Sérgio Vieira de Mello was a man who lived his life to honour the principles for which the United Nations was created: To help ease the suffering of people and mediate conflicts around the world. Sérgio Vieira de Mello was a pivotal figure within the United Nations that legitimised the organisation’s existence. A charismatic figure and remarkable diplomatic, he worked to resolve conflicts in several regions including Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Timor-Leste. He died five years ago in a coward attack in Iraq.

Although my first exposure to video-games was to the earlier Atari 2600, the earlier Nintendo handhelds and then it’s Nintendo Entertainment System, it was with computers that I had my experience of really being immersed into the virtual worlds. Computer Role Playing Games were (and still are, in my opinion) much richer in personal computers than they could in videogame consoles. Although the first role playing game I played was Dragon Warrior for the Nintendo, the first role playing game that really made me immerse into the game world was Hero’s Quest I (later renamed to Quest for Glory I). In Hero’s Quest, you play the role of a wannabe hero which needs to do good deeds and save the land in order to prove itself worthy of the title of hero. Instead of simple actions, repetitive battles and linear boring dialogues, I found myself having to type what I wanted my character to do and to say in order to move along the plot. Dialogs were extremely rich, and I found myself really thinking as the character I created in order to advance on the game. I spent countless days (no – months) playing and re-playing the game, and all of its sequels. I was about 13 years old at the time and I remember quite well spending half of my days thinking either about girls, or about if one day I could ever be a great hero like in Quest for Glory.

I simply love adventure and role playing games (and still do – if I had the time to play them) like King’s Quest, Monkey Island and Police Quest. I got so hooked into Police Quest that I even though that one day I could be a Police Officer (what were the odds eh!? :)).

But perhaps the most influential game I have ever played was the Ultima Series, in which you play the role of The Avatar – a hero from a far away world sent to the land of Brittania to rid the world from evil. Besides complex dialogs and non-linear quests and complex story-lines, Ultima had an elaborate set of principles and virtues which made players immerse into questions of moral and ethical grounds, making the character of the Avatar to lead by example in order to advance within the game.

Playing Ultima through my teenage years really influenced my way of reasoning. It made me wonder, question and further think on the subjects of ethics and moral grounds, developing in me an interest that brought me in contact with several different beliefs – from spiritual teachings such as Abrahamic religions and Buddhism to philosophical schools such as Stoicism. It made me want to understand how people see spirituality through different eyes, and I came to develop my own set of values and “virtues” that I deemed important for my personal growth and enlightenment.

It is fair to say that, in part, it influenced my ways of accepting people’s own way of dealing with their spirituality and God. Making me believe that

we’re all looking into a prism, but as each of us see it through different angles, we’re seeing different colours. But the reality is that we’re all looking at the same prism *.

* That is, as as long as you don’t try to push or shove at me the idea that the colours that you see are better than the ones I see – we can all be happy.

Being a good cop, being a hero, being the saviour of a land by doing and promoting good deeds to drive evil away… Are those values so démodé? I mean, do I risk being labelled a “fag” by some 13 years old boy because I like playing games where I’m a good guy? Instead, games nowadays like grand-theft auto promotes no values whatsoever, besides how to be a parasite sociopath. I do believe, based on my own experience and the experience of those close to me who played computer games, that video games DO influence people – perhaps on most of the people out there it wouldn’t influence them directly on their behaviour, but it can definitely influence people on their reasoning, and in their values. Now you combine this with the right set-up: poor upbringing, no job, no money, no future, bad company, depression, dire straits…

In less than three weeks, there has been news of horrific crimes in Brazil, Greece and Canada in which victims have been mutilated. Call me old-fashioned pansy, but I think we need a stop on the violence-o-metre, don’t you?

Now the Brazilian president signed a decree that imposes new regulations for call centres (source). If you have ever suffered in the hands of poor service delivery through call centres then get ready to feel avenged. You’ll love this!

From 31^st July 2008 all companies that provide the following services (amongst others) will have two months to adapt their call centres to the new legislation:

• telephony;
• communications;
• water supply;
• electricity supply;
• terrestrial transportation;
• airline transportation;
• financial services (including credit cards); and
• health insurance.

The new legislation enforces the following decrees:

• The decrees were divided in five groups: access, quality, transparency, cancelation (of services) and general rules;
• For services of uninterruptible supply (e.g.: water and electricity, cable TV and telephony), all call centres must be available 24 hours, 7 days a week;
• Companies must provide a unique FREE phone number to attend their variety of services;
• A customer call can only be transferred once from one customer care operator to another, in order to ensure that customers don’t have to overly repeat their issue;
• Customers have the right to request a case history in order to track the resolution progress of their query;
• Customers must have the option to override a telephone based menu at any time and request to speak with an operator;
• Service cancelations must take effect immediately; and
• Companies that fail to follow these regulations could be fined to a sum of up to R$3,000,000.00, in accordance with the Código de Defesa do Consumidor (Consumers Defence Code).

Now can you imagine if companies such as BT and Sky ever had to follow a similar decree? One can hope, if ever…

However, the authors also righteously assert that Brazil is not yet a superpower and that there is yet a lot to be done – particularly with regards to the public sector, infrastructure and the bureaucracy faced by organisations. This is the last bit I would like to stir some thoughts about.

I do think massive reforms are needed in regards to corporate legislation. But while Brazil should look around and learn from the experience of other successful economies in what to do, I think it is mostly important to learn what not to do. Let me develop on this thought.

I’ve been living in Europe for over eight years, and I have noticed organisations doing things in here that they simply wouldn’t get their way with in Brazil, particularly with regards to employment laws and consumer rights. What I mean is that although Brazil has problems, they can get much worse if Brazil just open its market to foreign investments by simulating other economies, without taking into considerations the singularities of the Brazilian market.

In the Canadian documentary “The Corporation“, a psychological profile is drawn upon American corporations as if they where physical human beings. Following this premise, the documentary illustrates how organisations tend to display a psychotic and egocentric profile. The documentary asserts that the main issue with corporate legislation in the USA is that it allow organisations to act like individuals within the constitution, whilst there is no single individual that could be taken into account for all the actions perpetrated by the organisation. The bottom line is: who is the culprit when an organisation crosses the line of ethical behaviour? Now imagine a country like Brazil with all the problems it still has to overcome, full of psychotic organisations.

Well in Brazil companies are also seen as individuals. You have pessoa física and pessoa jurídica (i.e.: physical individual and juridical individual). But there are also strong laws with regards to consumer rights and employment rights, and having lived abroad for over fourteen years and being a constant traveller interested in foreign markets, I am yet to see legislations on these matters that would match those of Brazil’s. Foreign companies really find a hard time in Brazil when trying to implement some of its questionable domestic practices. I always giggled when I read on Brazilian newspapers that yet another European telecom got its ears pulled by the Brazilian ombudsman due to some of their shenanigans, like trying to penalise customers for switching mobile networks.

I the UK, I have seen two page employment contracts, in which employees would be bound by a dozen pages “employee handbook”. This often means organisations can change the contents of their “employee handbook” from time to time and the employees are automatically subjected to its terms by proxy. I have even seen extreme example of an employee handbook attempting to override the laws of the land, in whicn an organisation was cheeky enough to put a clause in its employee handbook which stated that “if a crime was committed within the organisation premises, employees were forbidden to inform the police and they should inform a member of the board instead”.

What I also love in the UK is the fixed term contracts that state that the given organisation can change the terms of its contract at any time they want without prior notice. Picture this: You sign a contract for a TV subscription service for a period of twelve months. Months after you signed the contract, the service provider decides to raise its prices in 25 percent. You can’t get out because you are bound on the terms of the original contract. In Brazil, as soon as the organisation makes a change in the contract to which customers disagree, customers would be able to pull out of the fixed-term. In the UK, you would have to go to court in order to prove your rights.

So I DO think reforms in company legislation is a must for the Brazilian economy. But as chaotic and crazy it can be for a foreign company to establish itself in Brazil nowadays, in a (not so perfect and totally incidental) way this Babel tower of bureaucracy has kept the country safe from being on the mercy of corporatism — We have enough problems already!

Xaraya was a full of new promises, and most of them were fulfilled. It has a more flexible core, flexible template and layout system, strong debugging and error support and an extensive API. In my opinion, from an architectural perspective Xaraya is the best open source CRM out there. Of course this is only my opinion, which I based on my experience with several other systems (Xoops, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc), and I can proudly assert that I am the original creative thinker of several features that have been adopted by Xaraya. Looking back in time however I feel that most CMS systems, not matter how good their API or framework is, are failing to keep up with the recent trends and developments in the Internet.

First and foremost, portals are designed with the end-user in mind. It doesn’t matter who your target audience is and their level of knowledge; the portal must make sense to its user base, not its administrators. What is the value that you are willing to offer to our user base? And most importantly, what is that your portal has to offer to your potential user base that users can’t find somewhere else? This is the fundamental basis of a marketing orientation approach, in which the organisations must be aware of customer needs and the competition. So if you are offering a photo gallery, forums and some basic social network features, bear in mind that there are tons of other sites out there that are offering the same for free. As an example, which should members of my family register at my portal to make use of forums and photo galleries when they could use Facebook and Flickr?

Another point is that users don’t like redundancy and ambiguity. Users don’t want to register into yet another website, in which they will have to maintain yet another identity and upload pictures once again. With the recent trends in Web 2.0 users are welcoming integration of social networking features, which is exactly what I think is missing in Content Management Systems at the moment. With Facebook’s application framework and Google’s approach with the Open Social platform, there is a lot of development opportunities that free Content Management Systems are failing to grasp.

For my family website, I would like that my users could log-in into the portal using their existing Windows Live, Yahoo or Google ID, and be able to make use of social network features of sites like Facebook and Google’s Open Social. I would also like my users to be able to link their Flickr photo gallery into their profile at my family portal, and to be able to interact with related groups in Facebook and Orkut. In the case of my portal, it would be futile to expect my user base to participate in it. Why you ask? Well my family portal is a silo of information, meaning that only the users of my family portal would be able to interact with the data. It is unrealistic to expect that my users would actively participate in discussions and upload pictures and other contents, while they could do the same in portals with a wider audience like Facebook or Orkut.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Content Management Systems shouldn’t have their own photo galeries, forums and other functionality. On the contrary, I do love to see all the fantastic open source applications that are out there and I think they are a viable option for portals in which integration with 3rd parties would be unrealistic. This is particularly the case in which portals memberships are closed to given members (e.g.: site is closed for subscribers or over 18s only). However, being most of these features modularised, I believe that portal administrators should have the freedom to choose. Moreover with Web 2.0, portal owners could have their implementations of Menalto’s Gallery and phpBB forums integrated with Facebook or Google’s Open Social platform. The possibilities are numerous.

Therefore I urge for the developers of open source CMS out there to start adapting their systems to integrate with what Web 2.0 has to offer. Authentication modules for Windows Live, Yahoo and Google IDs would be a great start. More documentation and modules that focus on integration with Facebook and Google’s Open Social would also be of great value for portals that are willing to target a wide user base.

On a personal note, I rather like the idea of having a Windows-based server at home. But I do miss having the ability to play with Linux hacks. So I was thinking what I could do to have Linux as an option at home when I came with a solution where I could have both Windows Home Server and Linux on my MediaSmart server running at the same time: Virtual Server.

After upgrading the amount of RAM on my MediaSmart served from 512MB to 2GB, I felt this would be a great opportunity to have a Linux system without compromising the features of Windows Home Server. So I have prepared this guide to explain what I have done to run a Linux virtual machine under my Windows Home Server. I part from the principle that you know what you are doing and you have some idea of what virtualisation all about.

Here is what you need:

• Upgrade your server’s RAM. 512MB is unrealistic if you want to do anything with Windows Home Server besides its out-of-the-box features. If you have a HP MediaSmart server, you can find instructions on how to upgrade the server memory here.
• A copy of Microsoft Virtual Server. At the time of writing this post, the last version was 2005 R2 SP1. Virtual Server is free and can be downloaded from here.
• A distribution of Linux. I am a big Ubuntu fan. However I opted to use openSUSE because of the benefits it has from the interoperability agreement Novell has with Microsoft (e.g.: virtual machine additions). You can get openSUSE from here, and Ubuntu from here.

Setup Instructions

1. First and foremost, you must do a remote access to your HomeServer using UltraVNC or Remote Desktop and log in as administrator.
2. Once on the servers desktop, install Microsoft Virtual Server. Reboot the server is necessary and remote desktop into the server again as administrator.
3. On the Servers Start Menu under Microsoft Virtual Server, click on Virtual Server Administration Website.
4. Under Virtual Machines on the left-side menu of the Admin Site, choose click on Create.
5. You must now provide the initial settings of your virtual machine. Here are some of my recommended settings for a simple Unix Server:
   1. Name. The name of the Virtual PC (e.g.: Linux, openSUSE, Ubuntu).
   2. Memory. The amount of RAM you want to provide for the virtual machine, bearing in mind you should leave enough for your server to run smoothly. It really depends of the amount of RAM you have and what you want to do with your Linux server. For example if I only want to use some console (text) applications I would go from a minimum of 256MB to 512MB (if I want to run services for a development environment). If using a graphical desktop and/or some more intensive applications, I might go to 1GB. As I have 2GB for my home server, I prefer to never leave the Home Server operating system with less than 1GB.
   3. Virtual hard disk. You can create the disk to use with your Linux virtual machine now or specify one later.
      NOTE: If you already have or plan to have Linux on an external disk or flash drive, you could create a linked virtual hard disk that points to the Linux you partition you want to use.
   4. Virtual network adapter. Make sure you configure your virtual machine to connect to the external network. This will ensure that the virtual machine can be seen and accessed on your network.
6. Once the machine is created, you will be presented with its configuration page.
7. If you need to install Linux, you need to ensure the virtual machine will be able to initiate the Linux installation process:
   1. If you have a CD/DVD drive on your home server, simply put the disk on the drive and ensure your virtual machine CD/DVD drive properties is configure to use your physical CD/DVD drive.
      NOTE: If you want to use your CD/DVD drive within your Linux virtual machine, you should do this procedure regardless if you need to install Linux or not.
   2. If your home server doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, you must configure the virtual machines CD/DVD driver properties to capture the ISO image of your Linux install disk.
8. If you already have an external disk with Linux installed, or if you want to install Linux on a dedicated disk, you must create a linked virtual disk that points to your existing Linux install:
   1. Plug the external disk with Linux on your home server.
   2. On the Virtual Server Admin Site under Virtual Disks, choose Create then Linked Virtual Hard Disk.
   3. Specify the location name of the file to be saved and the physical drive that will be used for the virtual disk.
   4. Go back to the configuration page of your Linux virtual machine and under hard disks, provide the filename of the file created for your linked virtual hard disk.
9. OPTIONAL: Still on the virtual machine configuration page, you can click on General properties in order to specify a username and password to run the virtual machine upon system start-up. Recommended if you want your Linux virtual machine to be always on (i.e.: starts when the home server start).
10. On the Virtual Server Admin Site under Virtual Server, choose Server Properties.
11. On the bottom of the page under your server Properties, click on Virtual Machine Remote Control(VMRC).
12. On the Virtual Machine Remote Control (CMRC) Server Properties page, ensure you enable VMRC server and specify a TCP/IP port that is not already in use on the server. Then click OK to reflect the changes.
13. OPTIONAL: Back on the left-side menu of the Virtual Server Admin Site, under Virtual Server you could click on Resource Allocation to specify the maximum amount of resources your virtual machines can use in order to ensure resilience to your home server.
14. Once again on the left-side menu of the Virtual Server Admin Site, under Navigation click on Master Status in order to see your recently created virtual machine. Hove the mouse over its title to show its context menu that would allow it to start and stop the virtual machine, as well to Remote Control it.

All done! Once I got my Linux box installed, I was running things like shell scripting, mySQL, Apache, PHP and other nifty tools. I hope you found this little guide useful!

As a next step, you could look into Microsoft Services for Unix for good interoperability between your Linux virtual machine and your Windows hosts. You can find more about Windows Services for Unix here.

If you want to discuss this implementation with other Windows Home Server enthusiasts, there is a forum thread at wegotserved.co.uk (registration required) here. Thanks to Bodog from wegotserved.co.uk for the support!

– A patriot flies a flag to unite people, while a nationalist flies a flag to segregate people

How easy it is for one to blame others for their own failures. What I find amusing is the kind of comments that goes around about Brazilian biofuels. Forgive me for being so blunt, but I think that 30 years of experience in the biofuel market does give Brazil more know-how and leverage to talk about the subject. And if one thinks that the Brazilian perspective is solely motivated by commercial opportunities with regards to its biofuels, well think again from another perspective:

Brazil’s production of biofuel is so far mostly aimed towards the internal market. Just look how haply Brazil is powering its cars with flexi-engine fuels that support the mixing of any ratio of gasoline and ethanol.

Since sugar is not a ration or basic food product like corn or beans, it is very anecdotal to claim that it is responsible for the raise of food prices. Moreover, only 0.02% of Brazil’s arable land if used for sugarcane. From this 0.02%, only half is used for fuel production (that is 0.01%). There are no issues in Brazil with over production of sugar cane favouring other types of crops, and due to the size of Brazil (amongst other elements I raised previously) it is quite far-fetched to think it would ever be.

So if the Europe is concerned about the raise in food price, here is some food-for-thought (no pun intended): What about Europe’s unfair agricultural subsidies that not only harm their own small farmers, but also poorer regions like South America and Africa?

I took the liberty to quote the “The Hunt for the Red October” movie opening quote at the beginning of this post. In the 1990 movie, the captain of an advanced first-strike soviet submarine addresses his crew, claiming that they’re on a game of chess with their old adversary.

And I must take my hat off to the Kremlin: Not that I agree with their politics, but I must confess that they seem to surprise the west over and over again with their moves. Keeping on with the chess analogy, Kasparov’s fatherland is showing off to the world how the game is meant to be played (ironically, that is regardless of how Kasparov himself may feel).

To me, Russia proclaiming the end of the Soviet rule and a shift to democracy was one of the biggest strikes of evil geniuses I’ve witnessed so far. With the end of the cold war declared, Russia was officially acknowledged as a friendly democratic country. On the other hand, it inherited virtually all of USSR foreign relation protocols, including partnerships and mutual aid with socialist regimes. Plus, having veto power within the UN Security Council gives Russia an (unfair?) handicap advantage – making a game of chess look more like a game of tic-tac-toe from this side of the (former?) iron curtain.

Moldova is a former Soviet Republic, located between Romania and Ukraine. A unrecognised breakaway republic, called the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic is located within its eastern border with Ukraine. A Russian “peace keeping” mission is present in the region since 1992, which according to the government of Moldova, “is against the political will of Moldovan constitutional authorities and defies the unanimously recognized international norms and principles, being qualified by Moldovan authorities as a foreign military occupation illegally deployed on the territory of the state” (source).

Since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at the flags and coat of arms of the previous Moldavian SSR, the current Moldovan Republic and the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (separatist Transnistria). Can you spot the similarities?

Moldavian SSR (until 1991)	Moldova (present)	Trasnistria State (separatists)

Another regime that has (unconditional?) support from the Kremlin is the Republic of Belarus. It’s (so far perpetual) president Alexander Lukashenko is seen by his critics as an authoriarian leader which policies are influenced by a nostalgia for the Soviet regime. Let’s have a look at their flags and coat of arms as well:

Byelorrusian SSR (until 1991)	Republic of Belarus (present)

Can you spot the similarities? It would be funny if it wasn’t sad. But now trying to be completely pragmatic (if one could ever) – how is this different from what truly democratic western countries ever did? Russia’s move, in my opinion, echoes the stand of the British Empire with regards to South America’s independence from Spain. Breaking South America in small sovereign states would hinder the possibilities of a super power in the region with a stronger bargaining power.

Thus, to me Russia’s strategy just reinstate that capitalism and communism is just two different sides of the same coin.

It is not my intention to just second Thurrott in his opinions. In fact that would be a waste of time, as probably a good part of the IT community that is familiar with Windows and the recent strategies announced by Microsoft (particularly about Windows 7) is chuckling at Gartner’s comments. For those that would like to know why, you can read Thurrott’s views about Gartner’s assertions on his website here and then here.

What I do want in this case is to share you my views on what is the real problem with Windows. In my view, the biggest nonsense in Gartner’s argument is that they say that Windows should have different kernels (”one size doesn’t fit all”) whilst at the same time they made a case against the over complexity of the operating system.

Different kernels? This is as complex as it gets. My view is that Gartner simply wanted to sound smart and give the impression that they know what they’re talking about. As Thurrott well put in his site, Windows VISTA is the most modularised version of Windows, and there are several editions available for different needs (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, …). The factual difference is that, instead of creating different kernels (as Gartner argues in favour) the key is to modularise it instead — a practice that is Microsoft’s main strategy for the Windows brand.

The problem I see here is software compatibility is that Microsoft should have opted to modularisation about five years ago. And I mean way more modularisation than Microsoft have now with Windows VISTA and Windows Server 2008. Things like the NTVDM, POSIX and OS/2 compatibility layers should have been optional modules. In fact, I was just recently thinking about NTVDM being removed from x64 flavours of Windows. Well, for me it makes sense. I mean, I can get much better DOS legacy support by getting something like DOSBOX to run DOS applications.

As for complexity, again I see this as a problem of modularisation. Just out of curiosity: What happened with the option of doing a “custom install” in Windows and choose NOT to install Painter, Screensavers and things like that? For a 14GB of HD space hungry operating system like Windows VISTA, this is a must. I want to be able to choose what add or remove during the installation, and without having to edit some unnatened script files.

Moreover, I think the complexity problem is way beyond bundled goodies like Windows Mail or Windows Movie Maker. The problem is that Windows VISTA requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM to barely run. I’m sorry but this is insane. I don’t care how much cheaper memory is these days. What I see is that today you can do similar funky graphics in *nix with 512MB RAM. The problem? Again I think is the fact of little modularity within the kernel.

As for hardware compatibility, I agree with Thurrott that Windows VISTA being having issues of incompatibility is a myth. I know that VISTA has much, MUCH better drivers. However, this came with a dreadful cost (which is a related, but different subject):

The fact that Microsoft only allow signed drivers to run under Windows x64 is SUICIDE. Probably one of the siliest moves Microsoft did for the x64 platform. Why? Well, sometimes there are nice open source applications out there that require abstraction layers that sits on drivers (e.g.: network analysis tools, emulators, etc). Being open source drivers, it is well likely that they won’t have their drivers signed (me thinks). So, what if I want to install some open source cryptographic tool? what about VNC’s video driver? What about network analysis tools, and some *nix ported applications which require “drivers”? See my point?

Moreover, I despite the fact that Microsoft added some shenanigans on their HAL, such as disabling sound features when someone inputs something in the MIC IN or LINE IN of the PC, etc. These shenanigans, which were added to hurdle piracy, do little to prevent piracy, but do a lot to annoy customers.

The way I perceive these issues, I don’t believe Windows is in danger of collapsing — far from it in fact. But I do think that Microsoft is in danger of loosing market within the enterprise and power user segments of the market to *nix (BSD, Linux, Unix-based systems) — And I make my point as an IT specialist and implementator, not as an analyst.