In this third post I’ll show some of the reptiles at the Guadalajara Zoo. See part 1 for the big animals and part 2 for the birds.
This sign was a bit of false advertising to me, or the croc went into the iguana area
I finally found the iguana
I think it was the mating season for snakes because there was a lot of love at those exhibits
With the recent news scandal about the NSA surveillance program code named PRISM more people is starting to question their use of cloud services thinking about their privacy. I’ve talked about free network services and ugly cloud stories but this is the ugliest of all stories going mainstream.
The autonomo.us group was focused in producing free network services and established the “definition” of what makes a free network service with the Franklin Street Statement. There is also a big list of self-hosted software you can use to replace most of the popular web based applications and services.
But in addition to that list, Peng Zhong created a web site called PRISM Break with a nice and easy to understand list of software, both desktop and web services to help protect your privacy.
I’ve already been using several of these programs and discovered new ones. It might be scary to run your own instances of web services or change the software you’ve always used, but freedom and privacy are worth a shot. I hope these list gets bigger with new software developments and current offerings get better as more people use them and get more attention.
I hope you liked my first post about my visit to the Guadalajara Zoo. This second post is about the birds. I love their bright colors and soft feathers.
Taking pictures of them is not easy but I think I got lucky and have some good shots to share.
I was very impressed by the peacock. I’ve seen quite a few in some places in Mexico but I rarely see them showing off their feathers. This guy was trying to impress a female and I think it even posed for my camera. Their personalities might be as cocky as they look.
I remember when I used to hunt pheasants for dinner back when I was living in Hungary. It’s been a while since the last time I saw one. They males have beautiful feather colors, the females are just brown. I remember they taste great served in soups.
The predator birds are the most fascinating to me. The look in their faces, the way they stand. They are great looking birds.
Oh the mexican eagle. A sad metaphor of our country these days to see this photo of this great eagle, symbol of our nation, behind a fence.
Pink flamingos are fun. They remind me of ballet dancers with the way the move and their leg extensions.
Their balance impresses me, how can they stand in one leg for so long and never fall down? I think I even saw one sleeping in that position.
There were many other birds that I couldn’t get the chance to take a good shot at, in a photographic way of course. Next post about the Guadalajara Zoo will be about the reptiles.
A few weeks ago I went with some friends to visit the Guadalajara zoo. I hadn’t gone to a zoo in many years. I remember not being too impressed by the animals as this time as an adult. It’s fascinating to see them up close and at the same time thinking they must be sad for being in captivity.
In a way they are no different than humans in modern day society: With the privacy scandals and freedom vs security debates lately, we’re not very different than these animals in limited areas that emulate freedom but safer than being in the wild while all our moves are being watched.
I took a lot of photos that I’d like to show here, so I decided to split the blog post into several posts, each with a group or type of animals. In this first post I’ll show the mammals, marsupials and one large bird that got in the mix.
The hippo area was at ground level and this happy guy was eating very very close to the fence, so I had a great opportunity for nice shots.
The titi monkey area was the most fun part of the trip. These little guys are very curious and will jump over you without notice. They also like to steal things from tourists like earrings, pens, lighters and anything removable from your person.
This titi monkey jumped on my back while I was photographing another monkey, then got very curious about my camera and tried to grab it from me.
Next we took a “safari” tour, where we saw many of the big herbivores from the African areas.
We also got the opportunity to feed the giraffes.
The last of the big animals we saw were the kangaroos. I thought they were not going to have them but there they were. I like the expression in this kangaroo’s face.
Before moving to other types of animals, we rested by the edge of the gully to take a landscape photo of this beautiful view. This place is called Barranca de Huentitan.
I’ve seen a lot of confusion on the use of the new HTML5 sectioning tags <article> <section>, <nav>, <aside> and the role left for the old <div> element we used often in previous versions of HTML specifications.
After reviewing the documentation and consulting several examples of usage, a basic practical skeleton for an HTML5 document should look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta content="utf-8">
<title>Your page title</title>
<div id="wrap">
<section id="main">
<header>
<h1>My page title</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Website main section 1</li>
<li>Website main section 2</li>
<li>Website main section 3</li>
</ul>
</nav>
</header>
<article>
<header>
<h1>My content piece title</h1>
<header>
<p>My content text</p>
</article>
<article>
<header>
<h1>My content piece title</h1>
</header>
<p>My content text</p>
</article>
</section> <!-- closing #main -->
<aside>
<p>Sidebar content</p>
</aside>
</div> <!-- closing #wrap -->
<footer>
<p>This is my footer</p>
</footer>Here’s a colored chart to understand better the nesting of the elements:
The <div> element has no meaning in semantic web development practices. It should only be used for styling purposes. In my example, I used it as a wrapper for centering the main content with CSS styling. I could have used <section>, but semantically there was no point on having a section that has nothing else but another section immediately inside it. I only need to wrap all the content so I can style the margins and colors of the background. So I use <div> when I need to wrap some content just for presentation purposes.
I always struggle when deciding to use <section> or <article> for a particular piece of content, or how to layout the document’s structure.
The W3C defines the <article> element as:
The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is, in principle, independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.
For the <section> element, the specification says:
The section element represents a generic section of a document or application. A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content, typically with a heading.
So in that sense, you can nest <article> in <section> or <article> in <article> and <section> in <article>. Yes, I know, this is still confusing.
On my example structure, I put a main <section> with the ID of “main”. This means I have a “main” section on my page, with a list of articles. Each article has its own heading and content. Some articles might have subsections, hence having <section> nested in <article>.
For the case of nesting <article> in <article>, the W3C exemplifies with a blog post and it’s comments. Since the comments are related to the article, they must be inside the tag, but each comment is an independent piece of content that can be individually distributed (direct link to a comment).
So in that way, the HTML structure will look like this:
<article>
<header>
<h1>My blog post title</h1>
</header>
<p> my post content </p>
<section id="comments">
<article id="comment-1">
<header>
<h1>Comment subject</h1>
<p>by line</p>
</header>
<p>Comment text</p>
</article>
<article id="comment-2">
<header>
<h1>Comment subject</h1>
<p>by line</p>
</header>
<p>Comment text</p>
</article>
</section>
</article>Here’s the colored chart:
I hope this give a clearer view on how to use the sectioning elements in HTML5 and this example code serves as a quick boilerplate for your projects.
Nowadays is more common to hear stories about people getting rich and accomplishing great things at an early age. Fortunately, there is the other side of the coin. Not everything is lost if you’re not a millionaire by 30, or accomplished something important.
Recently the media published a story of the 17 year old who got bought by Yahoo for $30 million. Then we have Mark Zuckerberg who became a billionare (yes, with a “b”) at the age of 23. And of course the now cliche of Bill Gates founding Microsoft when he was 20 years old. And well, if you’re interested you can grow this list with a Google search on “young millionaires” anytime.
These stories are supposed to be inspiring for young people starting out, but sometimes, for me, these kind of news are depressing considering I haven’t achieved something remarkable or a million dollar company.
Lucky for us, the “older” folk (whatever your age can be), there is still hope. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson’s mum recently wrote a book at the age of 85 and is thinking on writing another one! My favorite latin comedy screenplay writer, Roberto Gomez Bolaños, played his now legendary hit character for the first time “El Chavo del 8” at the age of 40.
For whatever you want to do, whatever you’ve always wanted: It’s never late to start. Keep your hopes, keep trying and never quit.
Political scandals have always been about leaked information. Don’t you wonder why sensitive data has been passed around in clear text on the leaked cables that Wikileaks has been making public, while your latest SpongeBob Blu-ray or DVD disc is encrypted with DRM locks and transactions like your book purchase at Amazon is secured and encrypted by SSL certificates?
Encryption has been overlooked by general public all the time. You only hear about it in “hacker” films or breaking news scandals. Although encryption is commonly associated with hiding secrets, when in fact it’s more about securing information. When you change the mindset you’ll start considering encryption as something more relevant for your everyday digital life.
For example, the cloud storage service Mega has encryption built in, after the lessons learned on the data kidnapping of MegaUpload servers. This is for the protection of both parties, the service providers and yourself, the user. This way, only you can open the files and not even Mega employees can know what is in your storage account. Dropbox, Google Drive and other services don’t provide the same level of security, so basically anyone that has access to those servers can see your personal information.
There are many types of encryption methods. One of them is called GPG (initially PGP but the free software version is known as GPG).
GPG is a two key system, where you hold a private key and a public key. The way it works is that you encrypt a file with someone’s public key and send it. On the receiving end, the other person has a private key, and only with the private key the message can be deciphered.
Public keys can be obtained from the person directly through a file transfer or email attachment prior to encrypted communication. Some people, like me, publish their public keys on their personal web page. The most common method to get a public key is to search it on key servers. Most GPG GUI programs have the option to search, download and upload public keys on key servers.
So to get started with protecting our data using encryption, you’ll need to learn the basic concept words:
Encryption will protect the contents of the file, image, text or whatever is being encrypted, so that only the owner of the private key can view it.
If you want to protect a file only for your eyes, encrypt it with your own public key.
This is the process of removing the encryption so that you can view the contents of the protected file. This can only be done if the contents were encrypted with the public key of the person who’s supposed to see the information.
If someone sends you a file that was encrypted with your public key, only you, who has the private key, can decrypt the file.
Sometimes the only layer of protection you need, is to make sure the contents of a file or email were not altered between the time you send it and the time it is received by the other person.
It also works as a way to make sure that a message is coming from you, since you need your private key to sign the file and only you have access to it.
Signing a file or text is a mechanism to know that the contents are intact. This does not hide the message itself, it only adds a signature to the file to ensure that every bit is in place with no modifications.
This is how you check a file or message’s signature for authenticity and integrity. If the signature doesn’t match, it means that the file has been altered or didn’t came from the right person.
You can sign or encrypt a message or file. Signing doesn’t hide the information but it helps to certify that the information hasn’t been modified by anyone else before reaching you. Encrypting will hide the information so no one can see the message or file’s contents.
To setup GPG on your system, you’ll need to generate your public and private keys. Any GNU based system is compatible with GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). Most GNU/Linux distributions are already bundled with the gpg command-line tool. If not, on a Debian-based distribution you can install it with:
sudo aptitude install gpg
After you installed gpg on your system, to create your keys for the first time, all you need to do is open a terminal and type:
gpg --gen-key
This will start a step by step process with some simple questions. When in doubt, use the default options by just pressing Enter. Don’t fear the command line, it’s just text.
When asked for a passphrase, note that GPG is not asking for a pass word, it’s asking for a pass phrase so make sure it is longer than one word and an easy to remember sentence.
Once that is done, you can check your list of keys with
gpg --list-keys
If someone hands you their public key on a file, you’ll need to import it to your keyring to use it:
gpg --import key.asc
The key.asc is the file with the public key.
You can also search for someone’s public key on key servers
gpg --search-keys myfriend@email.com
After the results, the GPG will ask which key you want to import. Select the key from the results list by their number at the beginning.
To encrypt a file, first you need to import the receiver’s public key, then you can use it like this:
gpg --encrypt --recipient myfriend@email.com my_message.txt
This will generate a file my_message.txt.gpg which is the encrypted file you’ll want to send.
To decrypt a file, the sender must have used your public key. You can use whatever name you want for the output file, in this case “my_message.txt”
gpg --output my_message.txt --decrypt my_message.txt.gpg
To sign a file you use this command:
gpg --armor --detach-sign myverifiedfile.zip
This will create an additional file called ‘myverifiedfile.zip.asc’ which is the signature to verify the file. Send both files to the receiving end.
You receive two files: the data file and the signature file. You can verify the signature with this command:
gpg --verify signature_file.asc myverifiedfile.zip
If you’re on GNU/Linux and using KDE you can install the user interface KGPG
sudo aptitude install kgpg
On Gnome, you can use Seahorse
sudo aptitude install seahorse
For graphical user interface options on Mac OS X and Windows, you can check the GPG website.
These GUI front ends will integrate well with your desktop environments, so you can easily encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify files from the file manger right-click menu options.
The easiest way I can recommend to use encryption with email, is with Enigmail, an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. It integrates very well and makes it easy to sign, encrypt, verify and decrypt email messages.
In case you haven’t generated any keys, Enigmail will help you generate them with an easy step by step graphical Wizard.
I hope this guide helps you know more about encryption and how to use it. And remember: Encryption is not only about hiding secrets; It’s about protecting your personal information.