Pinoy under the sun

Every Pinoy has a right for a better governance

ovrombaoa — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:18:59 +0000

Hold on folks, it’s election season again in the Philippines! Can we expect something new this time? I guess not, look, most of those seeking office, if not re-electionists were sons, daughters, spouses, nieces, and nephews, of those traditional politicians. Why are they all clamoring for these positions, I’m asking this question because of the very small salary that those positions offer. I’ve read from a newspaper that the salary for a senator is just 35, 000. How come they all wanted that position with just a little pay? The estimated cost of running as a senator was pegged at around 2 million. Hmmnnn, really, something fishy is going on here.
They all wanted those government positions not because of the salary (obviously), not because they wanted to serve the people (only few can I think with such philosophy), but because of the PERKS that they all get for it. The country wide development fund or commonly known as the pork barrel, yes I think that’s the main reason, I’ve heard once that the pork barrel of senators is almost 200 million! Where on earth do they put or spend all that (if not saved in their own accounts)? That’s lots and lots of money if used for a real country development, their constituents probably are enjoying better life now, no street children and everyone can go to school. There should be no defective infrastructures (road should not only be repaired when election period is near), the poor families can at least have three satisfying meal a day, and even no stinking sewers is left unattended.
Is that what they meant when they say, “to serve the people”? I guess not, even their 35, 000 salary, that goes for nothing, we see on television many empty chairs during sessions, they can’t even attend sessions, so why should they be paid with taxpayers’ money. It’s really proper to deduct from their salaries the time that they are absent. They are lawmakers right, but they all end up investigating this, investigating that, and that and oh I don’t know. Isn’t that the work of the judicial branch of our government? They should be included in that branch, or even so, we should abolish the judiciary because our lawmakers are “good”, they can act as the legislative body and the judicial body as well. Maybe we can save some money by doing that, right ?
Election, how many are really true to their promise to serve and not just try pocketing people’s money? With this election, we will again spend millions of taxpayers’ money to put into authority some wolves dressed in a sheep’s coat . In the end, we, the people are always on the losing end.

Why Philippines is still among the 3rd World Countries

ovrombaoa — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 04:19:42 +0000

In the past decades, the Philippines had seen many different leaders. They have all pledged to the people one thing, to uplift everyone’s life and take the country out of the hole of poverty. Empty promises, 100% promise, but that’s what all there is, promises. Their sons, daughters, nephews, nieces and grandchildren succeeded them as leaders, and their promise? To continue their ancestors legacy, well, let us put it this way, the old ones have done little or nothing at all, so what legacy are there for them to continue? The legacy of empty promises, whew! Their families just continue to become rich; they acquire more and more properties in their hometowns. Most hometowns ended up being named after their families, people say it is a gratitude to a former great leader, well for me, it is because these families end up owning half of the whole hometowns, tsk, tsk, tsk.
It is a sad fact, that here in the Philippines like in most part of the world, the gap between the rich families and the poor and middle classes continue to widen. Well, they say that it is because the lower classes exert a little effort to uplift their lives. Believe me, they exerted everything within their arsenal, only, they have nothing to compliment that effort. They don’t have the financial power. In this country where money is a driving force, all wit is nothing, it will only go down the drain.
Let us not blame everything to our ‘leaders’; we the people have a share in this problem. We tend to listen to leaders making promises; we tend to keep our hopes high that these leaders will fulfill their promises, well in fact, it shouldn’t be that way. We should also struggle more; we need to work to prove that we really deserve more. People, us, should have learned that a long time ago. Sharpen our skills, mind and body, in that way we can be more competitive, if we do that, we will feel that the workforce really has a need for us, we will never be a pushover type of race. In the not so distant past, Filipinos were the best English speaking Asian country; no other Asian country can contend that, not openly perhaps. But what they did, is that they invest in themselves, they invest in their people, and they invest more in Science and Engineering not in Law. Up to now, we are the better English speaking Malay race, but when it comes to real talent, they surpass us miles and miles away! India to this day has the best Information Technology workforce, although they struggle like us before, they can now cope up with the richer world. During the 1997 Asian crisis, every Asian country was hit, and it was almost impossible to recover. In the Philippines, every Filipino was worried; we were all worried that this financial turmoil will only make the lives of the poor more miserable. Closures of companies were expected, sooner. Negative energy hovers over the whole country. This was not true in our neighboring countries, although they too were not prepared for such crisis, they calmly device some master plans to offset its huge impact. Take Thailand for example, before the crisis, our currency has a higher value than the Thai Baht, yet, in an unexplainable circumstance, they took this crisis as a challenge, they managed to maintain the value of their money, in the end, their money has a higher value than ours today. The Koreans (South Korea), when people learned that their government was in the brink of bankruptcy donated some of their family gold to their government for a fresh start. That is why they continue to reap the benefits; their economy is still in the upswing.
The Filipinos can endure any hardships; we have proven it and still showing that we can. It’s a good attitude, but it doesn’t mean that we always have to endure. We can make a difference in our lives if we can only put our acts together. We don’t have to rely heavily on our government. “The government is most corrupt when there are too many laws – J.P. Rizal”, our country has still a chance, that is if we, the people, can act as one now. Stop cursing, the government, stop cursing one another, if the government can not give a concrete way to prosperity that people can follow, then let the people set that way so the government can follow. Stop those street rallies, stop complaining to what this government has to offer, we will always be in the losing end plus anger without them hearing us, that’s double lose for each and everyone of us. Let’s endure the situation a little more, if we really are enduring people, we shall be more productive if we are working. We are good workers, so let us prove it and sooner we will reap that fruit of our labor, if not during our lifetime, at least we can assure our children of a prosperous country.

Philippines is now a member of Paypal!

ovrombaoa — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:27:55 +0000

yes folks, we can now signup to become a member of paypal, provided you have a credit card ok, Visa, AmericanExpress, Discovery, and Mastercard of course, though we can only send money for the meantime. I’m sure, we will soon be able to use paypal to accept payments also. So, don’t waste time and go on, sign up now!

Online gaming and its future in the Philippines

ovrombaoa — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 06:20:49 +0000

Hello there! Whew! it’s been a busy nights and days for me for the past couple of months, that is why i wasn’t able to post some new topics here, well sorry and i hope you guys didn’t get tired visiting my site for fresh blogs, anyway, i’m back! And my topic for today deals primarily on online games proliferating the entire Pinoy country!

yes, just like in other countries, online games have caught the attention not only of the young generation but also of those who belong to the atari and game-n-watch ‘civilization’. here is a list of games that pinoys love playing:

from e-Games:
     O2JAM
     Battleposition
     RAN Online

from netGames:
     Khan
     Khan Tugrik
     Pangya
     FlyFF

from MU:
     mobius
     Gunbound
     rakion

from levelupgames:
     Ragnarok
     Rose Online
     Novus Elite Squad
     Free Style
     OZ World
     RF Online
and a lot more! this list also includes the all time favorites:

    World of Warcraft
    Red Alert
    Counter Strike 2
    Diablo 2
    Starcraft
    Age of Empires
    NBA live XX

This only shows how pinoys love online games now, and the proliferation of internet cafes in every corner, malls, boutiques, and eateries, only shows that they are here to stay. i myself love playing these games, they gave me relaxation after lots of time spent programming in front of my pc in the office, they offer great satisfaction like a freshly brewed coffee after a days work.

well, that’s all, how about you guys, what are the online games in your country where kids and kids-at-heart go over gaga?

How to install Windows in a New Computer from Scratch

ovrombaoa — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 05:21:27 +0000

Hi everyone, it's been quite a while since my last post here, well I'm back and this time I'll give you details on how to install Windows Operating system in a new computer, not because there is no topic of this kind in the www, this is my way of giving in to the request of one of my friends. Actually, when he first asked me about this, I told him to surf the net, because there's a lot of online resources on this one, but he insisted that I make one and post it here, I think one of his reasons (though he didn't tell me) is because he wants to have a chance to criticize me, he he he, well ok, I'm up for the challenge. Installing a new Windows operating system is not that complicated actually, it's even easier if what you are going to install is the Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Ok then, let's begin. Let's say you have just finished assembling your new CPU (because here in the Philippines, we like clone CPU's, since we get the chance to select what we want to be installed in our hardware direct from suppliers), you have set up you computer in your table, and now ready to install your newly bought genuine Windows XP (retail or OEM version – stop piracy please), you powered on your computer, and now your ready to begin.

Steps in installation:

Plug your CPU (and monitor), in the first display, press the DELETE button on your keyboard to enter the BIOS setup of your CPU. In the BIOS setup, make sure that your hardisk was detected (if you have more than one hardisk, they should have been detected automatically for you).

Using the arrow keys on your keyboard (Left & Right keys), go to the BOOT menu, here, make sure that the first boot is your CD-ROM drive or your USB CD-ROM (new BIOSes today supports booting from an external device such as USB devices).

Insert your Windows 2K/XP CD installer in your CD-ROM, exit and save your changes for your BIOS. Allow your system to restart.

Upon restarting, your computer will detect whether there is a bootable disk or CD in your CD-ROM (IDE or USB). If it does found one, it will prompt you to “Press any key to boot from CD”. Press any key.

And the next that you will do is to wait while the system loads the necessary files to be used during installation until some questions appear on the screen that will ask you before proceeding.

On the next few screens, you have to make choices, the keys to be pressed for a certain selection is labeled below the screen, so pay attention to it (e.g. For accepting agreement you need to press F8).

During the installation, you will also be asked if you want to create partitions (if you haven't made one yet). Using Windows XP/2K installer, you can only make NTFS partitions, but if you already have an existing FAT32 partitions, you can leave them as is.

After making partitions, you are now ready to install your operating system, press the key that will install your OS (it is the Enter key), the installer will start installation by formatting your hardisk. Now all you have to do is to wait while the system installs. After installation, the system will reboot.

During the reboot process, you have the option to enter the BIOS once more to change your first boot device to your hardisk, since it already contains an operating system or just let the system reboot until the message “Press any key to boot from CD”, but in here, DON'T PRESS ANY KEY ANYMORE! Just wait, if no key was pressed, the system will search for a bootable system in your hardisk, which is the right way.

NOTE: If you press any key again, the whole process will restart and your installation will be lost, everything will start all over again.

The installation continues, but this time you see a Windows-style and not the DOS- style installation. The installer will now finish the installation by gathering some inputs from the user. You must provide the complete name of the user, organization name, the name of the country, a password for user “Administrator”, the time in your region, and the product key for your copy of Windows XP/2K installer, etc. Just provide the proper answer to every question or input box.

Once the installation is done and your system has reboot, you will now be prompted to provide the password for user “Administrator”. The system will also try to correct your display setting if it not good enough.

Once you are inside Windows, it's time for you to install the drivers for individual devices such as, Chipsets (VIA, SiS, Intel, etc.), ethernet driver, USB driver, VGA or display driver, audio driver, printer drivers that you have bought, etc.

Drivers are installer CD's or 1.44” floppy, included with every hardware (Video card, Sound Card, Monitor, LAN Card, Modem, etc.) that you bought, these are the ones that will introduce your device to your system so that it will know how to use these devices.

If the Main board that you bought has all the other attachments built-in, meaning the Video card, the LAN Card, and the Audio Card were all incorporated in your model of main board, then you surely have a single installer CD that has all the drivers for all the built-in devices in it (separated in folders/directory). Except for most of the new model of printers, they surely have their own installer CD, so be sure that the supplier will provide you an intaller CD for your printer if you will buy one.

Insert this installer CD in your CD drive, if the installer has an autorun operation, it will be triggered once you close the CD drive, a GUI (graphical user interface) will be displayed with the list of devices that has to be installed. You now can install each driver for every device, if a message box appears that is asking you to “restart now” or “restart later” your computer, select the restart later if you are not yet through installing all the drivers. If you are done with all the installation, you may select the “restart now” option after installing the last driver in the list. Your system will reboot and once you entered Windows XP/2K, you will now see some difference especially in the display, the resolution is now better than before installing the VGA driver. Also, you can now start playing your music via the Windows Media player or watching your favorite movies on it (be sure that you have attached a speaker or a headset in the socket that is located behind, in front or at the sides of your CPU or else you will not hear a single sound). You can also start installing other applications such as games, productivity software, graphics software, anti-virus, etc.

After installation, you have to activate your copy of Windows XP, either via the web or by calling Microsoft's hotline in your country. If you will not activate your copy, you can only use your operating system for 30 days, after that you can't enter or virtually use your computer anymore, not until you activate your copy.

It is easy to activate your copy of Windows XP if you have a network connection. Select Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Activate Windows. See figure below. Follow the easy instructions and after activating your copy, you can now use your computer all the time.

The good thing of having an authentic copy of your operating system is that you have the privilege of downloading updates from Microsoft site.

That's it! I think I've covered here the basic steps on how to setup your computer directly out-of-the-box. Try it, and if you have some comment, I will be glad to hear it. The next topic that I will post in here is how to setup a Linux box from scratch, after all, there are already lots of people using the Open Source Technologies. For further reading, I suggest you read the PC Magazine March-April edition, they have in there an article on how to build your own PC with an easy-to-follow guide (it is focused on how to build your PC, so it is the hardware part that was discussed in there).

Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

All other trademarks and copyright referred to are property of their respective owners.

A Free Secondary Education

ovrombaoa — Sat, 27 May 2006 01:18:17 +0000

The Philippines belong to the 3^rd World country, there’s no doubt about that. This is a country where many parents don’t know what to do about their children’s education, that’s because they don’t even know where to get their next meal for a day to think about other expenses such as education. That is one of the sad predicaments of this tiny country off the the South China sea. Children who got lucky finishing secondary education will have a hard time going to the next level of education, because it’s too costly to be in college, expenses for transportation is just too much for a common or within the poverty line families, so children will tend to stop their studies, hoping that next year or the year after next or the next …, their families can afford to send them to college, but to some, it’s like trying to catch fish in a basin. Secondary education is not even enough to equip children so that they can land a small time job just to support their plan to pursue college education, they only end up helping their families cope up with their daily living.

In this country, no more than 30% of its population knew that an institution offering free secondary education all year round since 1985 exists. Yes folks for FREE!, as in free of bonding or whatsoever, just like Open Source Technologies, this institution’s name is The Sisters of Mary School, a catholic school founded by an American priest. Fr. Aloysius Schwartz was a newly ordained priest then when he became a missionary priest in war torn South Korea (just after the Korean war), he saw the sufferings of Koreans, elders with no one taking care of, abandoned children and infants, women and men from broken families, homeless and mentally-handicapped elderly men, and people suffering from tuberculosis. He took pity with what he saw, and from then on, he started his lifelong mission, to change the lives of these society outcasts. It was in South Korea that he started the mission given to him by Christ, with the help of friends from his country, he was able to build an institution whose primary work is to alleviate the suffering of the poor. With God’s grace combined with the good priest’s sacrifice, he was able to extend his mission in different countries, and we are lucky, he chose our country to be one of those whom he wanted to help through Christ. With an invitation from then Archbishop of Manila , Jaime Cardinal Sin, Fr. Schwartz brought to our shore the Sisters of Mary School.

In 1985, he and the sisters started in Sta. Mesa, Manila a Boystown and Girlstown in Talisay, Cebu for the very poor children. Since the boys need more space for sports, agriculture, driving lessons and other necessary activities, bigger parcels of land were purchased and buildings were constructed for them.

Thus, in 1991, the boys from Sta. Mesa were transferred to Silang, Cavite, Philippines.

And in 1995 those of Talisay, Cebu were transferred to Minglanilla, Cebu. At present, the Sisters of Mary Girlstown in Sta. Mesa was already transferred in Silang, Cavite, Philippines (former Boystown Campus) because the environment in Sta. Mesa, Manila is already not convenient for their education. The boys were now transferred to a newly constructed campus in Adlas, Silang, Cavite, Philippines.

Now, even when the good priest had passed away (due to sickness), his charitable works were continued by the sisters (South Korea, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico) and by the graduates. From then on, every year, an estimated 4,000 Filipino boys and girls, graduate in secondary school for free, they pay back nothing but the promise to continue practicing what the sisters and Fr. Al had thought them, i.e. to live a life where Christ is the center of all. Thus their motto says: Serve the Lord with Joy. As the number of graduates grow every year, the alumni is now making moves to share whatever little they have so that this free institution continue to exist and free always.

The Dawning of Open Source Technology in the Philippines Part I

ovrombaoa — Thu, 11 May 2006 10:26:19 +0000

I've gotten used too much using products from leading software companies, well, that was the trend here, during the last decade, proprietary software rule almost every workstation in this country in almost every aspect. What else there is to say, these software provides anything that every user needs, even beginners find them too user friendly and can be learned for just a fraction of time.

That trend is about to change. Why? Blame it to the price that users need to pay to be able to have a licensed software in their workstation, yes, while proprietary software promises to deliver what users need, their cost starts to skyrocket as well. That is even one of the main reasons of the proliferation of pirated software in this country, proprietary software are good but their sky high prices make them very “unaffordable” to the public. Pinoy's patience was put to test in here, we started to think of other means to battle high priced software without compromising quality of our works, alas! Open source technology was finally introduced by a few who learned about it while abroad or by constantly surfing the net, things began to change. I will discuss here some of the open source technology that I personally use in my everyday life.

Let me start by introducing to you PostgreSQL (www.postgresql.org), for sure, many of my fellow IT countrymen never heard of this software. Here is a definition of PostgreSQL from the site's about page:

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.

As you can see, PostgreSQL, is a relational database system, that could provide us all the functionality that we need that we can only find from proprietary relational database system. And the good thing about it? It's FREE! Yes, it is released under the BSD License (see http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence for the complete explanation of the license), anyone can use PostgreSQL to manage their personal or company database. All they have to do is to download the file from their site or from mirror sites. I've been using this system for only a couple of years, but the impact that it gave my in-house software was great, before, I only use .mdb for my database, because our company is in a tight budget, and spending thousands of pesos for a SQL server is out of every CEO's mind. I get a lot of comment from my users because of the too slow connection just to retrieve a few records from our database. That is why when we have learned about this from one of our staff, we started studying and researching about PostgreSQL. After few months of research and testing, we were able to deploy a SQL server using PostgreSQL, we were able to use it with our VB projects because they also provide the PSQLodbc that helps in the connectivity that we thought was our major problem if we want to use it in our system. Now all I can say is that, we were able to satisfy our clients and we were able to develop more software for our company because our SQL server delivers what we really needed that we can only get from a proprietary software. Thanks to you guys.