Crimson Crux

For the past months — no, a year! — I’ve spent more time on my offline writing career (UST and LIRA literary workshops) than the online one (blogs and web projects). Truth to be told, I think my heyday of putting up blogs and writing posts here and there is drawing to a close (or has done so already). I’m now settling into a comfort zone in the offline writing world, slowly but surely.

Still, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be turning my back on blogs. I still love blogging. It’s just the time that is scarce, not affection.

And time for blogging is what I will be setting aside on September 6, 2008, when the first WordCamp in Southeast Asia will be hitting town. From the event’s About page:

WordCamp is the premier event for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is arguably the #1 blogging platform in the world today…One of the objectives of WordCamp Philippines is to encourage more developers to use and deploy WordPress, not only as a blogging engine but also as a full-featured content management system for Web sites.

I’m one of those users who fully appreciate WordPress’ power, having deployed it on a plethora of sites, from my main website to the family portal, from a personal blog to a literary magazine. I’ll attend WordCamp Philippines not only to learn more WP stuff, but also to show support to a platform that just keeps on giving.

(more…)

I got this news blast from the UP ACM e-group:

UP ACM, UP CURSOR and UnPLUG
invite you to attend

K.I.S.S.S 2008
Knowledge, Information, and Skills Sharing Sessions

on JUNE 21 and JUNE 28 at the UP Alumni Engineers Centennial Hall (commonly known as UP Eng’g Lib 2 and Computer Science Department)

June 21
9-12 pm - GIMP
1-4 pm - Macromedia Flash

June 28
9-12pm - PHP with MySQL
1-4pm - HTML/CSS

This is a FREE tutorial.

Registration starts at 8:30 am and 12:30 pm

You can register at our KISSS webpage.

See You There!

On a side note, it feels good that the student org I helped resurrect a few years ago (UP ACM) is very much alive and kicking today. Keep it up, guys.

I was supposed to post this great news a few days ago, but a rash of offline events (LIRA, komiks, etc.) kept me from blogging. I got this from the UP CS Network mailing list (edited for clarity):

The First Philippine National Programming Competition (ACM-ICPC Philippines 2007) was held last October 20 at De La Salle Canlubang. Fifty teams from 24 different schools in the Philippines joined the contest, and we are proud to announce that out of the 50, 3 teams from UP Diliman, specifically from the Department of Computer Science, got into the Top 10! Well, that’s not all because one of our teams happened to be the ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 CHAMPION!

Congratulations to

Marte Raphael Soliza
Ralph Rainier Pineda
Reginald Eli Deinla
ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 CHAMPION

Ralph Justin Arce
Vanessa Rose Castro
James Wyson
ACM-ICPC PHILIPPINES 2007 FIFTH PLACER

John Kristofferson Sanchez
Wigi Vei Oliveros
Pio Ryan Lumongsod
ACM-ICPC 2007 NINTH PLACER

and, last but not the least, the Champion Coach who helped the UPD teams make it this far,

Sir Eric Tambasacan
UP DILIMAN TEAM COACH

Again, Congratulations!!!

Many thanks to Diwa del Mundo for pointing me toward Dr. Rafael Saldaña’s blog post on the official results of the prestigious competition. The top 10 teams and their schools:

1. University of the Philippines Diliman - “U.P Morons”
2. Ateneo de Manila University - “cxxC”
3. University of the Philippines Los Baños - “Heaven”
4. Ateneo de Manila University - “Team Automata”
5. University of the Philippines Diliman - “Team 43″
6. De La Salle University Manila - “DLSU-2″
7. Ateneo de Manila University - “Excessive Output”
8. De La Salle University Manila - “DLSU-1″
9. University of the Philippines Diliman - “Team 45″
10. Ateneo de Manila University - “eTeam”

You can check out Dr. Saldaña’s blog archives for the complete rankings and the programming problems given to the contestants.

Congrats to the aforementioned students for doing UP Diliman proud — this is a worthy advance gift for the school’s upcoming Centennial, and a great follow-up to UP ACM’s 4th international award last July and the recent Yahoo! Philippines Hack Day.

Mabuhay ang Unibersidad!


P.S. Do greet my dearest Ia Lucero a very happy birthday!

To quote the Inquirer article:

Five computer science students from the University of the Philippines Diliman showed their programming skills to executives of Internet giant Yahoo! in the first Philippines Hack Day contest.

Ralph Justin Arce and Wigi Vei Oliveros won the gold medal for their project called “YM Status Logger,” which tracks the Yahoo! Messenger user’s status.

Meanwhile, Abigail Yacat won silver for her “YM Conversation Distributor” project, which describes how a user can distribute private conversation to other users.

Bronze medalists were Vanessa Rose Castro and James Wyson who developed the “YM Thesis Mate,” helping thesis makers edit their documents collaboratively using YM.

All three winning projects used application programming interfaces (API) from Yahoo!

At least four of the students were my orgmates in UP ACM. Congratulations, guys!

Also, check out a video of the 1st Philippine Yahoo! Hack Day.

(Via Ia’s email.)

I was supposed to write this post last Sunday, but a bout of asthma (now running at five days) deprived me of the chance to do so. The Philippine Blog Awards Night wrapped up an exhausting week for me, and here’s a brief recap of the event.

Ia and I left the blog awards pretty much satisfied with the results (but not with the programme — more on that later). The complete list of winners can be found at the 2007 PBA site, but here I’m giving extra recognition to three of my blogger friends who bagged the big prizes:

• Best Socio-Political Blog: Dean Jorge Bocobo’s Philippine Commentary
• Best Blog Design: Jorge Cosgayon’s Far from Neutral Notions
• PhotoBlog of the Year: Eric Isaac’s Señor Enrique: Wish You Were Here

Ia didn’t win the Best Tech Blog plum, but she took home something…big. Really big, as in worth thousands upon thousands of pesos. Read her latest blog entry to know more. Hint: it’s from the Adobe User Group Philippines.

Now, some thoughts on how the event was held:

(more…)

I’ll be at the Philippine Blog Awards Night tomorrow to support and accompany Ia, whose Stellify.net is a finalist in the technology category. It came as quite a surprise for both of us, as she’d be the first one to tell you that Stellify wasn’t meant to be a tech blog. You can say that we’re not expecting Stellify to win the best tech blog award, especially since it’s going up against established tech bloggers.

Both of us have a “you win, I also win” mentality, and I’m happy that her efforts with Stellify (which is less than seven months old) have already been recognized. This kind of nullifies my disappointment at not winning a recently-concluded prestigious Tagalog poetry contest (too bad I couldn’t follow up my being published on the newspaper — that would’ve been a great birthday treat this coming May!).

Aside from Ia, a number of my blogosphere friends got the nods of the judges, namely Eric (aka Senor Enrique), Jorge Cosgayon, Gibbs Cadiz, and Dean Jorge Bocobo. I’m hoping these guys will win their respective categories, especially sir Eric — I was the one who nominated his photo blog, hehe.

Wish Ia and my friends the best of luck!

Calling all UP DCS graduates! The Department of Computer Science of the University of the Philippines Diliman will be holding its first-ever Alumni Homecoming. The event will be held on February 24, 2007 at the College of Engineering Library and Computer Science Building.

Here’s the letter from the Department’s revered figure and current College Secretary, Prof. Evangel Quiwa:

(more…)

This just in (courtesy of an email message): the Philippine team for the Software Freedom Day 2006, through the University of the Philippines Linux Users’ Group (UnPLUG) has won in the 2006 Software Freedom Day competition.

UnPLUG won the Best Plan for FOSS deployment project on new server for community benefit, and will receive a high performance IBM server. The full list of winners can be found on the SFD website.

Congratulations to UnPLUG and the University! Modesty aside, I’m honored to have been an officer of the organization, even for just a few months. Other members of Team SFD Philippines ‘06 include the Philippine Linux Users’ Group, UP ACM, the UPD Department of Computer Science, Bluepoint, and Alpha Phi Omega.

In my last entry, I talked about the Php 130,000 Philippine SEO Contest for the keyword Isulong SEOPH. Guess what? We placed fifth! Not worth much in monetary rewards, but still quite an achievement considering there were more than a hundred entries (or so I heard).

Congratulations to all the winners! A recap of the Isulong SEOPH Awarding Night can be found at the blog of my teammate J Angelo. (Ia Lucero, one-time guestwriter here, completes the, uh, stellar cast.)

(more…)

The week-long celebration of the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science’s 25th anniversary drew to a close this day with the CS Symposium.

Computer science students from UP Diliman and other universities presented their research output and shared them with the CS community and industry leaders in the Computer Science Undergraduate Research Symposium, the last event of the week (nicknamed “Silver Flame“).

I can now let out a brief, very brief sigh of relief. Sigh. (There you go.) Yesterday, we successfully presented and defended our thesis, HAMSTER (the other half of the project MOVISS). I mentioned HAMSTER a few months past, branded as S^infinity.

The good news is that a certain company has contacted us and shown interest in the project. Their representatives seem satisfied, impressed even, with the two groups’ presentations. Well, I think we were just fortunate to have handled well the questions that the panelists threw at us. Now, only the final demo with our adviser looms in the horizon! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Postscript. Entries on the CS Week:

Introduction and Original Sked
Revised CS Week Sked
Silver Flame Sets UP Ablaze
UP ACM Programming Contest
UP Parser Editorial Exam