Monday, December 7, 2009

Keys is releasing her new album The Element of Freedom exclusively through the world’s largest social network.

Alicia Keys Element of Freedom


Alicia Keys the artist that popularized the smash hit "If I Ain't Got You" is streaming her latest chart topping album "Element of Freedom" in Facebook beginning today! Now all Alicia Keys fans will have the chance to downloa... err... listen to her latest songs via the largest social-network site.

Now ain't that cool :)

Alicia Keys Facebook Page
for more info visit: TechCrunch

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Koffice 2.1.0 now available for PCLinuxOS

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul.


This release is a marked improvement of almost all parts of KOffice compared to 2.0. Version 2.0 was labeled a “platform release”, which was meant as a first preview of the framework and new UI paradigm. In version 2.1, most applications and components have improved significantly but should still only be used by early adopters and probably not as the primary worktool. Koffice 2.1.0 is currently available on our premium server and shipping to the public servers shortly.

For more info visit the PCLINUXOS website

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Google Chrome Browser update available for PCLinuxOS


Google Chrome (chromium-browser) is a web browser from Google that runs web pages and applications with lightning speed. An updated build is now available through our Synaptic Package Manager. While still under development, Google Chrome (chromium-browser) is still quite functional and can handle most web browsing tasks.

Monday, November 23, 2009

PCLinuxOS and Window$ 7 Dual Boot



Check out this guy's experience on dual boot PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS enables my wireless connectivity out-of-the-box. Ain't that sweet! :)

PCLinuxOS Magazine November Issue

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Sun Microsystems VirtualBox




Virtualbox and open-sourced virtualization. I
s installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment.

Boots up much faster, fast network, installs fast.

Download the latest versions here :http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Facebook Lite: A lighter way to connect


Facebook is a bandwidth hog I think most of the people I know agrees with that. And Facebook knows that as well :)

Good thing there is facebook lite! Now you can access your FB account without suffering your bandwidth. This is a neat feature especially when you're in a company that shares throughput on their broadband connections.

Although it is limited in features (since it is the lite version) I still find it brilliant to have esp in places where there's limited internet connection; like what happened when I attended a seminar in Cavite, Philippines. I managed to keep in touch with my friends.

I say kudos to Facebook and keep it up! :)

Monday, November 16, 2009

Drupal wins Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards


Drupal has won the
Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award. As a result of the previous wins, Drupal graduated to the Hall of Fame along with Joomla.

It is a great honor for the Drupal community to be the first winner of the Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award. The Drupal community has worked hard to improve Drupal by adding internationalization, enhancing security, facilitating customization, increasing extensibility, and easing the user experience. This award is a great complement to winning the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. This critical recognition helps build both momentum and excitement towards releasing Drupal 7 in 2010.

This award has a $4000 prize, bringing the total prize money from the Packt Open Source CMS awards to $6000. The money will go to the Drupal association to help pay for drupal.org infrastructure, marketing, and Drupalcon events.

Three members of the Drupal community have also won awards for MVP, Hall of Fame best module and best theme. We will recognize those winners on the front page tomorrow.


Join the forum

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

CEBUNEXT



CEBUNEXT is set to make another exciting show this year by re-inventing itself with fresh, new look. From Cebu X comes CEBUNEXT; still one of the the best furniture shows in Asia.


The website has been redesigned to cleaner, smoother, more modern look. The buyer registration has been improved with a travel assistance feature to conveniently book you to the ideal hotel around Cebu.



If you're a furniture enthusiast with an inclination to contemporary or classical designs. Then this show is for you.

Be part of the Cebu furniture experience. Join CEBUNEXT now!

Friday, October 23, 2009

New Mac ad: WINDOWS 7 Broken Promises

It seemed like I've heard this before. LOL


Wednesday, October 14, 2009

10 Reasons Email Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon

10 Reasons Email Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon

1. People still send hand-written letters via snail mail, even though they could instead make a phone call, send an email, text message, or status update.

2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (through things like Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well.

3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks you are a part of (provided your settings are set up that way).

4. We haven't seen any evidence yet that Google Wave really is the next big thing and will catch on on a large scale.

5. Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web (while there are no doubt some exceptions) has an email address. Many places of employment give employees email addresses when they begin working there. Meanwhile, a great deal of them are banning workers from even accessing social networks.

6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks. Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them.

7. Email is still improving. It hasn't screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media. Look at how Google is constantly adding new features to Gmail. Look at the new Yahoo Mail.

8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. MySpace (still one of the biggest social networks) even launched its own email service recently.

9. More social media use means more email use. Look at these recent findings from Nielsen. The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.

10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue to struggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Streaming Live on Nobel Prize YouTube Channel

There is a youtube channel for Nobel prize winners and which streams announcements for each prize live in real-time. Of course once they have been announced, you can still go back and watch them. For example, here is a clip for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine:

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Video: Windows 7 launch party


Watch Windows 7 launch party



Google apologizes for Gmail outage

WASHINGTON – Google apologized Thursday for a Gmail outage which left some users of the free Web-based email service cut off for the second time in a month.

The Internet giant announced at 10:29 am (1429 GMT) that an unspecified problem was preventing a "small subset of users" from accessing their Gmail accounts.

About an hour later, the Internet giant said service had been restored for some users and at 12:58 pm (1658 GMT) it said the problem had been resolved.

"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support," Google said in a message on its App Status Dashboard, a site which monitors the performance of its online services.

The disruption came just over three weeks after an outage which left millions of users without Gmail for more than an hour and a half.

Google blamed server maintenance for the September 1 Gmail outage and apologized for the disruption, which it called a "Big Deal."

Google also suffered technical problems in May, leaving millions of people unable to use popular services such as its main search page, as well as Gmail and Google News.

Google also experienced a breakdown of Gmail, which has tens of millions of users, in February which lasted a few hours.

The failures, while rare, are seen by some industry analysts as a setback to the Mountain View, California-based Google's efforts to promote Gmail and other Web-based services to businesses.

Source: Google apologizes for Gmail outage

Thursday, September 3, 2009

100 Artworks from the Top Digital Artists in Asia

While surfing; I came across this site that features Top Asian Digital Artist. It hit me hard when I failed to see my countrymen from Philippines failed to have an entry.

I may have a long way to go; but I still believe we Filipinos can make it.


http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tutorials-effects/100-artworks-from-the-top-digital-artists-in-asia/

Sunday, August 16, 2009

From X to NEXT




From X to NEXT. The 21 year old Cebu International Furniture and Furnishings Exhibition, previously known as CEBU X, has been reincarnated as CEBUNEXT.

As CEBUNEXT, the exhibition embodies the drive to create new designs with exceptional quality. It harnesses and consolidates the collective strength of the Philippine furniture industry, while highlighting Cebu as the design capital of Southeast Asia.

Cebu has a rich history in furniture making. So rich that is is even the key source for trends that are followed worldwide, such as the popularity of rattan and buri in the 60s and 70s respectively, stonecraft in the 80's, cane & iron furnishings in the 90's and the abaca trend of early 2000. CEBUNEXT continues this leading legacy by setting its sights forward to the furniture trends of the coming decade--

Come see what's next at CEBUNEXT.

Visit the CEBUNEXT website

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Google AdWords Trying Out an Opportunities Tab

On Sunday, I went into AdWords to do a little keyword research. You've seen their keyword tool before. You just go into the campaign, click on the Tools button and you've got the keyword tool right up top. This didn't happen to me Sunday. In fact, I didn't see the Tools button at all. Sitting here confused, it took me quite a few seconds to recognize something I've never seen before, an Opportunities tab.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Hackers hit Twitter and Facebook





Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers.


Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe.

Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

The service was restored shortly after the blog post, but the companies have had to continue to fend off the attack.

Facebook said its service was reduced but not taken offline.

"No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users," spokeswoman Brandee Barker told the AFP news agency.

"We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."


View this article

REPLACE Statement on MySQL

Many times we need to update a record but we might not know whether such a record exists or not. In traditional programming we usually check whether the record exists or not, then perfrom the appropriate query according to the result of the previous query. A very good example of such situatuion is where you need to update the ip of an user against an user id, but the id may or may not be present in the visits table, user_id being the primary key for the table visits.

An usual solution to the problem is something like this.

Code: Perl
my $user_id = 1000;
my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
my $stmt = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM visits WHERE user_id=?');
$stmt->execute($user_id);

if($stmt->rows) ## a entry for the page id exists, update the record
{
my $update_stmt = $db->prepare('UPDATE visits SET ip = ? WHERE user_id=?');
$update_stmt->execute($ip,$user_id);
}
else ## no such id, insert a new entry with count 1
{
my $insert_stmt = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO visits VALUES(?,?)');
$insert_stmt->execute($user_id,$ip);
}

Code: PHP
$user_id = 1000;
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM visits WHERE user_id=$user_id");

if(mysql_num_rows($res)) // a entry for the page id exists, update the record
{
$result = mysql_query("UPDATE visits SET ip = '$ip' WHERE user_id=$user_id");
}
else // no such id, insert a new entry with count 1
{
$result = mysql_query("INSERT INTO visits VALUES('$user_id','$ip')");
}

Enter: REPLACE

The REPLACE statement very similarly or exactly like INSERT statment, except for the fact that in case a record with the same primary key exists in the one that's going to be inserted then the old row is deleted before the new one is inserted. You need to have an unique index or a primary key to use REPLACE statment.

REPLACE is not part of the SQL standard, it's an useful extension by MySQL, I guess there are many other RDBMSs which have come up with similar extensions.

So, now that we have REPLACE, we can rewrite above code snippets in the following manner:

Code: Perl
my $user_id = 1000;
my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
my $stmt = $db->prepare('REPLACE INTO visits VALUES(?,?)');
$stmt->execute($user_id,$ip);

Code: PHP
$user_id = 1000;
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$res = mysql_query("REPLACE INTO visits VALUES('$user_id','$ip')");

That's it, isn't that easier guys!!

Read more about REPLACE statement here, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replace.html

Alternative Approach

A forgotten or unknown feature among the masses is the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, it causes an UPDATE when a duplicate key error is encountered during an insert. The above code snippet again be re-written like this,

Code: Perl
my $user_id = 1000;
my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
my $stmt = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO visits VALUES (?,?) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ip=?');
$stmt>execute($user_id,$ip,$ip);

Code: PHP
$user_id = 1000;
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$res = mysql_query("INSERT INTO visits VALUES ('$user_id','$ip') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ip='$ip'");

You can read more about this feature here, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...duplicate.html

Monday, May 25, 2009

Google Chrome 2.0 now available for download


If you're like me who's using Chrome for quite sometime now, then you'll be excited to know that they've released the Google Chrome 2.0, which boasts 20% increase in browser performance than Chrome 1. With it's simple design hides a technology sophisticatedly integrated to provide faster, safer and easier web browsing experience.

Download it now at google.com\chrome and see for yourself!

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Tips on improving your site's page visit | page ranking | traffic




Hi! I have gathered some websites that explains you a lot of creative ways on how to
improve your web site's page ranking and page visits. This is very crucial for online marketers and web designers alike if they wish to see their websites being found on search engines like google, yahoo and etcetera. Please find time to read these tips and start your way now to improving your website's statistics.






reputation management tips: http://www.moregoogletraffic.com/



I hope this helps you!

Monday, May 18, 2009

13 Amazingly Rich Resources for Web Development - CSS | Web Layout | Javascripts | Colors





Free CSS templates
http://www.opendesigns.org/

Automatic generator of backend codes

Provides over 500 layouts to use in planning and designing websites
http://www.layoutcookbook.com/

Formats and Optimizes your CSS
www.cleancss.com/

Dreamveawer color codes
www.buttonator.com/

Fast and concise JavaScript Library
http://jquery.com/

Free CSS templates downloadable in .zip format
http://www.free-css-templates.com/

Rich variety of useful photoshop tutorials on creating web layouts
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/40-useful-photoshop-web-layout-tutorials/

Open source service that creates screenshots of your web design in different browsers
www.browsershots.org/

Very good list of patterns for your web layouts
http://www.welie.com/patterns/

Another great list of CSS Resource

Monday, April 27, 2009

Your Photography Costs What!?

One of the essentials in organizing a wedding is finding a photographer, I recently had this urge to discover how come photo service cost so much... I mean from my point of view it's just a simple matter of pointing the cam and clicking, right? So what's the deal about it? Read Why Wedding Photos Can Be Expensive

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

MY MANHOLE EXPERIENCE




Two weeks ago I found myself dumped in a manhole. It started while I was closely attending someone on the rooftop in the office where I work, looking constantly upward as I was on the ground, I didn’t noticed that I was stepping on a square cement-made cover for an opening, a hole; it seems that the weight of my body was too much for the cover to bear and at the slight moment the cover fell off with me still on top of it.

As I was rushing downwards I had the presence of mind to use both hands to push against the ground so that it would somehow break the momentum of my fall, but it was kind of a second late because I found out that both my feet were already soaked on dirty, smelly, murky water. I immediately pulled myself out of that pit and head straight to the closest source of running water around and washed my sneakers and some portions of my pants. I got some minor bruises on my hands and legs and so I asked my colleague if I could go home for a while to change my clothes and be back after lunch.

It’s definitely the most embarrassing moment of my life. Being in a situation where I least expected the most would happen to me made me feel so uncomfortable, I felt all of a sudden all eyes were on me and I didn’t know what to do. “What’s this?” I asked myself, the feeling of your feet being soaked deep on the dirt of people was so humiliating, I will not forget the horrifying smell my socks bore that time.

But somehow that experience made me remember one important lesson in my life… I was reminded of a person who shared the same experience as I did, only it was a hundred folds worst than what I experienced. My embarrassment when I fell on that pit was no match for how degrading people have treated Him, the humiliation I got was not even close to what he had when his robe was being torn apart by the roman soldiers and even before he was being nailed on a log he suffered wounds, cuts and lacerations so deep he could hardly walk. I was reminded how God loved me what the Son had to go through because of that love.

Is 54:10 God assured his people that even if the mountains be shaken and the hills being removed, never will His unfailing love depart from us.

Lam 3: 32

Ps 33:18

God is love and since He lives eternally, so is His love will endure forever.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Nalusuan Island Revisit


Summer's definitely here again and what better way to drench that hot wave out of our skin than to be on an island where beauty magnifies everywhere; the water surrounding the island will surely captivate your heart and would find diving in it irresistable. The marine sanctuary will marvel you with breath-taking views of sea creatures rushing from all areas.


Be sure to taste this adventure of a lifetime! Visit Nalusuan Island and make your summer vacation experience a thing that will last a lifetime!


Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Twit-ing my way on the highway

Twitter is a global phenom that's been sweeping the internet right now.

I myself have been using its services and I too have wondered like most "What's twitter for?", but the more I follow people with it, the more I realize the power and potential it has to gather fresh, up-to-date info everywhere!

The rudiments are simple, simply register an account for free search topic that interest you and you'd be given a list of people sharing the same, then all you have to do is follow those people and immediately their 'twits' will be displayed on your on web page in twitter!

Imagine the immense amount of thoughts, info, links, reviews etc. you'd be receiving DAILY by simply following people!

It gives more excitement to the old familiar question: "What are you doing?"

This is indeed a remarkable tool for internet freaks like me; who thirsts for fresh info daily!

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Another Cebu X Barely Passed

The trying times was felt by all the exhibitors as evidently shown by a huge decline in total number of exhibitors during the show. The once overly crowded exhibition halls and galleries full of excited buyers has been diminished to what I think is its lowest... yet.

Certainly, what transpired on the show have brought up a lot of questions; will this industry thrive? I recalled attending one of the seminars about surviving in these trying times... and looking back from that point up to present have made me see the whole picture, the whole dreadful picture...

My hope still stands that our industry, something we Filipinos can take pride of will steadfastly trek this rough terrains.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Cebu X Season Once Again

Whew! Hi multiply-mates, kumusta po sa ating lahat... Dumating na po ang linggo na matagaltagal din tayong hindi magkakiakita-kita sapagkat ako ngayon kasama ng aking mga ka opisina ay nandito sa Waterfront Hotel, Lahug upang idaos ang taunang Eksibisyon ng mga furniture (don't know the tagalog ) sa Cebu. Ito po ay isang natatanging pagkakataon para maipakita sa buong mundo ang kakayahan nating mga Filipino na lumikha ng kakaiba, kaakit-akit, at bukod tanging likha ng sining.

At ako po ay buong galak na mapabilang sa grupo ng mga nag-ooraganisa para maisakatuparan ang mithiing ito.

Hiling ko po ang inyong panalangin at suporta.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!