Reflective Surface
Still powered by a contradiction in terms
Archive for Uncategorized
March 11, 2006 at 12:08 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
My name is Ronaldo Melo Ferraz, and Reflective Surface is my personal weblog. When I write here, I write as a private citizen, and I am solely responsible for what’s written. My current employer has no affiliation whatsoever with this weblog.
The name of the site comes from a common Web phenomenon: the reflection of information. When I was searching for a good name for my personal site, I thought about thousands of names but quickly found out that most good domain names were already taken. (To tell the truth, not so quickly. I only gave up after I had tried almost all Greek and Latin words in my lexicons.) At the time, I was thinking about how weblogs are much like a room full of mirrors that reflect information back and forth ad infinitum, and thought about the name Reflective Surface. Coincidentally, I came across an entry in a weblog that had just been born at the time, and in the entry the blogger talked exactly about that. The rest is history.
A few personal bits
I’m a 28-year-old Brazilian, living in Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon), capital of the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines) and the country’s third-largest city — which is also were I was born and raised.
Now that you know that I’m not a native English speaker, don’t worry about any spelling or grammar errors you may find in this site. I read somewhere that anybody who started learning a foreign language after infancy will take about 32 years to master the language completely. I still have more than three quarters of the way to go. Never having taken classes, I’m learning as I go–mistakes included.
I’m happily married to beautiful Alessandra (who I still couldn’t convince to have a weblog) and have a son, adorable Marcus. I’m a Christian — a Baptist to be exact.
Interests
My interests are too diverse to enumerate, so I will list only a few.
As a programmer, I’m obviously interested in all things relating to technology. I’m mostly interested in programming languages, compilers and related technologies. In the future, I plan to publish a few projects of my own in this site.
Also, as you can see from one of the categories in my blog, reading is one of my passions. I try to read at least ten books each month. I miss the time when I was younger and still could read one or two everyday. I read anything I can get, but I tend to read much more science fiction and fantasy. I don’t have favorite authors, or rather, every good author becomes a favorite.
My tastes in music are very eclectic, but I prefer rock. My favorites artists are Petra, Dire Straits and The Alan Parsons Project. I’m currently learning to play the guitar. Two months ago I bought a Danelectro DC-3 from a friend. It’s an incredible sounding guitar that already gave me countless hours of pure enjoyment.
Contact me
Well, I guess that is all I can indulge to write about myself. For futher information, jobs offers, or anything else, you may contact me at mtblog@reflectivesurface.com.
December 23, 2004 at 4:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A merry Christmas to all readers and visitors. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, a merry end-of-year to you too. 
As always, updates will be erratic here until the next year. Have a good time. 
September 5, 2004 at 11:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
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January 30, 2004 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
My hosting provider has just informed they will be changing the server in which my site (along with those of many of my friends) is hosted. Motive: none, except that they want to change it. As a result, the site may become unavailable for some time in the next few days. In fact, considering the recent level of service of those guys, it will probably be much worse than that.
To my (few) faithful readers: I’m trying to solve this chaotic situation for some time now, but fear has prevented me from doing I should have already done, which is moving away from this hosting provider. I apologize. Thanks for your patience, too.
In a good Christian spirit, I think I should send an e-mail to my provider thanking them for all the troubles and headaches I endured in the last few months. It’s certainly helping me to be more patient with everybody.
January 20, 2004 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Just the other day I was doing a favor for a friend of mine who owns a marketing company when I stumbled upon a thing that showed once again how Windows is much more unsafe than Linux or any other decent OS if installed with its default options.
Since that friend doesn’t know much about programming, she asked me to create some scripts for the site of one of her clients. The site is hosted in one of the biggest hosting providers in Brazil, both in terms of customers and infrastructure, which shall remain unnamed to protect the not so innocent. At some point, one of the scripts gets a file uploaded to the server and forwards it to a specific e-mail address. So far, so good. It’s just a question of hooking two components together.
However, when I started creating the script, I found that I didn’t know where to temporarily store the files, before they were sent to the correct e-mail address and deleted from the server. It was a bit past midnight, and I had to way to ask support. Since I was using a programming language that has no command to retrieve the current directory, I just used the simple and dirty way to find where the file is running from: I caused an error. With the directory at hand, I tried to save a file to it. It worked. Considering that that language also lacks any kind of protection against that kind of thing, I wasn’t bothered. So, just for fun, I tried to save the file at C:\Temp. To my surprise, it just worked.
All right, accessing C:\Temp isn’t a big deal, even though it wasn’t supposed to happen. So, I decided to go further, and tried to access C:\WINNT. As incredible as that may sound, this directory was completely accessible, with full reading and writing rights. If that is not a security hole, I don’t know what a security hole is.
In short, a user with a simple FTP password can easily compromise the machine, which is part of a much bigger cluster. Even a user with proper access to the site can easily damage the machine by mistake. And some people still say Windows is safe.
January 15, 2004 at 5:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
All reports regarding my assimilation have been largely exaggerated. 
Contrary to what may seem, I didn’t stop blogging. It’s just a project with a tight deadline that is approaching faster then I’d like. As it happens with this kind of project, extra time and weekends at work are the norm. I hope to resume normal programming here anytime soon.
December 4, 2003 at 2:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A thread in the ll1 mailing list has a list of questions to ask yourself when you are designing a declarative programming language. A good read for people interested in the subject.
December 2, 2003 at 1:29 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Via Scoble, comes the news of an incredible statement by Steve Ballmer, the second in command at Microsoft, saying that Windows costs about US$ 12 a year, considering the average life cycle of a computer. As James Robertson commented, it’s simply too amazing a allegation even to begin to make fun of. I feel like crying instead.
Even considering that you get a discount when you buy Windows bundled with the computer — something that, here in Brazil, it’s not true in most cases — Ballmer’s claim is a far cry from the truth. And it’s easy to show why.
Less than two weeks ago, I was in a computer store in a shopping mall near my workplace. My coworkers and I were checking the price of anti-virus software, and, just for curiosity, we asked about the prices of Microsoft software. Windows XP Professional was priced at R$ 1900 (US$ 664), and Office 2003 was even more expensive, being priced at R$ 2500 (US$ 874). Together, they cost R$ 4400 (US$ 1538).
I will admit the prices aforementioned are a little bit above the market’s average. Nonetheless, that’s the price you will find in many computer stores. Even considering the four years of use Ballmer mentions in the article, that’s a long way from US$ 12 a year.
Now, let’s take a look at the economic situation in Brazil. The minimum age is R$ 240 (US$ 84), which means Windows itself costs almost 8 times what a average works gets monthly here. Did I hear somebody say luxury item? Heck, you can buy an excellent computer here for the price of Office 2003 alone. It’s easy to see how absurd Microsoft prices are for the Brazilian reality, and how ridiculous Ballmer’s claims are.
To go further, taking the combined price of Windows and Office you can buy a good used car here. In fact, together they cost about one third of a brand new car. Worse yet, in Belo Horizonte, the city in which I live, that price would buy you one tenth of a nice, albeit small, house.
And I’m not even going into the details of how much the problems Windows gives you cost yearly (virii, trojan horses, etc.)
I don’t know what Ballmer was smoking when he was interviewed, but it was strong. And the most amazing thing about Windows and Office is that for that price you get only the OS and a bloated office package — nothing else. On the other hand, a normal Linux distro ships with more than 2000 different application, including various office packages, games, utilities, connection and sharing tools, Web servers, database servers, and scores of programming packages for a minimal price — in many cases, just the price of the media.
Do I need to say anything else?
November 26, 2003 at 12:12 am · Filed under Uncategorized
In my previous entry about SCORM, I presented some considerations about the implementation of its API on a LMS, talking about both its client part, which runs on the browser, and the server part, which runs on a Web server. The entry was an overview of the issues found in the implementation, but it didn’t look into the fine details of the process. This entry tries to complement some of the information found in the previous entry, explaining some details of the server-side implementation.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 23, 2003 at 6:51 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
On account of a personal project, I’m looking for a new tool to manage a site whose main focus is written content. The tool must be able to manage this content effortlessly while also being sufficiently extensible to allow forms of interaction between the users of the site.
While searching the Web, I came across a most useful site called OpenSourceCMS where anyone can try out dozens of tools related to content management without needing to install or configure anything. It’s just a question of following a link to get access to a fully functional installation of the tools, which also includes administrative access. It’s a very nice site, indeed.
One of the most interesting tools I found in the site is Typo3, a fully featured CMS with excellent extensibility and a wealth of configuration options that make it a good choice for many kinds of sites. I intend to test it as soon as possible since it seems quite adequate for what I have in mind. The tool looked so interesting that I will consider it for managing this blog as well, if it proves itself satisfactory to my needs. I have been planning to replace MovableType for a long time, as it’s not powerful or flexible enough to do what I want to do in the site. Maybe Typo3 will be the right option.
The OpenSourceCMS site, with all of its options, also convinced me, as far as I can see, that I don’t need to write my own tool since there are plenty of good tools out there that are more than sufficient for my needs. No need to reinvent the wheel when those needs are not that unusual.
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