25 years of .br domain

Most of the Brazilian websites we access today we put ".br" by the end of the domain, and those "2 letters" completed 25 years last week. On April 18, 1989, American Jon Postel, director of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the agency that regulates the distribution of IP numbers and management of root servers, delegated the .br domain to the group that operated the academic networks in Brazil. Today, 25 years later, the country has more than 3.4 million of .br domains registered.

At the beginning, the internet was restricted to universities and research institutions. In 1991, the famous subdomains were created com.br, net.br, org.br, gov.br andmil.br, but the number of users was still quite small. The commercial phase of the Internet in Brazil was in 1996.

The CGI.br, who coordinates the services of Internet in Brazil in early 1996 there were only 851 registered .br domains, that number jumped to 7,507 at the end of the same year. Today there are over 3.5 million .br domains registered, which places Brazil in eighth position among the countries with the largest number of records.

To register a domain with CGI.br costs R$ 30,00 per year, all money raised is reinvested in maintenance such as the operation points of traffic exchange, researches with valued statistics about the use of the internet and free courses about IPv6. Since 2008, any person with CPF (Brazilian ID) is eligible to register a domain, before that, only companies could do that.

Interested in registering a .br domain, visit: www.registro.br

A very special post

As mentioned previously in a post last year, I've been working on a personal project for Apple Store which runs on iOS, by the way my second app (this is the first).

The purpose of this app is to have a small dictionary on your pocket (your iPhone, but also designed for iPad), but differently of many other dictionaries, you can choose one main language and you will have other 3 languages for references. Suitable for a trip where you would like to know how to speak a few words with natives, but you don't want to look for a word all the time on a dictionary - so this is the app you would need, a few taps and there it is the word.
Eg.: You choose English as the main language, and then you have Portuguese and Spanish languages for reference. Furthermore you can also pick Italian language, more languages will be available soon.

Take a look here on the iTunes App Store:

Enjoy it ... and thanks for downloading..

The Brazilian productivity

The renowned magazine The Economist has made harsh criticism of the low productivity of Brazilian last week and provoked mixed reactions. But does the article "The 50-year snooze" talk correct about Brazil?

Of course nobody likes that someone points the finger in your face and speak about your deficiencies! If we stop to think about some statistic data and look around the reality and the contrast, we will see many truth things.
Some specialists mention there are a few aspects that we should highlight and take apart:

- The first is the "physical capital": The workers are more productive when they have better infrastructure, best machines and tools. A truck driver in the U.S. to make ten trips per month transporting soybeans, while a Brazilian makes only three. We don't need to think too much to conclude that Brazilians have lower trucks, travel through the worst roads and spend many days in queues of ports.

- The second is natural resources: a country with poor natural resources such as soil fertility, mineral reserves, rivers and climate - certainly it will contribute to break the growth of the country; Again, definitely this is not Brazil's reality where most of the cultivable areas whatever we sow, we reap.

- The third is the "human capital": This means the level of education, training and technical skills of workers. No need to highlight that Brazil is far from developed countries, when we see researches such as Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) ranking the country in last positions. Also another research from Varkey GEMS called Global Teacher Status Index giving the last position to the country when related to the value of its teachers.

- The fourth factor and not last, technological knowledge: When compared with the U.S., the Brazilian worker operates inferior technologies, exceptions of sectors with technical excellence. In this analysis the private sector and the public sector are included, and as it is well known that the Brazilian public health system is inefficient, its contribution to the low productivity is quite large.

However there are a few more negative points that contribute to this status - heavy tax burden, slow judiciary system, high corruption and bad laws - also contribute to low productivity. Certainly, we don't like to see articles like The Economist made about us, but we can think over and see if we should accept it or act as soon as possible, the #Eleições2014 are around the corner.

Curious to read the full article from The Economist? Check this out:
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21600983-brazilian-workers-are-gloriously-unproductive-economy-grow-they-must-snap-out

Virtualization: the shadow of the Cloud

In recent years, we have heard a new term called Cloud, which means in general lines to have the service or application available on the internet reachable from anywhere, quite different from the traditional model where the application runs in a specific server and reachable only from a closed network. The Cloud comes with a different concept of work, instead of you buy the hardware, take care of the maintenance and provide all infrastructure, you just buy a piece of service where you will put your application to run – the simplest and practical example we see it is the email, instead of having the server mail to host you domain and provide the service, there are many companies providing this service where you pay a monthly or yearly subscription and access from anywhere and just forget the maintenance worries.

Although, do you know how the Cloud service usually works behind the scenes? It’s a complex environment and varies a lot from service to service, but the main though is to have a hardware that can work to run as many “clients” as possible in order to use the full capacity of the hardware, and make this model profitable. The service can vary widely because in our giving example about Email service, possibly the server would run only one email service and then shared with many customers. The complex service would have from each customer some specific features which would be pretty hard to match with another customer and share the same resource. In order to solve this gap, it would have another layer which splits the server in many other small servers, known as Virtualization.

To give a better idea how virtualization works, imagine the company has a very powerful server with lots of processors, memory and disk space, each time a customer comes with a specific requirement, the administrator will slice the server and create a “virtual server” or “virtual machine” with the resources to meet the requirement. This is the mentioned added layer that will be used for the customer with specific purposes and totally isolated from the rest of the resources of the powerful server.

You might be wondering that only companies with specific requirement can afford this kind of hardware!! Actually at home you can also have a virtualization environment with no money involved (or a little), of course not powerful as a server, but the same hardware using different purposes.

Let’s describe some possible scenarios:

- You might have special needs for specific software that you use only works in a specific operating system, but you don’t want to downgrade the whole environment, thus with virtualization you would keep your current operating system and create a virtual machine (VM) and install the operating system required for that. Eg: your laptop running MS Windows 7, but you use a program that works only on MS Windows XP, so this XP version would be a VM.

- A very interesting requirement - You just bought a Mac and of course some programs are incompatible with OSX and only run on Windows. Not problem, you will install this program into a VM by creating a VM to install your MS Windows 7 and later your program, so that it will be easy to switch platforms in clicks and taking advantage of both platforms.

- You would like to install a trial program and test if it fits on what you are looking for, but don’t want to do this on your fresh and clean operating system recently installed, so you would create a new VM, install the operating system, install the trial software, test and decide if it’s worth to have on your “real” computer. This is much easier to do because if you don’t like, you can reverse back a copy of this VM or just leave this VM for testing purposes.

Did you enjoy this idea? So take a look at those vendors’s website and look for the products, some are free, others paid – just be aware of the minimum requirement to run the software virtualization on your PC or laptop:




- VMWare Player from VMWare (Windows and Linux) - www.vmware.com
- VMWare Fusion from VMWare (Mac only) - www.vmware.com
- Virtual Box from Oracle (Windows, Linux and Mac) - www.virtualbox.org
- Parallels Desktop from Parallels (Mac only) - www.parallels.com

A new finding threat that prevents users to fix

In this world of technology very often we hear thread of virus, trojans, vulnerability or bugs in operating systems and applications, and the first action we users are instructed to do first is to update the software with the latest release or also update the antivirus’s database because the thread has already been fixed or blocked.

However, this time it is different, the Google’s engineer along with Codenomicon’s engineer have found a bug called Heartbleed in the OpenSSL protocol, an implementation of the open source SSL and TLS protocols that is widely used by most common browser, eg: Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. This protocol is used when we navigate on websites that requires encryption, generally when evolves sensitive information such passwords, confidential information (banks, credit cards, purchases, etc) and we can notice this because the browser puts a padlock icon in the URL bar and also changes the URL address to use “https” instead of “http” protocol.

At this time, we users cannot do anything to fix or avoid it because those fixes should be updated in the servers of the websites. More than this, the manufactures still have to analyze the impact and how to implement this fix, and now there is no prediction how much time it will take to have this fixed. According to specialists in encryption, on a scale of 1 to 11 (the gravity of the threat) is about 11. Even though we users can’t get fixed it now by ourselves, it’s worth to keep the operating system, antivirus and firewall up to date anyways and always.

The lack of professionals with technical skills

Many researches point out that it’s getting harder and harder to find qualified technical professionals to work in areas such as mechanical, electrical and hydraulic with minimum skills and experience. Those workers don’t come from a university but from technical schools which prepare the worker with specific knowledge, however nowadays people are giving more priority to have a university course judging that it will provide more opportunities, what it’s not wrong.

One of the causes of the mismatch between supply and demand is the career choice of students who complete high school. Most do not consider the technique as a career path to follow, despite the high rate of employment and rising wages. In part, has been strengthened with greater access to higher education (university courses) through programs like Prouni provided by the federal government. So there is a left over candidates with generalist higher education and a lack of skilled technical professionals.

There is an expectation that for the further years this situation will be softened with the federal program called Pronatec (National Program for Access to Technical Education and Employment) released in 2011.