Coredump

Originally uploaded by iandexter . Julian Emmanuel's first birthday is coming up. I gave this flyer a grungy look because it fits Julian's personality well. He's got that gritty look in him, and just the right amount of mischief peeks through every time he smiles. We call him "sutil", a Filipino term that's similar to "naughty" but not quite there. (Fonts from dafont.com . Grunge brushes from bittbox.com .)

Via The Dilbert Blog

So thin, it's like it isn't there. It arrived through inter-office routing. Yup, it's *that* thin! See how thin that is? My fingers are almost touching together. Of course, I had to to try out the multitouch pad. Loving it. It's thinner than my Moleskine notebook . I may have to ditch that one. (Enough with the hype already. Heh, /me dealing with my Mac envy.)

I'm writing this on a mobile phone using the wp-admin phone interface plugin, WPhone . The experience is quite painful -- it's not meant for the usual mobile phone browser, but rather for richer ones (in both the functional and, er, economical sense). I'm better off using other means, like email-to-blog perhaps. Update: I take that back. Well, the part about posting using the mobile admin interface, anyway -- that is still not usable and there are better ways of doing it. But other simple admin tasks (like activating or deactivating a plugin, for example) can be quite easy using the mobile interface. For example, I was able to activate the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, and was able to see the result right away. There's still the matter of having the plugin there in the first place though. Hmmm, SSH on S60 should be next in my list.

Okay, I know this is old news , but lately I've been getting a lot of these sorry pages that prompt me to input CAPTCHA words so I can continue with the search. This would be understandable * if * only because I go through the Tor networks sometimes when I do searches, but this also happens at work. Weird, though, that I encounter the sorry page mostly when I go through the northern American segment of our network, but rarely when I'm on the Asia Pacific side. (That is not to say that I search "anomalous queries". We do have in-house Google searches {using the appliances}, but sometimes I need to go out on the internet to look for hints on some issues we encounter. {Okay, so searching for [ Sara Brinsfield ] from work -- well it was only that one time -- is a *bit* anomalous, but still...})

My PLDT DSL connection is having some routing issues lately. First off and most annoying is that I can't browse this blog . My other domain works perfectly fine, though. Here's a traceroute: (I wonder why Window's tracert shows more hops while my Linux box merely shows end-to-end connectivity. Windows tracert shows that the connection to iandexter.net breaks at 58.71.0.79 , a PLDT intermediate router.) Here's my IP using the DSL connection: So I used Tor . The Windows bundle includes Tor, Vidalia and Privoxy. I also used the Torbutton Firefox extension to easily toggle the Tor connection. The Tor connection IP: Finally, I was able to browse Coredump . As expected, because of the multiple hops and encryption through the Tor relays, connection was slow as honey: Interestingly, I couldn't even browse Speedtest.net through the DSL connection so I can't compare speeds. Sheesh.

I have been messing around with the Asus eee PC. Here are my first impressions (sorry for the bullet points, I really am having trouble typing with the dwarfish keyboard {more on this later}). The good : Low cost. This subnotebook has an amazing price point. Asus really outdid itself with this. At about USD 490, this proves to be an attractive proposition for budget-conscious consumers. Open source. This is really a win. Aside from being customizable, this really proves that Linux and open source software can significantly compete in the desktop space. In no time, I was able to add new repositories, enable full desktop mode, and insstall Beryl, among others. The peripherals Just Work (tm) -- no need for modprobe and other CLI voodoo to detect USB storage, for example. User interface. I have a strict usability testing regimen: if my six-year old son cannot browse the web in under two minutes, the interface has failed miserably. This one passed with flying colors. The easy mode's ...

Gab is getting too fond of online games (Cartoon Network, Bandai, mostly kids' stuff), so I used a little hack often employed by Trojans and other malware: I set the hostnames of the above domains to 127.0.0.1 in the /etc/hosts file. I know, I can be an *evil* tatay sometimes, but I had to curb his growing addiction. But, to paraphrase Judith Milhon , there are clever ways to circumvent imposed limits . He googled [ cartoon network ] , and clicked on the next working link in the organic results. Lesson in online parenthood: if it's on the web, it's just a google away. Touché.

Cover-flow style , courtesy of MooFlow tools . The photos were compiled from Flickr . I was attempting to automate the process ala- fd's Flickr toys , what with the Flickr API's fantastic use of JSON responses (no need for server-side nor cross-site xHTTP requests). Alas, my days were packed. But I'm getting the hang of it. I'm relearning JavaScript along the way (I could actually rebuild a DOM tree from the JSON response, cool). One thing that would have made my coding easier: an API wrapper for JavaScript. Anyway, enjoy. Kudos to Naraoya and ATIS547 for the borrowed pics.