VampiroZ

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.

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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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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.

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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

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