December, 2006

General — 2 Comments
29
Dec 06

My 2006 Recap

Let’s start with my work. I’ve had 2 jobs this year. The first, with an outsourcing company working on a high traffic Drupal site. I was lucky to have nice bosses. I left the company last September due to differing work perspective. The second, I worked on creating a SEO tool full time at home. I was even luckier this time with a great boss.

2006 is also that year that I earn more from my blog related activities than from work. Almost half of it generated here and the rest from some spammy blogs I setup from last year and earlier this year.

Sideblog is more popular today than last year and it grown from a simple asides to a complex widget even I have a hard time figuring out what to do with it. More user-requested features still to come. Just waiting for the next major release of WP.

I still haven’t reach my goal when I started blogging. To be able to write better. Let’s see next year.

Asides — No Comments
29
Dec 06

Technologically Crippled

I feel crippled for the past 2 days since 7.1 magnitude quake hit Taiwan. My internet is too slow. I’d be luck if this post gets posted.

General — 1 Comment
23
Dec 06

Ubuntu Lockups Prevented

I tried all kernels and the 2.6.17-10-386 worked. Digging in the ubuntu forum, I found that SMP kernels (i686: generic and server) causes some problems with some machine. I can make my laptop boot with i686 kernels using acpi=off in the boot parameter, problem is that it refuses to shutdown.

With the 386 kernel, there’s no need for noapic, nolapic nor acpi=off in the boot parameters. It just worked. I don’t know the impact of using a 386 kernel on a SMP capable machine but I’ll stick with it for now. As long as it doesn’t stop me from doing my job, I’m alright with it.

General — 3 Comments
22
Dec 06

Artsd Overloading CPU in Xubuntu

When my laptop hard drive died a week ago, I installed the 6.10 relaease Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu because Ubuntu locks up after the login process. It freezes right before the Ubuntu sound/chime end.

Xubuntu suppose to be leaner than the other Ubuntu variants. But it feel sluggish on my presario laptop especially when alt-tab switching between applications. Running top shows it consume as much memory as the regular Ubuntu. I’m still good with that.

The decision to reinstall Ubuntu came when the frequency of artsd overloading the CPU increased. Just today I had to restart the laptop 3 times because artsd use 99% of CPU resources making it generate more heat than the usual. I already lost a hard drive and I don’t plan to change processors anytime soon.

General / Programming — 1 Comment
19
Dec 06

The Illustration News Portal

I just would like to thank Darren of thelittlechimpsociety.com/The Illustration News Portal for giving me the heads up. I helped Darren customize his version of Sideblog he is currently using on his site. I actually don’t know how he did it but I think he got it to work like he wanted.

Darren emailed me directly about the plugin. He explained what he wanted the plugin to do so well that I didn’t think twice helping him on one specific feature. If only people can explain clearly what’s their problem with the plugin, I could take some time of from work and fix the plugin. A couple of visitors even gave me administrator account on their blog just to the damn plugin work.

Asides — 2 Comments
18
Dec 06

I’m TIME’s Person of the Year

Wow. Certainly feels good to TIME Magazine’s person of the year. Will you find my picture on the frontpage anytime soon? Probably not, I share this honor all you bloggers.

General — 1 Comment
15
Dec 06

Hard Drive Failure

My laptop’s hard disk died abruptly yesterday morning. I don’t what to blame of its demise as there was three actions I did before that. First, I upgraded my Ubuntu kernel image as suggested by the Update Manager. Before that, I’ve clicked on an ad which made firefox complain. Due to my stupidity, I didn’t read the message. And lastly before that, Ubuntu ran fsck at boot.

While trying to bring the hard drive back to life, I was thinking whether the laptop was not as sturdy as I thought it was. But a friend suggested it was due to heavy usage. For 2 short years of its life, it carried out its task with the rest of the laptop’s component averaging 2 on and off a day.

My laptop is my work machine. Why do I have to turn it on and off always? Well, electricity cost on this side of the planet takes a huge slice of our income so it’s only proper to turn appliances off when not in use.

I was actually worried about the health of the hard drive a few months back. Good thing I moved all pictures and music files to an external drive. Gosh I can’t begin to think losing everything. I might get another external drive to backup the other external drive just in case or have it backup in DVDs.

I’m in the process of setting up my programming environment while writing this post. I can’t believe the speed of my DSL today. I’ve been downloading files from APT repositories since last night and I’m no closer to getting done. I’m downloading at dial-up speed.

General / SEO — No Comments
15
Dec 06

Google will Sell Domain Names

Ready to make that SEO theory about getting preferential treatment in Google when you use them to register your domain name? Here’s your ammo.

Google’s service will charge a $10 annual fee and only handle addresses ending in four suffixes — “.com,” “.net,” “.biz” and “.info.” There are more than 250 other suffixes in the Internet’s master directories.

Web sites that register their domains through Google will be automatically set up to work with several other company products, including e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging. The configuration won’t prevent the Web sites from using services offered by Google rivals…

via Yahoo News

General — No Comments
13
Dec 06

Pacquiao-Barrera Fights On March 11

The WBC has reserved March 11 as the date for Marco Antonio Barrera to defend his title against our very own Manny Pacquiao.

THE MEXICO-BASED World Boxing Council (WBC) has directed the camps of Filipino superstar Manny Pacquiao and Mexican hero Marco Antonio Barrera to start negotiations for the mandatory defense of Barrera’s super featherweight title.

Barrera, in an on-line poll, is considered by majority of boxing fans as the most worthy opponent for Pacquiao. The Mexican also hopes to avenge his earlier loss at the hands of the Filipino in 2003.

Via INQ7.net

General — 1 Comment
6
Dec 06

Photo Albums and Zooomr SmartSets

100_2615

When I decided to use Zooomr as my primary online photo sharing site, I was not concerned about its other features other than it gives me unlimited storage, unlimited photo to display and has higher upload limit than Flickr.

It was only after I’ve upload more pictures that I realize the need to organize them. Zooomr has SmartSets which is similar to Flickr’s Photostream that serves as photo albums. My problem was I couldn’t figure out how to create one and I just can’t seem to find any help files on the the Zooomr site.

I don’t know why I didn’t get it the last time or why didn’t I googled the stuff. Anyway, there’s a good tutorial on creating a Zooomr SmartSet over at the Me Blog.

← Older Entries