VampiroZ

Hoy me doy cuenta que Arthur Clarke tenía razón cuando dijo que el ser humano, como raza inteligente, aún está en su infancia al ver que la proposición 8 (de prohibir el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo) fue aprobada en el estado de California. Más detalles sobre la noticia aquí (en inglés).

A mi en particular me parece un tema tan obvio que hasta me resulta estúpido discutir sobre él. Más discutible en todo casi sería el concepto del matrimonio en sí, que el del matrimonio gay. Pero bueno, se ve que hay gente que no lo ve asi.

Si alguien está en duda, creo que este excelente video de 8 minutos (en inglés) del profesor Lawrence Lessig (el mismo creador de las licencias Creative Commons, bajo las cuales se rige el contenido de este blog) trata el tema de forma muy inteligente y objetiva.

Nada más, solo resta esperar que la humanidad siga su curso y evolucione…

Hace unos días un amigo me mandó un link a este artículo del New York Times que habla de un reciente “blooper” de la bolsa a causa de un error en el algoritmo de scraping de Google News que hizo caer el valor de United Airlines unos mil millones de dólares.

La típica expresión en estos casos es: “Whooops!”

Y es que hay que tener cuidado con lo que se escrapea. El problema con Google News es su propia escalabilidad, ya que en definitiva no es más que el buscador de Google ligeramente modificado estéticamente y funcionalmente (en cuanto al algoritmo de crawling y scraping) y restringido a ciertos sitios. Algo muy similar a lo que es el Google Blog Search para los blogs. La gran diferencia es que, tanto para el buscador principal como para el Blog Search, este tipo de “bloopers” pasan desapercibidos. Quién no ha visto alguna página totalmente irrelevante colarse en los resultados de búsqueda de Google?. Pasa todo el tiempo, y nadie pierde mil millones por eso :).

Pero con Google News es diferente, porque la calidad importa mucho más, y ésta se ha venido sacrificando a costa de la escalabilidad.

Por eso Froogle (ahora Google Product Search) nunca progresó mucho como servicio, ya que los sitios de “Shopping Aggregation” tienen los mismos requisitos de calidad, y Google se enfoca en escalabilidad, que es lo mejor sabe hacer.

Pero bueno, Google es asi. Tiene muchos proyectos, algunos germinan, otros se secan, y otros quedan es un estado latente intermedio, como es el caso de Google News o Google Product Search actualmente.

Given the recent popularity of Privnote as consequence of appearing in ReadWriteWeb and the front-page of Digg, a rather heated discussion has arisen about whether notes send through Privnote are really protected against someone with access to the Privnote database.

We believe it is, and I’ll explain the reasons here by detailing the exact process used to store the notes in the database. I did try to explain it before in this post but unfortunately the explanation was obfuscated at best, and incorrect at worst.

Read the complete article

At first, Privnote looked like an ideal application for porting to Google App Engine because:

• it’s already written in the “official” App Engine platform (Python+Django)
• it’s entirely based on a request/response mechanism
• we would forget about scalability problems forever

So we give it a try and implemented a prototype, just to see how it goes, but, in the end, GAE didn’t work because:

• it doesn’t have support for SSL, which is mandatory for Privnote
• it doesn’t support third-party Python C extensions (which we use in Privnote) unless they’re pure-python modules

As for scaling Privnote, we”ll have to try other alternatives, but it was a good experience to gain some knowledge about Google App Engine and cloud computing, which are very hot topic these days.

When I launched Insophia, about a year ago, I wanted it to have a blog, right from the beginning. So I chose Wordpress as the platform for the site. However, in many occasions, when going to write something, I faced the question of where to post it. Should I post it in the Insophia (corporate) blog or here, at my (personal) blog?. And, even thought it may not seem that important at first, several articles never saw the light because that uncertainty prevented me from going on.

So I’m happy that I finally made a choice. From now on, I’ll write everything here. I can always aggregate the articles in the Insophia blog, if I see the need. My original idea with the Insophia blog was to be written by all Insophia people but, after a year, there are only 3 articles and all of them written by myself. Why did this happened?. Not much bloggers at Insophia, I guess. In any case, the “new” Insophia blog will be more like a “News” section (with quick short posts) and all articles (well, at least mine) will be published here.

In the future, if some people at Insophia become interested in blogging (blogging should be encouraged, but never -ever- enforced) we could aggregate all their blogs into the Insophia blog.

Have you ever wanted to send some highly confidential information (like credit card information or root passwords) over the Internet and were afraid others could be sniffing your traffic?. Well, I have, all the time. I’ve always being paranoid about this, so that’s why we, at Insophia, came up with Privnote, a tool for sending private notes over the net in a very easy and secure way.

All you have to do is enter the site, write the note and click Post. Then you get a link that you can send to the only person you want to read it.

What makes it so secure then?.

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Yo sabía que de algún lado me sonaba el “look” del nuevo favicon de Google…

favicon de pablohoffman.com (desde 2004)

nuevo favicon google.com

Voy a contar los pixeles iguales y si superan el 50% los demando!

I needed a virtual machine for debugging some Python memory leaking software without risking the health of my Ubuntu system. VirtualBox was my first choice because of its ease of install (just “apt-get install virtualbox”). Since I wanted to access the VM via ssh (instead of using the VirtualBox console) I found a bit annoying not being able to access the guest PC from my host PC. This is because VirtualBox does user-level NATing for providing connectivity to the guest PC. Although you can change the default virtual networking method, and use bridging instead of NAT, that requires installing bridge-utils and some networking configuration changes). I wanted something simpler, which didn’t involve installing additional software or modifying my network settings. After all, that’s the reason why I installed VirtualBox in the first place: to leave my system untouched. So after peaking at the manual, I found VirtualBox supports port forwarding between the host and guest PCs.

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Google has just launched AppEngine, a new hosting service with “all the Google infrastructure” available for you. For now, it only supports my favorite language, but they may add more languages in the future.

A couple of things that come to my mind now:

• If you’re running a hosting company, you should re-consider your business, specially if it’s a python/django one
• This is a huge booster for Django and, at the same time, a big blow for Rails
• Guido joining Google was a good idea

Let’s see how it goes, but I foresee a promising future for this one.

It took me some time to find out how to do this, so I’ll post it here hoping that someone will find it useful.

First of all, “fidsk -l” won’t show all your FreeBSD disklabels, you’ll have to do “cat /proc/partitions” to find the partition you wan’t to mount. If the Kernel has support for disklabels (it comes by default on modern Kernels) you will see all your BSD disklabels.

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