Crimson Crux

Earlier today, I received my first two copies of the Scientific American magazine for the months of April and May 2008. I’ve gotten used to this kind of delivery delay (from way back in my CACM subscription days), being a resident of the Philippines and a lucky customer of the inefficient PhilPost.

SciAm was one of my favorite magazines in high school; I used to regularly visit the library archives and photocopy the best SciAm articles.

My new subscription to SciAm isn’t just a rekindling of that old interest — it will also help me in writing/researching my future, future science fiction works (I have to emphasize future, as I have plenty of cake on my plate, such as my creative nonfiction in English and poetry in Filipino).

Here’s to my read-to pile getting taller!

Know our Komiks.ph story here.

Each to his own, as they say, but if you would hear my unsolicited advice, it would be: Don’t use Dreamhost. Well, maybe, if you’re American or can easily threaten them with legal action. But if you’re from a Third World country, stay away.

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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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s oldest scientific and educational computing society, turns 60 this year.

By May 2007, I’ll be completing my first year as a professional member and my second year overall (I was first a student member and officer of UP ACM). Admittedly, I haven’t squeezed every bit out of my membership — I haven’t touched ACM’s vast digital library in a year, nor have I taken even one of the free online courses.

Still, I value my membership for two things. First, I enjoy reading the Communications of the ACM (CACM) magazines, which keep me up to date with a field I tangoed with for four years in UP. I love to acquire and reacquire CS knowledge, even though at times I have trouble understanding the articles. My favorite articles are those related to what I do and where I work today — namely, blogging/webmastering and the Internet, respectively. The only time when reading the magazines becomes more of a chore than a pleasure is when I’m in serious mag backlog.

Second — and I’m going to unabashedly say this — being a “Member of the ACM” (MACM) looks good on the CV. Of course, it’s a paid membership. Anybody can be a member, really. Even someone who mistakes portable DVD players for laptops.

The travesty in ‘buying’ your membership lies in not trying to know more about CS and its diverse disciplines and how they meld into the everyday things around you. The travesty lies in ‘buying’ the title “MACM” to improve your resumé, not your brain.

Of course, there are always two sides to every story. There are people who have reasons not to become an ACM member. One such person is Kent Pitman, a former ACM member and columnist for the now-defunct ACM magazine Lisp Pointers.

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It’s quite refreshing to see computer science blog posts like this that discuss sorting algorithms. In a time when many blogs churn out rehash after rehash of news items (or worse are simply splogs), an original, lengthy, and “deep and dirty” analysis of the shell sort algorithm is a treat to the mind.

The blog entry, titled Shellsort Optimization Project was written by a good friend of mine and former UP DCS coursemate. (I’m not sure if he wants his name to be divulged, as his own blog is written under his nickname.) He’s an intelligent fellow, and it shows through his post.

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After almost nine years of putting up with dial-up connections, we’ve finally jumped ship and availed ourselves of BayanTel DSL’s 768 kbps plan. The DSL modem was installed just last Thursday, and now I’m happily torrenting away some good stuff (don’t ask me what).

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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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Personally, I don’t use the www when visiting websites, chiefly because I’m a lazy typer. This has led to several encounters with “Server not found” errors, because some sites need to have that www in their addresses (one example of which is the UP Diliman website).

Ia, our guest writer of several days past, has written about the www issue in our Go-Ogle! Isulong SEOPH blog. She writes:

In order to market your URL properly it has got to be memorable; that’s one of the basic things to consider when choosing a domain name…So if you’re all for convenience, stripping the WWW out should seem logical. It’s basic knowledge that the more things you throw at a person, the more difficult it is to remember.

Read her complete post here.

Yours truly understands the need for good captcha systems; after all, spammers must go to hell. However, extremely distorted captcha images need to go to hell, too. Take the crap of an image (to the right) as Exhibit A.

Captcha images are designed to differentiate man from beast bot. Exhibits B and C below — way much worse than A — make me wonder if I’m still human. (Dammit, I knew sitting in front of my laptop everyday was bad…!)

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[Ed. note: This is courtesy of the first, and possibly only, guest writer for Crimson Crux -- Ia Lucero of Qwerky. Take it away, Ia.]

I’ll be straight. This article caught my eye simply because it was about software. I saw several good things mentioned in it, including:

1. Favoring fresh graduates instead of requiring at least two years of experience
2. Being involved with open source applications
3. Founding an incubator firm with a Filipino name (”Simula Labs”)

But this one left a mark:

“Another Philippine-based software firm, Exist Engineering, is now working with local universities to design courses that will prepare fresh graduates for a software engineering job at the company.”

And I just had to protest. (more…)