Crimson Crux

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.

For a few months after I bought my iPod Nano, I couldn’t find the right skins for it. As late as December 14 of last year, there weren’t skins and cases for the second generation of iPod Nanos, at least in the Philippines. (Because of their slight physical differences with the first generation, the new Nanos don’t fit that well with old cases.)

Chances are I didn’t do enough searching, but I did burn my sneakers’ soles scouring SM North Edsa, SM Megamall (and a tech fair held within), and Powerplant Mall. So I was mightily pleased when I dropped by the Apple Computer Center at SM North Edsa last week and, lo and behold — they finally had iPod Nano 2nd gen silicone skins.

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Just a few hours ago, Manny Pacquiao unleashed what I believe to have been his finest form in dealing Mexican boxing hero Erik Morales the worst drubbing of his storied career.

The Pacman scored three knockdowns, the first of which came in the second round and followed by a vicious duo in the third, en route to a third round stoppage of the fight at the 2:57 mark.

Here are some pics of the three knockdowns (all courtesy of ABS-CBN/Solar Sports):

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The Philippines’ own Ronato “Ronnie” Alcano defeated Germany’s Ralf Souquet, 17 racks to 11, to win this year’s World Pool Championship held in Manila, Philippines.

Alcano displayed superb and dominating cue artistry that drew exuberant reactions from the hometown crowd and impressed the match commentators. One foreign commentator remarked that if they were to make a highlight reel of Ronnie’s beautiful shots, it’d be an hour long.

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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.

From yesterday’s INQ7.net Infotech article:

The University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City, is getting a 500 million pesos budget to set up the country’s version of “Silicon Valley,” a ranking House leader said Monday.

Finally, the Philippines’ premier state university gets what it deserves.

Villafuerte said the Diliman hub would serve as the national center for research and development in the natural and applied sciences, and mathematics.

Let’s see what role the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science shall play should this Diliman Silicon Valley lift off in the (hopefully near) future.

Remember UP ACM, the Filipino student organization who made the news last year after winning two of the five ACM International Student Chapter Excellence Awards? Well, I’ve got some news for you.

UP ACM has done it again!

The organization has won the 2005-2006 Excellence Award for Outstanding Community Service, the same category it won last year. (more…)