noel alanguilan

there is something to be said about waking up to the sound of waves. unfortunately i live somewhere not exactly in the center of manila but a good number of kilometers from manila bay. this only meant that it rained terribly hard last night (and i slept through all the mayhem) which eventually immersed the street under six to seven inches of murky, muddy water. the vehicles that were trying to traverse the submerged street was causing the waves hence the “sleeping beside the beach” sound effects. i’m not exactly a fan of surreal morning wake up calls.

they were already trying to clear up the drainage for the past couple of days. apparently it isn’t having much of an impact. they have to do more.

maybe manila is sinking. i’ll scream ‘titanic!‘ whenever flood waters reach the 6-inch mark. 

i’ve been wanting to post these photos for a while now. this was the time when tito pacing, rosie and randy came with us when we visited san pablo city. we took them to a short trek to lake pandin — one of the seven lakes in the city proper. we also had a ride on a large bamboo raft — my first in this lake. all in all, i think tito pacing and the others enjoyed themselves.

robin took a swim after the ride but with a life vest.

this post is an experiment in using a wordpress photo gallery plugin.

trek to lake pandin

it was drizzling when we started the trek to lake pandin.

we have arrived

we have arrived

yambo

lake yambo is just beyond that 'v' at the far end of the lake. pandin and yambo are often called the twin lakes.

horsie

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing

randy

robin wants to swim

robin wants to swim and we didn't allow him to hence that face. rosie and cherry is at the back

bamboo rafts

we rode the bamboo rafts to the the far end of the lake.

fiddling with the camera

tito pacing on the raft on the lake fiddling with his camera.

other visitors

there were other visitors too

randy and the pose

nearing sunset

nearing sunset and about to take our trek back.

ducks

ducks. mates i guess

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this is a follow up post to securing your gmail.

google has made it easier for you to permanently use https when you access your gmail account. that’s from login and logout and everything in between. in gmail, click on your “settings” located on the upper right hand of the browser screen. this will bring you to the general settings of your gmail account. scroll down to the bottom and you will see “browser connection“. click on the “always use https” and then click on “save changes“.

and you’re done. easy.

please understand that doing this will make your gmail session a tiny bit slower because of all the encryption/decryption that’s going on between your browser and google mail. the upside is you secure your gmail account.

this is my eight-year old desktop computer. overclocked, i used to use it a lot back when electricity was less expensive. the last time i turned it on was october/november 2007. a need for another computer came up and i decided to take it out of storage, disassemble and clean it up component by component and put it all neatly back together. that chore took about three days — well, it has plenty of components .

it refused to boot when i finally turned it on. grrr. the fans were running, the cdroms and hard drives were doing their thing but nothing’s coming out of the screen. there were no error beep(s). heck it didn’t beep at all. this is not good.

i think the motherboard has gone to heaven.

dang. i just can’t leave it at that and relegate the whole computer to being an oversized doorstop. i don’t want to throw it out and add more pollutants to the planet. i don’t believe that a computer, even one that’s two or three generations old, would be completely useless if just one of its components dies. the rest of the components are still in pretty good shape — only the mobo is kaput. the truth is, its really impractical to replace the motherboard with a completely new and up to date one simply because — aside from getting a new mobo — i’d have to get a new cpu and memory modules to match. ugh. my pockets are not exactly overflowing with money here. the practical (and cheaper) choice would be to get a motherboard that supports the current cpu and memory that i have. the only hurdle is where to get a brand new, old motherboard. worse case is i have scoure tipidpc for a second hand mobo.

i’ve always thought that old technology can still be useful. i have  a pentium 3 300mhz running a linux firewall and a pentium 4 1.6ghz running a linux file server. this one is no different, it can be my son’s desktop for his studies (and games of course) or another linux file server.

there exist a tool that can “automaticaly steal ids of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into google mail accounts” and it will be released to the public in a few weeks. the tool was presented in the recent hackers’ conference in las vegas called defcon. click on the link above if you want more technical details.

essentially what the tool does is to allow a hacker (unsuspecting or otherwise) to get into your gmail account and do what s/he pleases — like change the password. scary stuff.

the solution is simple enough — encrypt your entire gmail session and not just the login portion. to do that both the server (google mail) and the client (your browser) have to talk to each other via ssl (secure sockets layer) all the time. fortunately, google was informed of the vulnerability about a year ago so they took steps to implement ssl on their side of the fence. browsers has ssl-support built in.

all you have to is to add an “s” to the “http” portion of the google mail address making it look like “https” (without the quotes of course) and you’re done. preferably, you should do this at the start of your gmail session when you log in.

i just got word that the wordcamp programme is up as well as the schedule for the talks which you can sign up for online. they have more sponsors up (thank you) so i updated my list — i might win something. i’d like a free black wordcamp shirt (hint hint). i already signed up for a couple of sessions and i hope to get my pass within the week.

it would be good to be on the lasallian grounds again.

blue will do if there isn’t any black (hint hint).

its been A terribly frustrating day. i’ve seen enough of “error establishing a database connection” to last me until the next version.

i was just trying to post something on one blog and experimenting on another and i keep getting this message. i have several wordpress blogs in different subdomains under alanguilan.com. one setup shouldn’t affect another but in this case its site wide — i get the same message on all the blogs at the same time. once for a few minutes things go well and i can access the sites but it goes south again soon after.

when i get an opportunity to check the sql databases with phpmyadmin the databases for each blog checks out fine. so my guess is its the main mysql database that’s getting messed up. there are utilities to repair the database and several backups of the thing via yahoo’s control panel so i’m not terribly worried. its just inconvenient for the moment.

so far the database seems stable and i haven’t seen the error message for an hour now. i hope it stays that way.

i created a test blog earlier and noticed that yahoo now installs version 2.3.3 of wordpress. previously they used version 2.0.2 as their default wordpress install. or was it 2.0.3? i don’t remember.

well, wordpress is currently in version 2.6. yahoo is still a little late but its better than nothing, yes? its certainly better than staying stuck at 2.0.2.

update: 2008.08.09: i don’t think that wp-cache works with wordpress 2.3.3 — i got database connection errors all over the place. heck, i couldn’t get it to run on 2.5.1. wp super cache might work but the folks at yahoo doesn’t let the users have access to .htaccess so that plug-in wouldn’t work with wordpress sites on yahoo webhosting. disabling the test blog and wp-cache solved the database connection problems. i’m going to try again later.

update: 2008.08.09 part 2: i took out the test blog but the database connection problems remain. so maybe the cause was not wp-cache after all but i do maintain that version 2 of wp-cache doesn’t work with wordpress 2.5.1 and newer under yahoo webhosting. i tested that fact, at least. maybe something’s up with yahoo.

i have been getting a number of comment spam in one of the wordpress-powered sites i manage. i say “wordpress-powered” because its not exactly used as a blog and its not entirely a cms either. well, not yet anyway.

the “blog posts” are actually the upcoming events of the organization. comments and trackbacks are open so that people can ask questions about the event and maybe refer the event to their friends by blogging about it. unfortunately, the spam comes in via the posts that were made several months or even years ago. i have askimet installed and it catches the spam 99% of the time (the rest is caught in the moderation queue) and i really shouldn’t be all worked up about it but it still nags me a bit. but that’s just me. i just like to close doors that are unnecessarily open.

i’d like to suggest a plug-in or a feature incorporated in one of the versions of wordpress in the coming decade is a way to turn comments and/or trackbacks (pings) off or on en masse — check or uncheck boxes and click on “apply”. it may also be possible to have an option to edit a comment then and there.

i was looking over the database structure and it seems that the wp_posts table is the one to be modified, changing the contents of at most two fields — comment_status and ping_status — from “open” to “closed” or vise versa. i am out of practice with my sql but it seems easy enough to change these fields 10 to 20 rows at a time using a single update statement. maybe i could write a plug-in but i’m not good at php. yet.

table wp_posts
– comment_status: open/closed: varchar(20)
– ping_status: open/closed: varchar(20)

references:
– id: bigint(20)
– post_type: post/page/attachment: varchar(20)
– post_date: datetime

my bookmarks are a mess. at some point years ago i tried organizing them neatly into folders and subfolders and subfolders but given some time and a couple of hundred web pages later my bookmarks have transformed into an even bigger organized mess. its like leaving cheese in the fridge for five and a half months — it evolves and takes on a life of its own. time to reorganize again.

sort of.

version 3.0.x of firefox added tags to their bookmarks which i started playing with for a couple of hours now. its really not new — del.icio.us has been at it for some time now but in this version the tags and the bookmarks are in your computer not on the internet. what i like about tags is that you are able to use your own words to associate with the bookmarks that you save. in a sense, its not really sorting things in an ordered — ascending/decending/numbered/alphabetical — manner but organizing things so that my brain (what’s left of it) can easily access it via word association.

now the problem that i face is to add tags to the hundreds of bookmarks that i already have. that will take some time, i’m sure, but there is a way to add a tag or two to several bookmarks at once. tagging for multiple bookmarks is an add-on to firefox which performs exactly this. a word of warning though, as of this writing, the add-on is still marked as experimental so it may be buggy. so far it hasn’t given me any problems.

links:
Mozilla’s bookmark tags
tagging for multiple bookmarks