Roberto Live!

Guess what? Our application that we submitted for Mashup Australia, Suburb Matchmaker, seems to be one of the favourites. We even got an article in Open Australia and published in the Google blog! We still have work to do but at least we’re getting attention from the public and hopefully people in NSW and other places in Australia will realise of its real potential.

Now, you can help us by checking our application and voting for us. Twitter and Facebook have also been quite useful. Any feedback or comment is more than welcome!

I just came back from the OpenAustralia Hackfest, which took place at the offices of Google in Sydney. Honestly I went there expecting very little (I’m quite busy at the moment finishing papers at Uni, looking for job in a few countries and planning a relocation of continents). Daniela, a good friend of mine, met me a few weeks ago trying to figure out what project to do, so at the end we thought the database of NSW Crime would be an interesting good mashup. Well you won’t believe that, but we met a few guys over there and ended up with a quite robust database and a prototype and we won the first place. Yep, just like that, everybody liked it because Raul (a Spanish-speaking, how funny is that?), the guy presenting it, suggested using the database to find the best suburb to get a girl (since now we can filter by age, income, sex, marital status, education, and population size).

There is a contest that finishes on Friday, we’re going to be working on the project now that we know we have a chance. And even if we don’t win I think is good way to start using that data for monitoring the level of security. I’m (unofficially) in charge of the data mining, I’ve been merging information lot of information in a consolidated database (more than 1.7 million records so far). So it looks good so far, keep on this frequency and I’ll keep you updated about the progress.

This blog moved out of California to live in Michigan under a new hosting. I was about to hire the new virtual servers in A2, but I don’t have enough time at the moment to set  all services up in Linux for myself and under 128MB of RAM, perhaps in a few months. Anyway, I’m happy that now I have SSH access (yay! managing files under FTP is brain-damaging), RoR, Python and InnoDB with MySQL, now I can have all kind of orgiastic fun.

I moved DNS records as well, if you can’t see this blog let me know

If you want to know what have to do my degree in IT Security with the classes of intelligence that I’m taking now at Macquarie Uni, well here there is a small presentation that pretty much summarises that: The Value of Cyber Intelligence Capabilities, presented by a guy from Deloitte.

By the way, there is Threat Management summit taking place in BrightTalk.com, with very very interesting presenters. All for free!

In case you haven’t noticed it, I haven’t posted too much recently, and the reason is my Twitter. It’s just quite attractive because they’re very short messages which usually I update from the phone on the train. So that’s it, if you want to know what I’m doing up to the minute, follow me. As some of you know from time to time I put cryptic phrases or messages meant to be read by someone specifically, therefore don’t try to figure it out.

I finally surrendered to all the hype of the iPods and got the iPod Touch second generation.  Unfortunately Palm lost the battle is in the process of extinction. Quite bad, we had good times. But let’s welcome the awesomeness of Apple! That little device is finally more than a funny toy that plays music and can do virtually all things my Palm used to do: from watching videos to manage my agenda.

The killer app for me was the electronic book and PDF reader.  I like reading books or papers on the go, but I hate carrying all that stuff. I like buying cheap books in the eReader store or reading interesting stuff in PDFs. Now I can carry all the boks and documents I want in a very little space.

One drawback is that the Touch doesn’t work in Linux yet, it hasn’t been jailbroken yet, but it’s good enough so far. I can do more of my stuff wirelessly so no much need to reboot on Windows.

And the other reason to buy the iPod was the price, since I went to the Apple Store on the Black Friday and even better, I’ll get the taxes back at the airport! How cool is that?

I bought this week the Skype phone, to replace my Z550i and it’s so cool.  I wasn’t so sure to get it, but after I found out that you can keep your number I decided to get one. This way I can talk with family and friends overseas at any time. Now please everybody using Skype please add me, my ID is roberto.arias

Yeah the second one, this time in Chatswood

Update 12/08/2008: Picture of the shop taken with my phone