[ Fer-Martin ] (Re)invent your life every day

No Further Comments Needed… this is just awesome!!

Via: Gchan in Japan from xkcd Webcomic

Related Articles:

• Entrevista a Gchan (Vulcanus)
• Si mi novia fuera una clase en C++…

People involved in this conversation, business development plan and business failure:

• Kirai
• Jasp
• Haripako
• Gellar
• and.. CaDs who found the real POP BEANSS!!

Thank youuu!!

ps) I moved the original script to the comments. You can read it here!

Hey guys,

Living in Singapore made me realize how different work environments are depending on the country you work. It’s an amazing experience to get to work in different parts of the world and grasp the subtleties that arise in daily life.

I would like to introduce to you my work environment in Singapore, but for now, I will let you get a look-n-feel of how are in Japan.

I know how offices are in US & Europe, and still learning and enjoying about Asia here. How are offices in your country? Do you have any cool experience to share? What’s the coolest office in the world?

Flapy in Japan introduces his laboratory in Nara, where he is doing Research on Network Protocols and many interesting things! (Spanish)

Microsoft Japan. Some Japanese trying to get an intern jobs at Microsoft Japan! They try to cross the language barrier and for that, they have to create a proposal/presentation for the board to pass! Will the individuals fail or succeed?

Cool Office in Tokyo. Presentation about a really cool Real Estate company in Tokyo. You can see the wicked interfaces they have in the meeting room tables; May be not as cool as the iBar (the largest multitouch touchscreen in the world), but still is pretty impressive for an office.

Godzilla! Now it comes the Geek side of the Japanese. Can you imagine how it would be to be working with Godzilla?

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• Entrevista a Matz (Fundador del lenguaje de programacion Ruby)

Artist: Soul Ja
Title: ここにいるよ feat.青山（含中文歌词）
Year: 2007
Lyrics: Japanese | Romanji/English

Hey guys,

I just saw a very interesting video in frikis.net. Its a fight between some rappers-breakdancer-capoeira guys against a group of skinheads who are taking advantage of a defenseless couple in an empty train station.

Some of the movements reminded me a lot to my Capoeira class in Las Palmas and it brought a big smile to my face. There are a few places you can learn and enjoy capoeira in Tokyo. If you are interested, please check this interesting article from Metropolis and drop me a line!

Capoeira technique at Cascati Nardis, Carisolo

Via: frikis.net

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• Capoeira Paranaue
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I tried to edit an article in wikipedia today (Publish/Subscribe Paradigm), and found that my IP at home was blocked by Wikipedia because of some not-respectable behavior by one of my neighbors… apparently I live with vandals around!

Editing from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (your account, IP address, or IP address range) has been disabled by Dreadstar for the following reason(s):

Vandalism: Continued and repeated vandalism after being previously blocked

Your IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and the block has been set to expire: 04:04, 12 April 2008.

On the other hand, this is a good proof of the enormous effort by Wikipedia editors to maintain a good quality of User-generated-content (UGC). Clap! Clap!

(Spanish Translation)

Hey guys,

Recently, there has been quite some buzz about the DDoS attacks to Meneame, Genbeta and Error500 websites early this week. Also, early last week the British newspaper The Register (among many other newspapers) wrote an article about how a big community of hackers started a cyberwar again the Scientology Church worldwide.

I realized how little software engineers know about computer security. It is a fact that many engineers graduate from a 5-year course, without ever hearing terms such as buffer overflow, sql injection, MITM, Cross site scripting (XSS) and many other security exploits. And this is just a grasp of the whole area of security.

Picture of a typical Computer Security expert
Harry Potter learns about Security in his School, but we don’t!

The general computer scientist usually don’t know much about general security concepts. And even when they have heard the term, they have a tough time trying to articulate a correct definition. Therefore, lets not assume that they will be able to hold onto proper design best practices when they sit down to code. This directly leads crackers to try to profit from Security Holes.

Usually, they don’t even know how to choose an antivirus (pdf), how to encrypt emails or check SSL certificates. I’m sure most of them, if they sit down and study it, they will understand everything and learn fast, but somehow I find most of my colleagues to have orthogonal love/hate approach to security.


Security Experts and Microeconomics Laws

This has a very logical consequence that we can extract from the principles of microeconomics. The laws of supply and demand have proven right in this case, because the increasing demand in “security professionals” and the limited supply of those, shifted the curves to a high equilibrium point. In other words, companies urged to hire security professionals and because there is not a high competition, they can charge ridiculous salaries for their services.

But we should be aware that this is our fault, and not theirs. If Universities and education centers would have reacted faster to this flashing alarm in the job market, probably we would be less vulnerable when we use a credit card on the internet or when someone decides to store our personal data in their servers.


Interesting Videos to Learn More

Here you have a couple of interesting videos to put you back on track.

Final Quote on Security

“Foolproof systems don’t take into account the ingenuity of fools.”
Gene Brown. Emerit MIT Professor of Biochemistry

Enjoy!

Yes, this is my laptop memory usage before and after closing Firefox.

The memory leak has been considered a Firefox Feature instead of a bug by some of the Mozilla developers. I think there is still a long road ahead before we can enjoy a really fast and clean Firefox.

InternetDuctTape figured out a couple of tweaks to “temporarily solve” this issue. For those interested, you can read How to fix the Firefox memory leak with a couple of interesting hacks.

Via: Internet Duct Tape Blog

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Update. It seems that the new XPCOM Cycle Collector on Firefox 3 partially solves the problem. How does it work?

The cycle collector spends most of its time accumulating (and forgetting about) pointers to XPCOM objects that might be involved in garbage cycles. Periodically the collector wakes up and examines any suspicious pointers that have been sitting in its buffer for a while. If the collector finds a group of objects that all refer back to one another, and establishes that the objects’ reference counts are all accounted for by internal pointers within the group, it considers that group cyclical garbage, which it then attempts to free.

Updated Via (gemal.dk)

Quick Facts.

Singapore is a small island in the South of Malaysia (Google maps), with an area of 700km² (just a bit bigger than Andorra) is the home for 4.5M Singaporeans.

There are 4 official languages including English or Singlish- and Mandarin. In fact, this is a really convenient aspect of Singapore, since it is one of the few countries in Asia where almost everybody can speak English (Hong Kong as well).

Singapore, until 1963 was a colony of Great Britain and the influence of such period remains in many aspects of the country. I has also a great Indian, Chinese and Malasyan culture

The currency is Singaporean Dollars (SGD), and currently the exchange rate is 1S$≈￥75 - 2S$≈1€. One cool thing about Singapore money, is that the new notes are made of a special polymer that makes them almost unbreakable (info).

It is considered the second biggest Financial Hub of Asia (after Hong Kong - UN Article) and ranks second in the world based on the Index of Economic Freedom (The Heritage Foundation Article).

Singapore from my eyes

Singapore is a really cool place to be. Commonly known as “Asia for beginners”, it’s quite easy to find your own space here. There are several communities living in harmony (Malay, Chinese, Indian and Expats) which makes the city quite cosmopolitan.

This Service-oriented city is an ideal place for you to spend holidays or work. I’ve been only some weeks here and I feel that there is so many things to do that the only thing missing is time!

Someone recently defined Singapore as “A big theme park where East meets West”, and I can’t agree more. Living here is very simple, full of things to do and with an extremely high quality of life.

My Apartment in Singapore

Let me try and brief you on things you can do in Singapore if you come here:

• Little India. Enjoy the craziness of India in its purest essence. Lots of great places to eat on Banana Leaf, jewelry shops, cheap stuff and a great atmosphere 24/7. Try “Mustafa Center” for great bargains!
• Chinatown. You can see the Chinese temples, cheap food, tea houses and typical Chinese atmosphere. There are also plenty of Food markets and shops to go around until very late at night.
• Colonial Areas. Relaxing and luxury areas that once belonged to the British Empire are still conserved intact. It’s best to be seeing during daylight and it has many green areas to rest and enjoy.
• Botanic Gardens. With the biggest Orchid garden in the world, is a wonderful place not to be missed. It has also a couple of good restaurants for a romantic dinner in the evenings. Sometimes you can enjoy concerts and activities as well.
• Sentosa. Resort island with plenty of beaches and things to do. It has the biggest laser aqua show in the world, dolphin show, cafe del mar, km8 beach party and many many things!
• National parks. Singapore has almost 25% of its land of forest and natural parks. The one i recommend the most is the Night Safari, which is close to the Zoo in the north, and it is a wonderful experience if you like animals.
• Night life. The keyword in Singapore for you to remember is Clarke Quay. It’s a quay right in the middle of CBD which holds a lot of parties every single day of the week. One of the main attractions is Ministry of Sound (video1, video2), although there is enough choice for you to jump from one place to another until satisfied. Another great place to party is Cafe del Mar (video)and KM-8 (video1, video2), both in Sentosa. Well, enough said for now.

Little India

Chinatown

Colonial District. Raffle’s Hotel

Botanic Gardens

Sentosa

Because a video is worth a thousand pictures…

Thanks to: Flapy in Japan

Firefox: Open Source Internet Web Browser available for every mayor platform, Extensible, Customizable, Fast, Reliable and managed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Hey guys,

What a wierd world. I still found here and there some people who don’t use Firefox as their default browser. I found this a big enough issue as to take the time to write about why I Love Firefox.

Free Beer!

The biggest moral reason is that is Open Source; All the improvements are made by people who want Firefox to become more transparent, more secure, faster, more extensible and, in the end, better than any other browser. This philanthropic approach to development that has always proved right to me and this is not an exception. For more information about this, read the classic text The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond.

I just finished reading his book, The Art of Unix Programming and is a must-read for any serious programmer who wants to understand the practical side of Unix philosophy.

If you want to read more about the Mozilla Foundation and how they managed to make Firefox have 150 Million users, please refer to the extremely interesting McKinsey Quarterly Interview with Mitchell Baker. (bugmenot)

Being productive

The biggest practical reason is the huge collection of Firefox Extensions you can find. There are so many extensions that sometimes it’s hard to know which ones are good for you. This is a short list of the ones I find very useful:

• All-in-one Sidebar. Bookmarks, downloads, history, page source or anything you want, on a side bar.
• Flashgot. The fastest way to download anything from Firefox.
• Mouse Gestures. Do virtually anything you want, without touching the keyboard
• Session Manager. Save and Restore Sessions, useful to quick switch between work/home.
• FoxMarks Bookmark Synchronizer. Create an account, synchronize and then access your bookmarks from any PC in the world with firefox. For me it’s an improved version of del.icio.us
• Moji. Learning 日本語　or 中国語? This might give you a hand, specially if combined with All-in-one Sidebar!
• Internet Explorer Tab. Just because some web designers and architects are just useless.

With this extensions, I feel Firefox has been made to fill my needs. There are plenty more you can try and download at Firefox Extensions. Which ones do you find essential?

Want more?

The cool thing is that is not only extensions you can find; In Firefox, you can add a lot of different things that help you even more to be productive, have fun and enjoy the pleasure of internet:

• dictionaries to help your spelling in almost any language
• you can add personalized search engines to search in flickr, wikipedia, linkedin, technorati…
• you can make Firefox cute as hell with themes…
• and you can (of course) add plugins to all the buzz stuff (Adobe PDF, RealMedia, Flash, Quicktime…).

Isn’t it wonderful?

Blind love?

Of course, blind love is cool but silly after a while. You need to accept your partner with their virtues, but also with their defects

One of the worst things I found in Firefox (and may be the only one) is that the memory usage is not so improved. When Kirai and Flapy where here last week, we did a profiling experiment for Firefox and we found that it leaks memory on tab creation/destruction.

We found that the amount of memory required to create a new tab is between 15-20Mb. If you open the tab with some multimedia content, it increases up to 40Mb. The funky thing is that when you close the tab, Firefox only frees about 70-85% of the memory taken, which makes it grow bigger and bigger as time goes by.

Hope they can fix that soon!

Related Article: El arte de Renacer (spanish)