There's no Place Like ::1

Great movie! Really interesting history, and the best part is that you really don’t understand a thing until the last 10 minutes! I can’t belive that Lucy Liu is already 39…

Anyway, thanks ambs for the recomendation :)

Yesterday I watched the movie The number 23. I love the history. It captures your attention all the way until the end of the movie. On the other hand, it’s cool to see Jim Carrey doing serious movies, not just “stupid” comic stuff. Anyway, good movie, I definitely recommend it.

PS – Today I was having lunch at a local Pizza restaurant. When I receive the receipt from my order, I looked at the time stamp: “13:10” :D 13+10 = 23.. Oh god.. It is starting…..

Since the last year, I spent a lot of time studying cryptography and data protection on Linux. Since then I use cryptographic methods to cipher all my hard drives.

I started using loop-AES and then switched to dm-crypt + LUKS. This are really great and secure methods to protect your data. I spent some time using Twofish, but I found it slower than AES (I always use 256bit keys).

Recently however, I’ve heard that there are some Linux kernel optimized modules for specific hardware. I’ve header reports that these assembly implementations are more than 5 times faster than the C AES standard module.

Since I’m running ate 64bits on my server (Athlon 64 3500+), I decided to give it a try:

$ rmmod aes; modprobe aes_x86_64

And OH MY GOD!! It seems that I have a new machine!! This is completely different!! Thank you ASM sick guys!

PS – For you with x86 (Pentium or higher) use aes-i585

If you ever wonder why MacOS users have a nice little command-line application called “open” to open an arbitrary file with the correct application, and you – a proud Linux user – don’t, you have come to the right place :)

If you use GNOME (KDE sucks :P) you probably have a nice little command-line application called “gnome-open”.

It does exactly what you are thinking. It find the mime-type of the file you pass as a parameter and use the GNOME configured application for that mime-type.

Since I am lazy (and probably you too) don’t forget to put this on your .bashrc (or equivalent):

alias open="gnome-open" 
alias o="gnome-open" 

Have fun with your console!

^{(Probably KDE (and others) have a similar application)}

Today I discovered that I’m addicted to Katapult, an application specially designed to provide quick and easy access to applications, bookmarks, music and more.

Unfortunately, it’s a KDE (QT) application. This means that using it on GNOME makes your system load and mantain in memory many KDE libraries just for a small application.

Today I asked myself “are there a similar application to GNOME?”. Some seconds later Google got me the solution: GNOME Launch Box.

This application works great! I don’t know if it was just for me, but I had to configure manually the shortcut to fire the gnome launch box. I used the instructions here.

Hope you like it too!