Better Merging with Subversion

Check out the blog article I wrote about using svnmerge.py when merging with Subversion.

a Ham quote

I've had my fair share of ham jokes but a ham "quote" is something else. Allow me to reproduce it here as read from Dimsumdolly.com ...

The most exquisite peak in culinary art is conquered when you do right by a ham, for a ham, in the very nature of the process it has undergone since it last stalked on its feet, combines in its flavour the tang of smoky autumnal woods, the maternal softness of earthy field delivered of their crop children, the wineyness of a late sun, the intimate kiss of fertilising rain, and the bite of fire. You must slice it thin, too, almost as thin as this page you have in your hands. The making of a ham dinner, like the making of a gentleman, starts a long, long time before the event.

~ W.B. Courtney

Cross Browser Web Development and coming to terms with IE

I just published a blog entry over at Solution Grove with tips on cross browser web development and Internet Explorer.

If you happen to be a front-end web developer, you might find this article interesting.

the story of how "Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight"

I got this link from Rickey.org about how Steve Jobs indirectly caused the guy to miss his flight.

Now I wish I bought a Mac

Apple released the long awaited iPhone SDK last week and boy does Steve Jobs know how to make you regret buying your new PC.

The SDK seems to only come in the form of a dmg file which means that you can only install and use it on OSX.

Ironically, the linux news sites were all abuzz about the iPhone SDK in recent weeks leading up to its release.

I'm sure the *Nix geeks are out there scratching their heads and wondering if there will be a version of the SDK we can download, install and try on Linux.

3 days without DSL and living on Wifi

It's been a while since I have gone without DSL. Last friday, PLDT, my service provider, decided that I needed to go without it for a while. Needless to say it took a while (3 days to be exact) before it was sorted out. Thank God it was a weekend.

For the first time, I was actually thankful that I was paying the extra P99 per month for Airborne Access Wifi.

The problem then was to find a place with a good enough signal at decent speeds. Funny that Airborne claims that they have "the widest coverage, connecting you through the most wi fi location nationwide" because many of the Airborne Access hotspots I went to in the past few months were either offline, excruciatingly slow or just plain difficult to connect to.

So I'm either incredibly unlucky at finding hotspots or they're not very good at keeping their hotspots online and working.

There is, however, one consistently good hot spot in my experience. The Starbucks at Petron Macapagal Avenue always seems to have a good signal at decent speeds.

I felt quite at home because many of the laptop wielding crowd had Thinkpads. They came in all shapes and sizes from the very portable X series to the huge and heavy iSeries, you name it someone has it.

Anyway, the internet has become quite accessible now thanks to wifi. I can remember a year or two ago when internet cafe's were the only place to get internet access. Today, you have wifi hotspots even at the mall. Some, like the Robinson's Malls even offer it for free, mallwide.

Well, my DSL is back and I have to start cutting back on the caffeine now. :-)

gearsAJAXHelper: Using Gears as an optional speed boost

I remember trying to do something along these lines a couple of months back. You still need gears to be installed on your browser though.

Read more about gearsAjaxHelper

iGoogle uses YUI CSS Tools

While messing around with firebug, I found out that iGoogle uses YUI's CSS Tools ...

Yahoo ! releases YUI 2.5

Recently, Dave and I worked on adding some neat features to the list template code.

It's patterned after some of the things we saw in DabbleDB that we thought would be a nice have for list template on OpenACS.

Just last week Dave demoed Ajax List Template at the OpenACS conference at Guatemala.

So how is this related to YUI 2.5.

Well, with the release of 2.5 comes the Data Table control and from the looks of it we'll be rewriting the Ajax List Template to use it soon. The current version uses YUI menus and a lot of back-end code. With the Data Table control it seems we will be able to "progressively enhance" a list template better than how we did it now.

In addition to the Data Table control, a few more notable additions include :

Image Cropper

• I'm not totally sure but this looks like it's based on Julien Lecomte's image cropper widget

Layout Manager

• This looks like the layout manager that ExtJs has.
  

Uploader

• Looks like this is a flash based experimental file uploader based on the one they have at Flickr
• I still like SwfUpload though :-)

Resize Utility

• This utility will relieve us all of mucking around with the drag and drop api to make elements resizable with YUI :-)
  

Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion To Acquire Yahoo

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft is offering to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 Billion. A copy of the letter Microsoft sent to Yahoo is also in the article.

I must admit, the offer must be tempting for shareholders given Yahoo's current state.

The guys at Microsoft were quite patient to wait a year and rather intent to offer so much for a company struggling to stay in the black.

All I can say is ... "Resistance is futile .... "

I'm just worried about what will happen to YUI, if the buyout happens. Is YUI.NET in the horizon ?

Kernel upgrade to 2.6.22.16-0.1 and minor MadWifi inconvenience

The opensuse updater applet upgraded my kernel and the nvidia graphic card drivers on my opensuse 10.3. Everything was ok except Wifi stopped working.

I have a T61 with the Atheros chipset using MadWifi. It seems the MadWifi repositories haven't caught up. Luckily you can search for updated MadWifi rpms from software.opensuse.org/search.

So first things first is to check what my new kernel is ....

uname -r

Next I search for madwifi-kmp-default that matches the kernel I'm using on http://software.opensuse.org/search and I click on the "One click install" icon to install it.

My sister's EEE-PC

Lucky my sister has small fingers. I can't imagine myself using this thing for work. The keys on the keyboard are so small and the screen though bright and clear is just too small. I guess that's the adjective that best describes this machine. It's small but it's just fine for my sister who happens to be just as petite ;-)

The unit is the PC-701 model equipped with a 1.3 megapixel webcam, 1GB memory and a 4 GB solid state hard disk with Xandros Linux pre-installed.

Three days before purchase I called to ask if there were available units. The sales person I spoke with said they had 75 units available but he added that these things were selling like hotcakes. When we finally dragged ourselves to the store, there were only 3 units left, he wasn't kidding !!!

I had a chance to play with it for about an hour and here are my first impressions.

• Boot up is fast. No doubt, due to the solid state hard disk. It beat my T61 to the login screen.
• The posters and flyers say its "Shock Proof - Weather Proof - Best in Class !". I'm inclined to agree, it feels solid and it's light. It feels like you can actually throw it around without worry.
  
• It's linux of course, so the apps were all familiar linux apps like Pidgin, OpenOffice and Firefox, nothing any linux user hasn't seen.
  
• Applications were quite responsive. Skype worked out of the box with the webcam.
  
• There's a voice command app but I didn't get a chance to try it out yet.

Here are a couple of photos from my camera phone. The last two shots give you a feeling of how exactly small it is.

ExtJS 2.0.1 is out

Everybody start your download managers and get ExtJS 2.0.1 from ExtJS.com

http://extjs.com/download

Looks like I'll be busy updating projects today ....

Can I have your name sir ?

When I go order my favorite venti coffee jelly frapuccino from our local Starbucks, the barista always asks if I want a ham sandwich to go with it, I wonder why ?

see ya later ... Netscape

All around the web candles are being lit for the once great browser we call Netscape. As sad as it sounds, we all take comfort that its legacy will live on thru Mozilla Firefox.

My earliest memory of Netscape was in college queuing up at the university library waiting for my turn to use the internet in 1994. On a 486 PC running Windows 3.1, I used Netscape and browsed the internet for the first time. My first ever download was Star Trek TNG icons and wallpapers from a gopher site I can no longer remember. Geeky huh ?

Here's a quick round up of the news, "obituaries" and "eulogies" around the web ....

• Yugatech : Netscape Navigator: RIP, 1994 - 2008"">Netscape Navigator: RIP, 1994 - 2008
  
• Engadget : Netscape finally bows out, browsers no longer supported
• Slashdot : AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development
• Web Worker Daily : End of a Browser Era
  
• Netscape : End of Support for Netscape Browsers
  

Check your Gmail filters .... and I mean NOW !!!!

Before anything else, login to Gmail now and check your filters and POP Forwarding settings and make sure there aren't any strange filters or e-mail address you don't recognize.

I read an incredibly alarming item from digg today about how an unscrupulous hacker stole someone's domain name by hacking into the person's gmail account.

David Airey, the victim, tells his story and the on-going saga to get his domain back in this blog post. If you're a freelancer, your website is your life, I can just imagine the emotional distress he is in.

According to the blog post, Google has already fixed this but the fix will NOT remove filters or settings that have been added or changed by the exploit, so I say again, check your Gmail account now.

Details of the hack can be found in http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/google-gmail-e-mail-hijack-technique/

Holiday greetings and how Starbucks saved a man's life

I found this touching story from digg about how Starbucks saved Michael Gill's life.

Who is Michael Gill, you ask ? Go ahead, click the link and find out.

I think it's a fitting story to share this Christmas because it's about hope in time of great tribulations and finding happiness in the simplest things.

Happy Holidays everyone !!!!

NVIDIA Driver 169.07, Compiz and OpenSUSE 10.3

I left my PC to update overnight and I was surprised this morning after a reboot that Compiz isn't working anymore.

It seems the OpenSUSE updater upgraded the Nvidia drivers to version 169.07 but it broke Compiz in the process.

After some exhaustive googling I found the solution in this blog. It's in Italian and it seems meant for Ubuntu users but the code snippets were easy enough to follow and they worked for me on OpenSUSE 10.3

After installing the updates and rebooting, I noticed that compiz wasn't working anymore so I manually executed compiz from a gnome terminal and got this error ....

“No GLXFBConfig for default depth”

The solution according to M0rF3uS’ Ubuntu Blog is to execute the following in your terminal

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz -–no-libgl-fallback -–replace ccp &

Alternatively, if you use fusion-icon to launch compiz, open the file

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/FusionIcon/data.py

and locate the line with compiz_args.

edit it so that it looks like

compiz_args = [’–replace’, ‘–sm-disable’, ‘–ignore-desktop-hints’, ‘ccp’, ‘–no-libgl-fallback’]

Then, open a terminal and execute

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 fusion-icon

UPDATE: This latest version of the NVIDIA drivers fixed the function keys that control the brightness on my T61. This means that I don't have to exit X windows anymore to adjust the brightness.

Microsoft Philippines sued for Piracy!

I dugg the story on one of the earlier Inquirer.net news breaks ...

http://digg.com/microsoft/Another_Lawsuit_against_Microsoft_2

At the time I thought that it was probably an honest mistake on Microsoft Philippine's part.

Well, apparently, it wasn't.

From reading the most recent Inquirer article it seems that Microsoft was fully aware and even "tried to resolve the copyright dispute" as the title says.

It's also apparent that whatever Microsoft was offering to the university to resolve the dispute must have been unacceptable (to put it mildly) for it to actually go so far as to sue Microsoft Philippines and to name Microsoft Corp. in the US as a respondent.

Out of curiosity, I visited the university's website at http://www.southeastern.com.ph/. While it's not as famous as it's neighbor from a few blocks away (DeLa Salle University) the university has been around since 1946.

The article says that "Microsoft Philippines Inc. is disappointed", I think and believe the proper term is stunned that a little known university would challenge them in court and sue them for something that they are, ironically, staunch advocates.

I would dare say that if Microsoft Philippines was dealing with DLSU, UP or Ateneo, the story would be very different.

On the other hand, it could be a huge malicious publicity stunt but an incredibly risky one at that, even if they have Estelito Mendoza as their lawyer, because, all things considered, they're not suing just any company, they're suing the company that made the Internet Explorer browser, the spreadsheet application (MS Excel) and word processor (MS Word) that you and many people around the world use, and a company that has been known to exert "influence" on governments and entities.

I'm rooting for the underdog here.

Any person or organization should think twice, thrice and ten times before thinking of challenging a giant with vast resources such as Microsoft. To step forward and sue is either incredibly foolish or admirably principled. I hope they are the latter.

As a final note ...

The article also quotes a statement from Microsoft Philippines ...

" .... For all intents and purposes, this is a purely local matter which does not involve Microsoft Corporation, ... ”

I seriously beg to differ because if Microsoft loses this case, they will also lose the "moral pedestal" to demand companies to abide by intellectual property and copyright laws.

So the world will be watching, reading and listening in anticipation of what "Goliath" will do to "David" and if "David" can slay the giant or whether he will just give up in the end.

The Why Not Forums : Our local version of TED

They could probably do a better job with the website, nevertheless, I can only describe this forum as the local, proudly Filipino, version of TED.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's patterned after it. Their tag line "Think New Thoughts, Share Big Dreams, Do Brave Things" isn't that far away from "Ideas worth sharing" , if not a bolder, stronger more inspiring statement.

It's the 2nd time for this forum, the first having been held last Sept 27. Our Awesome Planet's Anton attended and wrote a review of that event. Apparently he wasn't all that thrilled with the line up of speakers. Nevertheless, I got wind of Why Not Forums 2.0 from his most recent blog entry to date and the line up seems much better this time around.