Year: 2008

Summer breeze makes me feel fine, Blowin’ through the Jasmine in my mind

Tomorrow, we along with the Chief are a-gonna join the Celdran Tour I managed to wangle out of the man himself.

Then we’re going to the Hippie Flea Market at Makati Ave., hopefully to figure out a joint venture we’re trying to finesse.

The dang leprechauns made it 3-1 against my purple and golds, rendering my ‘Lakers in Six’ prediction completely inutile, proving to the world what most good friends already know – that I do not know what I’m talking about.

Further, I wanna go to the gym and / or watch The Hulk, but its payday today, and unless I can drive thru traffic the same way Ray Allen drove to the basket sans any semblance of defense whatsoever like this morning, my ass is limited to either Ever Gotesco (no way), Sta. Lucia (still too far), or SM Taytay (hmm. possible).

Continue reading Summer breeze makes me feel fine, Blowin’ through the Jasmine in my mind

Ubuntu from a newbies POV, and why I advocate FOSS

I’m writing this with assumptions on how this latest Ubuntu might appear to newbies primarily because of our long term plan to create a distribution for local internet cafes. In this respect, I’m hoping to create a one – size – fits – all (or as many as possible at least) distributable, bootable image that contains the most practical apps an icafe might need.

I’ve completely installed Ubuntu Horny Herod and here are my notes. BTW I know that’s not the name, I’m just protesting against the downright fugly name. Can’t they give it a proper, cooler name? I mean, ‘Hardy Heron‘?! I can’t imagine the general populace to get turned on by that name, really.

Anyway, here’s some thoughts:

  1. Downloading the Ubuntu Torrent was a breeze. Installation isn’t for newbies as I chose to do manual partitioning instead of the guided stuff, which confused me more than helped. I had two 40gb. partitions and I wanted to install Ubuntu on the first (NTFS) partition, while retaining access to the 2nd (FAT32) partition. Otherwise I kept the rest at default (monitor, keyboard, network settings, etc.) and that’s fairly a no brainer. Newbies won’t have a hard time installing on a fresh machine and IMO, this is just as easy or easier than Win.

Continue reading Ubuntu from a newbies POV, and why I advocate FOSS

Review of Aside Plugins

I’ve been mucking about WordPress’ meta info and such because I’m trying to show posts from specific categories to show up at specific places outside of the loop. Yes, this is one of those techie posts with code stuff and all so if you’re looking for my usual touchy feely monotonous nonsense, move along this is not for you. I will revert to normal programming immediately after I lick this problem.

Anyway, am writing here my thoughts on the 3 plugins that I tried for this purpose. Am doing so to remember them and possibly help others save time. Who knows, I might actually get the energy to write my own plug in after all this mucking about. I imagine a lot of people would appreciate it, and besides there’s thankfully no need for javascript, just php extracting from mysql in a specific way. The usual stuff.

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What I Learned From My Bosses (and other sources) Part 1

When you run your own biz, you hang on to the core reasons why you decided to go off on your own as well as remember every little thing you learned from your superiors. I dunno if I’ll get it all down on this post, but today I decided to try. Here goes.

My Scottish Boss: “Never stop asking (your proposal’s status) until you hear a ‘no’“, is something I still tell myself today. Until I hear a flat – out NO, then the game’s still on, and you work like a dog to get it approved. Makes beautiful sense.

Another was when he’d either catch me losing focus when chasing a deal or concentrate too much on a non – profit goal, he’d sarcastically (but jokingly, mind you), say “Oh it’s ok we have more than enough money!“. Applicable almost to all things I do. Whenever I remember that, it puts my thinking right straight and center almost immediately.

Continue reading What I Learned From My Bosses (and other sources) Part 1

Ninjians – A Review of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The most I got out of watching Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Cystal Skull was when, in a scene where they exit a cave and indians / aztecs / natives / whatever popped out from the ceiling and walls and whatnot, it prompted me to think that they were like Ninjas.

Then at about the time it turns out there were hundreds of them I realized what would be a cool way to call them – Ninjians.

And I laughed at myself, which was inopportune, because who laughs when the heroes are being chased by Ninjians, right? Then I laughed some more, because I used it in a sentence. I’m laughing right now, actually. Hahahahaha!

Continue reading Ninjians – A Review of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

XML Feed Finally Validating

I just fixed one of the most confounding problems I’d ever come across on WordPress, so I’m sharing how I did it because I definitely couldn’t find the solution after weeks of trying.

See I was trying to get the valid XML feed for a particular Tag or Category from this blog, a process I’ve instigated on PLUG’s mailing list, so that the PLUG website can aggregate feeds tagged as ‘plug’ or ‘open source’ or ‘foss’ voluntarily submitted by its (currently 130+ strong) membership.

The problem was when I try to get the feed URL, for example:

http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed

I get this error:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed
Line Number 2, Column 1:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
^

Continue reading XML Feed Finally Validating