Coredump

We had our team's Christmas dinner at Twist (which, incidentally, was the caterer for the company Christmas party in Speedzone, The Fort, last Sunday). The food was great -- loved the roast beef, and oyster (the hollandaise was a bit icky, though). And for Php500++, the buffet was a steal. We exchanged gifts, basing on the gift registry wiki we set up. Here's what I got: Before the dinner, we had our year-end team performance report. Guess who came out on top. ;) And for those endless parsing of log files and lab-environment setup, I got a rip-off iPod nano. Yay. :P (I'm having it replaced with a real one, hopefully. Hehe.)

Check out RFC 2397 , which defines a new scheme that let's you embed data into a URL. Using the data: URI scheme, you can now encode binary files as links on any web page. Here's a pic . To encode a file, you can use this CGI program . [via Lifehacker ]

Christmas gift exchanges, that is. Here at work, we've also set up our own. Unfortunately, we only have until Friday to pick Php300-worth gifts for our Kringles. To, er, "facilitate" the process, we put up a wiki where we can anonymously post our wishlist and gift preferences. I know, that takes away the creativity, but we're so sunk in work that we'd rather do this down-and-dirty rig just to keep up with the holiday spirit. Some of the wishes are pretty interesting, though. Where can one find a sake bottle, for example? Who would have thought of a " Bratz Petz Dogz "?

As give-away for the global year-end report, we were given Cube World Digital Stick People : Cool.

Some quotes from the executives: Be cool, but not cocky. Be constructive, not merely complaining. Cooperate, don't compartmentalize. Instead of meeting competition head-on right in that wide red ocean, seek the river and a blue ocean of our own. The current trend in the Philippines is business process outsourcing. Hello, we've been doing that for ten years now -- we can claim to be the first global company to set up a full-blown IT shop in the country. We won't outsource R&D and support -- our core competencies. Why would we move away from what we are strongest? [Big-name IT company] suffers from a credibility problem in the security space. They're not likely to take away that edge from us anytime soon. We are always open to changes, so long as they are consistent with our core values. We thrive in our willingness to make mistakes, and of not being afraid in making them.

Resting in my hotel room right now, after the year-end global planning and report conference for our company. Things are peaking up. One thing I must say about this company: it's visionary. It's willing to change even when the changes would mean disruption and sometimes pain. This kind of out-of-the-box thinking is what makes this company tick. I was looking at my colleagues, some 500 or so packed in the hotel's grand ballroom, and I can sense the electricity traveling across each engineer as the CEO laid out the company's vision for the next five years. I think to myself, "What is it they see that I don't?" They all seem so happy, despite all the setbacks. Maybe it's what turns this people on: the ability to transition seamlessly, to constantly move out of the comfort zone. Am I going to miss this? Hell, yes. But like them, I'd be moving out of my comfort zone, and explore other possibilities. This company was the proving ground for my readiness. ...

Sort of. I'm posting from my ninth-floor room here at the Century Park Hotel . When I checked in earlier, I read the promo poster at reception that WiFi is available in the rooms for Php150 per hour. Man, that's 50% more expensive than Airborne Access. But, but, but... as I was messing around with my lappy, it detected three (!) unsecured APs. I tried one, and after a few tweaking with the IP settings, I was online. Before I checked in, I was ready to use dialup instead. I even got to borrow a friend's dialup access code to Infocom (free from 12 midnight to 8 am). Good thing I can ditch that now -- city calls here are available for a "minimal" fee. The cheapskate in me just won't subscribe to that. ;)

Perl Regular Expressions / perl programming regex

Macro Photography Tips for Point and Shoot Compact Digital Cameras Great tips, specially for my hobby . / tips howto photography 150-Country Travel Adapter at Hammacher Schlemmer Comes with international sockets and a built-in USB port, allows simultaneous AC and USB charging. / tech travel hardware xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe Nice representation of IPv4 address space using fractal mapping. / mapping math internet

Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself - New York Times "Three years ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, made an audacious prediction: the problem of junk e-mail, he said, 'will be solved by 2006.'" Right. / spam internet

For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate - New York Times / ict4d