Crimson Crux

Got this from the UP ACM mailing list:

The Ubuntu Philippines Local Community Team (Ubuntu-PH), in cooperation with the University of the Philippines Department of Computer Science and Engineering, invite you to a day of sharing experiences, learning, and meeting fellow enthusiasts involved in the hottest GNU/Linux distribution that hit mainstream computing - Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Love Day Manila 2008 is a grassroots effort to spread the spirit of Ubuntu. On August 23, 2008, learn and interact with fellow Ubuntu enthusiasts on how you use Ubuntu in your everyday computing needs. (more…)

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.

Please support my friend Noel’s research study:

Good day!

I’m an undergraduate student from the UP School of Library and Information Studies who is presently working on a study entitled TagBux, a tool to determine the effectiveness and relevance of tags on a library’s collection. The library collection that was chosen for this study is the Philippine Science High School (PSHS) Diliman Library. Through this study, library users will be able to discover the popular topics or the current trends in a library’s collection through the frequencies of tags.

Website: http://nicole.feria.name:8080/tagbux/feedback.jsp

What is TagBux ?

TagBux is a Web 2.0 application developed through Open Source technologies (Java EE and Wordpress) and patterned from social networking applications such as Shelfari. It lets you use tags to assign labels to books and was designed to test the accuracy of tagging as compared to the subject headings assigned to books. The library collection that was chosen for this study is the Philippine Science High School (PSHS) Diliman Library. Through this study, library users will be able to discover the popular topics or genres in a library’s collection through the frequencies of tags.

(more…)

Michael of the distinguished Basapa.com (and its forerunner, Basang Panaginip) has published the 2007 edition of the Top Pinoy Probloggers.

Well, Michael sprang a surprise for me through email — I’m listed as one of the country’s top probloggers for this year. Specifically, I’m under the “Bubbling Under” category (which occupies the last eight spots).

Never mind the low ad earnings — I’ll unabashedly take this recognition anyday. Thanks, Michael!

Postscript. This development jarred me into the realization that my list of blogging projects (plus the sites I write for, edit, and manage) hasn’t been updated in quite a while. Get the souped up list today at Corsarify.

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.)

Great news (for the Pinoy blogosphere and me as well — go figure). A Filipina has placed Runner-up in the recently concluded Sandbox Designs Competition!

She’s no other than Sophia Lucero, whose Tiffany Blue got the nod of the judges. Congrats, Ia; I hope this provides you with an impetus to create more free blog designs.

Here’s the list of winners, culled from a talented field of 46 entries. Kudos to all of ‘em — great blog designs, guys. Here are my three favorites (aside from Tiffany Blue, of course):

• Blue Berry by Dean Robinson — gotta love the header
• Walk in the Shadows by Adam Freetly — sleek
• Essay by Ian Stewart — great for a writer’s blog

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!

“There is no greater innovation that matters more than that which saves lives.”

Nothing really profound; I was just pleasantly surprised to see a Pinoy’s quote deliver the conclusion to the article Open Source Software for Disaster Management written by Currion, de Silva, and Van de Walle for the Communications of the ACM March 2007 issue. The final line in its entirety:

Only in this way will FOSS applications such as Sahana grow and mature to fulfill the real needs of humanitarian assistance, and live up to the expectations that Avelino J. Cruz Jr., Secretary of National Defense in the Philippines, expressed when discussing the deployment of Sahana in response to the Leyte landslide disaster in early 2006: “There is no greater innovation that matters more than that which saves lives.”

Sahana is “a free and open source disaster management information system developed in Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami”. It was deployed by the Philippine government, with the support of the IBM country team, in response to the 2006 mudslides.