VampiroZ

In a recent article on his blog, about the nature of open source software, Ian Bickling does a good job on explaining some of the main reasons why Scrapy exists today.
To quote a few:

Underneath most open source work there is a passion for the craft itself. This is what leads to a certain kind of […]

I just started downloading Opera 10 for Linux with my 1.2 Mbps connection at a ridiculous rate of 5 kbytes/sec
Why?
Because most CDNs use only the geographical distance from the client, to pick the best mirror for downloading.
In my country, Uruguay, this typically leads to picking a mirror from Brazil which is far from optimal, because:

Brazilian […]

Every now and then, I stumble upon some article that amazes me because it portraits certain things that I always believed to be true, but never saw them explained so eloquently.
Such is the case of most essays from Paul Graham but, today, it’s also the case of this last post from James Bennett on the […]

Is it just me or the blogosphere is a bit down these days?. And I don’t speak only for myself here :).
Maybe everyone is just too busy, maybe it’s the blogs I follow, or maybe people are moving to Twitter or Facebook (neither of which I follow). But my Google Reader certainly isn’t as active […]

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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]