[Fer Martin] Reinventa tu vida cada día

Flying Suit Up!

Fer — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:14:49 +0000

No Further Comments Needed… this is just awesome!!

Relationships in an Ideal World

Fer — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:53:46 +0000

Via: Gchan in Japan from xkcd Webcomic

Related Articles:

I follow @kirai with Pop-Beans!!

Fer — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:28:02 +0000

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!

Offices around the World: Japan

Fer — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:06:27 +0000

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:

I’ll be waiting for you…

Fer — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:24:38 +0000

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

Capoeira against SkinHeads

Fer — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:52:11 +0000

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

Related Articles:

My room @ Singapore

Fer — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:22:12 +0000

My Naughty Neighbors

Fer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:39:42 +0000

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!

When The Dealin´s Done

Fer — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:05:01 +0000

You got to know when to hold ‘em,
know when to fold ‘em.
Know when to walk away,
and know when to run.

You never count your money,
when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’,
when the dealin’s done.

Kenny Rogers - The Gambler Song. 1978
Talking about the traders in the Stock market

(Spanish Translation)

Tienes que saber cuando mantenerte,
cuando doblar tu apuesta,
cuando marcharte
y cuando correr.

Nunca cuentas tu dinero,
cuando estás sentado en la mesa.
Ya habra tiempo de sobra para contarlo,
cuando terminemos los negocios

Kenny Rogers - The Gambler Song. 1978
Hablando sobre los agentes de bolsa y sus apuestas

All Engineers Should Know About Security

Fer — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:18:35 +0000

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!

Engineers don’t (usually) know (enough) about Security

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.

Google Tech Talks. Security for engineers talk

Informit OnSecurity

Final Quote on Security

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

Enjoy!

Fix Firefox Memory Problem

Fer — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:32:30 +0000

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

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)

Geekest Graphitti @ Singapore

Fer — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:36:27 +0000

IBM AS/400 Graphitti @ Singapore

Welcome to Singapore

Fer — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:20:39 +0000

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…

Sexy Japanese Cheerleaders

Fer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:06:54 +0000

Sexy Asian - Japanese - Cheerleaders Dance - video powered by Metacafe

Thanks to: Flapy in Japan

Why I Love Firefox

Fer — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:23:17 +0000

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)

Minimal Techno

Fer — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:18:16 +0000

Hey guys,

Lately I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Minimal Techno. Although I’ve always found it hard to categorize music, I think Minimal Techno is just a simplified version of Techno music, with cleaner sounds and good base rhythm. Somehow like an improved version of drum&bass.

One of the artist that I like the most is Nathan Fake and here is one of my favorite records he made. This version of “The Sky was pink” (2004) was made by James Holden, and it is extremely well done. This video is

Here you have Dj Yosh (Ryan Yoshimoto), the most famous Minimal Techno Dj from Japan. His music combines vocals as well as more deep sounds that makes a really powerful combination.

What’s your favorite House/Techno/Minimal video?

Enjoy!

Life update - Work

Fer — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:50:42 +0000

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

The Spirit of the Age

Fer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:40:08 +0000

Zeitgeist (The Spirit of an Age) refers to the ethos of a select group of people, that express a particular world view, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

This video is a well thought explanation about the origins and relationships between Catholicism, Governments, the Federal Reserve Bank and Mass Media Corporations.

Zeitgeist, The Movie

The Video is quite long (almost 2h), but is worth every bit been streamed to your brain. Although some information can be a little bit misleading -specially the biblical correlations- it provides an intelligent critic and a well presented argumentation on their perspective on the fundamentals that our society is based on.

When the power of love overcomes
the love for power
the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendryx

Warm regards,
Fer

Certified Blindfolded Monkeys

Fer — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:15:08 +0000

Hi everyone,

5">I have been thinking lately how important -or not- is it to hold an IT certification in this industry. Most IT profesionals, at some point of their career, go through the debate of being or not certified and it can burst a few brain cells to come up with the right answer.

There is not a single correct answer for this question, but before making this investment of time and money, and to avoid bowing to the first cheap advise that lands on your mailbox, you should think about it carefully.

Too many Options.

There is a huge market of certifications available for you (MCSE, CCIE, PMP, CCNA, 6Sigma, ITIL, etc) and they are all sponsored by really big multinationals. As the American psychologist Barry Schwartz would say in this case, “more is less“.

We are completely overloaded with options and that can become a very big problem. When we actually have to decide, we panic and we tend to choose the simplest option we can think of: we choose not to be in a position where we have to decide. Or what is worse, we choose someone else decide for us.

This is commonly known as the I-dont-know-what-to-do-with-my-life syndrom, and fortunately, it has a cure

Blindfolded Monkeys.

If we think about it, this problem comes down to basically the same structure to operating in the stock market. There are so many options available and we are dealing with so many different variables, that performing a really profesional analysis or picking any stock/certification randomly would make no actual difference at the end.

The Princeton Economist Burton Malkiel stated on his famous investment book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that a “blindfolded monkey throwing darts on a newspaper would have as much luck selecting a good portfolio as a profesional”, and he might have not been far from the truth for both cases.

I’m sure a blindfolded monkey, throwing darts to a “certifications list” could have the same chances of picking the right certification for you. And this is just because on a list of “10 things you can do to take off with your profesional career”, probably a certification is the last one to add value.

Define your goals.

You want to learn some technology? Ok, that’s a good goal. I honestly think that almost no one would ever pay such a big ammount of money just to learn some technology (unless you have enough money not to care where you spend it).

If you really just want to learn and master some technology, you might as well use that energy (or money) to put yourself in a position where you can actually work and gain experience with that technology. Certifications are certainly not the best path for learning, they are a way to achieve something else.

Ok, so if it is not about learning, what are we really looking for? In my opinion is something else: we are looking for a way to earn credibility. We should not foul ourselves in thinking otherwise. What we want is basically to prove to someone who doesn’t know us, that we are good enough to do some job. Think about this for a second, would you get certified to prove that you can master certain technology to someone you already know?

Let’s imagine for a second that I’m right, and that your goal is actually to increase your credibility (and probably your visibility). Then we are facing a different problem, and other solutions may come to the table. There are different ways of earning credibility; You can earn it by your experience and knowledge; or it can be transferred from someone with established credibility.

In my opinion, you won’t increase exponentialy your experience/knowhow by holding a certain certification, and only in some specific environments they can give you some credibility. If what you are looking for is credibility, you should start worrying about things like: how you present yourself, what kind of questions you ask, how well can you understand a problem or how fast/reliable can you implement a solution. There are no real shortcuts out there.

Having a paper that says ABCD Certified doesn’t prove any of this. Its like a driving license, it only showed that one day, on a certain road and during 10 minutes, you did the minimum to be a driver. Doesn’t it?

Are certifications a bad idea? Hell no! It is a great source of income for multinationals, as well as a way to prevent competition to enter a certain market. Besides that I think are not better than a book, a laptop and a good friend to ask questions

Becoming a consultant

Fer — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 02:42:19 +0000

Hi everyone,

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately but the truth is that I’ve been quite busy since I got back to Japan. I finished my first month working for Fusion in Tokyo and it has been a very challenging and exciting opportunity.

From the day I started, I could read the word “Consultant” on my business card. I’ve come to notice that most of the people I talk to have heard this word, yet quite some don’t exactly know what it means. I will try to explain what lies beyond that name, and what makes the difference between a really good consultant, and the rest.

So, what is exactly a consultant? A consultant is basically a professional that provides expert advice in a particular domain or area of expertise.

Specialization. Sounds really obvious, yet lots of people fail on this. You can’t be a consultant in every domain in the world, therefore you must specialize in a certain area of expertise. In the RealWorld(TM), competition is fierce and the only way to provide a first-class service is by becoming specialized in your area(s) of expertise.

I want to be a good consultant and that means to commit a huge ammount of time to develop a very wide and deep skill set. I will try to go through all of them in this blog with you, and hopefully we can learn together.

As for now, I have to go back to my number-crunching excel sheet

Cheers,

Fer