TheWeeklyRant.com: NEWS - Apple's BootCamp boots Linux!

Just hours(?) after hell freezed and Apple released boot camp. Some linux geeks managed to get Unbuntu 5.10 to work on those new Intel based macs using the boot camp software.

Hmmmmnnn...

[FreeBSD-Announce] The FreeBSD Foundation Announces Java JDK and JRE 1.5 Binaries for FreeBSD

Yay! Its official. FreeBSD can now come with JDK binaries (1.5) binaries. Hooray! Beasties rejoice! rejoice!

BSD Guides :: Doing Stuff With FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, & Mac OS X

Jon of BSDGuides was pissed off that www.bsd.ph was ripping off the sites content. From the site:

Site Rip-off
Posted by Jon on March 13, 2006 at 11:57:29 am MST

The popularity of BSDGuides continues to grow so much that people just want to rip it off. It seems the owner of http://www.bsd.ph/howtos.html does not have any creativity because they didn't even bother changing the format and stylesheet. I am not posting this to promote their site, but merely to inform you that BSDGuides.org is original in its content and strives to stay that way. I have no plans on informing the owner of their stupidity at this time as public humility should be enough.

Wonder who the owner www.bsd.ph is? The domain was registered by Chroot Inc. Copyright? Copyleft? I think the intention is good. Even if I have read Lessig's Free Culture, the public nature of the web makes the issue a bit foggy. Hopefully this can be settled soon.

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 4, 2006

Interesting peek at Bill's digital workstyle. Three LCD screens, each with designated roles. His Tablet PC usage and how Microsoft collaborates internally using sharepoint. Wonder what Steve Job's digital workstyle is? That might make another interesting comparison.

On the other side Cringley's latest post tells us why he likes Paul Allen than Bill Gates.

Canon EOS 350D

My dream digital camera. Should be a nice companion for the upcoming bicol trip. Or nice tool for starting in digital photography... Ahhhh... Daydreaming... Seems forever out of reach...

Skype - The whole world can talk for free.

Just upgraded to the latest version. Still no video available. I don't have a webcam or an iSight, so won't be needing that much.

It does bring a nice touch: When somebody calls you, or if you make a call with skype, it automatically lowers the volume of iTunes, mutes it on the duration of your call, then gradually brings the previous volume back after you hangup.

Shiny!

Howto OSS iFolder Server - iFolder

Oh goodie! iFolder is now open source! This enables you or your organization to have your very own box.net derivative. Cool!

Welcome to HBO Asia!

They now removed the avantgo/pda version. Sigh... And wasn't even kind enough to provide RSS feeds. Instead resorted to a mailling list subscribtion model. Bummer...

NETGEAR - 802.11b Cable/DSL Wireless Router

Currently testing the netgear that came free (promo) with a colleague's new laptop (an Asus lappy from Villman). It seems to nicely cover the apartment and has some decent config options. Looks sleek and surprisingly I get a full bar on the 1st floor even if it only has one antennae and the unit is located on the 2nd floor on my makeshift SOHO. Fortunately the original owner has no immediate need for one, and I might get lucky and get a good discount for this thingy.

Oh well, currently happy unthethered :D. Still crossing my fingers that the connection won't be so flaky as reported by some customers around the lazy web. So far so good.

Ethernet Oldies

Since I don't have a switch/hub, and I can't justify to my lovey buying a Linksys WRT54G, I ransacked one of the old boxes where I knew I had a spare realtek ethernet card. Found it and plugged (surprised it still works!), it into the home server so I can at least configure it as a gateway gleefully doing the NAT dance. This still means no couch surfing and tethered living, but its better than nothing.

Still pissed off Bayantel DSL doesn't provide static IP's as they used to. Buy hey, still fortunate I was able to back off on that Smart Wifi connection. Bayantel's promise of a rebate for downtimes sends a message that this guys will hopefully move heaven and earth to manage service interruptions. Will settle for dynamic DNS solutions for now.

Ahhh.. the additional ethernet card also allows me to offload JUnit tests to that machine and still be connected. I also now have an excuse to update the kernel to FreeBSD 6.0 Release. Also, maybe its just me, but I get a kick out of having semi transparent terminal screens logged on another machine. Too bad the default OSX terminal doesn't support tabs. What a shame...

NewsForge | Interview: Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD

This guy has the ability to *really* stand for what he believes. My hats off to him. OpenSSH would not be where it is now, if not for the valiant efforts of the OpenBSD team.

Reading this interview reminds me that people are indeed strange, everybody is deranged. And the striking difference between advocating for software freedom, and meatspace freedom.

Fruity Thoughts

Yesterday, the taxi driver gave an interesting advice: "One of the key secrets in enjoying a healthy life is to eat whatever fruit thats in season.". His argument is that God made fruits seasonal for a purpose.

Makes perfect sense. Who would argue with Mother Nature and God's design?

So today, in addition to our traditional "Adobo Sunday" (TM), we bought a bunch of sweet mangoes and had a grand time eating it after lunch. Mother nature really knows best.

DesktopBSD

Finally a BSD variant aimed for th desktop crowd. Although it begs the question: Why does it have to be KDE?

I have nothing against KDE. It just doesn't feel right. The innovation seems to happen in the Gnome crowd. Oh well.

The magic that makes Google tick - ZDNet UK Insight

A nice article providing an overview how the Mighty Google search engine makes searching a household name.

A nice read...

Hot Weather

Hot Weather

Literary hot these days. Yahoo weather reporting 36C average the past few days. Am having Asthma triggers more often. I should try to change my routine to go out of the house earlier and take advantage of somewhat a cooler time to commute and likewise go home late to wait for the streets to cool off a bit.

This are the times I wish I had a car with good airconditioning. Or wish that somewhat live in a place a bit further from the equator. Or wish telecommuting is the current standard norm. But such is life...

The gameplan is to send the kids to Bicol, which has a considerably more cooler climate since its nearer to mountains, to spend the rest of the summer. That would cut down our electricity bill and the savings could prepare us for the the next school year this june.

treonox
- typing away on a north bound MRT train

Folksonomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apparently there is a term for what I have been interested in for good deal of time now. It's called Folksonomy: a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links.


folksonomist nox
- thinking of ways to simplify things in his spare time.

Sun Grid Compute Utility

Fascinating! A step towards the "network is the computer" Sun has been saying for eons.

Looking into the future, it could be apparent that all that you would need to run your apps is a thin client terminal. Your applications run on Grid computers like this and data stored on your personal terrabyte drive. Your mobile device doesn't have to have the latest high end processors. Just good enough to process HD data perhaps? Sun is doing the commercial side of this industry $1/CPU-hr. Would google be able to offer a public free on-deman grid compute facility? What apps would you like it to run?

That kind of computing power would be handy for the RSS agents I have in mind. Or maybe, finally upgrade PAGASA's weather prediction capability. Reminds me of William Yu's presentation on cluster computing last year. Speaking of which, he has been actively blogging of late, check it out on my feeds list.

Exciting times! Moving on...

Hardcore eh?

There is an ongoing thread on the PinoyJUG mailling list regarding the members favorite IDE. Amusingly some showoffs seem to indicate they mainly code in Vi(m). Hayyy... Idealists on the wrong side of the coin.

WTF? What kind of projects are they doing? I have used Vi since circa 96, but use it mainly to edit text files on unix environments. But to use it for mainly for real Java development with a fair number of classes would be downright stupidly arrogant/ignorant. How can it beat code completion and refactoring? These folks doesn't have something called common sense.

If they really love Vi for its really simple and straightforward keybindings, they should try an IDE with Vi support (I use Eclipse with Satokars Vi plugin). That way they benefit from the features of a full featured IDE and get the good ol' goodness of Vi keybindings.

Had a nice weekend!

pre-weekend highlights
- Rojan graduated from nursery! Perfected all quarterly exams. Bagged a medal. Accomplished something that neither of his parents did at that age. We are so proud! Had a small party were everybody got a taste of my fabled spaghetti.
- Burned the midnight oil for most of the workdays. Re-designed the main app. Read thru the POJO's in action and Head First Design Patterns. Realized that am implementing the POJO facades the wrong way. Sigh, a developers world is full of foggy references. Complexity vs. Simplicity. More on this later. The fog is getting rather thick in this arena.

weekend highlights
- Fight Night Round 3! Assumed the role of Pacman. Took a beating from Morales on the first try. End-result of stupidly and stubbornly not going thru the training module first. After learning how to lean and parry and do quick jabs, and counter punches, was able to beat Barrera on the 7th round. Corrales on the 4th. Morales on the 11th. Wasn't too inclined to sing "para sayo" tho. Anyway, it was a great game! The texture mapped characters are not yet of final fantasy film category but good enough to recognize the players and have a believable game. Got to love the CSI'esue scenes just before your opponent or you goes down. The controls are easy to use. Really great game.
- Did some website cleaning. Did a makeover of the main mobileindie.com website. Ditched the planetplanet and replaced it with Gregarius. This is the closest thing to what I want my aggregator to be. I can group feeds together and have each group have its own RSS feed. Its also quite easy to add new feeds. Found and AJAX enabled theme and its looking really sweet.
- Ran context analysis on my blog. Results were rather amusing. The tag outputs: Blog, Blogs, Mobile, Indie, Music, Humor, Erotica, Gadgets, M-Commerce etc. I never explected my blog to be erotic, maybe the occasional mention of the wild elmo triggered the thing. All in all a good start for my pet project that will potentially titilate the wet corners of the mind. Got to do some xml digging.

Theocacao. This is probably the best looking blog I have ever seen. Sweetly clean and nice. Makes you literally feel your reading a book just by its appearance. Wonder if this iWeb induced? Of course this doesn't blend well with the monetizing your content crowd. It does win in the simplicity department.

Thats why Einstein is a genius. He gets it! Make complicated things simple but no simpler. Same reason why Apple is successful. Same reason why GNOME is better than KDE. Same reason why *BSD simple and consistent layout structure kicks linux in the butt from a SysAd point of view. Same reason why Ubuntu is rocking on desktop adoption. Same reason why lightweight frameworks like Spring in Java beat the old EJB shit.

Make complicated things simple == More likely chance of success