Offtopic on Lantean

Tenerife

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:04:09 +0000

There’s this climatic phenomenon called Calima, where winds from Sahara bring over dust particles into the atmosphere.

This affects the Canary Islands, and the sky remains dusty for days.

Unpredictable, not good for your health, but manageable.

Nonetheless, Tenerife is a good spot for a meetup 🥃

Slash!!

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 19:23:18 +0000

Mallorca 🏝️

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 15:52:22 +0000

Stonehenge!

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 18:51:20 +0000

What nobody tells you about Stonehenge is that there’s a freeway about 200 meters away. The cars are SO CLOSE!

Last but not least.. there’s a fence surrounding the stones. You cannot approach any closer than 100m, give or take.

Reminds me a bit of my expectations toward seeing the Mona Lisa. There were just SO MANY people, it was like being in a Metallica concert, trying to reach the first row.

Farewell, MINI 🖖

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:39:07 +0000

Don’t Look Up!

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 15:12:19 +0000

I want to die peacefully like my grandfather,
not screaming in terror like his passengers.
Jack Handey

Enlightenment

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 23:04:32 +0000

Never.

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 10:20:36 +0000

CEO for a minute

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 01:27:28 +0000

These days, let’s just say that I miss my friends.

If you’re reading this, yeah, I’m taking about you!

Just Like Lightning!

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 00:40:41 +0000

Moobile @A8C

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 23:55:54 +0000

Twilio, the Cloud... and Me!

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:59:30 +0000

Today, we'll briefly detail how to setup a Twilio VoIP number in a way that it'll allow us to:

- Receive SMS's via Email
- Send SMS's via CLI
- Receive Voice Calls via Landline, and if nobody picks up, fallback to Softphone
- Make Voice Calls via Softphone

Before we begin, you'll need to:

1. Signup!
2. Register a Number!
3. Create a SIP Domain
4. Add a User under the SIP Domains > Credential Lists
5. Setup this "SMS to Email" PHP script", in your favorite EC2 box

#Respect Linus

Mon, 02 May 2016 23:46:08 +0000

San Francisco Muebles: A Website from the 90's!

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 21:56:15 +0000

Several years ago (1999 to be precise!), i’ve started a simple website for my father’s business: San Francisco Muebles.

This is how it used to look like (thanks god for web.archive.org!)

Back then, iframes, simple javascript, fancy flash buttons… and some plain html was, pretty much, the gold standard for a personal (OR business) website.

Over the years, my dad’s website has evolved into many different incarnations: i’ve adopted Plain-PHP, Code Igniter, and jQuery to handle fancy transitions.

Stark, you're a Genius!

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 19:21:02 +0000

https://youtu.be/oEx5lmbCKtY

May the Force...

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:56:18 +0000

Git toggled folders as submodules!?

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 22:08:29 +0000

Few days ago, i had to struggle with a strange scenario in which git began tracking a folder, as if it was a submodule.

Now, what’s strange with that?: i didn’t set any submodules!. My .gitmodule file was empty (in fact, i didn’t even have that file).

Thanks to this stackflow question, i ended up figuring out this solution:

git ls-files --stage | grep 160000
git rm --cached [Paths retrieved from the command above]

Hopefully, this will help another lost soul!

Shrinking EBS Volume

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 10:06:17 +0000

It took me a while to shrink my EBS volume, but this post helped quite a lot. For further reference, this are the exact steps i’ve performed:

Created a snapshot of the EBS volume, for backup reasons.
Added a new volume, based on the snapshot.
Added another volume with the desired size.
Attached both, the Normal and Shrunken volumes.

Check the big volume, and resize it:

e2fsck -f /dev/bigvolume
resize2fs -M -p /dev/bigvolume
```- Note that 'resize2fs' will say something like:

Resizing the filesystem on /dev/xvdg to 1035624 (4k) blocks.

- Let's calculate how many 16MB blocks we'll need:

x = 1035624 * 4 / 1024 / 16 = 253

- Proceed copy'ing blocks to the small volume:

dd bs=16M if=/dev/bigvolume of=/dev/smallvolume count=253

- Resize + Check the small volume:

resize2fs -p /dev/smallvolume e2fsck -f /dev/smallvolume

- Stop the instance.
- Detach the 3 volumes: Root, Big and Small.
- Attach the *Small* volume at the same location as the previous root volume was. In my case, /dev/sda1.
- **Ready!**

Nuke GIT Repository History

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 09:16:48 +0000

Suppose you’ve just commited a private API key that should not be public. Or maybe you just wanna restart your repository, because you’ve just finished major surgery and wanna start fresh.

If you’d like to delete all GIT history, you’d need to:

Remove all history

rm -rf .git

Reconstruct the Git repo with only the current content

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Push to GitHub.

git remote add origin <github-uri>
git push -u --force origin master

Source here.

Resistance is Futile

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:52:51 +0000

You will be assimilated!

More Hawaiian Awesomeness

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:43:36 +0000

Just wanted to share a couple more pictures of Oahu!

If i practice enough...

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:19:19 +0000

It is a well known fact… if you wanna master a craft, you need to spend at least 10k hours practicing. Guitars aint no different… with practice comes mastery. With time… you don’t need to look where your fingers are. You just know it. You feel the position of your fingers in the fretboard.

It’s rock and roll, in its purest essence…

Star Trek : Into Darkness

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 22:38:06 +0000

If you were looking for a new wallpaper, you’ve come to the right place. As you may know, several scenes of the new Star Trek “Into Darkness” movie were shot in the NIF… (National Ignition Facility).

The movie itself plays a twist over the original Star Trek Series, since… in the previous movie, we’ve seen an alteration in the flow of events, which led to a way different outcome.

If you haven’t gone to the cinema yet, i suggest you check it out. Seriously speaking!

GIT Modules

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 22:49:26 +0000

Equivalent to SVN Externals, GIT offers a nice feature called “Modules”. Long short story, you get to link an external project, inside your own project. What do you make out of this?. Well, suppose you’re using a 3rd party library. You can update everything with just a command line pull. No need to download and merge, by hand.

Sounds nice, right?. It’s done this way:

cd MyApp
git submodule add git://github.com/some-framework/some-framework.git Frameworks/SomeFramework

Afterwards, we need to recursively update the submodules. Which will, in turn, clone the ‘some-framework’ repository:

Fixing High I/O usage on Amazon EBS

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 23:48:42 +0000

This humble wordpress blog is running on an AWS micro instance. We’ve got somewhere around 1k visitors each month, which is pretty awesome. But… to my surprise, the whole system is using over 14 million I/O operations.

I suspected there was something wrong with this… so i proceeded to do a small research. By means of the application ‘iotop’, i managed to spot the I/O hog: apache!.

Specifically, i ran iotop with the following parameters:

Installing a Webserver on AWS EC2

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 23:31:17 +0000

I’ve recently lantean.co to AWS EC2. Amazon offers a free EC2 instance for a year…. so i decided to give it a shot.

The main reason i had to migrate to a self managed hosting is simple. Shared Hostings don’t allow you to fine tune several settings, such as the PHP Memory, and you might event not be able to login using ssh. What did i need to do?. It’s simple… let’s see…

SSH SFTP Updater : "Private key incorrect for user"

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:18:33 +0000

If you’re using Wordpress SSH SFTP Updater plugin, and you got the error “Private Key is Incorrect for use”… even when the keys are correct, check the following:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

If there is a “ForceCommand internal-sftp” directive, somewhere, in sshd’s config, try disabling it. That was what was causing me issues:

I had an sftp-only user, and the WP plugin doesn’t support that!.

The Beginning is Near

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:48:48 +0000

I just wanted to share this awesome picture… there isn’t much to add to it!

Dropping a MongoDB Database

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:35:27 +0000

I’m writing this down, riiight here, because i just got bored of searching this in google everytime i need to run an experiment. If you need to drop a mongo database, just fire the mongo shell and type:

use mydb;
db.dropDatabase();

That’s it!

Warp Drive is Possible!

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:52:51 +0000

Not long ago i’ve read Michio Kaku’s book, Science of the Impossible. If you have enough spare time to pick up a new book, i’d like to recommend it.

Michio suggests, in his book, that building a Warp Drive might become a reality in the next 100 years. But what are the grounds on that saying?.

Alcubierre Warp Drive

Proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre, the Alcubierre’s Drive is a solution to Einstein’s Relativistic equations. For it to work, we need matter with negative mass… which, as of today, hasn’t been discovered yet.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:11:38 +0000

I've gotta say this. I'm a big fan of J.J.Abrams director. He managed to develop a fresh sci-fy style, which looks really attractive. If you compare science fictions movies from the past 10 years, with the latest Star Trek: Into Darkness movie... you'd be impressed.

What i like the most of the new movies is the way they’ve recreated the whole Trek technology. I’m not into hi tech visual effects… but the technology that’s shown into the movie could deceit even guys with PhD’s… the transporter looks super real!.