Neü Titan

Firefox Friday Feature of the Week: Personas

2010-01-29T11:39:00.005+08:00

Today marks the very first Firefox Friday. It is the brainchild of Myra Jill. Every Friday, the members of the Mozilla Philippines Community will write a blog post and a tweet, with the tags #FirefoxFriday and #MozillaPH. As my personal twist on Firefox Friday, I will write about a Firefox feature that I like. The very first feature that I have chosen to highlight to day is Personas.

Personas is a light theming system for Firefox. It has drastically lowered the barrier of entry to make Firefox themes. There are now more than 35,000 themes available. As a user, I find that personas theme loads quickly and responsive. I could also choose a random theme from a certain category, and each of my Firefox windows will have a different theme.
You get Personas automatically when you download the Firefox 3.6, the latest release. If you like Personas so much, you can also get Personas Plus, an add-on that super-charges your Personas experience.

Campus Reps assignments for 1Q

2010-01-24T19:23:00.000+08:00

Here are the assigned tasks for Mozilla Campus Reps.

Renren

Inquiry with NSTW folks regarding Mozilla involvement
Mozilla Philippines Community t-shirt and badge design contest

Viral video channel
CosPlay event/contest

Joell

Signage for Internet cafe and Jeeps

Other regular activities to participate include:

Firefox Friday, post a Mozilla- or Firefox-related post on the blog or on Tweeter with a hashtag, #MozillaPH
Mozilla Firefox on email signature
Mozilla or Firefox logo spotted at... posts

You can do these regular events even if you're not a Campus Rep. If interested in joining, drop us a line in the comments and we'll get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Mozilla Campus Reps schedule of activities

2010-01-24T18:24:00.001+08:00

The 2010 kick-off meeting of the Mozilla Philippines Community was held yesterday at the UP Ayala Technohub. A lot of items were discussed, but I will focus on the Mozilla Campus Representatives activities for the first quarter of this year. Most of these are simply to push Mozilla Firefox into schools, and establish Campus Reps in these campuses.

IT Week, AMA Computer University, Quezon City
The Campus Rep here is John Arce. The school term started late, and so the IT week has been moved as well to mid-February, hopefully not on Valentine's Day.
IT Week, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Manila
There are no local campus reps, but they are currently represented by the campus reps from their sister school from Calamba. No dates have been set yet. Notice was given too late. It will be held tomorrow, Jan 28.
IT Week, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Calamba
Local campus reps are Eusebio Barrun and Joell Lapitan. Tentative date is sometime in March.

If you want Mozilla Campus Reps to visit you, please get in touch with us through the comments.

Mozilla Campus Reps visit Angelicum College QC

2009-12-15T14:30:00.007+08:00

The Mozilla Campus Reps Philippines participated in the IT Week of Angelicum College of Quezon City on Monday, December 14. This event is the first campus event conducted by the Campus Reps, and represents the first of the baby steps of the Campus Reps towards cross-campus event organization.

I accompanied Jun Barrun (shown in picture giving the Mozilla talk) from the Colegio de San Juan de Letran. We met at the Cubao MRT, where we rode a taxi to Angelicum College where we were met by Josie Santos, the adviser of the Computer Society that organized the IT Week. They were really supportive and helpful.

After the opening ceremonies of the IT Week, Jun spoke on the virtues of Mozilla Firefox and the Open Web Standards.

We were initially surprised at the size of the event, since was also a Family Day for the Angelicum College. Our Firefox booth consisted of two tables, two chairs and the Firefox tarpaulin from the "Fire Years of Firefox in Manila" event. The booth was positioned in front of the gym along with other booths, where we could receive a lot of foot traffic and eyeballs because of the ongoing events held at the gym. One of the most curious comments that we received was from a elementary school-aged girl who lingered about the booth, and told me, "Meron kami niyan sa bahay. Sabi kasi ni mama, mas maganda gamitin ang Firefox." "We have Firefox at home, because Mom said that it is better to use." She is one lucky girl who has a capable mom who can teach her how to use a secure web browser. I'll take a guess that her mom probably works in the IT industry.

We talked with the IT students on how Firefox helps with keeping the Internet free from non-open standards, as well as a possible "Firefox Installation Day" for their computer labs, which are currently using only IE.

We also received inquiries on how Mozilla is organized and operates, and how the Mozilla Philippines Community and the Campus Reps are able to participate in campus events.

We did run out of few Mozilla goodies that we had, and we even had to give away the ones that we were already using. For future events, we created a specific checklist to follow, in order to have a smooth operation of both the booth and the talk.

We are thankful for Josie Santos, and the Computer Society for having us in their event. We hope to attend future events in Angelicum College. We are also thankful for Regnard Raquedan for his support for the Campus Reps. Special mention also goes out to Campus Reps Myra Jill Siason and Joell Lapitan.

Update 2010-01-06: Josie sent a pic of Jun giving a talk on Mozilla Firefox and the Open Web.

Mozilla Campus Reps Philippines T-Shirt Design

2009-12-09T22:10:00.001+08:00

I have finalized the design for the Philippine Campus Reps. Due to price constraints, I had to remove the Firefox logo at the back in order to conform with a 5-color scheme. I'll just replace it with "getfirefox.com" URL.

Update: New back print shown.

Firefox videos

2009-11-27T11:40:00.000+08:00

mozilla firefox 3.5 from vineel reddy on Vimeo.

Thesis Proposal Done!

2009-11-23T23:32:00.002+08:00

Yay! Tapos na me mag-thesis proposal...

And now to the heavy lifting >.<

Five Years of Firefox in Manila

2009-11-22T09:32:00.005+08:00

I attended the 5th Firefox anniversary held at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati. It was a great place to meet up with fellows from the Mozilla Philippines Community, as well as the Campus Reps from UP Diliman and Colegio de San Juan de Letran Calamba.

I was there to introduce what the Campus Rep program, and to entice people to join up.

Globe was also there introducing some of their new products, minglr and web2mobile. I was impressed by the web2mobile service. Web2mobile allows you to select snippets of text as well as images from your Firefox browser, and send them as an SMS or MMS. Standard rates apply, ₱ 1 per SMS and ₱ 5 per MMS. Unlitext does not apply. =P

Minglr was also there. It's a social aggregation service. I think it would work great when used with a smartphone, so you can post your updates just once and it appears on all of your social networks.

For those who missed the event, here are some pics taken by Aja Lapus and Joell Lapitan.

UPDATE: The Mozilla Philippines Community website was also launched. :)

Section 101 of the Copyright code

2009-11-11T11:10:00.001+08:00

Does this mean that present interpretation of copyright infringement is... wrong???

in reference to:

"“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed."
- US CODE: Title 17,101. Definitions (view on Google Sidewiki)

Comment of the day

2009-11-11T10:44:00.001+08:00

Politicians are more willing to let people die than to start patent reform.

in reference to:

"Quick question, how many people do our patent laws have to kill before it becomes enough of a problem? Thanks!"
- More Important Saving Lives From Swine Flu Or Protecting Roche's Monopoly? | Techdirt (view on Google Sidewiki)

School principal in Sulu beheaded

2009-11-11T10:38:00.001+08:00

I extend my deepest condolences to the family of Gabriel Canizes.

It is very sad that these Abu Sayyaf bandits have targeted civilians, and in this case civilians whose responsibility are the education of the children, the hope of our country.

in reference to: Palace ‘embarrassed’ by beheading of school principal in Sulu - Regions - GMANews.TV - Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs - Latest Philippine News (view on Google Sidewiki)

Firefox blazes to the top!

2009-11-08T22:27:00.001+08:00

According to Net Applications, Firefox is now the most popular browser in use today with 45.18 % market share.

Congratulations to the Mozilla team and community! Go Firefox! ^_^

in reference to: October 2009 browser stats: Firefox finally passes IE6 - Ars Technica (view on Google Sidewiki)

VirtualBox installation on Ubuntu

2009-11-03T14:16:00.000+08:00

Upon installation of VirtualBox in Ubuntu, you need to compile the kernel modules needed for vbox to operate.

First, get the GNU/Linux kernel source and headers
$ sudo apt-get source linux-image-2.6.24-25-server
$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-25-server

Now, compile VirtualBox modules with the vboxdrv command
$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Don't forget to add your user to the vboxusers group.
$ sudo addgroup $USER vboxusers

My opinions and reactions on the class DPI project

2009-10-29T17:46:00.001+08:00

Repost from my CS 259 class blog.

When we first started the class DPI project, the first thing that came into my mind was how easy it would be. I mean, how difficult would it be to open packets, inspect their contents, and classify them accordingly. You could say it would be the equivalent of your friendly postman opening your mail, and classifying whether it contained something important, a postcard, some cash, or perhaps spam and even anthrax. And we're not looking for passwords, credit card information or information for the spooks. No, we are more benevolent than that.

Our purpose would be to classify applications running on the network properly. If we're going to monitor our networks, we must have a complete picture of the applications that our users are running on them. While most of these applications are "visible" and can easily be blocked. However, many applications running on the Internet have acquired the ability to bypass firewalls and proxies. Because of many corporate, academic, technical and what-not policies that have governed networks for the past few years, have pushed applications to use proxies or encrypt their communications in order to bypass the usual roadblocks that network administrators have put in place over our networks today.

The wisdom of such blocks have been in serious question, both on the technical and user levels. However, the reality is that these blocks are here to stay, and the target applications of such blocks have adapted to the current Internet landscape. A great example of such a versatile program would be Skype.

The purpose of our class project was to detect peer-to-peer traffic that have managed to pass through the roadblocks that the university network administrators have put in place.

While we did manage to get a sample of the network traces, we have yet to detect any peer-to-peer activity in the university network. So far, the university network administrators have appeared to succeed in their "quest" to block all kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

We also used some machine learning techniques on the traces, however, I think that we have largely failed in that because we don't have any training data to use... because there have been no peer-to-peer traffic detected. We need to get data which we positively know has peer-to-peer traffic. If we can't detect it, then we should run some applications and actively look for holes in the university network. Once we "detect" our own traces, put them into the machine learning tool and use it as training data to detect the peer-to-peer traffic that do not belong to us.

The other technique that the class investigated, which is actually reading the packet contents, is either a hit-or-miss thing. We can argue that reading the first few bytes of the data can give us the name of the actual application, however, once this traffic is encrypted, all bets are off. I believe this technique will only be useful in the near-to-medium term, and will work only on simple applications that have not acquired the variety of users who need to use special methods to bypass proxies and firewalls.

We are not yet there, but we have learned the "what not to do in DPI". This may sound like an Edisonian way of thinking, but I believe that as we continue to refine our techniques and code, we will be able to achieve a way to detect peer-to-peer traffic without reading the payload.

A first look at Google Wave

2009-10-15T18:05:00.002+08:00

I have received my Google Wave invitation yesterday morning. I immediate took to inviting some more people to join me in testing Google Wave.
So far, it's been very very exclusive, and I only have 5 contacts on my list, not really many, and it really makes it difficult to test. However, that really doesn't stop us, does it? =P
The Google Wave team has been working very fast on this one. Some bugs that I saw yesterday were already gone today. For example, when you make a new wave and then change your mind so you want to discard it, yesterday you have to click on Trash to delete it. That has been fixed to today.
Wave really looks great towards the future of online collaboration, including a great way to finally do online meetings.
Kudos to Google for a job well done on Wave! ^_^
in reference to: Google Wave API | Google Groups (view on Google Sidewiki)

New Twitter background

2009-10-15T11:25:00.001+08:00

I've always wanted to personalize my Twitter page, and so I made an initial attempt. The symbol that you see on the left is the symbol for "section". I wanted to put a 9 in there somewhere so that it would read as "Section 9", like the agency from Ghost in the Shell. But I think it looks better without the 9. What do you think?

in reference to: Twitter / Home (view on Google Sidewiki)

Freaky Fortnight at Slate

2009-10-06T14:14:00.000+08:00

Watch as husband and wife switch places.

Freaky Fortnight 2009

Advice from an experienced flood victim

2009-10-01T09:43:00.001+08:00

By Gwendolyn So
(Reprinted from email)

Unbeknownst to many, my family and I are experts when it comes to flooding. By this I mean that for almost 10 years when we lived in a low part of Sto. Domingo Street in Quezon City , we experienced flooding INSIDE the house at least once a year and if I remember correctly, sometimes it was twice or even thrice a year.

The first time it happened we were in shock, but as it happened more and more it became routine. Here are some nuggets of wisdom that may help:

I learned that once the water reaches knee level, the gates can't be opened anymore because of the water pressure. We thought we still had time to take the cars out but realized we were trapped. That time our cars submerged. Make sure you know which area near your residence is considered higher ground and take your cars there EARLY.
Do not despair so much if your cars submerge. They can be fixed. It's expensive and takes a long time for the smell to go away, but it's not the end of the world. After the flood, just let the car dry. We were still able to use our Hi-Ace and Mitsubishi Lancer despite their having been half submerged in floodwaters.
I learned that heavy stuff, like the ref and shelves, FLOAT. So every year from then on, we would TIE DOWN heavy appliances like the ref (too heavy to carry upstairs but in latter years we did lug it all the way up to the 2nd floor), the big shelves with wedding souvenirs and knick knacks and my dad's collection of wine. How did we do that? Tie them to the windows.
Adrenalin will give you superpowers once you decide you're not afraid of a little water and start saving what you can. In my case, it was my collection of books. They're not rare first editions but regular books. However, I love my books and I'm not letting them drown! I was able to move and carry our heavy sofa powered by my body's own adrenalin hormone.
You can have fun in the midst of disaster so I took out our cameras and starting taking pictures. It was to make everyone have a good laugh as we surveyed the chaos around us, the cockroaches and rats swimming by, the black inky spots of oily stuff occasionally floating around.
Apparently, no matter how much you're enjoying yourself frolicking in the water and saving what you can, once the cold water reaches your chest (especially your nipples), you start to shiver and it gets hard to breathe. This is the time to give up and go upstairs.
If your electricity stays on, go to the switch box and turn off all the electric outlets downstairs but not upstairs.
Cleaning after the flood is a pain. Once the waters recede, you are left with mud everywhere. They stick so you have to get the hose and start using the walis tingting (how do you say this in English? It's a broom made of just think twigs/sticks tied together in a thick bundle). You just keep the water running and sweep, sweep, sweep like there's no tomorrow.
You must scrub the walls with disinfectant. If you only rinse with water, it will still smell. We used Lysol. Scrub, scrub, scrub like there's no tomorrow. (If Lysol is too expensive, just try the regular bleach!)
First time water got inside our house, we didn't know we had to use Lysol and that the drying process is super vital. So, after a few days, there was this nauseating smell and later we found molds growing everywhere! We had returned the furniture and appliances to their normal places and the walls behind grew molds. Yuck!!!
We were still able to use our ref that floated in flood waters. Just clean and clean and dry and dry.
Once electricity is available, get out all your fans and dry everything thoroughly.
Yes, paint will peel off and wooden drawers and shelves deform. Salvage what can be used. Once they dry, it's still ok but sometimes the drawers get stuck because the wood expanded so you have no choice but to destroy it because icky water is still trapped inside.
Wait at least 2 to 3 days to dry everything. Use fans and hairdryers. Do not, I repeat, do not be in a hurry to return stuff you saved to their original places.
Have this mindset: Ah, it's good I'm now forced to do a general cleaning of my house. Now I have no choice but to do it. advice from me...

It is easy to go insane after this kind of calamity, to despair of the material things we lost (especially the cars), but please be thankful you got away with your life and that of your family and loved ones. Just keep on smiling. "Smile and whole world will smile with you; weep and you weep alone!"

But, I have fun!

2009-09-11T17:55:00.000+08:00

I came across Kelly Heckman's preview on the upcoming Jumpgate Evolution game. On her short description, we can find a great quote on gaming:

Some of my favorite games are arcade games and I'll spend 3-5 years on the same 5-6 levels because I just never get any better. But, I have fun.

DCCP throughput behavior over links with different bandwidth

2009-09-10T15:29:00.000+08:00

My study into the congestion avoidance phase of DCCP CCID2 lead me to investigate further into the behavior of DCCP across links with different bandwidths. At first, I thought there was something wrong with the comparison between the 2 Mbps link and the 100 Mbps link, however, it was not to be. Below is the normalized throughput of different links.

NS 2 Pre-processor files

2009-08-25T11:52:00.003+08:00

I made some new tools to preprocess my NS2 tracefiles before importing the data into OpenOffice Calc for the actual calculations and graphing.

The first is a throughput accumulator. It simply takes a file with two columns (time and packet size) and aggregates the bytes into equal-sized-time bins.

$ cat data | ./accumulate.py > throughput.csv

The second is a jitter calculator. Given the a file with the packet arrival times, it calculates the first derivate, or jitter. It is also called inter-packet arrival times.

$ cat data | ./difference.py

These two tools use pipes so you can easily input your output from grep, awk and sed.

Tools:

Braid game trailer!

2009-08-15T17:55:00.002+08:00

Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.

Don't you wish Mario had these abilities before? *grin*

Eclipse my python

2009-07-21T17:40:00.006+08:00

Just when I think that things can't get any better than this, PyDev now natively supports Google AppEngine development!

Wooot! And for those who don't know yet, Eclipse Galileo is now out!

Happy hacking!

Ubuntu 9.04 on SL400

2009-06-20T07:39:00.003+08:00

Backlight doesn't work properly. I suggest you turn off the ACPI module controlling the backlight using:

# sudo rmmod video

The video needs a little touch up before it will work properly.

# sudo rmmod uvcvideo
# sudo modprobe uvcvideo quirks=16

You may have this loaded immediately by adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options uvcvideo quicks=16

Opera Unite - Browser and Server in One

2009-06-17T09:54:00.005+08:00

Opera has released a new version of their browser that includes Opera Unite -- a server that sits on top of the browser itself.

So what’s the big deal? Why would you want your own web server on your local machine? For answers, you have to go back to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web — it was supposed to be literally a web, rather than hub-and-spoke network of servers and web browsers that we have today. The advantage of the true “web” approach — that is, I connect directly to your PC rather than both of us connecting to, say, Facebook — is that there’s there’s no third party involved, which means we all control our own data and aren’t dependent on a server.
- Scott Gilberston

I wonder what kind of data or service users would put on their own mobile web servers?

Back to School!

2009-06-15T19:31:00.002+08:00

It's the first day of school once again. After finishing up at the office, I headed out to walk to school. It's exciting to go back. Until I found out that school starts tomorrow, not today. >.<

The Real "Citizens on Patrol"

2009-04-17T09:50:00.006+08:00

If you have watched Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, this Newark Police project, featured by the NY Times, should be familiar. It even has almost the same objective: to spread good will about the police force.

Captain Susan Cole, the program coordinator has this to say,

“Seniors are home during the day, they see a lot, they’re staples in their community,” Captain Cole said. “They know a lot of people. They are the eyes and ears who can assist the Police Department. They’re the ones who can bring back that ‘it takes a village’ kind of community because somewhere along the way we’ve lost that.”

Susan Boyle vs Cynics and Skeptics, Inc

2009-04-17T00:29:00.005+08:00

Soul-moving rendition from an unexpected but exceptionally-talented lady. Simply amazing. Kudos, Susan!

Watch the YouTube video.

A lot of hurt from an ad

2009-04-06T09:00:00.008+08:00

I'm hearing a moans and groans from the Mac fanboys! Just look at the number of comments from the Engadget blog regarding the ads with Lauren and Giampaulo.

While the previous Microsoft responses to the "I'm a Mac" ads have been utterly lame, these new ones hit the right spot on. The current state of the economy have made these ads that show frugality resonate with the viewers. Lauren and Giampaulo both lambast the Macs on their price. Lauren shows us that we don't need to be cool to buy a Mac, as being cool = having $. Giampaulo, however, set some pretty high standards and ended up buying a laptop that has somewhat the opposite of those standards (battery life on an HDX?? Helloooo!). But then again, one must remember that these are ads, and they are actors -- not some random dudettes and dudes on the street.

Something odd is going on though. They both preferred HP. You can totally change the Microsoft logo on the ad with an HP one, and still deliver a similar message. Is HP paying for this ad? Or is this a favor from Microsoft? Remember the Vista Ready program? HP is now experimenting with both Ubuntu (Mi = Mobile Internet) and Google Android program. This ad could be a boost to get back HP deep into the Microsoft fold.

Aptana Studio for Google AppEngine development

2009-03-25T15:46:00.003+08:00

I like using Eclipse with PyDev for developing my Python applications. However, I've recently discovered joy in using Aptana Studio (with PyDev) for developing Google AppEngine applications. With code-completion and other perks, it makes development quite easy and fun, too.

Napapaligiran si Manny ng mga Sulsol-tants

2009-03-22T06:34:00.008+08:00

It seems Manny Pacquiao is getting a bad habit of rescinding contracts these days. Do you still remember the Golden Boy Promotions vs Top Rank dispute? There's a new facet to the network wars that has recently included Manny. It seems that Manny's isn't taking legal advice when he is entering into these contracts. He should have placed conditions for him to be able to terminate a contract legally, instead of just simply signing a new one whenever he feels like it.

Paumanhin na lang sa mga fans ni Manny. Alam kong henyo xa sa ring, pero pagdating sa batas ay isang xang Certified B—.

Truly Amazing Paper Cutouts

2009-03-20T17:05:00.005+08:00

These paper cutouts are simply amazing. And they're done by hand! No words can describe how incredible these are.

"Unsend" your mail

2009-03-20T15:37:00.004+08:00

Have you ever hit the "Send" button only to regret it a few seconds after?

With Gmail's newest feature, you can "unsend" your mail. It is still a Gmail Labs feature, so you need to enable it. Once enabled, you now have 5 seconds to hit "Undo" before the mail is sent on its way. You may extend this to up to 10 seconds.

However, you now have less excuses for sending inexcusable mail, especially with Mail Goggles as well.

Weather forecasts on your Google Earth

2009-03-13T14:49:00.009+08:00

Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program, according to Wikipedia.

There are lots of ways to play around with Google Earth. There is this nice animated weather forecast. We hope you like it, too.

Using Google Analytics

2009-03-10T07:23:00.011+08:00

I have been using Google Analytics for a few years now, and I have to say that I am quite impressed at the reports that it makes (even though the traffic at my sites aren't impressive).

For those who have not yet known GA yet, it is a service that generates detailed statistics on website visitors. This is very useful, especially for marketers, to know which pages work (or don't work) in attracting and retaining visitors.

Let's see what statistics this site has generated so far:

So far, most of our visitors came from the Philippines, and not surprisingly, a lot of them come from Makati. This next image will explain why.

Many of the page views are on the how-to page for configuring Globe Visibility (a local HDSPA service) for use with Ubuntu.

From this few information, we can create some hypotheses regarding the visitors. They are quite affluent, or work with affluent companies. The fact that they work in Makati and Mandaluyong already gives us this clue, however, the additional fact that they have Globe Visibility (not a cheap service) strengthens this conclusion.

This may be a "simplistic" conclusion to arrive on, but it is still noteworthy and important. This is a form of user feedback, and would drive me (as a blogger) more things that will be interesting to my readers.

Ubuntu is not for Ügeeks

2009-02-08T18:42:00.020+08:00

I started using GNU/Linux in January 2000. I joined the Diliman Networks Web Team, and we were asked to learn CGI-Perl for web programming. It was quite a pain to us then. Some stuff didn't just work, and I really learned a lot from exploring the command line, as well as Perl. The first editor that I used was pico, and my mail client was pine. It was also the time that I encountered GNOME, KDE, CDE and the rest of the gang, experimented for a few months, chose GNOME and never switched again.

I was using Red Hat from then on until some time after they changed it to Fedora. I stuck with Fedora for a few years, until I got tired of the release cycle, and decided to try other distributions. I also used SuSE, after they were bought out by Novell, however, my machines were too slow for it. For a year, I was using FreeBSD as my desktop -- which was really an eye-opener as they do things quite differently. And then, I settled on Gentoo which had a very similar program installation method to FreeBSD. I even compiled everything from scratch, with the specific optimizations for my CPU on. I even printed out the instructions so that I could follow them, since I couldn't use my PC (since it was still compiling the programs). I enjoyed having the fastest PC in town (or at least my office). We would compare benchmarks, and Gentoo would come out on top. However, the big disadvantage was that if I ever wanted to use a program, say Open Office, I would download it and then compile it. Sometimes, compiling would take hours or even a day before I could use the program.

It got me thinking, what do I use a computer for? At that moment, it became evident to me that I was spending too much time compiling stuff, hunting down libraries, etc. It just didn't make sense. So I fired up my friendly Google, and began scouring the Net for an alternative distribution. And I came to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, and not Red Hat so there was some stuff that I need to relearn, such as locations of configuration files and commands.

Nowadays, I continue to use Ubuntu heavily. I find that I have been able to do more if I let some things just be. However, I can switch between distributions easily, including some of the BSD's. I still find OpenBSD, quite a tough nut to crack. LoL

I certainly enjoy using Ubuntu. I have used its Live CD to rescue a lot of other systems, including Red Hat and Windows machines. I am still discovering and playing with a lot of new things everyday, such as Compiz settings. However, no longer to the extent of destroying my GNU/Linux installation. I want to get some real work done, too, you know. :)

So, yes, Ubuntu is not for geeks who get a hard on everytime we talk about benchmarks. It is relatively slow if you compare it with Gentoo. However, for my purposes, it gets the job done with minimal fuss. And that, for me, is the important criteria.

From C pointers to C++ iterators

2009-02-08T18:06:00.007+08:00

Yesterday, we discussed C++ vectors as one of the ways to improve the representation of an C array. C++ iterators allow easy access to elements in a vector safely. However, one must not mistake an iterator to be a pointer, even if it acts like one. Additionally, your vanilla pointers still exist in C++. Don't forget to put #include <vector>

std::vector<int> grades;   // dynamically-sized vector

// push items into the vector
grades.push_back(grade);
...

for (std::vector<int>::iterator grade_itr=grades.begin();
    grade_itr < grades.end();
    grade_itr++)
 std::cout << (*grade_ptr);

From C arrays to C++ vectors

2009-02-07T19:30:00.005+08:00

The C++ STL (Standard Template Library) includes some very useful templates. The main idea behind STL is to re-use some of the best implementations of the most common data structures, such as queues, lists, stacks. One of these implementations is the C++ vector.

In C, we could declare an array of integers like this:

int grades[MAX_SIZE];

This statement will still work with C++, and is still valid. However, a more "C++"-centric way of doing the same thing would be to use vectors:

vector<int> grades(MAX_SIZE);

You can still access each element using:

grades[i]

but now you can use STL vector functions.

Globe Visibility on Ubuntu 8.10

2009-02-06T16:13:00.001+08:00

Globe Visibility Postpaid uses Huawei E160 HSDPA USB Stick to access the Internet.
We simply plug in the USB stick and wait a bit for Ubuntu to set up the connect. We need to edit some settings before we can properly connect to the network.

To do that, we open up our network connections found on the upper-right hand corner.

We go to the "Mobile Broadband" tab and edit the settings for "Globe Telecom."

We authorize the application to use the private keyring (which contains our system-saved keys).

We change the "Number" from "*99#" to "*99***1#" and delete the default "Username", "Password" and "APN".

Click OK and we're done. :)

Update!
If the USB stick that you have is brand new, you need to plug it into a Windows machine so it can configure itself. Once you have verified that it can connect to the Globe network with Windows, you may now use it with your Ubuntu machine. Don't ask me why it's that way. =P

Reconfiguring VirtualBox after installation of new kernel

2009-01-30T09:56:00.000+08:00

When you update your kernel, you will need to recompile the VirtualBox kernel module. This can be done by running the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

You will need to have the Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework (DKMS) installed to do this.

sudo apt-get install dkms

Open Office 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

2009-01-29T10:44:00.001+08:00

OOo3 will not be available on Ubuntu 8.10 because the developers did not have enough time to test it. If you really need to install the latest and greatest OOo3, you can find installation instructions on Softpedia.

Subversion on Eclipse Ganymede

2009-01-23T17:52:00.000+08:00

The latest Eclipse Ganymede shipped with the SVN connectors. The update URL's are written below if your Eclipse does not have them.

Install the following:

http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/downloads.php

http://www.polarion.com/products/svn/subversive.php?src=eclipseproject

Show secure sites more clearly

2009-01-23T16:54:00.000+08:00

Firefox removed the yellow bar that indicated a secure site. Only secure sites with Extended Validation (EV) certificates, i.e. forked out a lot of money, show up with a nice green bar. Other sites with self-signed certificates or whose CA's public keys are not shipped with Firefox, they simply show up as a regular site.

To help show which sites are SSL-enabled, you need to edit the default configuration of Firefox. We browse the about:config page in Firefox and search for the term browser.identity.ssl_domain_display. We can set this to any of three possible values:

0 - default
1 - display top level domain only, e.g. blogspot.com
2 - display entire domain, e.g. neutitan.blogspot.com

I recommend setting the value to 2.

Subversion on Ubuntu 8.10

2009-01-23T15:12:00.002+08:00

Access methods

file:/// - direct access on local machine
http:// - using WebDAV
https:// - SSL-encrypted
svn:// - access via svnserve machine
svn+ssh:// - SSH-tunneled

Installation Instructions

Install the necessary packages:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 subversion libapache2-svn

Create the group (to contain subversion users)
```
$ sudo groupadd subversion
```

Create the repository folders

$ sudo mkdir /srv/svn
$ cd !$
$ sudo mkdir new_project
$ sudo chown -R www-data:subversion new_project
$ sudo chmod g+rws new_project

Tell subversion to create subversion repository. I"t will create new files.
```
$ sudo svnadmin create /srv/svn/new_project
```
(Optional) If you want to use the WebDAV (http, https) methods, you will need to repeat the last two commands in § 3, and apply these to the new files generated by § 4.
```
$ sudo chown -R www-data:subversion new_project
$ sudo chmod -R g+rws new_project
```

Enabling WebDAV access

Now, edit the /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf file, and add the following lines:

<Location "/svn/new_project">
  DAV svn
  SVNPath /srv/svn/new_project
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "My Project Subversion Repository"
  AuthUserFile /etc/subversion/passwd
  <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
    Require valid-user
  </LimitExcept>
</Location>

You may also point it to the "root" subversion folder /srv/svn if you wish to view the repositories of all projects that you are hosting.

Restart the web server.
```
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
```
(Optional) If you want to use WebDAV with SSL, simply follow standard Apache SSL certificate use.

Add the subversion users.

$ sudo htpasswd -c /etc/subversion/passwd first_user
$ sudo htpasswd /etc/subversion/passwd subsequent_users

Check if the passwd file exists.
```
$ cat /etc/subversion/passwd
```

Check if we can access the repository.

$ svn co http://hostname/svn/new_project new_project \
--username first_user

Access using SVN protocol

Edit the configuration file, /srv/svn/new_project/conf/svnserve.conf
Uncomment the these lines in the configuration file:
```
[general]
password-db = passwd
```
N.B. These lines must not contain spaces before them.
Edit the passwd file in the same folder and add a new user using this syntax:
```
username = password
```

Now, run the svnserver with this command:

$ sudo svnserve -d --foreground -r /srv/svn

Now, try to access the SVN using:

$ svn co svn://hostname/new_project new_project \
--username first_user

You can now use SVN sub-commands to add/edit/delete files here.

Access using SVN+SSH protocol

After enabling the SVN protocol above, enable SSH on the SVN server and create accounts for people who are given access.

Check the access to the SVN using this command:

$ svn co svn+ssh://hostname/srv/svn/new_project new_project \
--username first_user

References

Subversion, Ubuntu Documentation, accessed 2009 January 23.