Geek Lab

Bueno gente, si alguno de ustedes esta orgulloso de su laboratorio hogareño por los equipos que tienen instalados o porque tienen algun rack o algo por el estilo, lamento desilusionarlos, ya que esto los va a hacer babear a unos cuantos.

Linux cumplió 14 años

Y si, se me pasó, el cumpleaños número 14 de Linux fue el 6 de Octubre y como no podía ser de otra manera, aca les dejo un extracto de aquel famoso mensaje dejado por Linus Torvalds para comunicarle al mundo lo que había hecho. Es increible pensar donde estamos hoy, cuando se lee aquel modesto mensaje.


¿Echas de menos los días de minix-1.1, cuando los hombres eran hombres y escribían sus propios controladores de dispositivos? ¿Estás sin ningún buen proyecto entre manos y tienes ganas de meterle mano a un sistema operativo que puedas modificar según tus necesidades? (…) Este post puede que te interese.
Como mencioné hace más o menos un mes (?) estoy trabajando en una versión libre de algo parecido a minix para ordenadores AT-386. Ya estoy en la fase en que es usable (aunque puede no serlo, dependiendo de lo que quieras hacer) y voy a empezar a publicar el código fuente para que se distribuya más ampliamente. Actualmente está en la versión 0.02 +1 pequeño parche, pero he podido ejecutar correctamente bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress entre otras cosas.
El código fuente de este pequeño proyecto doméstico está en nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) en el directorio /pub/OS/Linux.

Este es un link al mensaje completo y original de Linus.

Check Point compra Sourcefire

Check Point, la reconocida empresa de seguridad, comprará Sourcefire, la empresa que desarrolla el conocido Snort, una de las mejores herramientas IDS existentes en la actualidad.

Martin Roesch, el fundador de Sourcefire y autor de Snort, ha anunciado la venta de Sourcefire en un comunicado en el cual aclara que Check Point continuará con el desarrollo bajo licencia GPL de Snort.

Esperemos que esto sea así y que no se vengan con ninguna sorpresita..

Quantumlink Reloaded

Hace ya algunas semanas que vengo siguiendo un proyecto asombroso, pero primero los pongo en tema.

Hace varios años, allá por la década del 80 antes que se popularizara el acceso a Internet, había alguno que otro servicio en linea para usar con esos veloces modems de 300bps o 1200bps !!!.

Pero uno de esos servicios sobresalía del resto, tal vez no por ser le mejor ni el peor, sino porque era exclusivo para nuestras queridas computadoras Commodore. Este servicio solo era accesible desde USA y Canadá y como ya habràn adivinado, se llamaba Quantumlink.

El nombre Quantumlink (o Qlink para abreviar) puede no decirle nada a la gran mayoría de uds. pero América Online o AOL seguro que si, y seguramente se sorprenderán al enterarse que Quantumlink se transformó en AOL, por lo cual eso que casi nadie conoce terminó siendo lo que casi todos conocen ahora.

Por aquellos años yo estaba obsesionado con un servicio en linea, pero obviamente nunca logré conectarme a Quantumlink. Obviamente no era posible desde la Argentina (excepto haciendo una llamada larga distancia a USA, claro).

Increiblemente aún quedan muchos fanas de Commodore (entre los que me cuento). Algunos de esos fanas, muy capaces por cierto, se dedicaron desde hace algunos meses a hacer ingeniería inversa del servicio y han logrado reescribir el servidor desde cero y sin ninguna pieza de software del servicio original.

Aún no funciona el 100% del servicio original, pero igualmente es una experiencia recomendable para cualquier antiguo fana de Commodore. En quantum-link.org van a encontrar bastante información de como conectarse y también tienen un foro muy interesante.

Este es un logro asombroso, ya que casi no existe documentación y AOL no cooperó para nada en esto, ya que increiblemente parte del código original aún persiste (o por lo menos persitió por muchos años) en su actual servicio en línea.

Lo que alguna vez era un servicio pago y solo accesible para USA y Canadá hoy es nuevamente una realidad y se puede acceder por Internet obviamente desde cualquier parte del mundo y gratis!!!.

Se puede acceder con una Commodore real de "carne y hueso" o con algún emulador, por ejemplo Vice.

Cual es el sentido de todo esto y que ventaja tiene respecto a todo lo que ya hay en internet?. En realidad no mucho, solo es el valor sentimental que tiene para algunos de nosotros, quien haya vivido esa época y haya tenido su Commodore lo valorará, el resto de los mortales seguramente no podrán entender que sentido tiene "gastar" tiempo y esfuerzo en esto.

HD DVD vs Blu Ray

Hace ya mucho tiempo que vengo escuchando en distintos podcasts y leyendo en varios blogs acerca de la batalla entre Blu ray y HD DVD, pero no he tomado ninguna posición al respecto todavía.

Los dos formatos representan un avance respecto al DVD actual (justo ahora que me compre una grabadora de DVD!!) tal como el DVD representó un avance respecto al CD-ROM.

Los defensores del HD DVD son Toshiba a la cabeza, Sanyo, NEC, HBO, New Line Cinema, Paramount Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Warner Home Video y aparentemente Microsoft e Intel.

Del lado de Blu Ray están Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Pioneer, LG Electronics, Dell, HP, Apple, Electronic Arts, Twentieth Century Fox, Vivendi Universal y Walt Disney.

Mientras que un DVD convencional de los actuales tiene una capacidad de unos 4.7GB; HD DVD tendrá una capacidad de entre 15GB y 30GB, mientras que Blu-ray tendrá una capacidad entre 25GB y 50GB. Los dos nuevos formatos usarán lasers azules en lugar de los rojos que se utilizan actualmente en las reproductoras y grabadoras de CDs y DVDs, lo que permite mayor densidad de grabación sobre la misma superficie.

El problema es que al haber dos formatos candidatos a ser sucesores del DVD, hay una guerra entre los defensores de uno y otro formato, pero independientemente de las ventajas de uno sobre el otro, desde mi punto de vista lo importante son los consumidores, y como aseguran que tanto las lectoras HD DVD como las Blu ray podrán leer los actuales DVDs entonces es probable que tengamos muy buenos precios en el mercado porque se van a sacar los ojos para imponer cada uno su formato. Aunque seguramente, encontraremos reproductores compatibles con ambos formatos y todos contentos.

Pero por otro lado quienes armen sus colecciones de lo que sea en estos nuevos formatos deberán apostar a uno u otro formato y si uno de los dos se impone a la larga es posible que muchos de nosotros nos equivoquemos e invirtamos en el formato "equivocado".

Y tenía que pasar…

Y bueno, tenía que pasar, a partir de hoy 30 de Septiembre de 2005, he decidido empezar a publicar las noticias del blog en castellano.

Antes eran en inglés sencillamente porque tenía ganas de practicar un poco de inglés, pero bueno, ya se me debe haber pasado, porque ahora prefiero seguir en castellano.

Voy a traducir, las secciones del sitio, pero las noticias viejas no las voy a traducir, prefiero dedicar el esfuerzo a poner cosas nuevas.

Ajax and Voo2do

Well, many time had passed since my last post, I've been a bit lazy about writing, but on the other hand I was not excited too much with anything enough to publish it here.

Sure, many things are floating around, the PSP, Google blog search service, iPod nano and more, but not enough interesting to me.

But that changed, two things caught my attention in the last two days. Ajax and Voo2do.

Ajax is an exciting new approach to writing web applications. It's not a new technology, but a combinatino of them XHTML, CSS, XML and more. Everything glued at your side with Javascript. Yes, any modern browser is Ajax capable because Ajax is simply a matter of using Javascript to call the remote server to make http transfers with XMLHttpRequest

But what the heck Ajax mean?. Well, the name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML.

Have you noticed that when you browse a web site, you are constantly submitting forms or clicking links so as to send data to a server and then receive it´s response?.

Well Ajax, makes the response seems much faster. When an application is written using Ajax it simply changes the part of the page that has changed and not all of it.

Have you seen how responsive gmail feels? well, they are using Ajax. Many more are using it, like Flickr, Google Maps, A9 and more.

Ajax has an important role in Web 2.0.

The other exciting thing that caught my attention is Voo2do. It´s a simple and very usefull Ajax site. It´s a time management application that you can use from your work, home, or anywhere (well, everywhere you have an internet connection available) to manage your time organizing yourself with projects and tasks.

Simple and nice interface and straight to the point. You will be managing your projects in no time, give it a try.

Telecom Argentina doubles aDSL bandwidth

Telecom Argentina doubled aDSL bandwith, and now my original 256k/128k (that was doubled to 512k/128k sometime ago) was upgraded to 1248k/256k. (yes 1248k !!!)

It´s a nice speed increase, but the latency is still horrible, I have about 250-300ms and more on international traffic.
Also, I´m not so sure that Telecom will not increase the price also. Let´s see.

Anyone have more details?

PDA though

I've been using my new Tungsten T5 for about a week now and I'm happy with it. My only complain is still about the non user replaceable battery. Perhaps it can be replaced anyway, but I haven't took apart my T5 yet (I need the torx drivers). I've saw batteries for other Palm models at pdaparts.com, so perhaps something will appear in the comming months. Let's wait an see.

All in all, my T5 is an excellent PDA for me, although it has many not so good reviews, but it's worth my $251.99.- (I bought a blemished one with a free wi-fi card, a very good opportunity I think.)

It has a very strange memory model, 55MB of flash (non-volatile) RAM for your programs and data, 160MB of flash RAM to be used like a flash card, 41MB of flash RAM to store the ROM image and system files and 32MB of RAM used by the T5 to operate normally, take a look here and give me your oppinion.

I'm using it for the same things I used my old trusty Palm III, but now I'm listening podcasts through my 15" walk to my office and back, and carry some personal files too.

I've already made it work with Linux, I just used jPilot on my Mandrakelinux release 10.2 (Limited Edition 2005). I do not needed to install or upgrade anything, The only drawback is that I have to press the hotsync button on the USB connector and a couple of seconds later press the hotsync button on JPilot in order to make a succesfull hotsync, if not it fails.

By the way I've been listening Comunicando and Punto y Aparte podcasts regularly and will probably add a couple more (don't forget that my native tongue is spanish!!, I'm writing this in english just for fun).

Light WarDriving

Today I went for a little wardriving, it really was baby-sleep-driving, but Luca (my little son) got slept so fast, that I decided to turn on my wifi enabled Palm T5 and went for a little ride.

I have never done it before and I was shocked. I drove for about 10 minutes and I found more than twenty unprotected networks, I mean they were not even using WEP (I know WEP is not really secure). I do not tried to access any of them, but leaved my T5 on and scanning and it found lots of networks but I do not stop the car to access none of them (remember that Luca was supposed to sleep!!!, I do not want him to wake up because I was playing with some poorly protected networks.

Well, my point is how many people do not even bother or know how to protect their networks, or even know that they do have to protect them!!.

Palm Tungsten T5 PDA

Well, finally I made up my mind and got a Palm Tungsten T5 (with wi-fi card). I must say I´m soooo pleased with it. It´s a really cool toy!!.

The only thing I do dislike is that the T5 has and internal Rechargeable Lithium Ion battery, that it´s not user replaceable. So what will happen to my T5 when the battery stops working?. Do I have to send it to a repair shop, or what?. Well besides that, this PDA is absolutely fascinating; 256MB of RAM. 160MB of them can be used as a regular pendrive, and of course it can be used as an MP3 player, so I have three in one. A new PDA, an MP3 player (also video player!!!) and an USB pendrive. Ok, perhaps it's not the best PDA in the world, but consider that my last Palm was a Palm III, so I am very impressed with the T5.

I've installed the upgrade from Palm and the wi-fi drivers. Everything went smooth and it's working fine.

I do not have a wireless network of my own, but I discover a couple of neighbors nets in just seconds, and I will try it on a couple of public hotspots in my town.

Now I have to try it with Linux, because in the hurry I decided to use a Win98 machine to try it, but I will investigate how to use it with Linux. I think that this link will be very helpfull.

Podcasting

Finally I decided to find out about podcasting, browsed a little and found a couple of interesting podcasts. I decided to be a "listener" for the moment, but who knows...

Now I would have to finally get an iPod?, hmmm, probably not. I only have a 15" minute walk to work, so I do not really need an mp3 player, but they are so cool!!!.

I'm considering a new PDA with mp3 capabilities, I can probably justify the money on it easily :-)

But now Apple is talking about launching a new iPod with video capabilities around september and this is so much cool!!!!

ok, I will try to think with a "cool" mind and decide wich is better for me; and iPod, a flash player or a new PDA.

Detective work @ work

Sometime ago, many people left jobs here at the company I work for; this was a "voluntary retirement" and since many were IT guys, many knowledge left the company with them too. Suddenly all the work from a co-worker and good friend of mine who left the company became my responsibility.

He was (is!!) a very intelligent guy, we called him "bobby" (he´s called Hector), but his programs and scripts are

Siemens A53 GSM mobile phone

Well, finally I got a new cell phone. My previous one was an old trusty Motorola Startac 7867w. A really good phone I must say.

But it was time to move on an enter the GSM era (???). I must say that I'm no mobile phone fan and I do only like to be in touch when I need, nothing more. No digital camera (I´m happy with my Sony DSC-P93), no mp3, no fancy colors, just a phone for ocassional use (I want a phone, not a swiss army knife).

Looking for a cheap phone I took a deal from CTI (local mobile phone operator) for a simple Siemens A53 phone. It seemed as a nice phone *before* my purchase.

I really did not make any research at all, I just bought the cheap phone because it looks nice, assuming that every modern phone will be a decent one, right?, wrong!!

First it turned out that the A53 is a stripped down A56. It does not have the vibration feature (the motor was removed), you cannot upload ringtones as easily as with other phones, the keyboard is hard to read, the backlight is light years behind my old Startac, the volume level cannot be changed for SMS reception, the manual is really bad and more.

So, in my opinion this phone is not a wise choice. I cannot understand why Siemens made such mistakes with it, but I will surely will not recommend the A53 to anyone.

Apple going Intel? - UPDATE: YES.

Well, this is sounding on every corner of the Internet, there is a supposed Apple swicth from PowerPC to Intel processors. I don´t know if this is true or not, but comming from Apple, it can be. They successfully swiched from the Motorola 68000 family to PowerPC, (although they loosed many clients), so why not again?.

Perhaps it's only a commercial tactic to get more attention from IBM, but who knows?. Apparently Apple is having many problems with PowerPC processors in laptops.

UPDATE: Now it´s official, Steve Jobs announced it officialy. Read about it.

Cherokee Web Server

Today I meet Cherokee, a web server promising to be really fast. It supports on-the-fly configuration by reading files or strings, TLS/SSL (via GNUTLS or OpenSSL), virtual hosts, authentication, PHP and more.

Browsing the benchmarks it seems to be really fast.

I think I will try it on Sparky (Apache was too much for it). I will keep you informed about my progress.

Good Old Times

Today I was shocked. Browsing my file systems I have found an old Fred Fish disk collection. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you have probably never used an Amiga. If you have no idea of what an Amiga is, go and check here.

Anyway, the Fred Fish disk collection is probably one of the biggest public domain software collection for the Amiga computer. I remember ordering some disks directly from Fred and spending endless hours with the software on them.

Browsing them I found the Moria game on disk #194. It's a single player dungeon simulation. Moria was originally created by Robert Alan Koeneke for a VAX 780 (a supermini computer) and later ported to the Amiga.

I was not hooked to Moria or dungeon games, but I was really hooked to the Amiga. Now in 2005, I cannot believe we are now 18 years ahead of 1987 when I got my first Amiga. I remember many names from those days (in no particular order), Steve Tibbett, Rob Peck, R.J. Mical, Andy Finkel, Allen Hastings, Dave Haynie, Jay Miner, Eric Schwartz and many more. Congratulations to all of them for making the Amiga computer and supporting it.

Windows XP Starter Edition uncompatibility with P4 and Athlon?

It´s been sometime from my last post, mainly because I´m too busy, but also because I do not found really nothing interesting (to myself!) to coment on until today,

I really cannot beleive this. Microsoft has made Windows XP Starter Edition uncompatible with Intel's P4 and AMD's Athlon chips. It will only run on Intel's Celeron chips, AMD's Duron or Geode chips. On bootup it specifically checks the result of the CPUID instruction and fails to continue if a Pentium 4 or Athlon processor is detected

Why?, simply because Windows XP Starter Edition is for emerging markets.and targets beginner users, so it´s cheaper than other versions of Win XP. In other words, if you buy a P4 or Athlon you will have to pay more for your legal Windows XP, you cannot use a "low end" XP.

Let me make my own reading. Apparently you cannot be a beginner if you have money to buy a P4 or Athlon; money seems to "magically" transform you into an "advanced" user?.

Well, this gives me another reason to continue using Linux.

Microsoft changes TCP/IP stack

Well, once again Microsoft decided to make their own implementations of standards (remember what happened with Java?). This time they decided that TCP/IP 'raw sockets' are dangerous: "Supporting packet sends from simple user-mode raw sockets makes it entirely too trivial for compromised systems under control of hackers to launch massive distributed denial of service attacks," (Microsoft warned in a statement to ZDNet Australia).

I´m nor a TCP/IP expert, neither a TCP/IP developer to fully understand this issue and make my own technical based conclusions, so I will use common sense instead.

Microsoft need to make their own modifications to standards and other OSes developers do not need this type of modifications. If this changes are needed on Windows in order to make it more secure, why do other OSes do not need this changes?. Are other OSes less secure or do they really do not need this changes?

We can safely assume other OSes do not need this changes, because neither Mac OS X, Linux, the BSD variants, and many others developers do not said or do nothing about this. Perhaps all the other OS developers are wrong and only Windows developers have the truth...hmm, no I do not think so.

So if other OSes do not need this changes the only conclusion we can get is that Windows need this changes in order to be secure because of Windows design flaws.

Make your own conclusions.

Testing m0n0wall

Well, as I write this, I'm testing m0n0wall as my firewall. It's quite a good piece of software, but I think it's somewhat "less" that what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, it has many usefull features like an excellent traffic shapper, VPN support, and many more, but I miss the IDS (snort) and the lots of status pages of IPCop. And keep in mind it's designed for SBCs (single board computers) so it's impressive all the features it has on such a small footprint. Anyway I will keep trying and will let you know.

New TLD’s (Top Level Domains)

Well, once again, we have two new TLD's. This time they are .jobs and .travel. My question is: Were they REALLY needed?. I think ICANN keeps approving new TLD's wich people don't really need. Do you know all the TLD's available?, or you just keep surfing .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov and countries top level domains only?

I know many companies want a domain already taken, so using it with a new TLD is an option, but I do not think it's good for users, they just get confussed.

Unfortunately this seems to keep going, .asia, .mail, .tel, and .xxx are still pending for a decision.

If we think that each activity needs there own TLD, then we will have countless TLD's. So in my opinion they are pretty useless.

You don't need to be very smart to know that you will be forced to but more domain names and of course this generate money to "other people".

If for example you have a travel agency, and you have a couple of domains like "mytravelagency.com" and "mytravelagency.net", now need to own "mytravelagency.travel", so go ahead and pay for a new domain you don't really need, don't want, and were not looking for, but someone could pick it up and steal customers, so now "other people" had created a need for you and you have to pay for it.

No more words.

Mandriva Linux

The Mandrake and Connectiva fusion has new name, it's called Mandriva. Personally I dislike that name, but it reflects both old names. What will bring this to all Mandrake users?, who knows!!. Personally I´m thinking of moving to another distro, perhaps Kubuntu.
It's not the name change, I was thinking about this before. I like the idea of moving from RPM to DEB package system, so I can clearly go to Debian too, but I think I will go with Kubuntu.

Single Board Computer Firewalls

Since a couple of days I have been reading a lot about SBC (single board computers) based firewalls. I have found Soekris and WRAP boards interesting and I think I will get one in the future.
I like the idea of having this low power little boxes as a firewall. They are completly quiet boxes, fanless and with a CFs (compact flash) cards instead of hard drives.
Most people use them with m0n0wall, a FreeBSD based firewall, so I think I will take a look at it before anything else, just to see how good it is. And it's also a good excuse to get my hands on FreeBSD too. :-)

Emergency: Contingency Firewall

My IPCop 1.4.5 is working good, and I have no complains till now, but I was a bit nervous about not having a contingency firewall. My old firewall contingency server is now unusable, so al least I must have a software contingency firewall. I have picked Coyote as a floppy based contingency firewall, it needs only one floppy and does not require a hard drive, so in an eventual hard drive crash it's obviously a good choice.

It's a great product and I can easily use it as my main firewall, but I do like IPCop more so I will keep Coyote as my emergency plan.

My only problem setting it up was that in my present IPCop configuration, eth0 is the LAN interface (green), eth1 is the DMZ interface (orange) and eth2 is the WAN interface (red) and Coyote recognized eth0 as my LAN interface, but eth1 and eth2 were WAN and DMZ respectively so I was forced to change cables on the NICs to make it work. This was not a very smart thing to do, since when I do really need it I will probably have forgotten about it and I will think it does not work, so I decided to modify the Coyote installer scripts to make it match my present IPCop configuration. So I modified by hand all the references to eth1 and eth2 on the Coyote generation scripts, replacing eth1 with eth2 and eth2 with eth1. Everything worked as expected and now I do have my contingency floppy based firewall.

Upgraded to IPCop 1.4.6

Ok, I know, I'm too hungry for new versions, but that's me! :-). I upgraded my recently upgraded IPCop box. Now it's running version 1.4.5. Update: Now updated to 1.4.6.

With 1.4.4 it was not a smooth upgrade, but don't get me wrong. IPCop itself was easily upgraded, the problems were with "Copfilter" an "Addons Server". They were not ready for version 1.4.4 so obviously they're not ready for 1.4.5 either.

But taking the same steps as with the upgrade to 1.4.4, made them work with 1.4.5, except for Addon Server, that because of it's online checking, it reported that it cannot install the mods, so I have to scp the mods to the IPCop box and install them by hand and everything worked quite well, except that Addon Server does not show them as installed, but this is ok, because of them being installed by hand.

Linux in an Ethernet RJ-45 jack

This is really interesting, a german company made a network enabled linux system in an RJ-45 jack. It's called "Picotux". It has a 2.4.27 uClinux port. There is also an 802.11b enabled version of it (the antenna is bigger than the machine!!). I really like this kind of small devices, perhaps I can put one on the fridge and have a web server on the refrigerator!

Upgraded to IPCop 1.4.4

Well, I finally decided and upgraded my IPCop box from 1.4.2 to 1.4.4. All is working fine now, but it was not as smooth as it was supposed to be.

After installing the 1.4.3 and 1.4.4 upgrade files and before rebooting, I uninstalled all my installed MODs from Addon Server as it was recommended. Then rebooted and applied this patch to copfilter.

At this moment the copfilter menu dissapeared and accesing it directly with the proper url just kept it stopping the services. So I decided to go on reinstalling Addon Server and then go back to copfilter.

After installing the new 2.3 test Addon Server, the MODs started working properly, and when I Idecided to try another time with copfilter, I accidentally deleted the "home" directory and obviously all the web interface was gone!!!

After a couple of minutes of desperation, I tried to restore the home directory and was able to make it work (after a couple of frustrated attempts) from a 1.4.4 fresh iso image.

I removed completely copfilter and reinstalled it with the patch and everything worked as espected, obviously I had to reinstall the MODs because I had lost the original web interface of them when I deleted the "home" directory.

Everything seems to be working right now, so I think that my "home" restore was successfull.

Advice: wait for the official Addon Server and Copfilter upgrades.

Gentoo 2005.0

I've read in Barrapunto that Gentoo 2005.0 is out. I've always been curious about Gentoo and never tried. Perhaps it's because I'm feeling at home with Mandrake, who knows. But I think time has come and probably will be trying it on my SparcStation 10, and probably I will have to let it run for many long hours, because the trusty Sparky is not really fast.

Trouble waking up? use Clocky!

One can never stop being surprised!. It seems like a joke, but it's real. If you have trouble waking up, MIT media lab has created an alarm clock for you. When you press the snooze button, it rolls off your bedside table and hide itself in a corner, so you will have to go and get it to turn it off.

Reconfigurable Computer C-One

Perhaps not many of you know the C-One (Commodore One). This computer is unique because it's a reconfigurable computer. This means that in can "morph" into many different computers. To say it in simple words it's somewhat like an emulator, but in hardware, more accurately it's reimplementation of other chips in FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) chips. In other words the main chips of this machine can be programmed to behave as other chips.

So when you boot the computer the main chips are re-programmed with the cores (FPGA programs) and can function as other computers like the C64, VIC-20, plus/4, TI-99/4a, Atari 2600, Atari 400/800 series, Sinclair Spectrum, ZX81, Schneider CPC and many more or an entirely new computer not yet known by the human beign, all this without even opening the computer case.

AFAIK the only cores available are the C64, CPC 464 and CPC 6128. And today I found the VIC-20 core here.

This revolutionary machine is unique because of this capabilities, and it's brought to you by the same person who developed the C64DTV, Jeri Ellsworth.

Digital Camera

Some time ago I decided it was time to get my hands on a digital camera. I decided to go for the Sony DSC-P93. Wow!, I'm more than happy with it. It's really quite a good camera and has more functionality than I ever imagine. Let me say that I'm not a photographer or photo aficionado, so I'm sure someone with more authority than me will have something to say; but for my needs this camera is perfect. Also it worked flawlessly with Linux, I had just pluged it to the usb port and voila!, I can see it as a SCSI disk, no need for special software.

Site Redesign

Well, I guess that all beginnings are rough. I changed my mind over the design and made a couple of changes to one I downloaded. I hope you like it.

VoIP paranoia

This days seems to be VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) everywhere, in fact I'm looking at the alternatives to make up my mind on what to choose. Probably I will start with free calls over internet, then go with one VoIP provider, and then with real VoIP enabled phones.

But if you're looking for privacy, look somewhere else. Just using tcdump and vomit is enough to hear VoIP conversations. Perhaps piping VoIP trough a secure channel could help, but I think it will not be a smart thing to do, because it will probably degrade voice quality and besides that, you could do nothing when using services as Skype or Brujula VoIP.

Computer “Table” case

From time to time people keep surprising me. I've read on slashdot about this guy that made a computer case that doubles as a nice table (here is a mirror). I think I could have one of this in the kitchen!, do you like this kinds of mods?

More Contents

I 've been working hard, and the blog is growing. I have added new pages and proofreading what I have added yesterday. It turned out to be much more fun than I anticipated, but it's hard work too.

What I found more rewarding is that I'm organizing my thoughs and keep remembering things I've done in the past.

The projects now are not detailed, since I have already done them many time ago, but as new projects arise, I will try to write them with more details.

Spare time

I decided to take a few days off, and will finally work on My Blog Space. I will try to make some content and we'll see how things go with it. Everything should be ready by March 28th. since I will be working again by then. I will try to put some pages about my interests and projects. Stay tuned!!.

Hello everyone!

Hi everyone!, welcome to my blog. Today, March 20th. 2005, I decided to start myself into this blogging maddness. I searched for good blogging software, and choosed WordPress. I really like it, but to be honest I have not really checked all the available options on the blogging scene, just a few and decided to go on with this. I may change in the future, let's see.

I'm from Rosario, Argentina, and naturally my language is spanish, not english. So why on earth am I writing in english?. Well, I have a good reason, al least for me!. First, I like english. Second, I have a good excuse to practice. Third, let's face it, the vast majority of the web is in english, although there is a really big chunk of it in spanish too, so once again, this english blog may go multilingual someday, let's see.

And what stuff you will be able to find here?. Well, mainly stuff I interested in, my projects, and some news. Probably mainly geek and tech stuff.