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

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?

Related Articles:

• Mi Residencia en Japon
• Las reuniones Japonesas
• Guia para estudiar y trabajar en Japon
• Top 10 Soft Skills for Managers
• Las 10 reglas para la “Buena Suerte”
• Entrevista a Matz (Fundador del lenguaje de programacion Ruby)

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!

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

Related Articles:

• Why I Love Firefox
• Semantic Social Syndication (Spanish)
• Opera y el Marketing Psicologico (Spanish)

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)

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)

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give you a quick summary of my life since the last update. Sorry to all of you who patiently waited for this blog to (re)start again! I will do my very best to give you high quality contents that inspire you and make you think.

Well, lets start this update with a brief explanation about my professional experiences since last year. After this post, i will continue with more personal stuff and other interesting things that have happened to me this last year.

Nikko Citigroup

Well, as you may know, last June (2007) I started working for Fusion Systems in Japan as an Associate Consultant. Shortly after, I had my first opportunity to work on-site for Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo.

My first project (June07 - Nov07) was to help Nikko Citigroup (Business Technology Organization - BTO) to improve their Software Configuration Management. This is basically all the different processes they must follow from the moment they start writting code, until it is succesfully deployed into production.

We analyzed the software lifecycle’s procedures for all the applications currently in production, defined a unified method to be compliant with Audit Risk Review’s global standards and help them migrate all the applications into this new system.

One really good thing about this project is that I could interview all development teams in Japan for both Equities and Fixed Income, as well as teams in New York or Singapore.

My first experience with Citibank was very positive, not only because of all the exposure to financial systems, but also because I met really wonderful and talented people working there.

EMC - Citigroup

Last December, I was required to move to Singapore for a joint project with EMC (info). The client was again Citibank (info), but now the Singapore branch.

EMC is one of the biggest information infrastructure technology companies in the world, and they offer a very wide variety of products. Two of the biggest products are Symmetrix DMX (an extremely fast enterprise storage array) and Centera (Content Addressable Storage system).

Centera is used commonly to store massive ammounts of documents (that do not change often) in an archive system with a fast time response (compared to jukebox or tape). This is useful in more environments that I initially imagined:

• Security videos
• Voice message systems
• Official Contracts
• Government documentation
• and many many more areas…

Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Public Company Account Reform and Investor Protection Act, or SOX), all electronic communications are to be recorded for a period of time (typically years) for compliance purposes. This made Investment banks an important target of EMC and all Storage Infrastructure companies. I recommend a very good article about Why SOX matters in China if you are interested in the topic.

My project is to build a Cache System that increases the performance when reading or writting to Centera. I designed a C/C# application that interfaces with Citibank current systems and delivers Centera content with a substantial increase in speed.

Future Steps…

I will be in Singapore until early March finishing up the project and overviewing the deployment issues that might arise on production. After that I will return to Tokyo and continue with other projects there.

Guys, it’s a pleasure to be back

From Jasp

Hi everyone,

I remember when I used to play with my commodore 64 when I was little. I remember doing my first programs, first with Logo and later with Basic. I wasn’t taller than a table but I could do a silly trivial program or even wrote an skiing game. I remember the first times I had the opportunity to sit down with a PC and write down on a notebook all DOS commands to play with that green and black screen.

I started in this geek world when I was about 7 years old and none of my friends at that time had access to technology like that -or weren’t interested- and I really had to beg my parents -or aunt, or neighbours!- once and again to spend some time playing with the computer. Things have changed soo much these days, and now virtually all children get access to this technology by default.

Thanks to Manu, I discovered this video of a 2 years old playing happily with Flickr and using the laptop faster than my mum does currently

New generations are coming fast and with lots of resources that are part of their daily life. For instance 15 years ago, I had to go to the library to photocopy some article, then come home, read it, underline the important parts, open Microsoft Works and start typing for hours to get the assignment done for class. Now it takes them about 1 minute to find it in Wikipedia and copy+paste it into Word… No Science Fiction here, but it would have looked that way then, wouldn’t it?

Hi guys!

I recently found another web 2.0 application that it may seem quite silly in the beggining… but it’s worth a try. What is Twitter? Well, Twitter is a new site that provides real-time blogging with really short posts and a strong social network. It’s like a live diary for you to share with the world, or just with your friends.

Is it a new idea? Absolutely not. It doesn’t have any new technology at all. I think this website can be cloned in less than 24h with ruby on rails, excluding the CTO-side of the project to handle so many requests as they do. Then we need to find what makes this site special enough to be mentioned here.

Ok, if it’s not the technology, what makes Twitter so good? The social side of Twitter is very interesting. I have found really important people in there (Bill Clinton (Former US President), Joi Ito (THE internet man in Japan), Steve Jobs (Apple’s president) or even the guys from Adaptive Path (the fathers of AJAX…). In Spain, we have mini.d, fernand0 (Barrapunto) or even kirai blogging real-time. We love to know what people like that are doing, and so there is people always wondering what they would be up to. A Famous People Big’s Brother!!

I think blogs like Joi Ito, or even Martin Varsavsky (FON founder) are really popular because they give us a dream to look at. They live a life of private jets, talking with the most interesting people every day and always keeping positive and happy. Their blogs are a streamline of their lifes and this makes other people -who admire them- really have a motivation to do more things.

I set up an experiment in this blog, I’m going to post real-time bits of my life on the right-hand sidebar. Named Geekly as “Fer’s Core Dump”, I will try to keep you posted more often there. I’ve seen people posting just about their life, but I think it’s much better to share about things you like, music you just found or even spreading a bit of gossip from time to time

Now it’s your turn! What is the Twitter effect for you? Do you have any interesting use for Twitter? Do you think it’s just a waste of time? Are you going to tweet soon?

Written with the collaboration of Sprocket (testblog). Thanks!

Hey guys, I just received an email from a friend. He is looking for a Venture Capitalist to start his own company, apparently on software development. Would you give these guys some bucks from your pocket…?

Can you guess who are these guys?

Link recommend by kirai.net

Good morning,

I’m still not posting much here, am I? Well guys, I’m starting exams this Monday with “System’s Theory”, so i need to really ganbare in here. If you happen to be during exams too, I wish you the best luck!

Even during these exams, I try to keep reading interesting blogs before going to bed, and I found a nice way to share the good articles with you…

On the right sidebar of this blog, there is a new column called Interesting Articles, and there -thanks to the google reader team- you can find very good articles to read. Ahh, and they update almost daily! You can read them all together if you want to, just acess here:

[ Interesting Articles ]

For those of you who are still stucked with Feedlines -I have to tell them- you are missing a whole new way of reading blogs. Google Reader is to blog-readers what Gmail is nowadays to mail-readers. If you tried the standard Google Reader time ago and it wasn’t enough for you, try to spice it a bit now and tell me what you think

As a final comment, I would like to ask the Google team -Do you copy me Ulin-san?-, when will it be possible to have a RSS feed for your shared items?

I guess if I could suscribe to the favourites of people like kirai, pamoga, paco vargas or tomy lorsch -among many others of course- I could have in one place, 99% of all the interesting things I would want to read in a day.

Now anyone, please answer me this….

How would a shared network of posts work?

Wouldn’t it be nice to mix personal network like orkut, with posts recommendations from friends?

Why no system can generate an accurate favorite list of posts for me yet?

When will posts thread in my reader when they talk about the same topic, even on different blogs?

How will the blogosphere be in 2014?

I’m waiting for you