Mental Blabberings

Methinks the deadline of one of our subjects got extended... And so goes my few hours of sleep which I can be able to claim now. That's if my groupmates let me take a short breather after a nightlong PHP-hacking/tutorial session. I miss having groupmates that actually know what they're doing, and what to do.

I need to manage my time better, now that things get bigger and bigger as time goes by. Oh well.

I'm currenlty preparing myself for the night ahead -- a friendster party of sorts. I'll most probably be posting about things later, or maybe the day after, but things should change from the last party I went to. Chillin'...

It's been a while since I've been working on 3 projects simultaneously and frankly I just love it. The idea of deadlines being beaten, and things working, features added and people happy just make it such a worthwhile experience. Although it's quite taxing, I've found solace in Ronaldo, Beckham, Zidane, Roberto Carlos, Figo, Casillas, and the rest of Real Madrid. I haven't been a big fan of football, but I've been watching my share of football since we've gotten cable (AT LAST) in Calauan. Staying up in the wee hours of the morning up coding in C++, Java, and PHP (in 3 separate projects almost multitaskingly (CRAZY)) makes me so much more productive -- unless you consider that I sleep at 4 and wake up around 11 am. The excitement of watching an attempt by any football player on TV while debugging code with elusive bugs makes it so worthwhile. Then when you squash the bug, you just feel so much like a person scoring a goal against Real Madrid. Or Mancheste

Conscious self Overall self Take Free Enneagram Personality Test Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||||| 30% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||||| 66% Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||||||||| 86% Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||||||||| 69% Type 5 Detachment |||||| 30% Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||| 53% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||||| 54% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||||||||| 77% Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||| 50% Your Conscious-Surface type is 3w4 Your Unconscious-Overall type is 3w2 Take Free Enneagram Personality Test Does this make sense? I'd like to hear what you say... :D

We just concluded the initial presentation of the Discussion Board project, and my was I shocked -- First, the project wasn't finished and nowhere near the proposed functional requirements, and Second, there were only a grand total of 2 questions asked by the instructor. It's a software engineering class which doesn't regard the Open Source development model, and still requires the documentation (ala Cathedral style) of weekly progress, and even documents for "end users" or "clients". I personally despise the need to write progress reports in human terms -- mainly I want to show that progress is being made in terms of code and functionality. I don't want to put down into writing things that I feel about my groupmates, but rather I would like to commend them just for their accomplishments. I've just submitted one progress report, and I never really liked it. My grade may be in jeopardy because of that, but anyway that's how I personally fee

Clemens Vasters: Indigo'ed - Where do you want to go, Aiden? It's a very interesting "treatise" on why a person who wants to "have a life" should "get real" and stop advocating open source or free software. However, it is attacking the issue of propagation and not the core of free/open source software. That should be a very distict observation that anyone reading the open letter should be able to keep in mind. The letter deals with the more practical side of FOSS, and as such not a lot of arguments could be made. I myself am 20 years old, and I haven't exactly made a lot of software yet that impacts other people's lives -- but in this country we call the Philippines, the concept of bayanihan is innate (back then in the past) and the idea of getting a bargain is definitely welcome. I'm not saying that FOSS will work only in 3rd world countries like ours, but making other people's lives a little better by giving services (like

http://www.computer.org/parascope/#journal A god-sent resource for the likes of me, who do research on Parallel Computing and HPC. I definitely need to read on most of the journals listed here, because the paper is due the end of this month. Which reminds me, I have yet to find an explanation to the anomalous behaviour from 1K210K (I have just coined it such, because of anomalous behaviour from the tests from chunk size 1K to 10 K). Possible explanations should crop up from hardware performce analysis using microbenchmarks, but that's the last resort. I should be able to find similar tests and results from other studies, right? I'm starting to believe that I might be the only one with such a setup, and with a test problem like what I have. Well, technically it's not really a parallel algorithm, but the idea of load delegation ala-scheduling is something that people have already definitely studied. However, I have not found any resources showing that what I'm

The virus squad - Icon - smh.com.au "The first point of contact with a new virus may come from an end user - someone bitten by a bug or suspicious of an odd-looking file. "We may hear of it when some victim sends it into a lab, or the virus writer himself - and it's almost always a him - will send it in," Ducklin says. Apparently virus writers are fond of showing off their handiwork."" -- from the link. Definitely interesting stuff. I wonder if labs like these are hiring... And maybe doing virus research (on the computer side) would be a very interesting profession... :)

Piracy and options for the consumer - Feb. 13, 2004 "To put it succinctly, why would I buy a 400-peso album if the next store is selling it for 40 pesos? Worse, why would I buy a 10,000-peso piece of software if one is available for 100 pesos? Or a 3,000-peso video game if one is available for 80 pesos?" I am just plain sick of this. Yes, the article is a bit old, but when you write something this irresponsible (even for an editorial) you have to think twice before doing so. It just sickens me that he makes a point, and even justifies the point he makes by saying that "why should I do this legal thing, when I can do this illegal thing?". This is what's going on in the minds of most of the people in the country -- and I can't blame them, not everyone can afford everything he/she wants. However, I do not understand why since you can't afford it, you'll find ways (mostly illegal) to get it? Why can't you just deal with the fact that hey, y

MS-open source hostilities muddled: META Group - Feb. 29, 2004 Precisely why the media has such a power over public opinion. I won't be surprised if MS will release stuff like this, even through other institutions and organizations which are obviously pro-MS. I just hope UP would be more vocal about its stance regarding Open Source and Free Software. If people would only get to hear both sides of the story from different people (not just from one consultant/public relateions person) then surely it would be a fairer battlefield in terms of public opinion (and influencing it). I won't be surprised if the dailies who released this article (even through the net) has recieved MS software as a partner, or a customer. I won't even be surprised if there isn't a single Linux box in the building. Besides, what would you expect? It's all a business to people, and they never really consider the fact that maybe, just maybe it's more on ideology than business. What