Me and the Computer

Ugh. 2008 has been bad for me. I know it has been bad for a lot of people because of the financial crisis and all that. But it has also been bad for me personally. I never had a worst year in my life like 2008. And now 2009 has begun. Thank God. Like every year a lot of psychics and Feing Shui expert are saying it will be the year of the Ox. And it's going to be bad for people born on certain years. But I don't subscribe to that. When a year begins it will neither be good or bad. It depends on our behavior and the choices we make throughout the year. If we slack off and constantly make poor decisions as the year progresses then it's going to be a bad year. But if we are constantly industrious and wise, it will turn out to be a good year. So here is to you all making good decisions and working hard this 2009. Happy New Year!

One of the hottest topic in 2009 is Cloud Computing . What it essentially means is running an application that is hosted somewhere on the internet. Yep it basically SaaS (Software as a Service) renamed. I have a notion that they renamed it to Cloud Computing to put less emphasis that you are going to rent the software and more on how the system would operate. But anyway I think Cloud Computing would be good for companies to adopt. One of the advantages is that you don't have to maintain a large IT department since your software applications are hosted somewhere else. And also somebody else is maintaining it for you. And with Broadband becoming the standard internet connection, it is certainly feasible. However, Cloud Computing does present new sets of challenges. If you're internet connection is down, you won't be able to access your software. Right now I'm pretty annoyed with my ISP (Internet Service Provider). Because I'm getting a request timeout ev...

I used to know the top ten most popular songs in Metro Manila. I used to watch a lot of TV. But now I hardly take a peek. But that does not mean I don't listen to music or I don't watch TV Shows. The difference really is I'm doing everything over the internet. I wonder how long traditional broadcast will last. Maybe 5 to 10 more years and then after that everything will be broadcast using the internet Nothing Else Matters And Christma... - Metallica More at MP3-Codes.com

I wonder what Google is going to do about this. Go to news.google.com. Then type in the keywords "making money online". You would come across several links from PWO France. But when you come to the site you wont find a news organization but a directory for advertisements. I have always liked Google News because it frees me from having to remember news website. Unfortunately, someone seem to have manage to exploit it.

I stated earlier that there are a lot of possibilities on the Internet. Here are the four things you can do: 1. Provide a service - Do web design. Be a freelance programmer. Do transcription. Be a virtual tutor. Be a remote help desk. 2. Sell a Product - Sell on Ebay. Sell using your own website/blog. Post your product through classified ads. 3. Be an Affiliate Marketer - Chitika, Amazon Associates, and Commission Junction are some of the networks you can join. 4. Start a New Kind of Business that no one has ever done before - There used to be no online bookstore like Amazon. Call centers did not exist. There were no online auction sites like Ebay. Maybe you have an idea that could start a new kind of business. Related Link: The World is Yours

If you were ever a fan of Scarface, the 1983 film starring Al Pacino, you would remember the last scene. Tony was shot on the back by an assassin. He falls down from the balcony into a small pool in the lobby below. He floated face down in the water. Beside him a statue was shown carrying the inscription "The World is Yours". I'm sure most of you find that humorous inspite of the tragic ending. But why did I mention it? Today I was thinking about eCommerce and I can't help but be amazed at the possibilities available to us today. The world is truly ours but only if we got the imagination to seize it. I'm talking about how any individual can be in their pajamas in the comfort of their bedroom and yet be able to sell a product or a service to practically anyone anywhere in the world. All you need really is just a computer and an internet connection and then you are good to go. It is simply amazing especially if you can remember back in the early 1990...

A few months ago I tried to apply for a job but I am not very familiar with the company's place. All my life I have lived here in Metro Manila and yet I can still get lost. Good thing there are now online maps of Metro Manila. Here are some of the maps that you can use : 1. www.kabeet.com 2. or you can try Google Maps or Google Earth Free Version . In the past these two map programs were only useful if you are looking up places in the US. But recently they have also become pretty accurate guide for Metro Manila.

To be honest I did not stick for long to Google Chrome when it was first released. Some of the things that turned me off about it are: 1. Flash Player Crashes 2. It steathly installed Google Update service and without asking permission (similar to what malwares would do). 3. It promised that it won't crash our PC when a Tab hangs but it frequently did. Today it Google Chrome just graduated from beta stage and I decided to give it another try. And so far so good. 1. It now plays online videos beautifully 2. Doesn't eat too much memory even though I launched many tabs (which is a problem common with Firefox) 3. Renders web page pretty fast. 4. No frequent crashes so far. One thing is still miss though are plugins, no built in spell checker, and dictionary. For me spell checking and a dictionary plugin is very important. Especially when you are writing an email or blogging. But it is just at version 1.0 so hopefully they will add these things in their future releases. An...

Aside from looking cryptic, it takes some experimentation to get the correct regular expression you need for a job. This is the kind of tasks that a testing tool would be of great help. Luckily there are a lot of tools available on the web. Here is one that I use: http://www.quanetic.com/regex.php

As much as I want to discourage anyone from using torrent servers, there are legitimate companies who uses it to distribute their files, like the publisher for the current MMORPG I'm playing, Cabal. For that I would recommend Halite . It's an opensource torrent client. Again the beauty of opensource software is that you can inspect the code to check if for any security risk.

Windows XP comes with a built in Zip program. But what if you need to handle RAR, TAR, and other compression algorithms. Fortunately, there is a powerful opensource archiving program at http://peazip.sourceforge.net/ I personally use this program and it's completely free.

One of the things you can do to keep your PC secure is to use a software firewall. You could download a free firewall with a built in antivirus software from Comodo . What it does is allow you to prevent unauthorized network traffic from going in and out of your PC. Personally this is how I use Comodo, I like to leave it at Proactive mode. What it does is popup a prompt whenever a program or service tries to run on my PC. So if ever I visit a malicious website and it tries to slip in a trojan, a message would pop telling me that the website is trying to write a program to a particular directory in my hard disk. This enables me to inspect and research whether the software it is trying to write is legal or not before I allow or block it.

I usually have no problem dealing with trojans and malwares but this one proved to be the hardest one yet. Because it operates in ways we don't expect. Usually trojans operate within your PC but what if the exploit is hosted somewhere else on the web. Woah! This took a week. Thanks to the people who commented on this blog. I could not figure out this solution without all of you who bounced your ideas here.   Anyway, lets get rid of it . 1. In the Windows menu go to Start>Run 2. Type cmd 3. This will fire up the command window 4. Type ipconfig /all 5. This will display the actual configuration of your LAN card. Pay particular attention to the DNS entry. In my PC I got three entries: 0.255.122.15 85.255.112.156 1.2.3.4 Two of these entries are not correctly formed while 85.255.112.156 is the DNS address of the exploiter. A proper DNS entry given by your ISP should look something like - 58.69.254.143 6. Type ipconfig /release 7. Then ty...

Last time we talked about blocking popups from popup.adv.net and wtn5.goole.ws . Thankfully Firefox has already solved this problem. Update your browser to 3.0.4 version to make it go away. But in case another malware is irritating you. You can use the NoScript add on for Firefox. To Install: 1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox 2. Right now NoScript is the first add on you will find there. 3. Simply click on "Add to Firefox" button to install. 4. In case you did not find it, simply do a search for "NoScript". 5 . After installing it you will need to restart your browser. What this Add on does is to strictly block Javascript, Flash, Java, and other plugin on all web sites. You will have to right click on the NoScript bar to find several options to unblock the site you are viewing. You can find more information from NoScript's official website. However I don't recommend this solution because - you may have blocked the adware doe...

Hello everyone. I have finally found a way to stop this adware/malware without using any third party browser add on. You can find the article I wrote here -> The Final Solution . Please be sure to read it so you can finally rid yourself of this problem. Read also the comments on this post where others have generously shared their solutions. - Temujin There is something terrible happening on the web today and it has gotten more rampant this week. Unfortunately Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple, and Adobe has no permanent solution for it at the moment. If you visited several legitimate website and an ad from popup.adv.net and wtn5.goole.ws keeps popping up when you click on a link or image, then you have been a victim of " Clickjacking ". No anti-adware or malware program can remove this strain because it appears that it isn't actually in your computer. In fact, I have tried using a newly formatted computer and still this illegal advertisements keep poppi...

A week ago this blog mysteriously disappeared along with the entries I made here for the past several months. I did not know if I accidentally deleted it or what. I reported it but until now Blogger has not replied. Somehow this make me think twice about hosting my blog here. But it is a rare case since my other blogs are okay. Anyway, there is not much to do but to begin again and hope for the best. Related Link: How to Backup your Blogspot Blog

The newer installation files of PHP for Apache in Windows throws an error. Cannot Load phpapache2.dll To solve this problem 1. Go to your Apache installation directory 2. then go to the conf subdirectory 3. Look for httpd.conf and open it with notepad. 4. Replace LoadModule php5_module "c:\php5\php5apache2.dll" with LoadModule php5_module "c:\php5\php5apache2_2.dll" instead. Then restart Apache. Take note that my PHP installation directory maybe different with yours. My PHP installation in this case is C:\php5. Make sure to replace this with your own installation folder location.

Update September 2009 :   (In Adobe Flex SDK 3.3 and older, there is a difference between mx.rpc.remoting.RemoteObject and mx.rpc.remoting.mxml.RemoteObject .  The first one does not have an endpoint parameter that is why you can't dynamically specify the endpoint using Actionscript. That is why I use mx.rpc.remoting.mxml.RemoteObject . But as of Adobe Flex SDK 3.4, you can now use endpoint parameter with mx.rpc.remoting.RemoteObject. ) This is the sample code I use to call a Remote Object in Actionscript rather than the usual Adobe Flex MXML tag. There are some advantages to doing your code this way. Like you can specify the endpoint dynamically. You will need this import statements. import mx.events.CloseEvent; import mx.collections.ArrayCollection; import mx.utils.ArrayUtil; import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent; import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent; import mx.rpc.remoting.mxml.RemoteObject; var clientrecs:ArrayCollection; ... I use a one fault handler for...

Something I modeled in Blender 3D. Sorry. No texture yet.

Java's original intent was to allow developers to write programs and it is supposed to run in any OS without the need to change your code. Hence, it's slogan "Write Once Run Anywhere" . Unfortunately, Java was not really able to fulfill this promise. It is widely known that the different JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) are incompatible with each other. This is what Adobe AIR promises to solve. And so far if you run Adobe AIR applications like Klok, you will find that it will run exactly the same whether you are using Windows or Linux. I cannot however answer with regards to Mac. Because right now it appears that Apple, Inc. is not very fond of Adobe, Inc.

This error occurs when we exceed the script execution time allocated in the php.ini file. One solution to this is: 1. Open the php.ini file with in notepad.  The php.ini file is usually located in your PHP installation directory. 2. look for these lines max_execution_time = 60     ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds max_input_time = 60    ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data memory_limit = 32M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB) 3. Set the max_execution_time to a higher number, say, 180 which is equivalent to 3 minutes. 4. Restart your Apache then try your script again. If the error still occurs it means you need to set the execution time to a higher number. Otherwise, it means you need to optimize your script so and make it run faster.