Monthly Archive for October, 2005

Of feeds and blog discoveries

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 26 October 2005
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Lately, I’ve been wondering why I blog.

The Dilbert BlogThen, Dilbert’s blog came along, and now I know why. He ever so eloquently sums it up as follows:

When I see news stories about people all over the world who are experiencing hardships, I worry about them, and I rack my brain wondering how I can make a difference. So I decided to start my own blog. That way I won’t have time to think about other people.

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

  1. The world sure needs more of ME.
  2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
  3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
  4. I know - I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
  5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
  6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

The beauty of blogging, as compared to writing a book, is that no editor will be interfering with my random spelling and grammar, my complete disregard for the facts, and my wandering sentences that seem to go on and on and never end so that you feel like you need to take a breath and clear your head before you can even consider making it to the end of the sentence that probably didn’t need to be written anyhoo.

If that doesn’t inspire you to read my blog, I don’t know what will.

Ah, nuggets of wisdom.

. . .

I’ve also rediscovered Jessica Zafra. Cool! I last read Zafra over at where my dad used to work, the Today broadsheet.

. . .

AkgregatorI’ve been trying to organize my feed subscriptions. Akgregator is a cool tool. Heh. Before, I’ve used Thunderbird, but I’ve ditched it because I rarely use POP mail anyway. I usually spend a few minutes every day browsing through the feed headlines. With Akgregator’s system tray notification thingie, I know right away if there’s a new feed. Way cool.

. . .

Oh, BTW, here’s my feeds’ OPML.

OpenOffice.org slower than MS Office?

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 26 October 2005
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And a memory hog at that? Considering the benchmarking test performed by ZDNet’s George Ou here and here, the numbers look bad for OO.o.

Why is this so? Ou points to unoptimized code, and Sun’s propensity for bloat. At first glance, this looks like typical MS FUD, but if one looks closer, one realizes that this is a prevailing problem not only for open source but also for proprietary software as well.

Yesterday, I presented before the Institute’s operations committee a brief overview of OO.o, and its similarities to MS Office. I pointed to the fact that shifting will be less painful because of the similar interface, and the (hopefully) seamless rendering of MS documents formats in OO.o.

The presentation went well, and the results of our recent migration to OO.o has so far been encouraging. But will performance be an issue for our users? I hope not. Given the fact that they’ve been using it for two weeks now without complaint (except for a few questions about keyboard shortcuts, etc. — trivial, really), I think I can rest a bit knowing that migration will be smooth sailing.

My optimism is hardly scientific, of course, but I’m after usability above everything else. RAM and CPU hardly matter for my users so long as things get done. And with less costs to boot.

The performance battles between OO.o and MS Office may look bad at first glance, but that is to be expected. Let them wage their battles, I say. We’re sticking with OO.o, thank you very much, and that’s what gives me the fuzzy warm feeling in my belly.

Things you can do with an IBM notebook

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 26 October 2005
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Warning: don’t try these at home. :D

Camp stool

Hair dryer

These and more, over at TechRepublic.

CLI shortcuts, 2

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 25 October 2005
in Work
. 0 Comments

Mirror a web site:

wget -m -k -K -E http://web.site.address/ -o /path/to/logfile

And so it begins…

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 25 October 2005
in Work
. 0 Comments

It’s official: the Philippine Rice Research Institute has finally issued a policy for adopting open source.

The adoption will mainly be for units that can’t afford the licensing costs of proprietary software. While the policy leaves the choice to the particular unit, it encourages and promotes the use of open source software that has similar, if not superior, functionality compared with proprietary ones.

For now, the shift will be in the office productivity suites, with almost 95% of desktop workstations already migrated from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

Soon, it will move on to the desktop OS. A few units have already been installed with Ubuntu or Bayanihan Linux. The tech support staff has set up a lab environment to test interoperability with the existing predominantly MS environment, and results have been encouraging, so far.

The policy was borne out of the Institute’s thrust to look for alternatives to costly solutions in line with the government’s cost-cutting measures, and a long-standing commitment of the Institute’s information and communications technology division to adopting open source applications.