After using Blogger and WordPress for 5 years each, it is time for something new. I am migrating this blog to a new space, https://ariya.io, with the primary objective of delivering it as fast as possible.

PNG format is very useful because it preserve all the colors, making it suitable to depict a screenshot faithfully. Unfortunately, many graphics applications do not produce a PNG file with the smallest possible size. Fortunately, this situation can be remedied using an additional tool such as Zopfli...

In the earlier blog post, I mentioned the use of Nix as a package manager on OS X. In this follow-up, you will witness the power of Nix to create isolated development environments.

Power users on OS X are familiar with Homebrew or MacPorts for installing and managing software packages conveniently. Yet, those two well-known tools are not the exclusive players. There is a growing interest in Nix, particularly for its use on OS X.

When using a programming library, it is unfortunate that we often encounter the use of function and property names in its negative variant. Particularly when there is a choice of two values, using the positive variant would help reducing confusions and ambiguities.

We often hear stories of harmful last-mile content tampering, from YouTube video downgrading to JavaScript-injected advertisement. This prompted me to run an experiment of always-on VPN on my phone (Nexus 5X running Android 6). Surprisingly, I come to the conclusion that it is definitely feasible to...

MozJPEG, a JPEG encoder project from Mozilla, is a fantastic way to optimize your JPEG files. Setting it up however might be quite a hassle. Fortunately, a virtualized environment such as Docker offers a much simplified way to use MozJPEG.

Using Docker on OS X is getting easier. Previously, it involved setting up boot2docker by hand. With the new Docker Toolbox (which wraps boot2docker and Kitematic, among others), installing Docker is almost trivial.

ChakraCore, the JavaScript engine that powers the new Edge browser, has been open-sourced by Microsoft. While currently it only runs on Windows, support for other operating systems is in the roadmap. It is fun to follow the progress of the Linux version of ChakraCore.

An important step in improving your public speaking skills is to learn from the master. These days, there are a lot of very fascinating talks that can become the source of inspiration. One of them is the most recent TED talk titled, “The four fish we’re overeating”.