Documentation Continued

I had a pretty serious decision here on how to get my documents down to Brasil. Royal mail do a service called Airsure for about £11, or FedEx do International Priority for about £50, I think when it comes to such important papers you’re far better off going with FedEx, in my mind, if my papers got lost it would take months to re-acquire them from college, university etc. It came to £52.60 for the delivery and it was down in Brasil within 4 days.

Translation and Submission

The next step is to get all of your now legalised documentation translated into Portuguese, this is a requirement for the submission process. As it is a temporary visa requiring a sponsoring company in Brasil, they sorted it out for me – the Brasilian company then submitted all of my documentation, and filled in all the forms – it should take 30 days from this point to get your confirmation or denial of Visa.

Confirmed?

Once your Visa is confirmed, you can begin the process of actually collecting it from the consulate. Like most things this is not entirely simple either. After receving confirmation of acceptance you need to head off to https://scedv.serpro.gov.br and fill in the application form. Once completed you will need to print off the receipt, sign it and attach a passport photo.

Additionally you will need a certificate (ACRO) from the UK Police force confirming that you do not have a criminal record. These can be obtained from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) – more information and the form. It’s £35 and you’ll get it in about 10 days or so. You’ll need:

• The Fully completed form
• 2 Proofs of your current address
• A recent passport photograph
• Copy of your passport
• Payment (Cheque / Postal Order / Draft)

So stick all of this in the post and wait patiently for your response.

Putting it all together

So now you should have in your hands:

• Completed application form (From the consulate)
• Your passport
• ACRO Certificate
• Payment Method

It’s time to head to the consulate and give them all this information. Part 3 to follow….

Foreign Citizen with an Employment Contract - NR64 (Now called RN80)

Getting a work visa for Brazil can be a complicated venture, but with some time and patience it’s quite possible. I had a huge amount of trouble finding information on the subject and often the information I received was wrong or out of date.

My Situation

I have been to Brazil 8 times in the last 3 and 1/2 years (I have spent something like 6 months there on and off on tourists Visa) and on my last visit I was offered a position with a US Company with a Brazilian division. After accepting the role, it was time to start the process of trying to get a Visa, so here’s the information on what I did.

Obtained from various sources:

“In order to obtain a work visa, a work permit application must be sent to the local Ministry of Labour and Employment (Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego) office by the company wishing to employ the foreigner. Once the application has been approved, the approval is published in the Diario Oficial (Brazilian legal newspaper) and sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will then authorise the Consulate or Embassy to begin to process the work visa.

Temporary Visa with a company tie (Visto Temporario V):
This visa is granted to an individual whose qualifications and/or experience clearly demonstrate that his skills set is unique and there is no Brazilian citizen who can assume the role he is intended to perform in the country. This requirement will be rigorously investigated by the Ministry of Labour and Employment (Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego).

Due to this stipulation, this visa is usually issued to technicians or skilled workers employed by a foreign-based company with activities in Brazil.

The visa is issued for an initial period of two years with the option to extend it for another two years should the need arise. Following this four-year period, the company has the option of applying for the visa to become permanent.”

Essentials

If you are going for the Temporary work visa, you absolutely need a job offer in Brazil and you need to have the company in Brazil file all of your paperwork there when you are ready to apply for the Visa.

Process

The basic process is as follow:

1. You get a job offer.
2. You need to supply your documentation (Notarised and Legalised and Translated) to the Misistry of Labour in Brasil.
3. They investigate and make a decision.
4. If accepted you go to the Consulate in your home country, pay the feee and get your Visa.

Sounds simple in process, but there are a few things you can do to make your life far easier!

Important point: Everything will take longer than you think, this is not a quick process and it is as times very involved, just be prepared to put in a bit of work.

Documentation

Finding your documentation is difficult enough, but figuring out how to make it legal and useful really stressed me out. All documentation needs to be legalised, this is the process of physically sending (or taking) the documentation to the consulate, paying a fee and having it authenticated as being a real, legal document. The prices differ depending on what you are legalising.

The other issue you will no doubt come across is any pieces of paper with a signature on them, in my case a letter of recommendation from my Managing director. You absolutely MUST get this notarized before sending it to the consulate. Your local lawyers will be able to help you find a notary – they basically just observe the signature being made, and stamp / emboss the paper with their seal to confirm it was signed by the person mentioned on the paper. If they are not registered with the consulate, you will need a sample of their signature to send with it. In my case it cost me £72 for a 5 minute process, should have been a lawyer!

You are providing your documentation to show your suitability for the role, the more the better, you need to make a valid case for your employment and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is preferential to employ you rather than a Brazilian.

So in my case I sent the following (originals and photocopies) to the consulate (Price the Consulate charged me):

• My University Certificate (£4)
• Transcript of University Degree (£4)
• My College Certificate (£4)
• Letter of Recommendation (16)
• Copy of the last two pages of my Passport (£8)

*My Passport too, so they could verify the copy.

I sent it Via Special delivery, it took a week to get back to me. You have to include a Self Addressed Envelope inside so they can mail it back. The consulate sends the documents back with an embossed stamp and their seal to prove that they are legal documents in the UK and not forgeries.

They are supposed to send back the originals unmarked and the copies legalised, but in my case for some unknown reason they decided to legalise the originals and leave the photocopies untouched, I did not have time to go through the whole process again, so I just mailed the original off to Brasil.

The next steps are to get your documents off to Brasil and have them translated, then to start the application…. Part two follows.

Useful Links:
Ministry of Labour
Brazilian Consulate (London)
Information about Temporary Visa – Brasilian Consulate

They just want to to either link to the website with some specific anchor text (seems pretty straightforward) or follow the twitter account (twitter.com/airport_news) and tweet about the promo. What have you got to loose? I can’t enter it (wouldn’t be very fair as I work here, but there is nothing stopping you!) Good luck and let me know if you enter.

Additionally, they have 4 more to give away on their other ‘new’ portals, check out the promo above for the links to the other sites.

Apple have been pushing HTML5 (One of the few companies on the planet that can openly shun Flash and the web follows):

• Apple came up with the CANVAS and CSS Transforms.
• They gave up Webkit and it’s (just) announced successor Webkit2.
• They openly and very publically blocked flash on both the iPhone and iPad encouraging people to use HTML5 (Vimeo, Google, NYT, and many others quickly offered HTML5 versions of their content).
• The addition yesterday of iAds shows all the cool functionality that can be had from 5.

But while Apple are a proponent of these great technologies, they have also shut their platform down jut a little more, see the new developer terms under section 3.3.1:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

If you are Apple, you could argue this is a good thing, completely native code, written from the ground up, no cross-porting, and at the end of the day, we are speaking about Apple here, who traditionally do whatever they want.

The key point here, is that although Apple now has a 63% (US) share of the mobile browser market, and this is surely set to increase with the uptake of the iPad, they really have some clout as to what goes on in the web. The thing is, the web is supposed to be an open platform with many people / entities contributing, refining, updating.

It’s a strange web we weave when a single company can practically change the web over night.

I love what Apple do, their products, brand and general image. Let’s hope things don’t get to closed.

Acute Accent:
Option/Alt + E, Vowel = André

Grave Accent:
Option/Alt + `, Vowel = Às

Circumflex Accent:
Option/Alt + I, Vowel = Você

Tilde:
Option/Alt + N, Vowel = Amanhã

C Cedilla:
Shift + Option/Alt + C = Ç (I couldn’t find a word with the Large Cedilla)

C Cedilla:
Option/Alt + C = Condição

So to write André you would hold the Option/Alt key and then press e at the same time (this shows the Accute Accent), then the vowel you want – easy, peasy.

My version reported only 1 database ‘Daylight’ which is part of the Marketcircle product Daylight Express, I have had this removed for quite some time, but OpenBase does not seem to offer an uninstaller – so a bit of shell magic is required.

Open the Terminal and enter:

sudo /Library/OpenBase/bin/RemoveOpenBaseScript

Magic, it will be uninstalled – just be sure to check nothing is using it first or you may have some problems on your hands ;)

modprobe FATAL could not load /lib/modules/2.6.29.4/modules.dep

Some people have reported that packing and unpacking the module does the trick, so after a short stint at the prompt I was hoping this would be fixed:

cd /boot
cp initrd.img-2.6.29.4 initrd-2.6.29.4.old (Just making a backup)
depmod -a
update-initramfs -k 2.6.29.4 -c
cd /tmp
gzip -dc /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29.4| cpio -id
touch lib/modules/2.6.29.4/modules.dep
find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29.4.new
gzip /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29.4.new
cd /boot
mv initrd.img-2.6.29.4.new.gz initrd.img-2.6.29.4

Didn’t fix the problem unfortunately, but the I stumbled across a forum post over at Remote-Exploit and the following rather simple cammand fixed the whole shebang:

update-grub

And now it works like a treat! Original Post at the RE Forums here.

ifconfig
iwconfig
dhclient

Lets assume that your running in a DHCP network to make our lives even easier (this also applys if your running Linux in something like VMWare), so, tap in:

ifconfig

‘ifconfig’ is the Interface configuration program, it will list all available interfaces on your hardware, in my case it shows lo (local loopback) & eth0 (ethernet), we are of course after eth0. So we now issue:

dhclient eth0

We are telling linux to attempt to automagically attach itself to the network and search for a DHCP server and assign itself an IP address – if this command will not run (has an error), chances are that you are not logged in as a root user, so issue:

sudo dhclient eth0

And enter your credentials when prompted, assuming you are in a small simple network, boot your browser of choice and away you go. Next up connecting Wirelesly ;)

root
toor

Nice and simple – right? But sometimes (often in my case) you’ll want to change the root password (especially as you’ll be spending so much time as a root user). You do remember the username and password you used when you installed backtrack right? So, open up a terminal and type the following:

sudo su
whoami
passwd

‘sudo su’ will change you into the Super User account, your system will ask you for your password (current password of the account you are using). ‘whoami’ will tell you the account you are using – should be ‘root’. Last but not least ‘passwd’ will let you change the root password, enter it twice and away you go.