Ultra-Mobile PC - Hardware a.k.a the microsoft origami project.

I haven't digested all the press releases yet. Apparently MS copying Apple's marketing tactic has paid off. Super secret announcements style that steve and co has mastered so well is now also being copied by bill and co.


The problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste.
- Steve Jobs

MRT Quickies

MRT Quickies

Noticed the one way ticket machines (TM) at the North Station finally usable. Wish they also had the same for stored values. And it really, really would help if they put some of them on major malls or other places frequented by the train loving public.

Finally had a different program displayed on the public tv screens. Was really getting tired hearing the same artist moaning for the past few weeks.


This post brought to you by a southbound train and a treonox.

OPML == The most horrific abuse of xml known to man. :D

Am getting a blank page at the pinoy techscene site http://techscene.free.net.ph for two days now. And to fulfill my pinoy tech news fix I decided to setup a planet pinoytechscene mirror. Managed to get the OPML file from Jan Alonzo's blog.

Planet Pinoy Techscene.

pinoy techscene seems down for today?

hmmmnn... where is that opml file...

Youtube.com is cool!

Check out this videos!

YouTube - Racecar simulator videogame.

The rumored widescreen ipod video

TV via IP (IPTV) delivery is quickly becoming a practical reality.

Tango Icon Gallery - Tango Desktop Project

If your artistically challenged like me, but have no choice but also do frontend thingies, tango is a great place to look for slick looking icons for both desktop and webtop use.

Do the tango!

u*blog again

u*blog again

After a few days of using it to post to both wordpress and blogger, I can definitely say this freeware Palm application rocks!

While blogging via email would suffice, there is one thing it can't do at the moment: edit previously posted blog entries. A dedicated blogging client like u*blog allows you to edit your previous blog postings. I also like the fact that it has a handy icon that let's you connect/disconnect your GPRS connection inside the application. The interface is amazingly very simple to use and allows you to define handy tag shortcuts.

The only minor gripe is the setup process. It would be nice for it to include sensible defaults for popular blogging engines. The u*blog website provides a pretty straightforward reference at the moment. It would also be nice to include basic help instructions inside the app to guide new users.

All in all, once you set it up, its pretty stable and you would be happily blogging while mobile with your network enabled palm device. And of course, did I forgot to tell you its FREE?


cheers!

treonox
(MRT, on my way home)

Earth having sex with Mars

Earth having sex with Mars

Yep, that's not too farfetched. Just one of the things that came up during The Long Now Foundation's (TLNF) seminar about the asteriod threat in the next 100,000 years. Its based on the idea that pieces of rock from both planets (as an effect of asteroid explosions) containing living organisms that could survive in space, could have seeded life from Mars to Earth, from Earth to Mars, or maybe cross polination perhaps?

Lots of other interesting stuff on TLNF's website. Basically stuff that needs long term thinking. The seminar topics are distributed in audio (mp3) form, and can be downloaded for free.

Its nice to have something like these to ponder from time to time. It gives one a different perspective about current life problems. Problems bigger than our own, bigger the our country. Heck, its not even global, like the asteriod threat, its universal! A problem every living organism in the universe would inevitably face. Resistance is futile.

Interestingly, the solution to the asteriod threat brings about huge ethical and moral implications. For example, if we only focus on blasting every threat in space, it could very well be the an excuse to build nuclear weapons in space (which might have a greater chance of endangering the human race). Also, if all we can do is deflect an asteriods path, who decides which place on earth should take the impact. Let alone who decides if the public should know if such a threat is detected in advance. Imagine the panic and pandemonium upon hearing your local station announcing an extinction level event.

The threat is very real tho. And we don't have the capability yet to monitor space effective enough to have realiable early warning protocols in place. A direct impact of 200 kilometer sized asteriod is enough to wipe out the human race and force another evolution. The ocean would boil, for some time the sun would not be able to penetrate the atmosphere, and a lot more armageddon like scenarios.

The good news is, its not likely to happen anytime soon. Nobody can predict the future. Its just one of those things that would be nice to think about during a star starry night.

Writing On Air: Jim Paredes is migrating to australia and would return to fight another day. Sad, but he really had very valid reasons there. Not to mention we are all given freedom to make our own decisions.

The topic of leaving the Philippines is very timely tho. Not a week would go by that me and my lovey would also discuss going abroad to work and eventually migrate to another country. To finally stop living in a world of ideals and get a grip on reality.

What's next? Is there really no hope? We continue to ponder...

u*blog testing

u*blog testing

testing u*blog...

Revision 2

Feeling inspired, I decided to resurrect the bicolano.org website. It has been dormant for almost a year now after we replaced both hdisk and OS on the colo server. The database has gone with the Dodos along with the erratic hdisk.

Last time we had a community driven bulletin board format. It has an ambitious goal of being a one stop shop on the net for everything Bicol. It was quite ok, with around a hundred registered users with half of them active, but didn't gather enough steam as I hoped it would be. We failed in reaching out/tapping the academe,NGO, and other communities. It was a bit technology centric, as most of the main contributors were developers. It was a good learning experience tho, so it wasn't a wasted effort.

So now we try a different approach, less ambitious goals, broader in scope, but the same noble idea: empowering the bicolano community!

If youre a bicolano, do visit http://bicolano.org, post an article, or leave a comment, get involved! Payt sana!

Summary log

Spent a good chunk of time fixing an open-relayed mail server today. A ton of spammers had a field day with that server. mailq revealed why the poor thing is having an asthma attack.

The ventolin-like cure is good old rejecting of all mails not destined for that domain. Add some FQDN checking and amavis-clamav-spamassasin loving.

Tonight would be some Joomla CMS PHP-powered template wrestling. Good thing was able to download that G4 optimized firefox version, the stock one had a tendency to be a CPU hog. Couldn't use Safari as it lacks the nifty web dev plugin exclusive to firefox.

Tommorow, will take a stab with a little SOAP derby. Crossing my fingers the given API doc would be a bit nearer to reality. The last encounter didn't mention that the hash keys should be converted to uppercase. Javadabadoo...

That's all folks.

This post brought to you by u*blog (hope it works TM).

p.s.
it didn't work. using tried and tested email method via versamail instead.

Dylan Wilk

Yesterdays MS NGO DayKeynote Speaker was Mr. Dylan Wilk, Englishman of Gawad Kalinga fame. The man who sold his BMW to fund making a village for poor Filipino folks. Inspirational talk there. He emphasized that what our country need is heroism not charityand giving should be the next trend in fashion. He mentioned how England was similar to the Philipines, a generation ago. Then the wealthy people started to get involved and it became a trend to give out lands and help the poor. He also mentioned their government was the last to react. But nevertheless, these changes has a great impact in rebuilding that nation.

What strikes me the most (ashamed even), is this generous man is not a Filipino, and yet he says that his only regret in life is spending 30 years just watching everything from TV, and not getting involved.

Fake modesty aside, after that keynote, I feel like an enlightened moron with a renewed love for this nation.

TIME: Life in the Googleplex Photo Essay

Checkout the employee desktop! Really a cool place to work/have fun.

Workshop

Workshop
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Currently attending an NGO Day workshop in Ortigas. This is seeing the other side of the coin. Its nice to see what current MS projects are there for the Filipino community as part of their CSR program.



On another note, I learned a new term in this workshop: Social Entrepreneur. This closely resembles my idea on what I want to be. The idea of helping people, and at the same time earn a little in the process. Win-win situations, finding sustainable business models where both sides would benefit.



I want to be a Social Technopreneur!

Long Now > Shop > Free Downloads > Seminar Downloads

Interesting stuff there, like the The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years.

Mobile-review.com 3GSM Congress - Symbian, Linux, Windows
mobile

GTK+ on Palm devices via the Access Linux Platform. Sweet.

Why I passed up the chance to work at Apple ~ Authentic Boredom

Good points to ponder there. As a family man, I had been to similar situations in the past. Albeit with a different twist: Go abroad or stay here with the family.

There are really things that money just can't buy.

But nothing is constant except change. Lets see how long it would be till we decided that its time to go to a land where there is more milk and honey.

Corrupted Partition: Time for Philippines to have a Mobile VAS Clearing House?

Hmmmmnnnn... Been whining about that for the past 3 years. The current state of acquiring an access code is a major bottleneck for CP's.

Disected MacBook Pro. Took just a few hours after he received the item.

Two words...

Mac Porn!

The First Bootable OSx86 10.4.4 DVD ? cavemonkey50.com

Hmmmmnnnnn... When Apple moved to Intel, I think this is enevitable.

Podbop nets big prize at MashupCamp | CNET News.com

The winner gets to take home a Sun Niagara server. Servergasm...

Apple to hold special event on Feb. 28

Ohhh boy... here we go again!

The Daily Blog It - Cloning Music:Ely Buendia- Cursor

Ely's take on the whole piracy thing. Couldn't find the MB link. Seems he now has a column there.

Superproxy

Superproxy
Originally uploaded by nocs.

What kind of computers will kids like Janro have in the future? Would laptops still be practical in an increasingly mobile world? Will the ancient keyboard ever be replaced by newer input methods? With the advent of video recorder phones, will blogs be replaced by videocasts? Will the current text-dominated-web be replaced by visually richer multimedia-content-on-demand services? Will door bells/buzzers be obsolete?



When?

A year/months ago, we complained to Globe about incorrect WAP over GPRS charging (using a prepaid sim). Sometime reaching as high as 30-40 pesos per transaction! At some point in time they corrected the error and promised to refund the incorrectc harges. Now we are reviving our WAP application.

Hot damn! I really need a GPRS counter.

Some statistics:

2 wap cards cost 58 centavos
3 wap cards cost 96 centavos

Each card not more than 1k. Following the 15 centavos per kb charging I really was expecting not more than 50 for the 3 wap cards. The average size for our wap application. Of course I failed to count the necessary? headers. Its not exactly divisible by 15, so am also wondering how exactly do they count the traffic? or is VAT computed?

Wonder if a mobile WAP browser application with traffic statistics exist?

A Look at GNOME 2.14.

I seldom use Gnome these days. But its exciting to see its progress from time to time. Hopefully Cairo/XGL/Compiz will be available soonish too. Maybe at 2.16?

Adding -Xmx512m to your VM config for your JUnit test on Eclipse would spare you the agony of pulling your hair due to out of memory errors on your unit tests executed via the IDE. Sigh... my old fashioned ant build script has those and am now wondering why Eclipse doesn't make it the default VM config parameter? I've wasted half a day figuring out why my unit tests wouldn't run on the IDE but run when invoked thru good old command line.

Above config can be added to Eclipse by right clicking your JUnit test file and selecting Run As->Run... from the menu, select Arguments and add those to your VM arguments input box.

ACCESS and PalmSource Announce the ACCESS Linux Platform - Press Release

Linux officially at the Palm of your hand? AWESOME!

Now that is a good direction Palm. Harness the power of open source.

Wired News: TextPayMe: Elminating IOU

Another take on the m-commerce thing. Same slow pace of adoption.

Basically, TextPayMe its a virtual wallet created via linking your credit card/bank account. Nothing new here, same system implemented in the Philippines a year or two ago.

I have a feeling something is bound to dominate the m-commerce space. The technology is here. Somebody has to mashup the bits and pieces together.

Wired News: My First Screen Kiss

This seems to be common in Japan, which is a year or two ahead of us in terms of keitai technology. There video calls are the norm, not the exception I guess.

Now that 3G is finally here, stupidly expensive rates aside, maybe next valentine will be seeing a few people smooching their cell phones on the streets of Makati.

Which makes me asks the question. Is it mandatory for 3G or 3.5G phones to be drool proof?

With this kind of technology, long distance relationships just might be the next big thing. Afterall, most Web 2.0 apps are geared toward mashups of social networking apps.

Oh my beloved,
Give me thy lips...
End our conversation,
with your sweet screen kiss...
-nox (of the future)

Valentines Day.

Valentines Day.
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Spread the love!

Melvin, finally succumb to the allure of the mac. Bitten by the mac bug, he's now a fellow iBook totting lad happily counting the good looking women in Singapore.

And no, I did not influence him to buy an iBook. :D

PalmBible by Yih-Chun Hu - A free Bible reader under the GPL license

Probably the best app on the Treo right now. Be enlightened and be free.

"Firefly" (2002/I)

Just finished watching the entire season over the weekend. That was a GREAT sci-fi series. Wonder why the network doofusly canceled it.


Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free.
You can’t take the sky from me.

Take me out
to the black.
Tell ‘em I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea.
You can’t take the sky from me.

Have no place
I can be
Since I found Serenity.
But you can’t take the sky from me.
-Theme from Firefly

Lower back, waist area hurts like hell. The expected result of playing basketball after being sedentary for good while.

And yes, what the world needs now, is love sweet love...

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Wired News: Forget Jobs, Let's Worship Woz

Nice article. Sheds some facts about Woz, his tendency towards simple and open designs. Unattached to his money in normal ways, and never forgetting the fact that great people are where they are because they are standing on the shoulder of giants. Very NGO'ish geek. I like that.

Woz rocks!

Russell Beattie Notebook ? MaxDox Redux - Create your own mobile Java e-books

This could be a great mobile content product. Retail tagalog novelas per chapter download. hehehehe.

Pwede rin comics. Pugad baboy downloads!

I Retail mo baby, yeah!

AIDS virus attacked inside & out. Seems there is now a possible cure for HIV/AIDS! Hopefully, this gives hope to millions of people afflicted by the virus.

CoverflowRemote. This is salling clicker script to enable you to control Coverflow via your bluetooth enabled phone.

Wirelessly SWEEEEEET!

Found this out via the Diggnation (Episode 27) Vidcast ove iTunes

CoverFlow

Don’t know about you, but I find browsing a list of album names somewhat uninspiring, to say the least. One of the big attractions of a physical album is the beautiful packaging and aesthetic appeal, something that’s sorely missed with the digital equivalent.

CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection. It allows you to browse your albums complete with beautiful artwork pulled from any sources it can find, whether that’s buried in your song tags, collected via Synergy, or looked up on Amazon.

Screenshot of CoverFlow on bookah below:

Blue afternoon sky...

Blue afternoon sky...
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Passing over the magallanes flyover. Loving the warm blue afternoon sky. In just a short while, hopefully the stars won't be too shy, begging you to smile even if happiness seems light years away. Its still a beatiful world.

Novell Linux Desktop Demonstration Videos | Linux Edge... It could also be the state of XGL and the shape of things to come.... Check out the cool videos. Finally, something to harness the power of those GPU's while you wiggle woogle your desktop windows on a boring day.

Oh goodie! Lookie here!
Linux running on a Treo!




Hope it still allows you to make/recieve phone calls. :D

Hack the Treo!

Mobile Monday USA

The Mobile Monday USA. mission is to cultivate and accelerate US mobile and telecom sectors through leadership, technology, government relations, research, education, mentoring, investment, recruitment, networking and promotion.

Wondering if we also have a local version of this. Mobile Tuesday perhaps?

Stellarium Astronomy Software: Sort of like the reverse of Google Earth (which allow you to view the earth in 3D), this one looks up to the sky. Linux/Mac/Windows versions available.

Its kind of weird looking at the stars on a computer screen in broad daylight. On the other hand, its a much cheaper, albeit free alternative to buying one of those fancy telescopes.

Scrap my last entry regarding doing a separate install of SJAS on OS X.

The latest netbeans 5.0 and SJAS 8.2 bundle now allows you to specificy a different destination dir for SJAS.

I'm begining to like netbeans. :D

p.s.

adding a Vi plugin for netbeans would really make my day.

Santa, if I promised that I would be a good boy this year, can I have one of these Lego.com: Mindstorms NXT.

Please?

Glassfish on Mac OS X

Yay! Curious, I coerced my bookah to download the JDK 1.5 for the Mac OS X. I unpacked the tarball from http://glassfish.dev.java.net.

As mentioned before it bails out on ant -f setup.xml, complaining it didn't find any JDK 1.5 compatible JVM. The fix is to do the following (take note that setenv is csh or tcsh shell dependent):

setenv JAVA_HOME /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home
setenv PATH .:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

And viola! ant -f setup.xml will happily run along.

I love my mac!

SJAS on Mac OS X - Google Search doesn't really help that much if you want to run SJAS 8 on OS X. For now aside from compiling Glassfish (which requires JDK 1.5), you are stuck with downloading netbeans4 with the SJAS 8 bundle from netbeans.org.

Anyway, I don't have JDK 1.5 on the iBook yet. And since netbeans doesn't have a VI plugin or keybinding, and to save disk space I don't want both netbeans and SJAS installed.

The solution is to install netbeans4 with the SJAS bundle, copy the SunAppServer8.1 directory to a new location and modify the appserver startup scripts to point to a new SJAS directory (in my case /usr/local/SunAppServer8.1). After some tweaking, found out you only have to modify the following files to point the the new SJAS directory of your choosing:

/usr/local/SunAppServer8.1/config/asenv.conf
/usr/local/SunAppServer8.1/bin/asadmin
/usr/local/SunAppServer8.1/domains/domain1/bin/startserv
/usr/local/SunAppServer8.1/domains/domain1/bin/stopserv

After which you can now delete the Netbeans4 app installed on your Applications dir.

It still boggles the mind why Netbeans doesn't include VI keybindings.

JavaPolis - The Architecture of the Brazilian Health System

I learned a few things about Brazil today:

- Free health care for every citizen!
- Electronic voting for the past few years. Results within 24 hours!
- Has a team of Java developers that can generate an application to be used by millions of users in just a span of four months!
- They dig open source!

The Philippine health care system immaculately pales in comparison.

Just noticed the lady in front of the jeepney wearing a T-shirt with tihs print at the back "Just tiis for all.".

Only in the Philippines.

Peter Pan

Currently importing some family photos from the Treo to iPhoto. Sometimes I wish I lived in nevernever land. A part of me doesn't want to grow old. Going home with a bright and witty 4 year old, an infectiously funny 1 year old, and a smiling lovely caring wife makes you hope that moments like this last forever.

Father and Son

Father and Son
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Just hanging out with Janro. Waiting for Barney to sing the "I love you, you love me!" song.



On another note, the Treo 650 makes it so easy to capture and blog moments like this. No extra software require. Its simply an MMS sent to a specified flicker email address which is configured to post the photo and blog entry to blogger. Best of all the service is entirely free! Your only cost is the MMS charge which is P3.00 for Globe I think. :-D

Just got this from the mail: Ynzal eCatalog is now selling the latest 12" model iBooks at around 61k and if you are a UP student/staff/educator I would say RUN, do not walk and get the the iBook at a discounted price of P54,207 only.

And no, for the record I am not a Mac fanatic. There is nothing to love about what probably is the best integration of software and hardware, embedded power of unix underneath and the slickest, and the most user friendly GUI the planet has ever seen.

And I swear I would only agree reluctantly that I am a mac fanatic if you give me a fully loaded MacBook Pro due out 2nd week of february.

BenQ 50: A treo in this form factor would be reaallllly nice.



On the meantime, am still dreaming of a flat rate P500/month unlimited data (GPRS) plan. That would remove the need for a wifi accessory.

And oh, if 3G would be that affordable and phones that runs OS like linux/bsd would be widely available. That would definitely be a signal that the Age of Personal Content Sharing has come. I imagine the mobile phones of the future "serving/sharing content". Heck, making apache run on mobile phones would be a good start.

Bobby D

Bobby D
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Currently listening a bunch of songs by Bob Dylan, while on my way home via the MRT. Over the years I have somehow grown more and more interested in his music. Simply put, just listening to some of his songs, you could learn a lot about life. Granted he lived in an era where both lyrics and music matters.



Everybody else is making love,

Or expecting rain.

-Bob Dylan (Desolation Row)

From Paul Graham: How to Do What You Love. Something to read on the way home. Believe me, this man writes stuff worth reading.

Tsk tsk tsk. It seems Bayantel has no plans of installing/transferring our DSL line from munoz to tandang sora due to unavailability of a slot.

Looks like Smart Wifi is the way to go. Wonder if Globe broadband is available in our area? or Destiny cable internet?

Grrr. Tried to use the contact us feature of Globe's unlimited data plan service: get-visibility.com, and this is what I get:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126'

Include file not found

/get-visibility/contactussendmail.asp, line 2

The include file 'include/adovbs.inc' was not found.

Ack! Looks like they don't like inquiries or sales.

Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One

A cool list of alternative uses for RSS feeds. Got it via digg.com feed.

If I have time, it would be nice to develop/add the things below to the list:

1. Social Network Aware (or appended to those dating services): fertility cycle feed. Where women could publish their menstrual cycle. Imagine the possibilities. Napkin makers would love this.

2. MRT stored value ticket availability feed. Pretty handy to know which station has one available. Since until now those MRT vending machines are just glorified displays, and they often ran out of SVT cards. Btw, why don't they put those vending machines in malls or other public places. This would GREATLY shorten the line and fasten the queue during rush hours.

3. DTI suggested retail prices for commodities. This would be awesome! Tulong sa mga maybahay.

4. Pampers availability. Simply because E.Q. sucks. Everytime we tried E.Q. due to pampers unavailability on our suki grocery stores, Our youngest, Janro, would overflow the diaper overnight, and worse it doesn't stay dry. Imagine the implications.

5. Lotto winning numbers: just in case tumaya ako.

6. For G-Cash and Smart Money: Available cash-in/cash-out points per area. Should help a bit in accelarating adoption.

7. Philippine Points of Interest (POI) feed. User submitted, containing lat and long data. Per area, per category etc. I even have a name -> PinoyPOI (TM) hehehe

Been lusting for this -> mytreo.net/store > Seidio 2 in 1 HIGH END InEar Noise Isolating Headset for Treo 650 (NEW!) I tried the iBuds silicon contraption for regular headsets and it still has the tendency to fall off with minimal movement.

Wonder if there would a local store that sells this headset?

Glass Off, Glass On

For the past few months I had been moaning about bitter sweet headaches and occasional nasuea particularly in the afternoons after work or whenever I spend an insane amount of time staring at the computer (which, more often than not happens on a daily basis).

So last friday we decided its time for me to seek help with a nearby refraction man (TM). We found a good shop at SM North, Acebedo Optical which offers some nice discounts at the moment. Consultation is at P200.00 and free if you buy a lens or a frame afterwards.

Anyway, after a few questions regarding what was my line of work, I was made to wear a clunky eye contraption (no digital gizmo available?) and asked to read a seemingly random alphabet from a canvass a few feet away from me. Right eye was tested first. I could still read the 7th row quite clearly but when it came to 8th row the letters appeared to be fuzzy tho still readable. The refraction man popped in a grade 50 lens on the contraption and lo behold the 8th row looked sharp and crystal clear! He explained that my dominant right eye must have been overworked and might the culprit of the bitter sweet headaches. We tested the left eye next and settled in for a grade 25 lens. He also recommended I get a non glare type of lens since I tend towork in from of a computer most of the time.

Next we were ushered to a display rack to try which frame would match my not-so-boy-next-door looks, long tarnished when the first acne left a scar on my pristine face. The ones with a rim make me look like an Einstein fanatic ready to shout E=mc2 at the push of a button. My lovey suggested I should go for the rimless design. I then choose the titanium kind, which was really light and comfortableb to wear. Total cost after discount: P5000.00 for both lens and frame. Ouch!

Conclusion: The past three days had been headache free. My eyes doesn't feel as tired like before, even after prolonged computer use. I should have done this sooner. Nevermind the pocketache inflicted afterwards.

Just tried this on the Treo 650 -> KMaps Location Services Platform

Unfortunately I couldn't make it view the Philippine map. Still searching for Philipine map layers and attempt to draw it on top of the Google map via the public API.


How does it feel?
How does it feel?
Your on your own...
No direction home!
-Boy Dylan (Like A Rolling Stone)

Web 2.0 Yahoo! Buzz Images and News

Yahoo News Mash-up Visual mode.

Globe 3G

Globe 3G
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Yesterday, was at the two towers and saw Globe's 3G demo booth at the bridge connecting the two buildings. With two lovely models inviting passerbys to try the 3G service, I coerced my companion to try the demo.



We tried a few streaming services, a handfull from ABS-CBN and while its not as good as an offline video (like the one played via TCPMP) in terms of picture quality, its still fairly viewable. Wonder how this compares with MobiTV?



Next we tried the video conf feature, was able to see the person on the other end (just a few feet away), a bit pixelated, although recognizable. If the bandwidth speed claimed is higher than dsl, maybe its the hardware at fault? Or maybe the choice of video streaming format for mobile devices?



Next we browsed a laptop assumed to be using the 3G service and it seems to be DSL'ish enough. I wasn't able to do a hands-on test on the lappy due to the person currently using it seems pre-occupied with his webmail.



According to the booth attendant, no definite launch date yet, but certainly it will be on 2006. No idea yet on pricing or packages that will be offered.

Sun Microsystems' Fab Four Reunites. One of the truly admirable company of our time. Some excerpts below:

Sun and Apple

Content to let his comrades do most of the talking, Joy became particularly animated when the informal conversation turned to Apple. He revealed that that there had been "six very close encounters" between the two companies, and called it a "personal disappointment" that Sun and Apple had never been able to complete a deal.

"As far as I know, we also almost bought Apple once," he said, to the audience's general glee. "We almost merged with Apple two other times." In addition, Sun, Apple, and Microsoft nearly agreed on a common filing protocol; Apple and Sun talked about sharing a software interface; and Sun tried to get Apple to move to the SPARC architecture.

Imagine OS X running on a SPARC processor! Or dtrace goodness on OS X!

Google's PDA website optimizer. No that is not the official name, just made it up.

Enter any url and it will try to format the content suitable for your PDA or any mobile device with a web browser. Similar to webxcope. Give it a spin!

Pinoytechblog.com - Pinoytechblog.com, a bit different today.

seems the domain expired?

Oh goodie, netbeans mobility pack now available for the mac platform. NetBeans

ThinkGeek :: Freedom Keepsafe... Should be quite usable for those of us who seem to have short term memory when it comes to our gadgets. The device is a proximity based system and would set off an alarm when you are a few meters apart from your favorite gadget.

Priced $29.99. Maybe some enterprising pinoy could come up with a similar but inexpensive version.

Salling Software - Salling Clicker for Mac. This is one really nifty software. It allows you to wirelessly control your Mac/PC via a bluetooth enabled cellphone.

With the Treo, I could for example browse my iTunes collection and select an Playlist/Artist etc on the iBook. It can even suport DVD controls so you can control the movie you are watching from a distance.

Groovy...

Wake up when my alarm clock goes off on 43 Things

On the top of my New Year resolution. Pretty hard for somebody nocturnal.

Wake up when my alarm clock goes off on 43 Things

On the top of my New Year resolution. Pretty hard for somebody nocturnal.

Palm Presentation. Slick! The next age of mobility.

Mobile Indie! Independently mobile!
- nox

Animated Weather for PDA's. Too bad it only covers the US. Wala bang PAGASA to have something similar for the Philippines?

For the meantime am relying on Yahoo's weather forecast via http://wap.oa.yahoo.com synced daily via Avantgo.

Weather, weather lang yan...

Apple's SF keynote was finished at last. Drool on the new intel based macintosh(es). That magnetic power cord is a really nifty and practical touch as well as the built in iSight. its the simple things like these that makes macs one of the best bang for the buck machines.

Loving the Treo 650. No wifi and around 23mb or usable memory. But really a kick-ass convergent device.

Mobile video is definitely the trend of the year. I managed to watch an entire season of CSI Las Vegas whilst riding the MRT. Currently halfway thru Bob Dylan's No Direction Home dvd directed by Martin Scorsese. Highly recommendable. That man really has the pulse of the younger generation during his time.

Also managed to find the much sought after sony ericsson mp3 headset (priced nicely at P400) that is compatible with the Treo. The only minor gripe was my ear wasn't designed for those regular earphones, so I can only use the headphones when not mobile. For now am looking around for those in-ear silicon caps that you can plug into your ear canal :D.

Hula on FreeBSD. Not much luck making it run on our dev server yet. Tried both the gethula script and manual patching method. Will take another stab at the weekend.

Beastie is having a hard time learning to hula.

The shape of things to come

Checking out Engadget's coverage of this years CES at Las Vegas.

Those huge plasma and lcd dijavascript:void(0);splays certainly makes me drool. But my modest means are still light years away in the possibility of owning one.

To a certain degree, I do hope we have something like those nationwide highspeed data networks they have in the US. That could really boost countryside development and finally bring the internet to those that need it the most.

Its only 8:30am. And am on my second cup of coffee. Am plowing thru last year's codebase. Since monday mundane, managed to get up early (5am!) as a part of my new year resolution to do some lifehacks. Early bird catches the wiggly worm. Riding the wild elmo before breakfast would be a nice too, and should be done often. But still fairly nauseated by the whole waking up early thing. I still can't let go of sleeping at 3am, or at the very least 1am. There's something about the nocturnal nature of us software engineers that is so damn hard to change. As if doing all nighters were the sine qua non. Lets see where this goes.

New year again. Whew! That was fast!

Looking forward outside the room inside my mind.

Pwede ba, itigil muna...
Ang pag-ikot ng mundo..
- Eraserheads (Spoliarium)

nox @ work! again! happy 2006 everyone! enjoy life!

LibriVox ? LibriVox Catalog: Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.

Just what the world needs.

Spread the love.

Merry Christmas! Everybody! Happy new year too!

Gmail Mobile!

Been using gmail a lot using an email client and rarely do I use a regular browser to access my mail. So was surprised that it now has a mobile page specially designed for mobile devices -> http://m.gmail.com

Just in time for the holiday season. Thanks Google!

BeJUG - Transactional J2EE Apps with Spring


Wicked use of flash. Instead of just having a powerpoint download, this uses flash to present both the slide and the speaker to a web audience.

Imagine a world where the best teachers would make their lessons available for everyone! Opensource based education! Pancit-eating promdi's like me has now access to the same type of lessons as their Fetuccini-eating metro manila counterpart.

Of course the Internet as it is, has more or less has the features I described above. The problem is how do you bring the Internet to the poor or bringing the poor to the Internet.

Linux successfully installed on Treo 650 - Engadget - www.engadget.com.



It would take a while before it would become usable. Elsewhere Palm announced the move to Linux for the Palm OS. Hopefully they follow nokia's path and opensource the sdk like what they did for maemo.

Found the download link at last -> Google Earth for Mac OS X Beta. Lazy web at its finest.

Ganda talaga ng mansion ni Mang Hefner. :D

Google Earth for Mac OS X: it's here

Cool! I can once again drool over Hefner's place.

Btw, The download link given has exceeded its bandwidth allotment. Bummer... Can't find the official link on earth.google.com either.

get-visibility.com, unlimited gprs plans for globe. their answer to pldt's weroam service.

the weroam wireless sierra card have no xp 64bit driver. so our mobile executive is using a spare bluetooth enabled phone to act as a conduit for dialup networking. this works well if you have other gadgets that can also take advantage of the unlimited gprs connection. frustrating if the laptop was your only device.

hopefully sierra could come up with the drivers soon. checking lazy web if those sony erricson pcmcia gsm modems have 64bit xp support.

LBS again...

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have an RSS feed of all points of interests (POI) in the Philippines (with location information). This can be arranged via categories.

Next step is to find a decent vector map that can be overlayed perhaps on top of Google map.

The RSS feed can be voluntary and for free. Meaning establishments could register their location and maybe a bunch of other metadata.

- Name
- Category (Pre-defined? Restaurant, Motel etc)
- Website!
- Contact Person
- Contact Numbers

This would fit nicely into the scheme of things since POI's aren't mobile. Maybe we could place shotcode stickers there or a code of some sort where you can send the code via sms to indicate where you are. That way your social network could be notified of your location. This eliminates the need to triangulate your location or require the user to have a GPS device of some sort.

This would enable you to perhaps ask a bartender at a new bar what their Location Code is and send it via SMS indicating you want to send the an MMS map to all your friends on the way to there. Maybe business cards would perhaps include your Location Code so that your associates can know the locatino of your office. Nice isn't it? The Location Code can just be a simple concatination of your latitude and lontitude to make it easy to decode.

This could immensely change the way you search things on the internet. Radius can be included as a search parameter.

Or maybe hire somebody with a GPS reciever to go to POI's and record their metadata.

Now to find somebody to fund this idea.


Everywhere you go, you shout it!
There's no need to be shy, about it now...
- U2 (Original of the Species)

John Lennon documentary playing on TV currently. Rockin' musician. Genuine ability to blend thoughtful lyrics and pleasant melodies.

Somewhere out there, my guitar gently weeps. Damnably missing the good old electric guitar. Make no mistake, I have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever.


Imagine all the people,
Livin life in peace...
-John Lennon

Typical 1am routine

Typical 1am routine
Originally uploaded by nocs.

Coffee and bread to calm the stomach. Search engines to feed the starving mind.



Always loving the serenity of early dawn. A time when thoughts can wander freely. Bandwith all mine.



The terminal blinks, seducing the subconcious. Hands that dance in vi restrained rythms. A new day begins.

Cyberspace Santa, would really love a copy of this.

The Apple Store (U.S.) - The Sims 2 by Aspyr

With the introduction of genetics in Sims 2, you can control your sims over a lifetime and pass their sims' DNA down from one generation to the next. The sims evolve by genetically passing on physical and personality traits. Create and play your own virtual sitcom by choosing one of five different aspirations--Popularity, Fortune, Family, Knowledge or Romance. These aspirations in life cause your sims to have wants and fears. Will you give them a long successful existence or leave their life in shambles?

The Sims 2 also opens up endless new creative possibilities. Make your own sim films with the new movie-making feature. Create the cast, set the stage, take control of the camera and capture your own screenplay in action. Zoom in close with the new camera to see every last detail.

Wish ko lang....

Aardvark'd Trailer: Twelve Weeks with Geeks - Google Video.

Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer geeks around the world fix their friends' computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek.

Would love to watch this film. A 320x320 version would do.

Btw, this is the first time I tried out Google Video (beta) and man it does rock!

Overview of Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8.

Jolly Kamote! This is hot! Check out the collaboration tool. Truly, we live in exciting times.

Adobo Blogging in Real time.

Adobo Blogging in Real time.
Originally uploaded by nocs.

1 kilo pork

2 large potatoes

4 medium sized onions

Lots of garlic

Half bottle of Silver swan soy sauce

Half cup of vinegar

Half liter of drinking water



Cut pork and potatoes into bite size chunks. Mix everything in a large frying pan. Let it boil and simmer until pork is tender and the kitchen is filled with hunger inducing aroma. Hopefully everything was mixed just right. Marvel at finally demystifying one of the best kept secret of modern day Filipino takosas.

Testing the company PLDT WeROAM account for our mobile executive. Feels just like dialup. According to some forums Globe's similar service seems to be better.

The SIM does work when you put it to another phone with bluetooth and use it as a wireless GPRS modem. Works great with the treo after fiddling a bit with the weroam apn and corresponding settings. Too bad you can't make phonecalls or recieve text with this SIM.

Waiting in vain that this type of data service could be offered for P500 a month or less...

Roaming charges: Can you base my location now?

Another stab at the enevitable copulation of the web and the nextgen GPS enabled cellphone.

Location-based software has held concepts of safety and privacy in counterbalance since its inception. Mologogo.com and other Web 2.0 contenders are now entering a third concept into the mix: social convenience, fueled by technology.

LBS integration to web pop culture hits like Flickr is not so farfetched. The basic computer bundled with GPS can open posibilities like DNS traversal based on your geographic location. The mighty Google would likely consider giving you search results in relevance to where you are located.

Exciting? Scary? Kalokohan?