Crimson Crux

Academic Year 2004-2005: A newly resurrected Filipino student org captures two of five ACM Student Chapter Excellence Awards, representing Asia in the winners’ circle.

Academic Year 2005-2006: The org bags its third Chapter Excellence Award. Again, it is the sole Asian org in the quintet.

Academic Year 2006-2007: The UP ACM wins its fourth straight Chapter Excellence Award! Now, that’s consistency for you.

Here’s the email that the org’s current officers (I’m already an alumnus) received from ACM HQ (via the UP ACM blog):

I am pleased to inform you that the University of Philippines Student chapter has been chosen as a co-winner of the Outstanding Chapter Activities award. Congratulations!

The $500 check will be sent to the address you provided in your submission. Please let us know if we should send it somewhere else.

I noted above that you are a co-winner: we recognized two chapters in this category– the other winner is the University of Minho (Portugal).

Again, congratulations on your outstanding chapter program for the year. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Warm Regards,

Lauren Ryan
ACM Local Activities

You can read UP ACM’s winning essay here. (The previous years’ winning essays can be found on Corsarius.net.)

Congratulations, UP ACM! Mabuhay ang ‘Pinas at ang Unibersidad!

If you think that the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engines scour an already impressive expanse of the World Wide Web, think again.

In one of my favorite Communications of the ACM articles ever, Bin He, Mitesh Patel, Zhen Zhang, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang shed some light on the “Deep Web”, the huge chunk of the cyberspace that isn’t reached by search engines. This chunk consists of data in massive online databases, as opposed to static HTML pages that are easily crawled by the search engine spiders.

The CACM article (titled Accessing the Deep Web) cites figures from this whitepaper, which says, “The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web.” Whoa. We are missing out on a lot, then.

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Because I have this fanboy-ish devotion to Blizzard games, especially StarCraft (a fact not lost on my scant regular blog readers), I regularly drop by the Blizzard Fan Art gallery. When I saw this recently added work by Marek Okon, my fingers froze above the keyboard in stupefaction.

Right at that moment, I knew that I was staring at one of the best Blizzard fan art pieces of all time.

What can I say? This work just captures the “Queen Bitch of the Universe” so vividly. Add to that the fact that my eyes are getting tired of seeing WarCraft-themed art dominate the gallery; I can’t wait for StarCraft II to balance the field.

Enough words. I’ll let Marek’s art speak for itself.

This video game article over at SomethingAwful.com supplied me with a couple of laughs that I desperately need in these times of, uh, impenetrable darkness. Heh.

My favorites:

Valve - “Step on it, boys, we’ve got a deadline to meet!”

PopCap - “Here’s an original idea.”

GameSpot - “I’m giving the game a 9 because it was fun as hell. Innovation is great and all, but we play it up way too much.”

Sony - “It sure feels good to be on top of the console industry.”

I’ll be adding one:

Blizzard - “Let’s prioritize the StarCraft universe, who needs WoW’s billions, anyway?”

Read the rest here.

Less than two months ago, I started writing for Gadzooki and Blog Tutorials, which in turn came on the heels of my new Performancing job. Well, I’ve just accepted two new offers, this time for Blog Network Watch and Blogger Jobs.

Both recently-relaunched blogs are also under the Splashpress Media network, which means I now write for five SP blogs.

Blog Network Watch is a source of news and developments regarding the blogosphere’s biggest blog networks. On the other hand, if you’re looking to start or expand your blogging career, Blogger Jobs will definitely help you out.

Be sure to pay me a visit there!

The following is a sponsored review.

Some of us might already know what the acronym “CSV” stands for, at least, in the software and programming world. CSV stands for “comma separated values” or “comma separated variables” (and also “comma-separated list”), and CSV files are commonly used to transfer big amounts of tabular data between companies and/or applications that aren’t directly connected.

Back in my college (BS Computer Science) days, we used CSV quite a lot, especially when dealing with database projects. It’s a simple file format that saves a lot in terms of disk space, and it’s supported by a lot of spreadsheets and database systems.

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Last week, I requested a free catalog from AirplaneShop.com, a site I regularly visit, being a collector of miniature aircraft models. The site offers tons of great models, many of which are sold at discounted prices (50%!). Still, I haven’t made a single purchase.

I just might, very soon.

To my pleasant surprise, the free catalog arrived just this morning. A surprise, because I really didn’t expect them to send me a free magazine halfway around the world from New Jersey. Add to that the fact that the site footer reads “Copyright 2004″, which I took as a sign of stagnation or even company death.

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