i like this quote from nat friedman from Planet GNOME...

"users should like us for our software, not for our working habbits..."

somewhat related to the issue of code quality... code quality fades into the background once the binary is shipped... users will never know how elegantly the code was designed or how much sleepless nights it has incurred on us codaholics... at the end of the day, all that matters is how good the user experience is...

but code quality can undeniably lead to a better binary product... so its not an excuse to at least learn the basics of producing high quality code... there must always be a balance of things... i have read somewhere that linus torvalds strives to have code that can be easily understood by many, while alan cox cares more about stability or code that reliably works (at the expense of code quality)...

been rather busy (who isn't anyways?)... we moved to the 3rd floor, previously a first floor dweller on this hole in a wall type apartments... a bit cramped since this one has two rooms and a real kitchen but almost same sized as old one... a bit safer here since i could go out the patio even at 3am in the morning... new computer table, more conducive to coding...

been also very busy refactoring the message filters at work.... i like these new setup better... most things can be configured via spring's applicationcontext.xml... still cant make wap work, so its frustratingly annoying... cant find a decent debugger that runs directly on the mobile phone...

pareng edwin, sensya na, i still owe you that PICS M-congress cd... will advice you next week if we can meet in makati...the entire cd contents can still be downloaded here... but will still try to give you the cd next week...

oh well, just too weak and too busy... frantically remembering how to smile and how to be happy.... hopefully i get to go home to bicol on the 18th... the sight of mayon in legaspi can definitely be refreshing... better get ready to pack the clie with a good amount of ebooks... still halfway thru lessig's "free culture"... interesting arguments on intellectual property rights and it's relative history...

grrrr... cant seem to make wap work... apache settings already include provisions for .wml... i can access it thru tagtag.com emulator but no dice on the actual cellphone... i could see the get request on the log so connection is not the problem... wml is not the problem either as i downloaded a working wml file that the phone can access... i think it needs more apache tweaking... everything is on port 80... hmmnn... hhmmmmnnnn....

muine... arguably the best/sweetest/simplest/cleanest/sexiest/slickiest desktop music player on the planet...



and no, am not describing kitchie... wifey my labidabs, youre still the most beautiful woman i ever met... post valentine musings...

i think i need to gobble up some caffeine...

browsing thru warrenm's initial commit on patriot... interesting... doofus nox! you have to finish reading the JSR-212 spec first for this stuff to somehow sink into the left? side of your brain...

on another context, its really ironic that sms application developers locally seems to be more geared towards providing content (artistaaa, ring tones etc etc etc)... only a small percentage gets to deploy other types of sms applications... not surprising really as getting a short access code will require that the telco likes you... or else your ideas would end up down the drain... only that a few months later you say fuck! isnt that the same thing that they say "its not possible, due to this and this... or, we will just get back to you as we need to discuss these more internally... but really, that might not go well with legal..." what the hell is wrong with this people? why cant short access codes be a simple process as getting a landline or registering your domain... if its like that (sans the ability to broadcast , since everybody then can do sms spam) we could be seeing more innovative applications than those that we have today... with the current revenue share, it would be favorable to the telcos... its not far eftched that in the future, CSP's would die and all applications will be developed internally or by a telco owned spin off company... as the sassy laywer mentioned -> greed

*sigh*... its really futile to restrain your fingers (frenetic at 100wpm) to type fcuk when you meant to type "suck! or the generally milder oh my gulay!"... from patriot to arm chair activist... that was disorienting...

in a futile effort to have a body of decent quality, my goal is to get enough sleep and stop fanboying the slogan "sleeping is a waste of time..." so i hereby will make it a point to sleep no later than 2am...

message to self -> sleep 4h; mpg123 wakeup.mp3;

The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager... check this out... really cool!

so the name "Rogelio" started in the 1910's and by 2003 there are about 489 per million babies with that name (?)... i also tried my children's name "rojan" and "janro" and it came out zero... originality at work here... =)

of course whats worth noticing here is the increasing slickness of javascript geeks... from maps to google suggest... the new era of webapps? really curious how this is implemented... data pushed from the servers and javascript lovin to adumbrate the rest!

Bomb blasts rock Davao, General Santos, Makati - INQ7.net what i dont really get is why innocent people has to die so that other people can get their point across... how i wish i could just telecommute from bicol... things like this makes me wary as i commute daily...

blogging via gnome-blog

testing this nifty gnome blogging tool...

this boy, (apparently my son) relentlessly trying to inculcate me his naturally impish smile and youthful ebullience...




a few years back, Kodak Moments (TM) like this would mean making sure you have a bulky film camera loaded with ample battery power for a hit and miss affair with overexposed and underexposed picture kung-fu...

kids today are soooo lucky...

old habbits die hard... been using java for the past few years and am still using System.out.println for debugging (turning it off on production by runing a script that puts "//" on all System.out statements)... lately however due to an increasing addiction to junit i took the plunge and now as heavily addicted as well to log4j... the commons-logging was a welcome addition to the toolset as this somewhat allows you to choose other logging frameworks...

log.debug() is now a focker...

fckeditor... awesome! javascript is increasingly being more and more powerful these days...

Rant City ? Eclipse Java-GNOME Demo... slick!

ubuntu users using the ndiswrapper module with an MSI CB54G wifi card, you need to set RadioState on your /etc/ndiswrapper//*.conf equal to 0 as the default behavior of ndiswrapper -i ms68bm.inf is to set it to 1 which turns off the power this wifi card...

hmmnn... am not yet free from manually editing config files even on uber-user-friendly ubuntu... :(

i seriously think that bayanihan linux should shift its efforts on making a filipino centric version of Ubuntu... slap a java sdk on this thing and you have one really complete windows replacement that can cover a wide range of users...

IMHO... KDE sucks...

after a crazy attempt to do semi-fine grained layering of persistence, business logic, front-end friendly wrappers with spring i was puzzled on how to proceed creating unit tests that would work on all layers... each layer has its own applicationcontext.xml file aptly named applicationcontext-orm.xml, applicationcontext-manager.xml and applicationcontext-wrapper.xml... my utility class for loading the application context file could only accept a single string... calling it twice would result in spring only remembering the last applicationcontext invoked...

RTFM as always... and true enough (obviously) there is support for loading those context files contained in a string array... my crappy spring application context utility class ended looking like this:

/*
 * Created on Aug 1, 2004
 *
 * Author Rogelio M. Nocom Jr.
 *
 */
package com.mobileindie.spring;


import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;



/**
 * @author nox
 * 
 * based on Richard Hightowers article "orm without the container" 
 *  
 */
public class ApplicationContextFactory {

    // logger
    private static Log log = LogFactory.getLog(ApplicationContextFactory.class);
    
    // path and filename of application context
    private static Object contextObject = null;
    
    // make sure we are not loading twice...
    private static int count = 0;

    public static void init(String _contextObject) {
        if (count >0) {
            log.error("Can't initialize the application context twice: THIS SHOULD ONLY HAPPEN DURING TESTING");
        }
        contextObject = _contextObject;
        count++;
    }
    
    public static void init(String[] _contextObject) {
        if (count >0) {
            log.error("Can't initialize the application context twice: THIS SHOULD ONLY HAPPEN DURING TESTING");
        }
        contextObject = _contextObject;
        count++;
    }
    
    public static ApplicationContext getApplicationContext() {
        if (contextObject == null) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Application context not initialized");
        }
        else if (contextObject instanceof String) {
            String contextPath = (String) contextObject;
            return new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(contextPath);
        }
        else if (contextObject instanceof String[]) {
            String[] contextPath = (String[]) contextObject;
            return new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(contextPath);
        }
        else {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Context must be initialized via String or String[]");
        }
    }
}

in another ubuntu related news...

maybe if the philippine government would be wise enough to promote the use of open source on all government owned schools there *might* be a pretty good chance that we could have something similar to these:



here's the link to the original blog entry...

probably dont need to say this... but ubuntu just rocks! hoary is rather slick!

a few tips on upgrading...

make sure you update warty to the latest first before changing all the warty to hoary definitions on your sources.list... this is my current sources.list:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
## The following lines pertain to supported packages:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted

## The following lines pertain to security updates:
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted

## Uncomment after release to continue getting updates:
# deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates main restricted

## IMPORTANT:
## Software from the following repositories are ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by
## the Ubuntu team, and may not be under a free licence. This means that
## software in these repositories WILL NOT receive any review or updates
## from the Ubuntu security team either. These packages are provided as a
## service to our users and nothing more.

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe' and
## 'multiverse' repositories:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe multiverse

## Uncomment the following line to add Java software:
deb http://jrfonseca.dyndns.org/debian/ ./

## deb http://ubuntu.tower.net.de/ubuntu/ hoary java
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

works quite well with the degatto, although i havent tested the internal modem yet... to use the ndiswrapper i have to apt-get the latest 2.6.10 kernel as the stock 2.6.8 kernel doesnt have the module with it... after that added ndiswrapper-utils and do the usual ndiswrapper -i to load the binary drivers of my el cheapo CB54G MSI wireless lan card...

obligatory screenshot below:

my lappy is now so hoary...

go figure! ;-)

my 1 year 2 months 17 days old degatto is already suffering from short term memory loss :( ... ntp seems to be a alleviate the problem but annoying nevertheless..

am also *this* close in wiping out this gentoo on the degatto and replacing it with ubuntu... compiling on your main workstation seems to get in me after almost a year of of compiling and updating everything every weekend... should be absolutely fine on servers but on a workstation, its really a very different story...

since using ubuntu on the machine at work daily for a few months, it certainly seems less bloated than other distros... yes, gentoo lets you optimize and customize to the max but at a certain point seems unnecessary/overkill for a moderately modern machine... hmmnn... must be getting old, modifying build parameters doesnt excite me as they used to...