Felipe Alvarez's blog

There is a great thread about endianess, Unicode, BOM (byte order marks), and other interesting topics.

UPDATE: I changed ‘>’ (erase file, then write to file) to ‘>>’ (append to file). This avoids you overwriting your, or other peoples’, public keys. Setting up password-less logins is both dangerous, and mighty. It allows one to authenticate to an OpenSSH server without typing in a password. Authentication is gained via knowledge of a [...]

I will never again buy a RAID Controller card from Promise again! They claimed to support GNU/Linux, and they don’t. They said they didn’t have drivers for Windows 7, and then suddenly they magically appear on their Downloads page. We weren’t even notified. I’m going to go with mdadm and try my luck with software [...]

I just ripped some of my CD’s to MP3, but I was just curious what OGG would do for me. I had never actually compared the two encoding formats, side-by-side, but today, I was simply stunned. A song compressed with MP3 (VBR 128Kbps Normal Quality) was around 5.1 – 5.8 MB. It sounded good, but [...]

I’ve been having some problems with charsets (character sets) when using FreeNAS, rsync, deltacopy, and cygwin. The filenames on a Windows box are either in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). The FreeNAS uses rsync to backup the files on the windows box, and saves them to a RAID array. I wasn’t sure if it was rsync, [...]

As part of National Cyber-security Awareness Month, Googleblog posts some important tips regarding password security. Creating a new password is often one of the first recommendations you hear when trouble occurs. Even a great password can’t keep you from being scammed, but setting one that’s memorable for you and that’s hard for others to guess [...]

New BSD magazine, available in stores or online at bsdmag.org How new issue includes: Installing FreeBSD 7.1 with Enhanced Security Jails… Getting a GNOME Desktop on FreeBSD… Packaging Software for OpenBSD – part 2… A Jabber Data Transfer Component… Building a FreeBSD Wireless Router… CPU Scaling on FreeBSD Unix… LDAP Authentication on OpenBSD Boxes… FreeBSD [...]

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux [...]

Since I don’t have an iPhone, and I don’t use windows, I’m not quite sure what to make of free long distance phone calls with iCall. If you want to download it, install it, and use it, let me know how it functions. Or if you already have experience with it, give me a little [...]

theodp writes “On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted US Patent No. 7,536,726 (it was filed in 2005) for intentionally crippling the functionality of an operating system by ‘making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user’s ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer’ [...]