpenSSL will be installed under /usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib/ instead of /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib.

Newer supported Ruby versions (2.4 and above) seem to work fine with OpenSSL 1.1. This is something I could not confirm from a reliable source, it is more my own experience. Nevertheless, if the Ruby version was built with OpenSSL 1.0, my experience is that it stops working and needs to be re-built, along with the gemsets you have for said Ruby version. But things are not solved that easily.

Ruby versions below 2.4 don’t support OpenSSL 1.1, and due to reasons© I need to work with some of those EOL versions. Having a setup with multiple Ruby versions and possibly multiple gemsets per version does not make things easier. For this reason I use RVM, a Ruby version manager. RVM uses a feature called autolibs this feature is enabled by default and it detects whichever package manager you have installed and calls it to fulfill requirements when installing new rubies. This will effectively ask from brew to install OpenSSL…which will nowadays be resolved to OpenSSL 1.1, leaving Ruby < 2.4 broken.

The solution I end up implementing was the following:

Install OpenSSL 1.1 with brew. It is the default after all. This will leave libraries under /usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib.
Build and install OpenSSL 1.0 however you like. I did it from source. You can use brew tap with this rbenv repo, or use brew extract. Brew, by default, will not link neither of them because it is a system library already present in OS X and Brew does not mess with those, instead it recommends altering the $PATH and make the system find those before it finds the default one (under /usr/bin/).
For Ruby >= 2.4, rebuild all Ruby versions and gemsets. RVM supports this by running rvm reinstall, which will rebuild gemsets as well.
For Ruby < 2.4, remove the Ruby versions, and install them again passing autolibs=0 and passing the the location of the specific version of the library like --with-openssl-lib=/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib --with-openssl-include=/usr/local/opt/openssl/include.

It took me a whole weekend to gather all this knowledge. I hope this might help somebody else, it will probably help my future self.

2019, the year in retrospective

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 17:41:20 +0200

The end of the year is soon upon us. I am not a fan of any new year’s resolutions or that sort of stuff, but for the past year and a half I have been dabbling into stoicism and some of its practices.

One of the most common practice is the daily reflection, exercised for example by journaling. This has proven for me to be a very powerful tool in all aspects of life.

Memories of summer. f/2.5 1/500s ISO100 @ 23mm

So, I wanted to mix daily reflections and the concept of zeitgeist, to review some topics I have touched during 2019. Below, a list in no particular order:

Photography 📷 – This has been a busy year for me when it comes to photography. This year has been about testing things and finding my way. I realised that rushing to publish material does not bring me anything, and I don’t need to please anybody but myself. I am comfortable with this line of thought and it will probably lead me to change the way I edit and publish my material, but I have not yet decided how or when.

I did a lot of experiments with my flow: from just processing JPGs, to exporting RAWs to a tablet and processing the files with different software like Darkroom or Ultralight (this last one made in Finland). On the same line, I have researched for what should become my go-to editing tool, having discarded Adobe products for their license and in line with my views, I have opted for RawTherapee. Next year I will continue mastering my tools further (software and hardware), gaining confidence at doing portraits and focus on finding out what I really want to photograph.

I even built my own personal cloud system with NextCloud installed on top of a tiny-but-extremely-powerful Rock64 attached to a 4TB disk; a home-made NAS/cloud, if you will, that end up discarded due to the subpar uplink provided by my ISP.

Code 💻 – This year I have grown quite a bit my knowledge in certain areas. Because of professional reasons, I have worked quite a lot with Ruby and a little bit with Golang. On my part time, I have decided at the beginning of the year to start learning Bash with Exercism. But then it dawn on me: allmost all I play with is object-oriented. Because of this, and my growing love affair with Emacs, I decided to start digging into Elisp, and here I am, half way through An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, happy and excited with the possibilities. But then, a colleague pitched to me Erlang, and I found it super powerful and, since it shares paradigm with Elisp, I thought why not? so I took over Learn You Some Erlang (thanks Larte!). My aim is to not take anything else, go deeper with what I have already started and see where that leads me.

Books 📚 – I have failed myself here. At the beginning of this year, I proposed myself two goals:

To read only books authored by women and (if possible) from different countries.
To read my first novel in Finnish.

For the former, everything started very well, with Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina as one of my favourite books of the past 5 years (go read it if you have not!). However, towards the middle of the challenge, I started to make exceptions (e.g.: with all technical books mentioned above are written by males) and then I failed at being consistent and started to read other subjects authored by males.

For the later, I decided to reduce the average amount of books I read during a year –around 30– to half of that, plus one, to make room for my pace understanding Finnish. Here I failed again, as I did not manage to settle on which book to read, and so I went ahead and just read English and Spanish literature without stopping to select a good Finnish novel to read other than Tove Jansson’s works which I have already read and don’t count as novel, but more teenage literature. You can find out everything I read from my Goodreads profile.

Leisure 🚴 – Fun was had, indeed. With my new bike I had fun on a solo 400km trip. Hiking the Finnish fjells short after with my dog Aarre was also a bliss. I was rather inconsistent at practicing some sort of physical activity for a sustained period of time (i.e. more than 6 months). I stopped my mysore practice due to fatigue, I stopped swimming out of boredom and I interrupted running because of the weather. Looking forward for getting on my bike in 2020.

Aarre running. 1/640s ISO100 shot with Minolta MC Rokkor 1:1.7 55mm

Doggy 🐶 Aarre is the best thing that has happened to me in 2019. Hands down. He makes me so happy!. I am super glad I came across him and I could provide him home, food and entertainment. Remember to adopt, don’t shop.

I have it clear now, I am failing to follow up on things 🙈 Well, at least I know what I need to work on.

I recommend this or any other kind of reflection if you are trying to get deeper into the whys and be systematic when going about things. I could start by updating this site more often…

EDIT Dec 17, 2023: Updated <figure> elements to include alt attribute.

Rakkautta Ja Anarkiaa 2019

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 13:55:44 +0300

This year’s Rakkautta & Anarkiaa will be a short one for me, as I’ll attend to just five screenings – down from my usual ten to twelve 😄. Below, the selected ones.

Aren’t you happy?

_{20/09/2019 21:00 @ WHS Teatteri Union}
Miles Davis: Birth of The Cool

_{24/09/2019 21:00 @ Finnkino Kinopalatsi}
Mid90s

_{26/09/2019 18:30 @ Orion}
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

_{28/09/2019 12:00 @ Kino Regina}
The Death of Dick Long

_{29/09/2019 14:00 @ Bio Rex}

See you at the movies!

EDIT Dec 8, 2019: Removed silly HTML markup (<sup> embedded within <sub>)

Of how Emacs saved my wrist

Tue, 21 May 2019 19:27:00 +0300

Act 1 – Perks of the job

As some of you might know, I bring bread to my table writing software. For this, I studied Software Engineering. My studies took rather long, around 7 years, probably due to a mix of laziness and a peculiar educational system in Spain. To develop that opinion alone would account for a whole set of posts, but let me cut it short and say that I got it done (and out of it) at the right time.

It is probably obvious to say, but I will leave it clear now, since it is the root cause behind me writing this post: being a software engineer requires a lot of time interacting with a computer. Interaction (in my case) is mainly done via two devices, a keyboard and a mouse. I guess no surprises there, right? Well, for one of those reasons that makes the Spanish higher education system peculiar, one does not spend (in general) as much time in front of a computer during the studies as when one lands, face first, on the job market. I think this is one of the reasons that let my malady pass unadverted, perhaps undeveloped during all those years.

Act 2 – It hurts

Fast forward to May 2016. I was over the moon. I had just started working at my current employer Digital Goodie as a backend developer, after a 4 years stint as Salesforce Developer. I would learn the ropes to contribute to an in-house e-commerce product on the making. My tasks would shift, I would start doing even more code, instead of the mix of code and requirements’ grooming, typical of the consultancy I worked until then.

As part of the normal procedures, a health check was performed, in which nothing relevant was found. But just couple of months in and I started to feel an intense and constant pain in my right wrist both during working hours, and outside work. After consulting with the doctor, I got a redirect to the physiotherapist, who confirmed my first impressions: the pain was due to my posture at work and if not treated, it could lead to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). At first, I blamed my mouse, an old Mighty Mouse I bought during my studies. Too flat of a design for my hand shape, quirky middle button, etc, all were to blame. Besides, by the end of the week, after resting during the weekend, my hand would recover well enough to stop me from requesting a sick leave.

So, in light of my (educated) guesses, and with the OK from the physiotherapist, my employer got me a fancy orthopedic mouse. Its main feature is that it is vertical (as opposite to an ordinary mouse) enabling a more comfortable position for my arm and my wrist. It did help, but it was not enough. The pain continued.

Act 3 – Yolo

So it was then when I decided to be more careful with my observations and found that, most of the time, I was not just using the mouse alone, nor the keyboard, I was switching between mouse and keyboard*. And this was due to the way I carried out my tasks. The blame fell on my choice of IDE. Around the time I started at Digital Goodie (back then, Foodie.fm), I was using TextMate and, despite not having fancy features like auto-completion, I had already thought of switching to Atom, the new cool kid in town, mainly due to vanity (yes, vanity, only a shiny new community separated those two programs).

Throughout my study years I had changed different times the development environment. I did not see that as a problem, in retrospective, I regret it. From Borland Turbo Pascal to Eclipse IDE passing by notepad++. I did not understand back then that, what I needed was just a plain text editor like Vim or Emacs. Those were familiar to me, sure, but I thought of them as giant old dinosaurs with dead developer communities (funny enough, I did not see the same issue with Eclipse 😆)

It was only then when I realised that I might need to write code with something more keyboard-centric. Well, d’oh, that idea has been around for over 30 years, the idea behind those editors I thought of as dinosaurs was spot on all along. Who would have thought that?

So I had to try to switch to a text editor. If I recall correctly, Vim and Emacs were drafted, and I made my choice solely on the impressions that I got from the embedded walkthrough. Nothing else. The switch was rather slow. I wanted to have a carefully crafted configuration that cattered for all my needs, at the same time I was familiarising with all the key strokes. I was naive when thinking about it, I learned later that I would never be happy with my Emacs config revisiting it again and again and finding bugs every time I would look at it; and sure I would never learn all the key strokes 😃

The pain went away as I embraced my now editor for everything. Years of accumulated wisdom won the battle for my editor of choice and did it helping me continue writing code and other things, like this post 😌.

hello world

Mon, 13 May 2019 15:54:11 +0300

Let this be the first one of many to come.

-Manuel