aggregated thinking

Sure, my bosses do this all the time…in airports, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops. The mere act of “connecting” to an unsecured wireless network doubles as a necessity and as a leaching of sorts. Gotta love wireless. :)

Sure, my bosses do this all the time…in airports, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops. The mere act of “connecting” to an unsecured wireless network doubles as a necessity and as a leaching of sorts. Gotta love wireless. :)

I love thinking. They say thinking burns as many calories as when you're having sex...so you may liken thinking to sex. Sounds good, eh? But be warned. Although you can easily fake either one, you don't lose as many calories as doing it for real! This isn't a sex column, so it's best I get straight to the point and present my thoughts on what aggregated thinking is (and what constitutes faking it). Wiktionary defines aggregation as an act of bringing together, or collecting into a mass or sum. We programmers are more familiar with aggregation as a slight modification of composition (yeah, we're no fun). Aggregation differs from ordinary composition in that it does not imply ownership. For example, an older model of a car engine will have a carburetor (yeah, it's spelled that way). Take away the engine and the carburetor will lose its usability. That's composition. Then there's a pond with a duck swimming about. Take away the pond and the duck ...

Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 broadcast back in April 1988 is being streamed today over XM Radio. Def Leppard’s Hysteria is currently playing. Measures and measures of this classic hit flood my ears and I can’t help but smile. There must have been thousands of Icehouse, Def Leppard, and Nelson (to name a few) playbacks since I got them cassette and 8-track tapes. I still think that the 1980’s was the best decade to grow in. All those crazy get-ups that now look fugly, the hair, and man, the dance moves! I did all those, and proudly at that. You wouldn’t blame me though, because like anyone who’s an 80’s kid, I’m peculiar. :)

Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 broadcast back in April 1988 is being streamed today over XM Radio. Def Leppard’s Hysteria is currently playing. Measures and measures of this classic hit flood my ears and I can’t help but smile. There must have been thousands of Icehouse, Def Leppard, and Nelson (to name a few) playbacks since I got them cassette and 8-track tapes. I still think that the 1980’s was the best decade to grow in. All those crazy get-ups that now look fugly, the hair, and man, the dance moves! I did all those, and proudly at that. You wouldn’t blame me though, because like anyone who’s an 80’s kid, I’m peculiar. :)

You know you’re a kid of the 80’s in the Philippines if: 1.) You have scars on your knees and elbows 2.) You owned a bike 3.) You had a barkada around your neighborhood (all of you had bikes) 4.) You loved climbing on your house’s roof (and your neighbor’s roof as well) 5.) You went inside an abandoned house in your neighborhood just to see what it looks like inside 6.) You ate all the aratilis in your neighborhood 7.) You plucked all the Gumamelas in the area for soap bubbles 8.) Your parents forced you to take afternoon siestas with the threat that you will not be allowed to play outside. 9.) You are never found in your house in the afternoon. You are often found playing in the street with your neighborhood friends. 10.) You loved exploring vacant lots for hidden knick-knacks 11.) You just can’t resist jumping in a sand pile 12.) You know all the street games (Patintero, Agawan-base, Langit-lupa,etc.) 13.) You owned a family computer 14.) Your hand-to-eye coordination is terrific due...

There's a pretty slick Windows application that will allow you to post directly to your Blogger Beta account. The Firefox extension  Deepest Sender , which allows posting to LJ, Blogger, and Wordpress, doesn't work with Blogger Beta yet, so here's a workaround that you can do meantime. I prefer FOSS applications that run natively on GNU/Linux, but sometimes, you really need to use a platform where you are most productive. Writing stuff from anywhere will mean doing this from my Windows-run notebook. Not so much an issue, I hope.

I wrote a memo the other day and could not help but emphasize on the importance of using good ol' wit and common sense, when on the internet. I probably had the gall to write these since I'm recklessly doing stuff on Ubuntu and couldn't care less if an intrusion breaks something. LOL. Windoze is like walking on glass. Some of the guidelines I wrote: 4. Browse and click responsibly. Do not be lured by pop-up ads or participate in online surveys or contests. 5. Stop forwarding chain mail. Although these mails may start as harmless simple email messages with valid content, you do not know where it has been! Think clean, and say to yourself: "This chain mail stops with me." and promptly delete it. 6. Keep you Windows firewall or any other firewall software up! It is there to protect you and not deprive you of internet activity.

This is how the rear of the NetBay rack in my previous company looks like now. I headed back to CDO for Halloween vacation and was able to drop by the office to pick up some of my personal stuff. They've slapped in a Cisco router (where the yellow fibre cable hooks up to) and another L3 switch. The old firewall appliance is still there, reliable as ever. Cabling got more structured as well. Now that's what I'm talking about! It's crazy, but when you've got a baby that you built for years and had to leave one time or another, you get somewhat near it and it's the first thing you look for! So I'm proud of starting this and making things happen, and I'm proud of the team that continued to make things happen. Hats off to Ian, Gayang, Sherlabs, and Derf. You're all the best! Make them drool! :)

Okay, it has been around for quite some time, and I remember writing an article about this in my older tech blog. I have a month to finish a pre-proposal on something GIS-related, so I'm seeing how this can be made possible with a renewed fascination with Google Maps. I'm currently catching up on readings for my thesis pre-proposal. Some projects are quite interesting, notably those that do geographic encoding, location tracing via IP, or widget development, using Google Maps technology. How would you like Google Maps to work for you? You can identify the need, depending on what industry you're in, and how you envision tracking applications as used in your locality. This guy thought of plotting his GPS-generated hike/bike trails onto Google Maps. He also made mention of parcel tracking (UPS) and driving directions, both utilizing the lat/lon coordinate system of Google Maps. Another implementation that I've seen in action is plotting website visitors on Google Maps, j...

MindMap

I absolutely love Gaim, but the message to group feature isn't readily available, even with gaim2-beta3, and this doesn't work for me especially that I sometimes need to broadcast messages to team members over IM. Quick googling led me to Frank Spychalski's very good article , which covers the essentials of configuring Google Talk on Kopete. For Ubuntu users, if you don't have Kopete yet, you will need an internet connection to get the necessary packages. $ sudo apt-get install -y kopete qca-tls The qca-tls package will ensure that you'll be able to connect using the default encryption protocol. After these packages install, start Kopete, and create a new Jabber account if you don't have it yet. On the first tab, set up your Jabber ID to use your Gmail address: Jabber Id: <yourid>@gmail.com On the "Connection" tab, use talk.google.com as your server and tick all the boxes like so: [x] Use protocol encryption (SSL) [x] Allow plain-text passwor...

Finally had a little time in my hands, ergo some updates. One week down. Queen city of the South. Torrential rains. I couldn't be any more bushed than I currently am right now. Moving residence is definitely top in my list for most strenuous activities one can go through. It's very prolonged; and the chores you thought you'd never do again, like wiring the aircon (Aside: among other things, and did I just forget about the aircon frame that we hacked??) , well...you end up doing them anyway. It's by God's grace that I haven't felt the flu creeping in yet. Maybe it'll never get the chance to. Special thanks go to my in-laws, who went with us and carried some of our hand-carried items, to Papa Jun, who's always ready to pick us up from the port whenever we're in the area, (Aside: guess what, we're settling down here, but I still hope he'd keep doing this until I get a car to do this myself...soon.) and to my parents and brother, who lent us a f...

Originally posted in my "other" blog. By the end of the month, I will be moving to the Queen City of the South, with my family in tow. I’m just glad that those guys at the new company were willing to wait for me. I was sure they understood the situation; I have established base in CDO and am currently employed. I was the one who was getting uprooted, so it was just proper that they agreed to waiting. Yes, I’ve tendered my resignation, and although a couple of times last week when I felt like I kicking myself in the ass, (I was starting to feel like some sort of sacrificial lamb), I remember the reasons _why_ my wife and I decided to take the plunge. As a direct result of my sudden resignation, manpower and work load concerns that we’ve been raising for years are finally being addressed. I just feel like the fall guy here, because I _know_ that if this pushes through, remuneration for my colleagues is ensured, on the basis of supervisory work load, and I can’t have any of it....

Over the Holy Week, two of our home computer's drives crashed, probably due to extensive user download, software installs, and malware. I had to do work on the laptop for a while, and since everyone in the house was itching for Internet access, I brought in a small IDE drive (roughly around 9Gb) that was mounted as slave on my office computer and popped that in the home computer. I had more than enough reasons to put Ubuntu back in there, and nobody would be complaining! Initially, I did a Breezy install and got all the needed packages up to-date. I wanted more so I changed all "breezy" references to "dapper" in /etc/apt/sources.list , and did sudo apt-get update , and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade . IIRC , a total of 940+ packages had to be updated over an estimated 4 and a half hours. I left the computer running overnight, woke up at around 2 am and finished the installs and configurations. By morning, my wife, daughter, and sister-in-law, were able to use the com...

I had the opportunity to spend a few days vacationing in Manila. My mom-in-law was attending a national conference for pediatricians, and was given travel sponsorships for the entire family. I jumped at the chance to visit my aging Lola because she had not seen her great granddaughter, as the case was with all of my QC -based relatives. Our itinerary was real tight, but I was happy anyway since we went through so many unexpected, yet pleasant surprises en route to Manila until we got back here.

It's so dissapointing to see CSS that you really like "unrenderable" in IE. All I can say is get Firefox now!

Met up with hardwyrd last night for preliminary competition planning. Also present were some of the pillars of GNU/Linux and FOSS in Northern Mindanao: Mr. Rem Taga of MPSC, Mr. Botp Peña of DMPC, and Mr. Vidor Balbon of Philcom. I hope to keep up with these guys considering that my GNU/Linux experience is so diversified and I'd have to polish skills on specific services, some of which I've not even bothered tinkering with. Can you say Dovecot or Cyrus?

I heard Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” about three times the entire day, and can’t help but snort and stifle a laughing bout each time. Who doesn’t associate that song with Latrell Spencer (Terry Crews) in the movie White Chicks? LOL!

This has been quite overdue, as I have been wanting to disable ntpupdate since the Hoary release. What is ntpupdate anyway? It's the program that synchronizes your system time to an ntp server. NTP is a protocol for synchronising the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. Since Ubuntu defaults to an ntp server somewhere in the www, and that it will attempt to sync on boot, it causes your machine to go through a much much longer startup process if an internet connection is not available at boot time. As I am lugging my lappy around a lot and I have not much of a need for the program, I knew I had to take it out and save me minutes of boot time. Ealden taught me how to remove ntpupdate , and I suppose we can change the arguments to remove other programs as well. $ sudo update-rc.d -f ntpdate remove update-rc.d will remove any system startup links for /etc/init.d/ntpdate , or any instances of such in the different run levels. Usage is as ...

My wife just got her account and she found it awesome; as she was able to catch up on old friends. A highschool buddy paid us a visit today and she too told me to get a Friendster account and you know, start catching up as well (she'd rather that I find out about my batch's whereabouts by myself than get bugged by me). So if you're a buddy of mine, add me to your 300+ node network of friends, jon dot doblados at gmail dot com.

The coming finals in my e-commerce class got me browsing through piles of readings and notes and I realized that I have not fully appreciated e-commerce as I should have. A techie will know what digital signatures, catalogs, EDI's, EFT's, shopping carts, or SSL are, as applied to buying and selling online; but graduate school won't even let you wallow in those. Instead, one gets tasked to relate e-commerce with business processes, and usually, look for solutions to support business processes that e-commerce systems can't support. TODO: a) Finish schematic diagram of a typical e-commerce (server/merchant client/customer setup), b) complete customizations on osCommerce, c) harden authentication module, d) re-read security framework paper

Thanks to Miko for the heads up. Check out this quite nice extension to Firefox, which will allow you to do updates without having to log in to your _numerous_ blogs.