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…)

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!

Just in time for the holidays — try giving this diamond to your sweetie.

According to this Pravda.ru article, astronomers have discovered the largest diamond of ‘em all, with a weight of a whopping ten billion trillion trillion carats. (No, that’s not a typo.)

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t aware of this revelation until a few days ago (thanks to Ia). The article might have been published recently, but a quick research reveals that this news is quite old. An excerpt from a 2004 (yes, 2004!) press release:

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left overafter the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

Well, aside from being remarkable on its own, this gigantic diamond caught my interest because I had been reading up on another diamond-related piece of trivia — diamonds make for a lousy investment!

(more…)

As longtime readers of this blog might know, I’m a sucker for all things Roman, specifically, Ancient Roman. (This interest manifests itself in Roman Empire video games, history books, historical fiction novels, and classic maps, among others.)

That said, I’m quite fascinated by the Rome Reborn 1.0 project under the aegis of the University of Virginia. The huge undertaking took a whole decade to complete and involves both a 3D digital model and a physical miniature model of the city. (Speaking of minis, you know I’m a sucker for them, too!)

To quote the Communications of the ACM article:

The $2 million project, called the largest and most complete simulation of an historic city ever created, allows visitors to view a side of the city unseen by ancient Romans.

For more info and tons of pictures and videos, visit the Rome Reborn website.

Thanks to J. Angelo’s heads-up on the recent speed upgrade of Sky DSL / Bayantel DSL (which has been rebranded as Bayan DSL), I’m now squeezing more juice out of my Plan 1699 connection. From a max speed of 768 Kbps, I’m now due for 1280 Kbps, which is burstable to 1536 Kbps during off-peak hours.

Existing users will need to call Bayan DSL’s customer service to get this free upgrade. Just dial 411200, or better yet, dial 171 from your Bayan phone (if you have one).

Update: Here’s what I got with Bayan’s Speed-on-Demand:

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.)

The pics and the title say it all.

Some of you might have encountered these before. I was introduced to these pests through comment spam, which unfortunately wasn’t blocked by Wordpress’ Akismet. Luckily I’ve always enabled comment moderation for all my blogs. Curiously, only my main site has received this kind of spam.

Had similar experiences, anyone?

Update: I’ve found a similar post with the same title by David Kirk, and he thinks this has something to do with PR and SEO.

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.