Roberto Live!

This country loves me so much that they created an award with my first surname, the ARIA awards, or ARIAS as everybody call them. Good for Silverchair, who won album of the year, I didn’t even know they were Aussies.

Apparently many people liked this shot, funny because it was taken on the move on board of a ferry.

OK I got my tickets to go back home. I’ll be leaving Australia the 26th of November, spending some days in San Francisco (let’s use the expensive American visa for something) and then arriving Villahermosa the 29th. Then back in Sydney to continue working the 6th of February

As many of you know (or should know!) I’m finishing my master’s degree this November and I’m working in my final project. Because I thought that only doing a theoretical research is for little girls (sorry guys) I decided to develop an application. Essentially the application a simple data storage, the problem is that the data storage will keep confidential information and should be able to communicate this information across internet, and even better, I want this information to be shared to some users without revealing my password.

So far so good, until we start with symmetric / assymmetric crypto. I was using only symmetric encryption, is good, is fast, is easy, until I found a big big big big… big big flaw in my design: How the hell am I supposed to share a record without revealing my symmetric password. Damn, why no one told me? I mean, really people, you never pay attention to me, right? It was blindly obvious that wouldn’t work. Fortunately I already solved this way: To login you give me a password, I store a hash of it, if you are you then the hash matches and I got your symmetric key, now I use this symmetric key to encrypt your private key; every record has its own symmetric key, so I use your public key to encrypt the record’s symmetric key, so if I want to share this record I only need to send you this symmetric key encrypted with your public key and you can get the contents with your private key!!Did you follow? Well I don’t really care if you don’t, the design is beautiful!!

OK I’ll put the short version with apples and oranges later. By the way, while doing the research I had to store many papers and books and articles so I found the perfect tool: Zotero, it integrates with Firefox and there is even a plugin to OpenOffice.org, cool because in the class people recommended EndNote, and I don’t even have MS Word in my computer.

Two of my best friends in Mexico got married yesterday in Villahermosa. Funny enogh, they married each other! So, Mike and Zeyla, my best wishes and hopefully you’ll spend a honeymoon in Sydney very soon

So looking for a picture of them, I found this old picture from our days in Uni, around 2001 – 2002 I guess. It doesn’t seem like too much time but who would think that Zeyla and Miguel would stay together, Vero would have two children so young and I will be 14 000 km away from home? Life is so unpredictable!

I haven’t had much time to blog recently but I’m back in business.

OK the Darling Harbour Fiesta 2007 was last 28 of September and it was a good one like last year. I went with some friends of Uni (Sophie, Carlos and Laura) and Philip, a German guy that I met in Port Macquarie, who in turn was with some nice German and Dutch people. I liked the pictures below with the nice colours. Also I uploaded in YouTube a video of the fireworks and another of the capoeira.