Author: Gabriel

This one’s for you Manu

Was it four or five years ago now? I was watching the Argentinian team in the World Basketball Championships, and this particular spitfire caught my eye in an otherwise boring game. He was wiry, around 6″4 or so, had long curly hair like the European soccer stars, and was an absolute whirlwind on the court.

No one could touch him. He was jumpshooting, shooting threes, stealing the ball, running all over the place, and on one occasion on an all alone drive, he slammed the ball Jordan style, legs apart with one hand just like the Nike poster. It was astounding, and I decided to remember his name, Manu Ginobili, pronounced by the announcer as “Jeeno-beeli”.

Posted a weird permalinks error on WP forums..

Just posted on wordpress support forums.

When I create a htaccess file using options/permalinks, a message says the htaccess file is not writable, so I have to cut and paste the code, save it as a file and upload. I do that by saving it as a.htaccess as a text file, upload, rename to .htaccess, then chmod to 666. It then worked ok.

I used it for a couple of days no problem. Then a few hours ago I was clicking around the options area (looking for the spam options actually). I clicked on the Permalink page, DID NOT DO ANYTHING, tried to go out of it then it returned a “INTERNAL SERVER ERROR 500”, etc.

Everything I wanted to know about podcasts (but didn’t care to find out until now)

My client m|ph’s editors went and made their first podcasts, so I went and fixed up the blog to get it ready, and finally did what I had been dreading for awhile to do – update from Wordpress 1.2 to 1.5 while using a highly customized template.

I would normally not worry about it, except that m|ph is a popular blog, and a screw up would be noticed. Also, the template is highly customized, and so I wanted to wait until we could choose a new template first before upgrading the core files to avoid having to deal with that. Week after week of zero response followed however, and I honestly worried about the day that they’d make a podcast, knowing that 1.2 doesn’t really do well with it, and 1.5 integrates it by design.

Google Bombing Knocks Arroyo Out Of Office! – not

So the Young Radicals blog managed to get Google to display Arroyo’s website whenever someone enters the keywords “pekeng pangulo”. Whoopee.

Of course, that would be terrific if people would enter the term “pekeng pangulo” now wouldn’t it?

Come on guys. Please. Let’s go for “liar”, “cheat”, “impostor”, “defrauder” maybe. But “pekeng pangulo”? Surely, surely you can do better than that.

This just saddens me really. PGMA is still there in all her annoyingness, with her relatives, former students and loyal congressmen hanging onto her for dear life, and for a moment we had her on the run.

But now, things have settled down. The people are going about their business trying to make do with eVAT instead of remembering the Mendiola hosing and even the PGMA tapes just a few weeks ago really, and we’ve fairly moved on.

In other words, the opposition has failed. And the only thing new is a Google bombing, ranking the PGMA website as the first found when searching for the incredibly popular term: “pekeng pangulo”. Sheesh.

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Categorized as politics

Analytics Shmanalytics? – A Review of Google Analytics

It’s slow. Molasses on a winter day slow, and while that’s ok sometimes, it’s surely not up to par for anything that comes out of Google’s labs. They need to fix that up plain and simple, which is probably why today, the ability to add sites to filter isn’t available:google analytics review cannot add new website

Sony BMG’s rootkit for November Boner of the Month!

(I’m starting a new category “Boner Of The Month”, to list down those wonderfully unique incidents in the tech world that you juuust can’t put into words – without thinking of the word ‘boner’ that is. My first one should’ve been the recent Microsoft Windows update that crashed PCs and opened them up to viruses, a real humdinger, but I couldn’t Google a link to the specific one I wanted because there are just so many and they happen so often! I was also afraid I might not even find one every month, but hey, the timely one below just goes to prove when it comes to committing acts of stupidity on a regular basis, you can never underestimate your fellow man.

Use.Firefox.Or.Else.

I’m not completely sure of what to make of the Explorer Destroyer movement, apparently a (over?)zealous groups of firefox user’s attempt to get people to switch from IE, making (good?) use as well of Google’s offer of $100.00 for every referral to Firefox.

Basically you slap on some code onto your site’s index page, and a IE visitor will either see a message encouraging them to download Firefox running across the top of the page (Gentle Encouragement option), a splash page before seeing your site, encouraging them to download Firefox and a link to continue on to your site (Semi-serious option), or IE users will see a message stating that they need to download and install Firefox to view your site, no ifs or buts about it (Dead Serious option).

Gadgets Galore

Me and Digital Exchange finally got our collective acts together to have all the gadgets I’m supposed to review over the following weeks delivered in one go. Not an easy task granted time and distance (they’re in Makati and I’m in Antipolo), the reported difficulty in dealing with the stores involved, occasional deadline issues and other nitty gritty details. Again, this is part of a 9 gadget writeup-fest to promote Digital Exchange (Glorietta 3), and so far I’ve finished with the Samsung SGH-e730, the Fujifilm F-810, and the iPod Nano 2gb, which should come out next week.

So anyway, here are they are!

More On Don’t Be Evil

After having read a lot about Google for an article I did that came out last month, I pretty much know a lot of surface information about Google guys Sergei Brin and Larry Page, or at least enough to write that article.

I just read a new one here though, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1869450_1,00.html, and it helped answer some of the questions I was thinking of in relation to ads, and how it fit in on Brin and Page’s “Don’t Be Evil” slogan.