There are several ways to improve the performance of a web site. One of them is HTTP compression. Moreover, compressing the web server responses can save tons of bandwidth without adding any significant amount of extra CPU load on the server. Two of the most common compression algorithms used in HTTP are gzip and deflate. [...]

By default, when the user installs software through the RPM Package Manager or through YUM, usually, the software’s configuration files included in the RPM do not replace the existing configuration files on the filesystem, but, if they differ from those that currently exist, they are saved with the rpmnew extension. In case the rpm is [...]

It is widely known that, if virtual hosts in Apache (httpd) are configured to permit vhost administrators override specific configuration options at the directory level using htaccess files, the web server consumes valuable time in order to check whether an htaccess file exists in every directory included in the requested path and parse it. On [...]

I have been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix (version 0.5). I’ve witnessed all the effort that has been put into making this web browser a success. It is still the only web browser I can fully trust. Suddenly, earlier this year, the Mozilla Foundation decided to change the release strategy of the project [...]

It’s been a while since the details of an SSL/TLS vulnerability have been released to the public. Since then, security experts have worked on the issue and have released a whitepaper describing how to mitigate the attack, known as BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS).

Mozilla Thunderbird is of those pieces of software I could say I am a fan of, but since I upgraded from TB3 to TB5 and recently to TB6, I’ve been experiencing various problems with the application’s overall speed and responsiveness. Using Thunderbird almost felt as if it was reading its data from the internet. Working [...]

It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X [...]

The fact that the developers of two projects with common goals decided to get along together is news in the Free Software world. What we usually hear are the announcements of new forks. I was very glad to read that the developers of two projects, ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs, which are open source tools that can [...]

I just discovered the Read-It-Later addon for the Firefox browser. This is one of the most fantastic plugins I’ve seen in a while. From what I see, there have been about 4 million downloads already. This means I am too late, but as they say “better late than never“! This extension makes it possible to [...]

I recently read that the Free Software Foundation has given the Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the TOR Project. Congratulations! There are indeed some cases that the TOR network can be extremely useful to the societies. On the other hand, the fact that an organization like the FSF gives this award to the [...]