Crimson Crux

The University of the Philippines, as the eternal vanguard of Philippine nationalism, poses an alternative to the Western toga and cap as the graduation attire of choice for Philippine schools. The sablay — first used at UP Diliman in 1990 — is a truly unique, truly UP, and truly Filipino academic costume.

According to a slip of paper I got when I bought my own sablay (yes, yours truly has just graduated!):

The word Sablay has two meanings: one, a loose piece of clothing, worn by a person, that is simple yet elegant and joined in front by an ornament, and two, the draping object or fabric on the shoulder.

The Sablay gets its inspiration from the muslim malong but incorporates various traditional elements found in other Philippine cultures. Running through the Sablay are geometric motifs of indigenous Philippine tribes.

The characters woven into or printed on the sablay are in Alibata, the ancient Philippine alphabet, and stand for the initials of UP. Upon graduation, the sablay is transferred from the right to the left shoulder — the consummation of a UP student’s college life.

Aside from being Pinoy to the core, the sablay has practical advantages over the toga. Dr. Victor Paz, Director of UP’s Archaeological Studies Program, once mentioned in his Arkiyoloji 1 class that the sablay is more suited for the tropical climate, compared with the toga which was born in colder lands. This might seem like a minor issue, until you get to know that there have been cases of UPians fainting in the middle of academic ceremonies due to the choking heat of the toga.

For another article on the sablay, you can visit the UPD Information Office’s Archives.

Ranjit Wilson’s Undelete My Blog Project might just be the right tool for people who deleted their blogs either by accident or in a fleeting moment of insanity (stupidity?). The site hasn’t been updated for the past two months, but there are still useful bits of information in the old posts, along with Wilson’s blog undelete utility.

Wilson’s site has also been featured in TWoTBlog. A high profile blog-deletion occurred last month when Google erased its official blog by accident.

…the Tactical Language Training Program, which is used by the US Military to train its soldiers in understanding international nonverbal language, i.e. body english.

According to the article at Wired News:

The player is asked to interact with other characters using speech and gestures, while a speech-recognition system records and evaluates the responses. Accurate responses allow the soldier to build a rapport with other characters and advance to the next level.

A civilian version might be possibly released, which might make the game the answer to Grand Theft Auto’s debauchery (snicker snicker).

Congratulations to the faculty and student body of UP Diliman’s Department of Computer Science for being the College of Engineering’s Best Department for AY 2005-06!

Modesty aside, we believed right from the start of the year that our batch can do it. One year of balancing acads with extracurricular stuff paid off, bigtime.

Technology Review has completed its ten-part special on the 10 Emerging Technologies for this year. IT buffs will certainly find the Universal Authentication and Cognitive Radio technologies to be greatly interesting. The former deals with a unified, privacy-protecting online ID system, while the latter can be used to avoid future wireless traffic jams.

You can find all the articles at the special section of Technology Review.

After almost a year in Blogspot, Crimson Crux is now proudly powered by Wordpress. Forget the lengthy URL of old; you can now access this blog through ccrux.corsarius.net.

I never had big problems with the Blogspot hosting, but three things helped me decide to make the switch:

1. Wordpress’ oft-mentioned flexibility and extensibility
2. My experience with my first WP blog, which I put up for my CW 198 class
3. Wordpress’ Import functionality

Speaking of the last item, you can import posts (and sometimes comments) from an RSS feed, a Blogger account, a LiveJournal, and Dotclear, Textpattern, and MovableType blogs. As expected, there were many formatting errors with the imported posts, but none that you can’t easily fix. (Unfortunately, Wordpress doesn’t seem to import the img title tags, so you have to retype the code for them.)