Coredump

Last night, I attended a wedding reception for a friend. I wasn't able to attend Presto and Aya's wedding and "formal" reception, but the after-wedding party at Balai Obrero (Worker's Home) was just as apt as the ceremony it celebrated. It was also a reunion of sorts: I got to meet old friends, and recall old faces. I brought home with me warm feelings of solidarity, Aya's mother's 'ube halaya', and a ripped CD of the newly wed's favorite songs. Not surprisingly, some of their choices were hits performed in street protests and in the countryside. Inserted between typical mushy fare like America's "All my life", Aiza Seguerra's rendition of "How did you know?", and Aerosmith's "I don't wanna miss a thing" were "Walang hanggang paalam" by Joey Ayala and Buklod's (original artist of Bamboo's revival, "Tatsulok") "Ang ating awit". What caught my fancy, though -- ope...

Just because something is not on the Internet does not mean it is untrue. - Adam Rogers, Wired Science

LOL

It's not a product at all -- it's a global humanitarian cause.

Registered diecastminis.com. Now, www.diecastminis.com point to my hobby blog . My iandexter.net Google-hosted email is having DNS problems. Hay... Wracking my brain all day, trying to figure out how to migrate Serena Version Manager files to Subversion. So far, PVCS-to-RCS has been successful, but it only gets the latest version -- no version history! Update : The DNS resolution issue points to my availment of a service from my domain registrar -- turns out they had to point my domain to their name servers. Thus, the MX record for iandexter.net vanished. Fast propagation, though, as I got nearly instantaneous update. Up-update : Interestingly, during the period when the MX record did not resolve, I still received spam mails. Spam is that resilient? I shudder at the thought.

I made several improvements in the previous script : #!/usr/bin/python import flickr import urllib import time import re flickr.API_KEY = 'Flick API goes here' print "Registered using API key" user = flickr.people_findByUsername(u'username') print "Found user %s - username" % user.id try: photos = flickr.people_getPublicPhotos(user.id, 500) print "Found the photos" total = 0 for photo in photos: p = flickr.Photo(photo.id) title = re.sub('\s+', '-', p.title) title = re.sub('[^-\w]', '', title) title = "%s_%s" % (title, p.datetaken.split()[0]) for s in p.getSizes(): url = s['source'] photoFile = "%s_%s" % (title, url.split("/")[4]) data = urllib.urlretrieve(url, photoFile) ...

Flickr Leech is a cool web app. It displays all Flickr photos, including those already rendered invisible because of the 200-photo limit in free accounts. But I need more: I want to download these photos for backup. After looking around, I found several tools that does the job . They didn't quite work for me, so I decided to hack my own. Using the Flickr API and a Python wrapper , I came up with the following: Get flickr.py and manually add it to the host Python library. Get an API key from Flickr. Write the script: #!/usr/bin/python import flickr import urllib flickr.API_KEY = 'API key goes here' user = flickr.people_findByUsername(u'username') photos = flickr.people_getPublicPhotos(user.id, 500) total = 0 for photo in photos: photoURL = "http://static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_o.jpg" % (photo.server, photo.id, photo.secret) photoFile = "%s_%s.jpg" % (photo.title, photo.id) data = urllib.urlretrieve(photoURL, photoFile) total...

Looking forward to hearing our new baby laugh like this (even without a Wii).

Love it or hate it, Helvetica looms large in visual culture. Helvetica is a feature-length film exploring the proliferation of one typeface as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

I've just started using Twitter , an up-and-coming web service that posts user status on the web, in IM and in SMS. The service also exposes its API , so it's possible to build apps using it. I found a nifty way of updating my Twitter status through the command line: curl -u username:password -d status='status_goes_here' -s http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml > /dev/null 2>

I've been visiting a few foreign - language sites lately, and Google Translate is a great tool, if a bit awkward. I created a bookmarklet that will point the site to Google Translate . I then added a keyword ("gt") so that when I'm in the site, I can just press F6, and enter the keyword.

These are "erotic" (but SFW) art by a 25-year-old fine arts graduate from Japan. The playful subjects are deceptively cute. Via Table of Malcontents .

I've been reviewing this blog's site stats in Google Webmaster Tools, and found this in the query stats: Interesting. I'm the top hit in [ metawire account ] (for the now-defunct Metawire.org site that offers free OpenBSD shell accounts). I also placed second in [ chikkatalk ], next to Chikka's official FAQ page. My PR stats are dismal. ( I don't really care about PR , though.) It was also interesting to find out what anchor texts were used to link back to Coredump.

Via CrunchNotes .

A Google executive in Spain has confirmed that the search giant's R&D is working on a mobile phone . Read the translated news item (I don't know Spanish -- except for a few lewd terms -- but Google has to work on its translation efforts. "Movable phone" -- that's original. ;))

Cellphone maker LG is sponsoring a National Texting Championship in the US. At stake is US$25,000. But, you gotta buy an enV phone (priced at US$79.99). I bet Filipinos would come out on top, if we could participate. (By the way, "texting" is a verb now?)

Sort of. Two philosophy professors (from MIT and Princeton) dueled to write the largest possible finite number on a chalkboard . Guess who won? The number: "The smallest number bigger than any number that can be named by an expression in the language of first order set-theory with less than a googol (10^100) symbols."

After their IdeaStorm survey to gather customer feedback, and with the resounding call for Linux on Dell notebooks (and desktops), Dell is now asking what Linux flavor customer wants ? I think Dell would be better off coming up with different offerings, and become OS-agnostic. Then again, there are support costs involved (even if there are available community support infrastructures for one's OS of choice), but the idea is to fit the product to the customer's requirements. For example, for a Windows user who wants to make the shift to Linux, Dell with Ubuntu would be great. For experienced Linux users (from basic to intermediate), there should be choices between Fedora Core, Ubuntu or OpenSuse. (I did not add the "paid" Linux variants, but those are better for corporate accounts, I guess.) [ Update ] Here's an even better idea: Dell should ensure that their hardware works with the kernel (and xorg, at least) out of the box .

"The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows," according to a news media study. The State of the News Media 2007 , conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, outlines changes that traditional (or "mainstream") media are facing and how news organizations are adapting to these changes. Traditional journalism is becoming a "smaller part of people’s information mix," the report says. The report also highlights major trends for the year: In an era of what the report claims as "shrinking ambitions", news organizations are moving towards building audience niches. The news industry is becoming more aggressive in pursuing new economic models -- they must find a way to "get consumers to pay for digital content." Instead of engaging audiences in debates, resulting in polarization and oversimplification of issues, more journalists are now offering solutions and maintaining advocacies. The report predicts that a...

It turns out that about 2,000 developers contributed at least one patch to the 2.6.20 version of the kernel. The study used the lines of code changed as a metric to determine the top contributions to the kernel code. Interestingly, while kernel development was "spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom (were) paid for the work they do." Not surprisingly, Red Hat, IBM, Novell and Oracle -- top players in the Linux market -- were among the top contributors. But it is also interesting to note that companies like Nokia and Sony also contributed portions to the code. Definitely not the case of having too many cooks.

Hmmm ... In Bash, I would have done: $ for i in `seq 100` ; do if [ `expr $i % 15` -eq 0 ] ; then echo FizzBuzz; elif [ `expr $i % 3` -eq 0 ]; then echo Fizz; elif [ `expr $i % 5` -eq 0 ]; then echo Buzz; else echo $i; fi; done Then again, it took me about 10 minutes to do that. (I couldn't get the ternary operator to work, somehow.) In C: about five minutes (rusty -- I last used C way back in college {ages ago!}). In a recent phone interview, I was asked to programmatically (in shell) rename a set of files. I blundered for about two minutes, and gave up in the end, saying I could probably do that by experimentation. I could fairly say I passed that interview. The point? Answering "FizzBuzz" questions does not reflect real-world situations -- it's how you approached the problem, even if you didn't get the answer, that matters. If I were an interviewer, I'd concentrate on the steps rather than the solution.