Crimson Crux

I’ve just opened Hardwar Crux, a mini fansite for the 1998 PC space simulation game, Hardwar. Chances are you haven’t heard of this game, and that’s because in my opinion Hardwar is one of the most unheralded game titles in history. But make no mistake about it — it’s one of the best.

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Just weeks after the first Philippine SEO contest drew to a close, another one has popped up, giving SEO junkies and rookies alike a new shot at winning some dough (and gaining invaluable experience). This time, the keywords to die for are ituloy angsulong.

The Go-Ogle! trio — me, Ia, J Angelo — has decided to join in the fun. Please visit and support our Ituloy AngSulong entry; link exchanges are welcome!

Kudos to our resident webmaster (webmistress?) for the great design of our entry. By the way, I’ll be posting some of my personal SEO thoughts on the Corsarius.net Ituloy AngSulong page, so if you have the time, do drop by.

The resurrection of my main site has been a long time coming. Presenting Version 2.0 of Corsarius.net!

Finally, my growing collection of blogs and subdomains now has a central site. My first static main site came in the form of kimpo.fil.ph, which sadly went down when the host, Fil.ph, suddenly went off the air. Now, it’s back with a vengeance (hm, quite cliche!).

If you have the time, feel free to browse through Corsarius.net’s pages — don’t forget to leave your message in the guestbook! (Hey, guestbooks are not dead. Hehe.)

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.)

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Subtitled: Blogging in the Dark

Typhoon Milenyo has just rampaged through Metro Manila, leaving our little neighborhood without power. Here’s to brownout blogging and all. I’ve got to love the scant 3-hour battery life of my Corsarify.

Anyway, we’re now down to the last three days of the Php130,000 Philippine SEO Contest. My team’s entry, Go-Ogle! Isulong SEOPH, is presently ranked 7th in the first Google search engine result page (SERP) for the keyword Isulong SEOPH. We’re hoping to at least maintain our position until September 30, the SEO competition’s end. Just a few hours ago we were at 5th place, and a month ago we were Top 1 in Google (can you believe it?).

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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

Presenting two of our “babies” who ate up our time for the past month:

Qualifier, Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO) Challenge
Finalist, UP Diliman College of Engineering Marketing Competition

S^infinity is a commercial mobile phone service being developed in UP Diliman. Specifics are under wraps…for now. Behind the concept of S^infinity is Team Rijndael (pronounced “Rhine-doll”, after a Belgian-born cryptographic algorithm).

Team Rijndael made it to the September 9 Finals Night of the UPD Engineering Marketing Congress, an event dominated by Industrial Engineering majors. I tell you, it is hard to convince a geriatric judge how wonderful an intangible product (i.e. technological service) is when your opponents are marketing soaps, gasoline, and tea. Ia Lucero and I presented S^infinity, in addition to writing the 18-page marketing plan.

But still, Team Rijndael disproved the theory that Computer Science majors are tongue-tied geeks who know how to program their software but not to market them. (We were the only Computer Science team in a field of seven finalists.) As consolation, we bagged the Best Exhibit award.

As mentioned, S^infinity is a commercial service; “brand name” would be an appropriate description. It runs on top of HAMSTER, which is the Team’s thesis itself.

FYI, Ia designed both the S^infinity and HAMSTER logos. Presently, Team Rijndael is in the thick of things at the PESO Challenge, a technology and innovation business plan competition modeled after the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. It is being held by the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship and the Ayala Foundation. S^infinity is one of the 37 ‘companies’ (pruned from 72) that made it through the first round. Again, I was Team’s business plan writer. Talk about having a stereotype job, haha.

I’ll be posting on our experiences regarding the first PESO Participant Enhancement Workshops in a few days. Wish us luck!

Keeping me busy last week was a WAP project on my two blogs, Slip of the Pen and Crimson Crux. I wrote the WML code and simulated the WAP application on the Openwave SDK 5.1, with the Apache HTTP Server 2.0.54 running in the background.

Here are some screenshots of the WAP site (I know, it’s a bit too primitive, nothing fancy here):