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. Example: # cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 8 0 195360984 sda 8 1 104391 sda1 8 2 1044225 sda2 8 3 194209785 sda3 8 16 78184008 sdb 8 17 78180291 sdb1 8 32 117220824 sdc 8 33 117218241 sdc1 8 37 1048576 sdc5 8 38 2097152 sdc6 8 39 3145728 sdc7 8 40 1048576 sdc8 8 41 109878209 sdc9 Suppose I want to mount /dev/sdc9 (it was /usr in my old FreeBSD) on /mnt. This is the command to do it: mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdc9 /mnt And, ye......

When you have accounts in dozens and dozens of servers, it could be hard to replicate and keep track of all your configuration files (aka. rc files). To be honest, that’s the reason why I never used rc files in the past, and always tried to stick with the default behavior of programs. But, for some time now, I’ve been using Subversion to keep and manage my personal rc files and it has proven extremely useful. If you don’t know Subversion I recommend you to read about it, even if you don’t plan to use it for development. It’s a great tool for keeping track of files, not necessarily source code. The Subversion book is the reference, but you can also find plenty of tutorials online. So the idea is simple: just use Subversion (SVN) to keep track of your configuration files, like you would use it to keep track of source code. To create a repository for your personal rc files you would do something like this: cd ~ svn mkdir -m "adding pablo rcfiles" https:/......

Have you ever ssh’ed into a remote server and wondered if you could run a program using the connection from that remote server in a transparent and easy way? Well, you can and it’s quite simple. Here’s the recipe for Linux. 1. Install tsocks using your Linux distribution package manager (preferably) or compiling from source. 2. Add a file ~/.tsocksrc with this content: server = 127.0.0.1 server_type = 5 server_port = 9999 3. add this to your environment variables: TSOCKS_CONF_FILE=~/.tsocksrc 4. ssh’d into the remote server by typing: ssh -D 9999 user@server 5. launch the application using tsocks. For example, if you want to run Firefox using the remote server connection, type: tsocks firefox There you go. The program will run using the connection from the remote server (where you have ssh’ed) in a complete transparent way, no matter which ports the program uses. An alternative way is to run the programs with this environment variable set: LD_PRE......

Beware of the whois service. There’s a lot of people in the world spying whois queries to steal domain names. Back in August I was looking for a cool name for my company, and the domain name was the starting point. To tell you the truth, insophia.com was not the first one at all, although I’m now convinced it was the best I started with others (arguably more or less) cool names, which some bulk DNS selling company stole from me after 4 days of making my first whois query to find out if they were free. And I didn’t even use any public web page for making the queries, I just used the good ol’ unix command line tool. So my advice is: if you are looking for a cool dot-com name, register all the “not so cool” domain names you find on the way, even if you are not sure at first (you never are anyway) whether you’re gonna keep them. Because, when you get to decide, it may be just too late....

Desde el martes mi nuevo celular es un iPhone. Al igual que hice con el V3, les dejo aqui los pasos necesarios para configurarlo con ANCEL. Estos son los pasos necesarios para desbloquearlo (gracias Jimmy!) y hacerlo andar con la tarifa plana WAP de ANCEL. No estoy seguro que sea la forma más optima de hacerlo, pero doy fe que funciona para iPhone que vienen de fábrica con firmware 1.0.2 o 1.1.1. 1. Downgrade a 1.0.2 (solo para iPhones con firmware 1.1.1) En mi caso el iPhone me vino con la versión 1.0.2 de firmware, por lo que no tuve que hacerle un dowgrade. Sin embargo, tengo conocidos que lo han hecho y les funcionó. Sin embargo, no conozco a nadie que haya logrado desbloquearlo con la 1.1.1 y le funcione con ANCEL. Este paso solo es necesario para iPhones con firmware 1.1.1. El downgrade es para volverlo a la versión 1.0.2 de firmware, que es la que funciona bien con las tarjetas de ANCEL, aunque probablemente tambén haya forma de hacerlas andar con la 1.1.1 pero aún no......

Brillante la movida de Google para competir contra Facebook. Están, básicamente, repitiendo lo mismo que hicieron con Google Talk para competir contra MSN. Los aplaudo. y no necesito desearles suerte porque ya sabemos cual es el resultado de un protocolo abierto impulsado por una empresa gigante: éxito inevitable...

Email obfuscation techniques are used to hide email address from spammers. They’re used to show email addresses in web pages without the risk of exposing them to spam bots which constantly crawl the web harvesting for them. In this article, I’ll describe 3 techniques I’ve used to obfuscate email address. 1. Obfuscating the HTML code This one consists in writing the email using HTML entities and (optionally) <span> tags. For example, if you want to to display the email “user@example.com” you would insert some code like this: <span>&#117;</span><span>&#115;</span><span>&#101;</span> <span>&#114;</span><span>&#64;</span><span>&#101;</span> <span>&#120;</span><span>&#97;</span><span>&#109;</span> <span>&#112;</span><span>&#108;</span><span>&#101;</span> <span>&#46;</span><span>&#99;</span><span>&#111;</spa......

Well, not in a traditional sense. I mean, I still receive loads of junk mail daily but they all go straight to the “Spam folder” so I never get to see them, pretty much as if I had never received them. Spam is just something I don’t care anymore. For me, it’s quite clear now that Spam filters have beaten spammers, hands down. Of course you need to use a decent spam filter but, frankly, who doesn’t? (when Gmail already provides an excellent one). There are also very good open source alternatives such as spamassassin and dspam, the latter which I’ve found extremely efficient. So, if you ask me, Spam is over. Sorry spammers, you’ve lost. Now let’s focus on more important issues such as Net Neutrality. Also, like I said a couple of years ago, Jabber will converge with email in the future (it’s already happening with Gmail/Gtalk) so communication will require a previous “synchronization” phase between the parts where thei......

Mucho he escrito y criticado en este blog sobre malapraxis en empresas como Microsoft, Antel y otras que (a mi entender) descuidan o equivocan el camino. Y lo cierto es que a todos nos gusta criticar lo que no podemos controlar. Es una forma de segura de criticar sin riesgos. Pues bien, ahora que realmente tengo la oportunidad de controlar mi propia empresa, espero no equivocarme o al menos no cometer lo mismos errores que he criticado en este blog. Es entonces que, con mucha alegría, tengo el placer de anunciarles el lanzamiento de Insophia, una empresa que trabajará en el área de las tecnologías de la información (¡vaya sorpresa!). No hay mucho para decir que no esté en la página. Será una empresa dedicada a brindar soluciones basadas en software libre y, por lo tanto, tenemos pensado liberar todo el código del software y las herramientas que produzcamos, aún cuando las licencias que usemos no lo exijan (como la BSD), ya que no lo liberaremos por obligación sino porqu......

Hace mucho tiempo hacía una reseña sobre una entrevista que dió Fernando da Rosa, sobre software libre, en un programa uruguayo. De hecho, fue el primer artículo real de este blog. Hoy tengo la felicidad de toparme nuevamente con otra entrevista brindada por Fernando da Rosa, pero esta vez a Radio Espectador donde responde muchas de las típicas interrogantes que se hace la gente que no conoce el concepto de software libre, como por ejemplo ¿cómo se hace plata con el software libre?. Les recomiendo que la escuchen, la charla es imparcial, no tiene fanatismos, solo respuestas concretas y objetivas. Desafortunadamente el streaming del Espectador (como software libre, al menos) deja mucho que desear, así que les dejo aquí unos links al audio de la entrevista en formatos más accesibles que RealPlayer: entrevista en formato mp3 (28 minutos) entrevista en formato Ogg Vorbis (28 minutos) Por si a alguien le interesa, estos son los comandos que utilicé para convertir el stream R......