About me

I was born the 4th of April, 1975 in Barcelona (Spain), but now I'm living in Tokyo. I'm a UNIX systems engineer, mainly focused on computer security (though I do many other things like PHP/Perl/shell programming, SQL administration, etc). My interests include programming 8-bit computers (mainly MSX), computer security, science-fiction (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson being my favourite writers), and several other things that I'm not good at. But now I'm pretty busy with my work and learning Japanese and have little time to do other things.

I'm currently working as a technical manager at International Systems Research.

At the same time I'm studying for a degree on technical engineering in computer systems at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Computer, gadgets, etc...

giskard

giskard is my main PC. It's an AMD Athlon running at 1.4Ghz with an ASUS motherboard, 512Mbytes of PC2700 DDR memory, two hard disks (160Gb+80Gb), an nVidia FX5900XT graphics card, a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM. It's running Linux (Fedora Core 2).

This computer is always on, because it is doing remote backups of my colocated server (the one where this website is hosted) and has a shell server that I use from time to time when I'm not home and need access to files stored on my home network.

tpad

I bought this laptop in March 2005 because I needed a Windows computer, and a) my old laptop was dead b) dual-boot or VMware on giskard were not a possibility. It's an IBM ThinkPad X40 with a 1Ghz Pentium-M CPU, 768Mbytes of RAM and a 20Gbytes hard disk. It is currently running Windows XP, but as soon as I don't need Windows anymore it's going to be running either Linux or FreeBSD.

fatlady & thinlady

These are two Silicon Graphics O2 workstations.

fatlady (left) has an MIPS R12000 CPU running at 300Mhz, 768Mbytes of RAM, a 9Gb SCSI disk (IBM DNES-309170), the standard CD-ROM drive, and an audio/video card with an SGI O2Cam connected. It's running IRIX 6.5.22. This computer is usually always on. It is running a script that updates my webcam every few seconds, but as of this writing (Jan 29th, 2005) it's off most of the time because of a hard disk problem. Besides the webcam, it is also running other automated scripts that I need.

thinlady (right) has an MIPS R5000 CPU running at 180Mhz, 128Mbytes of RAM and a 9Gb SCSI disk (IBM DNES-309170). Its CD-ROM drive is broken, but that doesn't matter because I don't need to use the CD drive on this machine for anything. It's running OpenBSD/sgi 3.6. This computer is usually off. There are some things that I want to use it for, but that will have to wait until I have more free time.

Panasonic FS-A1ST

This is my MSX Turbo-R. It's an 8-bit platform with a 3.58Mhz Z80 CPU and a R800 CPU running at 7.16Mhz, though they cannot be running concurrently. Its memory has been expanded to 512 kilobytes. I'm using a 128Mb CompactFlash card as a harddisk, using the CF-ATA interface made by Sunrise.

This computer is usually on when I'm at home. I use it for playing games and programming.

MSX computers stopped being produced in the early 90s. The production stopped in 1992, if I recall correctly, so this computer is now around 12 years old. It works perfectly.

It doesn't have a hostname because it's not connected to the network, but that will change when I receive my ObsoNET card.

Sony Clie PEG-TH55

This is my PDA, running PalmOS. I use it mainly at work because of its scheduling software (Clie Organizer), which I like very much, but also I keep lots of info on it (phone/address books, written memos, files, etc). It has a 512Mb MemoryStick DUO and integrated WiFi.

octospider

octospider is a Compaq Presario 703JP. It's an AMD Duron running at 900Mhz, with 256Mbytes of RAM and a 30Gb harddisk. It's running FreeBSD 4.8, but lately I don't use it much because there seems to be some kind of problem with the power supply. I'll fix it some day.