Getting serious about blogging

I've been quite busy in the past few weeks that I haven't checked how my blog is doing. I got quite a surprise to see that I am now ranked 899,581 from number 1,000,000 or so a year ago when I started.
I have to credit that article I wrote about Skype over at the PinoyTechBlog and that blog post I wrote about how virtualization can boost your productivity.

I have also signed up for a free mybloglog account. It tells me a thing or two about what people visiting my site view or click in the past 5 days. If it starts to get real interesting, I might consider getting a premium account.

Quote of the Day

" ... I have long felt that most computers today do not use electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the "pumping" motion of the mouse! ..."

http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php

YUI is 1 year old, Yahoo offers to host it for free

This is great news. Basically this means that you don't need to include the entire YUI library in your web app. Developers can just load the stuff from Yahoo's servers, sweet!!!

On a related note, I found this http://blog.davglass.com/2006/06/yui-code-samples/. The guy wrote some excellent reusable components, widgets and stuff from YUI.

恭喜發財

Happy Chinese New Year !!!!

Coping with Stress, Working at home is not as stress free as everyone thinks ...

I just love reading this blog. As a home web worker my self, I find a lot of articles enlightening. I've lost count of how many times I would say "yeah" or "that's exactly how I feel" while reading their articles.

This one in particular provides some tips on how to cope with stress for the home web worker.

Hoopa !

Hoopa !!! is what the gentleman below shouted as he lit ablaze our dessert of Flaming Mangoes.



Cyma is one of the few mediterranean restaurants in the Metro Manila area that I know off and I had the pleasure of having lunch last sunday in their branch inside the Edsa Shang-ri La with the family. Our only experience with mediterranean food is with Cafe Mediterranean's Gyros so we were feeling rather adventurous not to mention hungry. It was almost 2pm when we got to the place and all the tables were filled. Since it was already quite late, we didn't have to wait too long to be seated.



The center of attraction is when they serve flaming dishes. The waiter seving the dish would light it up and everyone shouts Hoopa ! We enjoyed being the center of attention twice, once with their Flaming Cheese (appetizer) and finally with their Flaming Mangoes (dessert)

Here are a couple of scrumptious pics I took of the food we ordered. I had to shoot fast before the food was all gone, so please excuse the amateur photos but I hope they're enough to get you salivating.

Broken nForce Chipset Cooler, Saving my PC from Overheating

I've known for quite a while that the nforce chipset fan (sometimes mistaken for the northbridge) on the motherboard of my PC has been defective. In anticipation I was able to buy a replacement cooler, a Thermalright HR05-SLI. Since, installing this cooler will cause me to completely remove the motherboard from the case, a time consuming endeavor which I do not wish to do often, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and upgrade the noisy stock cpu cooler as well.

I was eying the Thermaltake Sonic Tower but decided to go with the Scythe Ininity after Roel mentioned he was getting one for his new rig and reading some excellent reviews about it. I like tower coolers in general because they give you the option to cool the CPU passively just by removing or not installing a fan.

Anyway, today, I didn't notice that the chipset fan on the motherboard totally stopped spinning until my PC started becoming slightly unstable. I had no choice but to replace the parts now.

Well, I just completed the replacements. Pics below. I definitely noticed it's quieter and temps seem stable at around 46C.

Update : After some time to settle in, it seems my idle temps is about an average of 40C. No time yet to test temps on full load.

Check if your cpu supports virtualization

On a linux terminal type ....

grep -E '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

Get a screenshot of an X server running in the background

Ok, before I completely forget about this again.
To capture a screenshot of a running X server instance in the background,

On a linux terminal type ...

DISPLAY=:X import -window root xvfb.png

where X is the display number where the X server is running at and xvfb.png is the output, the file with the screenshot.

Use my Javascript ... It's Light Weight

When selling a product, the marketing folks would come up with an easy to remember tag line that describes something about the product that's easy to recall.

I think the tagline or tagword for the new and upcoming javascript frameworks is "lightweight".
Just see how "lightweight" is touted as a positive characteristic of these javascript products/frameworks.

MooTools : http://moofx.mad4milk.net/
JQuery : http://jquery.com/
Plotr : http://www.solutoire.com/plotr

It's almost like saying Prototype, Scriptaculous, YUI and Dojo are bloated ;-)

Pickled Green Mangoes

No, it's not a title for a movie ala Fried Green Tomatoes. It just happens to be one of my all time favorite food stuff. We buy them from a chinese deli over at china town. They make great snacks. I like them specially when chilled a little.

It's really just a coincidence that the brand name is the last 6 letters of my first name.

Swamped but Coping

I'm neck deep in tasks. Or am I really ? Do you ever get that feeling that you're running and running but not really going anywhere ?

How do you cope ?

Patrick a few weeks ago introduced me to emergent task timing . The idea, it seems, is to force yourself to be aware of the time you spend on tasks by checking in every 15 minutes. There is flash application with a time sheet you can mark. It sounds an alarm every 15 minutes to remind you to mark the sheet and to adjust your tasks accordingly.

Does it work ? I'll find out soon.

Bitterness

A friend shared this with me today.
" ... Look at Joseph at the end of his life. He had been abused by his family, had his reputation ruined by being falsely accused of adultery, he was forgotten by friends, and at times it must have felt as if God had forgotten him. But at the end of his life, when faced with those who were responsible for the years of slavery and pain, he forgives his brothers. He said to them: 'You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.' Despite all that has happened to him, he acknowledges the sovereignty of God, and God's amazing creative ability to bring good out of evil... "