Coredump

With homegrown 3G mobile technology still in the works, China recently rolled out 4G in Shanghai . Field tests are being done for the new system, which will allow up to 100 Mbps (3G is at about 3 Mbps). The new technology is expected to be commercialized in 2010. Via Crunchgear .

Translated from works provided by The Kafka Project , Franz Kafka's journalized writings are positively, uhrm, Kafkaesque. Heh. I wonder how Anais Nin 's work would fare? Via Table of Malcontents .

"Take a step back and ask 'What value is my site offering to users?'" - Google's Matt Cutts . (Ok, so I re-used that content here, and have not added any value whatsoever. Heh. Still, the above are well-thought-out advice that bloggers (and other "content creators") should heed. (Then again, I don't care much about my PageRank , anyway, as dismal as it is. Might as well forget about it .))

Here's a great way of displaying Flickr photos in a bunch . And for a spendthrift like me who doesn't have a Pro account (yet), this is a nifty method of retrieving that long-gone photo that has been bumped off the 200-photo display limit for the free accounts. Via Lifehacker .

Given: $ ll Archive/ total 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 d3m users 10 2007-01-26 16:29 file1.z -rw-r--r-- 1 d3m users 15 2007-01-26 16:29 file2.z What happens if: $ cd ~/Destination; cp ~/Archive/*.z :P

Okay, this just takes the cake. Search for [ African Ingenuity ] in Google, and see what it suggests instead. BoingBoing calls it " biased and unfortunate ", while Google Blogoscoped says it's a "strange" suggestion . Guess they haven't heard of "Pinoy ingenuity". ;)

It's been a long time since I did a source tar-ball install. But the production servers at work require that applications that are not part of the standard install base (from Kickstart/Jumpstart and VMWare images) should be compiled from source. It was a very refreshing experience. :) So after going through the usual configure; make; make install invocation, it was time to make sure that the app is persistent at boot. I would have copied an init script from my *nix desktop, but good thing SLES had a baseline script in /etc/init.d/skeleton . In a nutshell, the steps are: Define the INIT INFO section, as per the LSB specs . Fill in the variables. Use /etc/rc.status and rc_* functions for sanity checks. Create the basic start , stop and status functions. Use YAST ( System > System Services (Runlevel) ) -- or, if available, innserv -- to enable the startup script. Below is a script I wrote for Apache: #!/bin/sh # # Author: Ian Dexter R. Marquez # # /etc/init.d/httpd ...

Interesting news at NY Times: IBM is set to launch social software tools in the corporate world . (Hmm... I wonder if Sacha Chua 's ongoing research is part of this tool set?) Here at work, we use Lotus Notes for typical "groupware" applications: calendars, email, instant messaging, and task management. I have also explored the use of blogs and wikis in my previous companies, but they did not really took off that well. Perhaps the IBM experience can lead the way in exploring the use of these thriving media for the workplace.

' Ella ' is now out. Ack, I just did a one-click upgrade to 2.07 on Dreamhost . :P

Via Gizmodo .

"If writing fiction is dessert, (b)logging is snacking between meals." - Neil Gaiman , on a diet. (Reminds me of Dilbert's PHB, who recently went on a diet. Ugh, I gotta get back to work!)

Delete all mails marked as spam, in the morning, upon log in. Then forget about them. Go to the spam box again in the afternoon, and again delete all. Simple, but effective. Also helps unload my GMail storage.

Accidentally found this blog containing "blind items" about life at Trend Micro , my previous workplace. Okay, so it's not really a work blog, and the posts will leave outsiders totally clueless, but yes, it does reflect the "colorful" life at TrendLabs HQ Manila. (In the US Corp and 24x7 Premium Support teams, at least. My team, the European Technical Support Center, is much more, er, sedate.) The posts are funny, if a bit mean. Too bad, the blog author recently resigned. Will someone continue the "legacy"? Are there other blogs out there with a similar theme?

The cool interface in Minority Report , a film based in Philip K. Dick's short story, has just come true: Can't wait to get my hands on those. (Pun intended.)

Of course, time is linear (if we are to believe Einstein). Heh. Anyway, here's a cool watch design that displays time in a linear scale: I have a similar clock on my desktop: it's a Google Desktop gadget, DigiWatch , that displays the remaining time (for alarms) in a progress bar.

I've worked with lots of servers, most of which I cannot access directly, so I often use remote access: Remote Desktop Connection or Terminal Services in Windows, and ssh in *nix. While I do have PasswordSafe to remember all those passwords, I'm the lazy admin type, so I often opt for password-less authentication using public keys. For this, I use PuTTY, et. al. First, I generate an RSA key using PuTTYgen. I don't enter anything for the passphrase. Warning : NOT recommended for production servers! I save the public and secret keys (in .PPK format) in a directory. I also cut and paste the RSA string in a text file, key.txt . For now, the remote box is configured for "normal" ssh, that is, through password authentication. So, I copy over the RSA string file to the remote box: C:\> pscp \path\to\key.txt user@remote-host:/home/user/. I log on to the remote host using PuTTY, and do the following: $ mkdir .ssh $ mv key.txt .ssh/authorized_keys $ chmod 700 .ssh; chm...

Here at my new workplace , there are more than 20 web apps that are being developed in-house. They go through the following workflow: devs use development and staging servers for tests, and after QA, the new builds are pushed to the production servers. They've employed a custom version control system for coding, but it's not panning out. They need an automated way of pushing updates to the dev and staging servers for a quicker turn-around time. Enter Subversion . I've used Subversion both in production and in personal projects. (I haven't used CVS so I can't compare the two.) The way I see it, the web apps can be pushed this way: Install SVN with WebDAV support. Create the repositories' directory trees: mkdir /path/to/repository/projectname Note that the repositories have to be owned and writeable by the httpd user: chown -R httpd:httpd /path/to/repository/projectname; chmod g+s /path/to/repository/projectname Create the SVN repositories: svnadmin create /path/...

Never browse Google Reader feeds at work when you're subscribed to Fleshbot .

It's an obscure martial art skill of visiting bookstores without buying anything. I'm a master at this, having achieved the "Path of the Randomly Hopping Rabbit", in fact. (A Different Bookstore salespeople, in my experience, are the more knowledgeable lot.) (Hey, I'm deep in tech pr0n and I still have time to browse through my Google Reader feeds. W00t!)

I feel like I'm back in college! Here I am at my new desk, cramming docs on Solaris and AIX. I just started here at the new workplace. The first impressions were great. The environment is a bit subdued, not like in my previous one, which was, uh, "colorful". That's not to say that the people here are drones, though. I'll be handling Unix servers that run mission-critical applications for this organization. The administrative tasks haven't been formally turned over to me yet, so instead of just shifting my a** in my seat, I wallowed in tech pr0n -- that's tons of Unix admin guides. Yesterday, I was able to prep several SAN LUNs on an EMC 8530, using AIX, for data migration later from a Symmetrix DMX. Here's an AIX survival tip: Use smitty ! (Learned that from a former colleague who's now a sys ad at Globe.) Wonderful tool. AIX LVM methods are very similar to that of RHEL. I just have to familiarize myself more with the (for me) quirky commands ( chv...

I know there are scripts out there that does full-blown SMTP testing. I've used smtp-sink and smtp-source in Postfix for this purpose: $ smtp-source -s 100 -m 100 -f [email protected] -t [email protected] server.address:25 So this was what I recommended to a friend, a Unix engineer in Singapore. But she had a different requirement: she has to establish an SMTP connection through telnet to a remote server, and send a template mail to thousands of recipients. The telnet session goes something like: [user@host ~]$ telnet remote.host 25 Trying 123.456.789.10... Connected to remotehost.remotedomain (123.456.789.10). Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.remote.host ESMTP Postfix EHLO some.domain 250-mail.remote.host 250-PIPELINING 250-SIZE 10240000 250-VRFY 250-ETRN 250 8BITMIME MAIL FROM:[email protected] 250 Ok RCPT TO:[email protected] 250 Ok DATA 354 End data with . Subject: This is a test From: Sender This is only a test. . 250 Ok: queued as D81D7FA927 QUIT 221 B...

Well, almost. Dreamhost's one-click install was pretty straightforward. Backing up and restoring the WP database went smoothly as well. (Thanks to my regular backup strategy .) Replacing the theme and the plugins are still in process. I've managed to put back the site's look to its former layout, with not-quite-a-few tweaks in the CSS and theme files. I haven't installed all plugins yet, but the more important ones (like Akismet) are in place. A few minor hiccups: the flickrRSS plugin would have to be suspended for now as I have yet to tweak the CSS that places my Flickr thumbnails neatly in the sidebar. I'm still trying to understand this new widget functionality. I can't seem to add custom sidebar entries using K2, because manually editing sidebar.php apparently doesn't work. My hosted images (I failed to note that I also have Gallery installed!) are nowhere to be found. Good thing I also created backups for that. The more important blog features: The R...

I'll be doing some major maintenance for Coredump . I'm currently on Dreamhost , and it has these one-click installs that have one-click upgrades, too, which is cool. Thing is, I did that one-click thingie using iandexter.tambay.org, and I just used some nifty mod_url_rewrite snippet to redirect the WP install there to iandexter.net. The one-click upgrade doesn't work for these transferred domains, so I had to manually copy over files from the old domain to the new one -- very tedious. What I'm planning to do: Back up the WP install in both iandexter.net and iandexter.tambay.org. Remove the contents of iandexter.net (required for the one-click install). Do that one-click-install thingamajig. Restore the WP database to the new install. Remove the install in iandexter.tambay.org. Looks pretty easy, except, for step 1. I also have to disable plugins, save the theme modifications I did (hmmm... maybe it's time for a new theme? But K2 works great for me!), an...

Look what I found lying around at National Bookstore, Cybermall: Actually, it was waiting for me. I was just supposed to kill time, waiting for my passport photos to get developed (I looked particularly icky in those pictures). I would have gone back upstairs to the office, but the photos would only take 30 minutes, so it wasn't very "efficient" running back and forth like that. Well, I *did* go up before that, because I couldn't wait for the bank teller to return to her desk so I can ask for a bank statement. Then after logging in and checking some mails, I went down again, got the statement (very quick, that one -- she didn't even ask for my account number, just my name), and had the passport photos taken. And so... While killing time, I dropped by NBS, and there it was, this beautiful thing wrapped in plastic, mint condition. I would have promptly bought it, but I still had plenty of time, so I browsed the stacks. I found a few nice titles (Vintage epic books, ...

Originally uploaded by iandexter . (Yet another "New Year's resolutions" post.) Life . I will strive to be the best tatay to my two sons and wife. Being away most of the time (and going home only on weekends) is taking its toll in my relationship with them, but I will make up for that. My wife and I will learn cooking together. Even the little one can join in if he wants, but he will be busy with his little brother. I will also continue to be a great kuya to my brother and two sisters, and a good son to Mommy and Daddy. Last year had been a year full of changes , and I had been remiss in my family duties. This year will be different. I will also go back to school. Work . I will brush up on my coding skills (I really ought to review on Perl, and learn Ruby). I also resolve to blog more often, with meatier and substantive posts, not only here but for PTB . I may not be able to take on many side projects, but for those I do get, I will -- as always -- give the best I have,...

Originally uploaded by iandexter . (Obligatory "the year that was" post, with your indulgence.) If I could describe 2006 in one word, that would be "change". The year started with me rolling out this Wordpressed blog , from the previous Blogger-hosted one . The Open Academy's ICT roadshow kicked off in Northern Luzon . It was a resounding success, which eventually led to the building of an IT bus for Nueva Ecija . I'm proud to say that I was part of this project. In April, I moved to another company . We also learned that we're having a baby . (We're expecting him this January.) Here's yet another addition: I got me Mathilda ! Schweet. Also, I moved to my own (vanity) domain . I went on a blogging rut the next few months after that. (I resolve to change that this year. {More on that in a later post.}) I also took (and passed) the RHCT . I plan to pass the RHCE this year. The year ended with a bang -- well, lots of it. On the night of 30 December ...