Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Final modifications to home network: Squid and DansGuardian
I’ve made some final alterations to the Internet gateway box on my home network: I’ve added Squid for transparent proxying and Web content caching, and DansGuardian for content filtering.
“Transparent proxying” means that clients on the LAN can’t bypass the proxy–all requests made through port 80 will be redirected to port 8080, which is the port [...]
Added DNS to Home Network Setup
I’m running DNS locally on my home network now. The advantages of this are twofold: 1) local caching of domain names speeds up Web browsing on my network, and 2) I can now refer to the computers on my network by the names I’ve given the machines rather than by IP address.
Two packages are [...]
The Linux Terminal Server Project and the Return of Thin Clients
Veterans of the mid-90s era of IT hype will recall Oracle’s enthusiasm about the prospect of “thin clients” replacing desktop systems, as well as Sun Microsystems’ hyperbolic mantra “The Network is the Computer.” Microsoft, of course, having built its very empire on a foundation of bloated, resource-intensive software (necessitating ever more powerful hardware and [...]
Home Network Setup
I recently created up a home network/cable modem sharing setup using an old Pentium 100MHz box with 64 MB of RAM as a Linux-based Internet gateway providing the following network services:
IP forwarding (routing)
IP masquerading (for permitting all machines on the LAN to share the cable modem’s connection to the internet by letting them use the [...]
Software Patents
I’m in the midst of laying the groundwork for a small offshore IT outsourcing operation and it’s become evident that it will face some unique challenges. The most obvious of them can be seen in the mainstream press attention that this business has been getting lately, much of which focusses on the backlash by [...]
On salon.com….
My article on Vía Libre, a free software organization in Argentina, was just published on salon.com. If you’re not a subscriber, just click on the “Free Day Pass” option. You’ll have to watch an ad for the Mazda 6, but that’s a pretty bitchin’ car, so hopefully you won’t mind.
Leaving Argentina, Arriving in Mexico
On December 8th, 2002, I set out for home for the first time in eleven months. I had spent the year in Argentina, where I had hoped to achieve fluency in Spanish, and experience a culture that has fascinated me ever since I first read Jorge Luis Borges’ tale “The Library of Babel” (I [...]
WTO, “Trips,” patents in the developing world
I’ve just read an article by Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist Vandana Shiva that set me to thinking a bit more about the dangers that excessive concern with protecting “intellectual property” in the rich world poses to the developing world and to societies’ capacity for self-determination more generally. The article appears in Global Capitalism, a volume [...]
Andrew Sullivan on the unprofitability of Web content
Andrew Sullivan recently published an interesting reflection in the Times of London on the failure of Web content to generate profit, blaming its overabundance (as opposed to scarcity) for the problem. But he also suggests that the economic function of his “blog” may not be to generate profit directly but to promote his books, [...]
Back from travellin’
There are a few photos, etc. up on the Argentina section of this site. I just got back from a trip to Peru and Bolivia.