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.