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

Because the British bureaucrats will sink the kingdom.

I think I have been officially ripped off by a foreign country. Yeah you guessed correctly, the British didn’t reply to my visa working visa request at the end of September as promised. I sent another fax and they haven’t replied yet. They state that there’s no refunds once an application is placed. They can give no information over the phone. And there no signs of my 600 pounds of course.

On the good news, I started to apply for jobs in Australia and it happens there are some companies interested in sponsorships. Also, I got another skills assessment from ACS, which place my skills as 2231-79  Computer Professional - specialising in Data Warehousing  (fancy, isn’t it?), which in part of the Critical Skills List. Still the application make take 12 months or so. Anyway, I’m trying to be a bit more careful about the jobs and companies I’m applying for. Better not rushing and landing an interesting position.

About Denmark, well they haven’t replied yet although I haven’t chased either. That’s a different case. The government  says that they’re very short of supply of specialised IT workers, however I have found very few jobs on internet. Not sure if Danes prefer to advertise in newspapers, or simply they exclusively do it in Danish. Anyway, I think it’d be a competitive advantage if I know some Danish, useless outside of Denmark but at least I won’t get lost in København

I woke up today, opened the window and saw a Total-Recall-like Sydney, things are orange and dusty. There’s a massive sandstorm covering large parts of New South Wales at the moment. Apparently Sydneysiders have no experience with the health problems of suspended particles because I saw pictures of people surfing and exercising! If there were an IMECA count in Sydney, I guess we’ll be above 150. Below a picture of the sun, and this is how the sun looks like in Mars.

If you check my Flickr, you’ll see more pictures of Canberra. I had to come back last Friday, to request a new passport in the Mexican embassy. To kill some time before my appointment I went to Old Parliament House. Now it’s a museum, quite awesome, I had the chance to sit on the cabinet’s chair and discuss with my fellow tourists ministers the issue of the “boat people” in the 70’s.

The Mexican embassy is a funny place. There are no security guards at all, they made me wait for around an hour. Besides, now it happens that the passports no longer take 1 working day like in Mexico, but 6 to 8 weeks. Oh well, at least I spent a good day in the capital.

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!

A very good friend of mine, who’s currently in England but spent some days in Brazil, sent me a postcard of what is possibly the best sight of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. I want to go to Rio!!