Yesterday I was walking at Shinjuku, near Studio Alta and I found this big robot. It’s pretty common in Japan to see this kind of publicity, with big dolls and uniformed girls giving away pamphlets. Unfortunately it was the announcement of Symantec products. It’s just another way to sell “fear” to people.

There are a lot of parasite companies of the security lacks and bugs of Microsoft products. This business is based in the need for Microsoft users to secure their system after they have spent a huge amount of money buying those products. Tell me, where is the advantage? After I’ve spent a lot of money buying an “operating system” like Windows, then I have to pay a similar amount for an antivirus, and a network security solution to tamp the many lacks, back-holes and bugs of a worldwide-spread system, which is being sold as “one of the more evolved”?

Let’s try other, funnier and secure system that avoid us the headache of Virus

MacOS

www.apple.com

Linux

PclinuxOS www.pclinuxos.com
Open Suse www.opensuse.org
Ubuntu www.ubuntu.com

A really important person for me, made me realize about a very important thing that it’s a very logic one. I didn’t think about it before.

We all have wishes and plans for the future and projects to realize. Many times we can’t do it due a lack of money, time, contacts or whatever. There could be many walls that stop us to do what we want to do and any of that walls have a different way to go through it.

So almost all people, put that projects behind waiting for a better moment to do it. Time pases and what we wanted to do never comes true because we were waiting for the “right moment” to do it.

For example, if you want to study a language, you can be very motivated, maybe you have some material but you don’t have all the time you wish or money. But even in that conditions you can start for example 30 min a day or twice a month. If you wait until you have a good material, or a better situation or maybe the opportunity to go to a language school, at the end many years pass and nothing comes out of it. So think about how much should you progress in your study if you started even a few hours per week. Circumstances change every day. Maybe at this moment you don’t have the time but who knows about some year in the future. “Not starting doing something” will assure us that it will never be realized at the end.

Start it! Even little by little, that will assure you that sometime in future you will reach a point. Maybe it’s not the exact point you wanted to go but it’s obviously better that nothing!

An interesting link that shows different ways to approximate the use an popularity of programming languages.

http://www.langpop.com/

I’m glad to see that C is still one of the most used ones.

Some time ago, getting out from home to take a walk I found a non identify object riding a bike directed to some place at Shinjuku.

Last week I found him parking his bike (I think it’s a male but I really don’t know) in front a coffee shop.
I could take a picture from out side.

He/she is like an ambulant shop. I really don’t know his crazy or he’s doing some kind of performance. The fact is that he try to avoid direct contact with people in some way….

The other day at JR Shinagawa station I found this particular post box. It indicates the 0Km point in Japanese railways system.

Today I almost finished the Web page of a project. It’s an online magazine, Perl Magazine.
Since long time ago, Perl has been my preferred language. I use it extensively at work and at my quotidian life.

Perl Magazine is a free magazine and open to everyone who wish to publish an article.

Soon there will be a Perl conference at Tokyo. I hope to assist and try to promote the magazine.

Today we are going to talk with David Santo Orcero, a well know free software developer, responsible of OpenMosix user land tools and kradview, a radiologic image visor.

What do you do to live?

Not only as a University teacher, I do many other things. I teach companies how to earn money with free software, I design positioning strategies with free software, I manage some development teams, I provide technical specific instruction (few days ago I gave a talk about virtualizing for an autonomous government head) and finally I do cluster deployments and new technology testing systems, with the corresponding instruction course for technicians.

Many things.

The more important point is not “what I do” but instead “about what I do“: free licenses based technologies.

What motivated you, to make your own company?

I wanted to control by myself my own professional career. Some time ago I happily worked for a company, (Supermicro). My relationship with that company coworkers and boss was and still are very good. The problem was that Supermicro was a company that only sells hardware and my professional career should grow to a direction that was not in my plans.

That’s why I quit Supermicro – we still have a wonderful relationship and do some business together – and I started doing my job as consultant and coacher. That was two years ago and things are going really good.

How your life experience in Brazil is helping you nowadays?

It’s hard to find a concrete utility, but a lot of many useful things can be applied to many fields. Working overseas is always good. That makes you grow up, your self, and let you see your own culture from a different perspective. Not only that, but that experience gives you the opportunity to learn a new language and change your view about language learning difficulties.

For me this was a very important experience. I could live any of the goodness I mentioned before. And, personally I recommend to everybody, if possible, working overseas.

As a university teacher, just in few words, could you give an advice to someone that is thinking about joining Computer Science?

It’s important to avoid misunderstandings from media numbers. What the market is demanding are cheap programmers, instead of computer science engineers. Computer engineering is a hard career and maybe you’ll finish working not as an engineer in computer science. So it’s like a vocational career, as Classical Philology or Mathematics.

Another thing is that it’s very easy to convert a computer science engineer in a cheap programmer for a software factory. Thus, mass media, induced by software factories, want to show that more programmers are needed.

If you like it, computer science is a really nice career. Any field you work it’s easy to go a step forward to innovation and investigation. In comparison with old and settled careers, in computer science it’s really easy to be a pioneer.

But it’s important not to forget that, choosing computer science means choosing a career where you have to spend everyday of your life studying new things.

What is the most risky decision you took? What motivated you to do it?

Go to Brazil. I quit a stable and good paid job to run a dream.

At the end I had to come back, it works but I had visa problems.

It was really good during 4 years, where I learnt a lot and it was very useful in my life.

Based on your experience and dedicated years in IT, could you give us a prevision about how free software expansion will develop in the IT world?

I know this will not make me win any popularity award, but things are not so clear.

Big multinationals of the privative sector – specially Microsoft – are running hard. Now it’s our turn. Free software let us run quicker and with less inversion, because we can help each other. If we have really clear what are our strategic advantages and we exploit them, things will turn out good. But we need to be ready too. And we have to stop wasting time in philosophies promulgated by pseudopolitics and pseudobishops, that from their pulpits dictate rules or send free software developers to burn.

We need to come back to focus in the important: coding, coding, coding.

To conclude, if you could have the necessary tools, being realistic, which projects you’ll be glad to join in?

Cloud computing with transparent charge migration. I know what to do, I know how to do it but I don’t have time to do it. These projects are hard to implement due economic reasons for small companies.

Another great project I think it’s important: implement a free DICOM stack. I hope to implement it, in a reasonable time.

These are my father’s pictures (blue shirt) enjoying a Paella at Malaga (Spain)

I love this things of Japan.
Two drunk guys on the ground and nobody do anything bad to them. The guard is taking care of this guys until, maybe, some doctor or police come.