Best gift ever??

Now I can reaffirm that I married the right person, just look what I got for fathers day!!!



I know I do not blog that often but be assured that now I will be blogging none at all for at least a few weeks, or months....

Plotting SVN history??

Found a blog post by Samuel Jansen were he plots his subversion repository history so out of curiosity I plotted mine too...

actually nothing interesting, steady development almost linear and as you can see but it made me notice that I am almost near my 1000 mark!! when I reach it then I will have an excuse to celebrate and give a nice "1000 SVN passed mark present".

Linux Cafe in Akihabara

Have been in Akihabara (Electric Town) several times but never saw this shop before:





If you read the details below the logo you will see this shop is been there since 2001!! and I never saw it... I must go check my eyes. Anyway if you are an Open Source person walking around Akihabara you may well pass a get yourself a nice cup of open source coffee.

Long Vacations in Panama

I was in a long vacation (over two months) in a tropical paradise known as Panama. Most people (specially in Japan) do not know Panama is actually a country and only know about it because of the Panama Canal.

If you like beaches you would like to go to Isla Grande, Isla Colon and San Blas were you will find beautiful caribbean beaches or travel the Via Panamericana visiting all the resorts at the Pacific Sea. If you like mountain hiking you can go to El Valle, Boquete or Volcan to find a rich tropical fauna and flora only seen in Panama.


City people can simply stay in Panama City and visit the malls (Multicentro, Multiplaza and Albrook Malls) and all the night clubs around the city (The Gallery, Oz, Mistyk) and of course the Coast Way to eat on the finest restaurants in the country.

Panama has it all in a relative small country so make sure you visit it in your next vacation. Here are some links with information about Panama:




Chiriqui Chatter: a blog by James Dean where he talks about his like in Panama. Here you will find a lot about the culture and cousine and also how to retire in Panama if interested.

Blogs Panama The name says it all. You will find here a lot of blogs about Panama and it's people.

Tavel Blogs from Panama Here you can get the view of Panama from foreign people in Panama. People that have traveled to Panama and wanted to share their experiences, photos and even videos with the world.

Dealante.com Finally if you want to know about the night life in Panama (Wild on E! style stuff) then check this page.

After this long vacations under the sun I got a little rusty in the technology camp. This is the principal reason I haven't learn anything new or interesting to blog about. I will try to resume my studies/work activities and start blogging soon.

Differences in SQL Implementations

If you need to migrate your SQL database from say, MySQL to MSSQL, you should know that most SQL implementation differ in some trivial and some core ways that may make the migration very difficult and anoying.

Before you choose to migrate SQL implementations I recomend you to check this link with information about the differences in the most popular SQL implementations (MySQL, Postgres, MMSQL, Oracle and DB2).

Web 2.0 Network Management

Before working as a programmer I was a network administrator for a metropolitan ATM network. I had to deal with more than 500 network devices all over the city including servers, routers, ATM switches and cable modem CPE's.

To handle the daunting task of monitoring all the interfaces and services of all these equipments I tried a lot of tools from commercial solutions like IBM Tivoli, open source solutions like NetSaint, BigBrother and my own custom solutions with perl, mrtg and net snmp. In this blog I will tell you about my experiences in the field of network management.

The company I worked bought the IBM Tivoli Framework for the network management task. After months in trainings, setup, IBM consultants and technical staff coming and going and expending thousands of dollars in equipment,training and support we ended with a complete, ultra powerful and insanely complex system for network management. Too bad no one ever used it fully, not because we did not know how to use it but because we had no actual use for it.

All we wanted was to monitor a set of network devices via SNMP. The network monitor had to be configured with IP address and auto detect via snmp the interfaces, add them to the system, monitor them (traffic, errors, etc). The Tivoli Netview was more than sufficient for this but the sales guys at IBM would insist that we would also need the Tivoli Access Manager, Tivoli Identity Manager, Tivoli Directory Integrator, Tivoli Directory Server, Tivoli Storage Manager and lot more stuff. Each of these products came with a server, lost's of manuals, training, etc.

We tried to use these Tivoli things, since our company payed huge amounts of money for it, but no matter how hard we tried these systems had no use for us. Even the Tivoli NetView was not that useful. It was unable to autodetect correctly the interfaces of our CISCO routers and gave us ambiguous names and descriptions for out ATM Switches interfaces.

This really was not a NetView problem, the fault was on the ATM Switches manufacturer that put the wrong descriptions in their SNMP MIB. We had to manually edit the descriptions of each device interface and there were a LOT. The NetView GUI was far from fluid and each interface had to be edited one by one using like 5 different dialog boxes for each one.

The more we used Tivoli's NetView (the other Tivoli servers were accumulating dust and consuming power only) we were more convinced we needed to throw it away and so we did. As linux enthusiasts we started looking in the open source camp.

We played with open source monitoring solutions like NetSaint (now Nagios) and BigBrother and they are good but we must face it, web interfaces (at that time) were not the best in terms of usability and speed.

In the end we simply developed our own perl scripts with snmp and MRTG in linux. The linux console interface (with the GNU tools) is very powerful if you know how to use it, perl was perfect to handle large amounts of text data (mrtg cfg files) and mrtg combined with snmp command tools was simple and more that enough to our needs.

With our scripts we got a complete solution and we were happy but as time passed and people started finishing graduate school and moving to other companies (including me) the inners of out custom solution became taboo and black magic for those that came after us. Also there are now better tools like RRD Tool and Ruby that could be used to improve or replace the system.

A few days ago I read an article about Nagios and started thinking that these web based monitoring applications in the back end are really using the same tools I used like perl, mrtg, snmp. If only the interface was more fluid/flexible as to give the impression of a desktop application and real time monitoring it could become the next big application. Suddenly it hit my head: Wait! Web 2.0 is about exactly that!! make web interfaces more fluid and flexible as desktop applications!! I felt as if it was the discovery of the century and started to get ideas on how to develop such applications using Ruby/Rails/GoogleMaps/RRDTool.

Well my excitement only lasted a few minutes. After some thinking I realized that first: I have no time to do such thing, and second: Google showed me that this is not a discovery and that there are already implmentations of Web2.0 monitoring systems. See here, here, here and here for some examples.

Well these applications are still in diapers and there is a lot of space for improvement. Maybe when I finish school I will do something like this. With my experience as network administrator and now as professional programmer I may get something good...

Linux can do almost anything!

I like to browse linux application pages like sourceforge, kde-apps and freshmeat just to see what cool applications are there to play with. There are always little gems not known to the general public and who knows? there may be the next killer application waiting to be discovered.

After years of browsing these pages you will see that you can do almost anything with linux and on more than one way. Granted that most of the applications you see are not active, are pet projects of someone or were student projects that are no longer being developed. But this does not mean that all of the projects are of no use, lots of good projects are there to be discovered that can be usefull and maybe become the next big thing. Did you know that most popular applications today started as small pet projects or student projects of someone?.

Some of the little known applications I use are the Japanese dictionary software for kde, Kiten, the bible study software, Sword, the cool quake like console Yakuake and little eye candy apps like xsnow, xpenguins and amor.

One of my all favorite tools is x2vnc/win2vnc to share a single mouse/keyboard between different computers running different OS.

Another way to find applications is to browse your distro software repository. This way you can also install/unintall the software using your distro management tools with a few clicks/commands. For example in gentoo simply browse the /usr/portage directory to find out what softwares are avaliable and in kubuntu you can browse the list of available apps using adept.

With time browsing applications you will agree with me that almost anything can be done using linux. I mean you can even make coffee and brew beer with linux!

Working in Japan

Danny Choo at dannychoo.com has an interesting post about his experience in job hunting in Japan and I just wanted to add some points of my own experience.

The best way to get a job here is to come to Japan as a student. A tourist visa works but they are at most for a couple of months which is not enough time to get a full view of Japan and search for a good job.

As a student you get minimum one or two years student visa. This is time enough to learn the language and search without rushing the best options for job. Moreover if you obtain a Masters or PhD degree you are almost guaranteed a job offer after graduation because every year companies in Japan go to universities in search for new meat from within the graduates.

The only problem of this method is how to pay the school fee and living expenses in Japan for so long?. Well what all the people I know do is apply for the Monbukagakusho scholarship. This is especially good if you live far away from Japan (America, Europe, Africa, etc.). Asian people (China, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) come to Japan as japanese language students. They first pay all expenses from their own pockets and once in Japan they apply for local scholarships within Japan.

The Monbukagakusho scholarship (see here) is one of the best scholarships to come to Japan. It will cover your full school expenses, your roundtrip plane ticket and give you 175.000 Yen monthy for living expenses. This scholarship at first is for two years research program but if you apply and enter the Masters and PhD programs at your university then the scholarship can be extended up to seven years. This means you can live in Japan up to seven years as an student (as long as you comply with your university requirements like attaining credits, writing papers, thesis, etc.). During this long time you get to know Japan very well, learn the language (at least conversation skills) and look for a part time job. I came as a Monbusho student in 2002 and now I can talk the language (but not read it), got a Master degree, I am now running for a PhD and have a nice part time job as programmer. I also worked as intern in several companies as part of universtity projects.

There is also a JAIST scholarship (see here) but I don't have much details except that the scholarship is for three years max and after the three years you are forced to return to your own country and work for two years there. At least this is the situation of all my Bangladesh friends that have the scholarship.

If you are interested in getting the Monbusho scholarship the best source of information is the Japanese Embassy in your own country. Simply go there and ask about the Monbusho.

About the job well once you are in Japan it would not take much effort to get a job. Especially in the IT/ICT camps. I started scanning books at an IT company for 900 Yen/Hour and now I am a part time programmer for 1500 Yen/Hour. This and the scholarship is enough for living in Japan with my family and even take nice vacation trips around Asia (Beijin, Seoul, Okinawa, Kyoto, Osaka, etc.).

That's it... remember the best option is to come as a student, once here you can see your options for job.

About what university?? well any university will do but the famous ones are Tokyo, Meiji, Keio and Waseda. All these universities are high quality and studing hard is imperative to keep your scholarship. Remember that the scholarship is not for free! you must earn credits, write papers, participate on international conferences and if you are a Masters or PhD student you must pass the screening process and write your thesis. If you don't fulfill the University requirements your scholarship won't be extended and you will have to return to your country.

If you like to study extremly hard then go to Tokyo University but you will get less time for jobs, even part time jobs. Waseda is more relaxed on the Masters but the PhD is very, VERY difficult (experience). The other two are more or less the same as Waseda but the PhD is not as difficult as Waseda.

A problem of bad memory

This blog is to be my technical memory... How many times I have learned something usefull only to forget it a few months o even years latter when I really need it. As one of my professors once told me: Knowledge does not mean knowing everything, but to know where to find it.

So this blog is to record everything interesting I learn in hopes that I can find it in latter years when I need it.