DivisionByZero

wow! i never expected my post about jen3583 would get some attention from a few concerned netizens about true.com’s business practices. i do plan to post an update on that one (yup, i got another message from jen3583 ) and maybe get in touch with some of those who commented.

anyway, been slacking off lately. holiday season getting the better of me - made even worse by my current status as an unemployed individual.

so here it is, a list of things to do today:

1. post update: jen3583 and true.com
2. reply to sir tiger’s mail (blogroll and camiguinaction project)
3. reply to francis (cdo project)
4. reply to leesun’s query about blogsome
5. contact google why my post disappeared from their index

this is from neal cruz’s as i see it column in the inquirer:

A friend sees Sen. Ping Lacson banging his head against the wall.

"Bakit? [Why] What is he doing?" the friend asks Lacson’s aide who is standing by.

"He has been like that since FPJ died," replies the aide. "If he had accepted the offer to be FPJ’s running mate, he would be president now."

bowling for columbine

michael moore’s other award-winning documentary aside from the more popular fahrenheit/911. while the film is basically about gun violence in america, it takes the viewers on other related issues such as u.s. foreign policy, corporate greed, government-sponsored paranoia, and media-bias against african-americans and other minorities. this is a film every concerned american should watch.
rating: 4.5/5

twilight samurai

an award-winning film by yoji yamada about a low-ranking samurai named seibei iguchi who just lost his wife to consumption and must live a life of austerity with his two young daughters and old mother.

the development of the characters is brilliantly done you could almost feel their humanity. add to that the film’s great cinematography and accurate depiction of the period during the meiji restoration. this is a film, i’d recommend to anyone interested in japanese culture.
rating: 4.75/5

warriors of heaven and earth

set in the gobi desert during the tang dynasty, the story is about two warriors, lai xi and lt. li, who are on opposite sides of the law but are forced by circumstances to protect a caravan carrying a sacred relic from falling into the hands of invading turks and bandits.

i won’t call this film brilliant or anything - there were some aspects of the plot i think they missed out on. (maybe i was expecting spectacular kung-fu scenes instead of swordfights and horseriding or perhaps just more screen-time for vicki zhao ).
rating: 3/5

i’ve recently gotten into a flamewar with some jerk off the tech today forum in pinoyexchange.

someone was asking if it were possibly to get a user’s information just by tracing his ip address.

my answer was that generally, you can’t. even if you have access to the log files of all the servers the user passed through, establishing his identity is a different thing. what if the ip traces to a prepaid dial-up? or an internet café? or a university lab?

then, comes this jerk, another poster, who tells me that i’m wrong and then goes on to throw all sorts of seemingly ridiculous arguments and sarcastic remarks despite my effort to keep the discussion as reasonable as possible. the asshole even went to the extent of getting personal with me, mocking my previous job in an isp and even my username.

it’s not the first time i’ve been in a flame war. i’ve been in those situation a few times already and all of them have been ugly (some of them with close friends).

probably the reason i always seem to be getting into online fistfights is that one of my great weaknesses is that i can become quite combative whenever my ideas are being contradicted (especially from people who don’t even know what they’re talking about). i have that scientist mentality in me and scientists would die for their ideas. not to mention the fact i can keep a high degree of pride.

krakista, a long-time pex user and online acquaintance, once sent me a private message during one heated argument with another pex user a few years back, that engaging in online arguments are pointless, a waste of time, and generally does not resolve anything. too bad i had to have a few ugly ones before i’m finally realizing how right he was.

so the next time some troll tells you that your favorite text editor, music, political party, operating system, programming language, or even your face sucks, don’t hit the reply button immediately. he’s probably some attention-deficient jerk who’s got nothing better to do with his time. cool off. do something else. sleep it off. you’ll be feeling differently the next day. you know you’re right anyway. and even if you’re not - so what? nobody’s perfect. there’s no need to apologize.

don’t give a troll what he wants. ignoring him is the best revenge.

whew! finally done copying posts from blogspot to blogsome/wordpress. took me what seemed like two hours for 20 posts. trust me, it’s not as easy as copying-and-pasting (and setting the timestamp to an earlier date).

after about a few weeks running a private blog at blogspot (mainly for testing purposes), i’ve finally decided to use blogsome’s service instead. i’ve only been with blogsome for a few days but i like what i’ve seen so far. i’d greatly recommend it to anyone looking for a blogging host.

wordpress (which powers blogsome) is way more sophisticated than blogger - with features like categories, plugins, pages, image uploads, themes, among others. nothing still beats blogger’s wysiwyg editor though but with wordpress being open-source, i think it’ll definitely catch up.

what i’d probably be doing the next few days is to migrate the old posts from blogspot into blogsome manually (if anyone can suggest a better a way to do it, please do). so, think of this post as a sort of milestone - posts dated earlier are from my older blog at blogspot (and sni, my former company) while posts after this, i already wrote using blogsome’s service.

a "new fashion for thinking" about philippine culture by rome jorge (published online in the philweavers network.)

an excerpt:

"We are a young country. We are still under construction. And that makes this a very exciting time for artists, designers, writers and anyone with a stake in our culture. And that means all of us. We get to help build Pinoy culture from the ground up. We don’t just rediscover traditions; we start them. We get to write our name on the concrete while it’s still wet. Now is the time to be trailblazers, innovators and firsts. It is a golden opportunity and an inescapable responsibility. What we do as artists, writers and audiences either corrodes or galvanizes our culture."

from one of the comments in the slashdot article below:

solarrhino writes…

1) The first guy to think “I shouldn’t have to rewire, I should be able to write instructions that rewire it for me” - i.e., the assembler moment

2) The first guy to realize “I’m not just re-wiring this, I’m describing an procedure for it to use” - the FORTRAN moment

3) The first guy to ask “Why can’t I used the same procedure from different places in my code” - the subroutine moment

4) The first guy to say “I should be able to use the subroutine in the program it already knows” - the library moment

5) The first guy to ask “Why do I have to be the one writing down the results?” - the printer moment

6) The first guy to realize “This isn’t just a calculator, it’s also a controller!” - the embedded moment

7) The first guy to realize “This isn’t just a calculator, it’s also a storage system!” - the database moment

8) The first guy to realize “This isn’t just a calculator, it’s also a communication system!” - the network moment

9) The first guy to realize “I’m not just submitting instructions for it to process - it’s submiting instructions back for me to process!” - the interactive moment

10) The first guy to think “Why can’t it do something else while its waiting?” - the multitasking moment

11) The first guy to think “Why can’t it show me more context while I work?” - the full-screen moment

And finally…

12) The first guy to think “Man, why can’t this thing show me some chicks?” - the porn moment

from a post in slashdot.org:

the twenty top software people in the world

"believe in the resolute urgency of now…"
- the smashing pumpkins