Yesterday dawn was a mild nightmare for me. My NightmareHost (DreamHost) hosting account, again, was experiencing a slowdown. The server where my account is linked confronting a lot of problems; for the n^th time this March.

This resulted to decrease of my online productivity. That time, I was modifying Nate Sander’s Show Top Commentator plugin into a Top Commentator cloud. It took me a lot of time uploading and reuploading the code to check for errors. It also took me a lot of time checking its format whenever I edited it.

So I warn you, choosing a web host should not be taken for granted. There are a lot of tips on web hosting out there in the Internet. As much as possible, don’t be an impulsive buyer when choosing the right web host. I admit that I decided my webhost in less than 24 hours. I recommend that you read a lot (cause there’s too much industry hacks in reviews) of reviews on your prospect host before choosing it.

Most webhosts offer a limited-time money-back guarantee. I also advice you to use this if you’re unsatisfied so that you can move to another host. Bad thing for me, I only experienced major downtimes after my 97-day money-back guarantee period.

It’s up for you to choose. Just remember that choosing a web host should not be taken for granted.

Hey guys.

If you’re looking for high-quality preproofread song ltrics, then you’ve landed to the right page. The righest one in the entire cyberspace.

Okay, what I am doing now is SEOing a high trend low dense keyword (just heard this term from kuya Jehz), ltrics. I found this out after I misspelled the word lyrics while searching for the lyrics of the song “It Is Well With My Soul”.

I prefer not to disappoint you so I’m giving out links to real lyrics repositories:

1. Lyrics Area
2. LetsSingIt.com
3. Lyrics Mania

Hey guys, just made the big switch from WordPress 2.3.3 to WordPress 2.5.

It was painless with the help of WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. The upgrade clocked to 52 seconds; fast and furious rather than upgrading manually thru FTP.

All my plugins worked after the plugin. I tried to explore the brand new interface; it’s a lot more brighter and better. The dashboard gives you the sufficient data you need. I’ve read that you can embed some plugin pages to your dashboard; such as the WordPress Stats plugin.

The Write Page and Write Post pages are still powered with TinyMCE, but now with a cleaner theme. I’ve noticed that it loaded faster than the old one using our slow dialup connection.

The Plugins page, also offers an automatic upgrade link for outdated plugins. It seems that they want to have a WordPress that’s a lot easier and user friendly!

On the Comments page, there you can see the Gravatar of the person who commented. Weeee, so slick! Unfortunately, most of my commentators don’t have a Gravatar yet. If you still don’t have one, you may get one at Gravatar.com.

Good job WordPress coders, developers, designers and supporters! I’m liking it!

Hey guys, a while ago I felt so bored so I looked for something interesting to program or reprogram. Then, the idea of converting Nate Sanden’s Show Top Commentator plugin’s generated list into cloud came in.

You may take a look at it; it’s on my sidebar at the right, just beside the categories. (feed subscribers, you really have to open my page :D)

On my example on this blog, I chose the 30 top commentators who commented in the last 30 days. The top commentator gets a font size of 16 while the lowest among the 30 gets a font size of 10. Nofollow attribute is given to URLs with font size of below 16. Growth of your name is not based on ranking but instead number of comments. This means that for example there are 3 commentators listed with 3, 4 and 15 comments respectively; the one with 15 comments will get a much bigger font size than those who had 3 or 4 comments.

Neat, huh? If you want a copy, just contact me through my contact form. I still have to ask permission to Nate Sanden if I can release a modified version of the plugin; of course with due credit to Nate.

You may also suggest other plugin modification ideas by commenting on this post.

Waaaaaaaaaa!

Lately, I’ve been busy finishing our research project with the great help of Kuya Franz. Our graduation is over but still I lack some requirements which I need to get my high school diploma.

During the process of finishing it, I started to love microcontrollers, again, for the second time in my life. It was a really fun experience; especially the learning process. I learned a lot of things from kuya Franz; from Hi-Tech C (a C compiler for embedded systems) to active pull-ups and pull-downs, to Proteus VSM and a lot more.

Before, I only knew programming PICs and 8051s using assembly language; now I can do it in C (in just three days; but I’m still not that good at it). I found it lot easier to do it in C rather than doing it in assembly because there’s no need to worry on 16-bit to 32-bit operations, no need to assign variables to RAM addresses. It’s also a lot better ’cause it saves you a lot of your previous development time (that’s the best thing in programming microcontrollers with C).

It was also my first time to see an oscilloscope work. I was amazed of its function and how it measured the period of the signal’s transition from high to low and vice versa brought by the counting of the microcontroller’s internal timer. We (kuya Franz and I) were able to make the timer accurate (not precise) up to the fourth-decimal-place (0.0001) as attested by the Philips oscilloscope.

I also learned how NOT to make a spaghetti circuit in a breadboard. I was able to put some stuff in the breadboard in a much neater way than I used to. (in the picture, kuya Franz cleaned up some of my dirty connections).

I also saw an In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) programmer, again for the first time in my life. It was a nifty useful. With ICSP, there’s no need to remove the microcontroller from the circuit to program it thus reducing the risks of microcontroller breakdown. I also saw a Zilog development board; which according to kuya Franz costed approximately PhP 90,000.00 when it was still out in the market (fortunately he got one for free courtesy of Zilog).

I also found a PIC Simulator alternative; it’s called Proteus. Proteus is a package of ISIS (circuit designer and simulator) and ARIES (circuit [the real one] CAD). With Proteus, you can test a lot of microcontrollers. It also gives you the freedom to simulate your own circuit. It has a wide library of microcontrollers, resistors, transistors, power sources, LCDs and other electronic components. It’s the best simulator and circuit design tool I’ve ever met in my entire lifetime.

I got a lot more jargon to say, I warn you. Another thing, I used to be familiar only with Atmel products specifically its 8051 line. But our research study forced me to learn PICs. I studied its white-paper thoroughly just to get familiar with its SFRs or special function registers. I’m amazed cause I learned that PIC products’ timer0’s don’t have a timer run bit. It’s a free-run timer and runs all the time. I also learned that their operating voltage ranges from about 4.5 to 5.5 volts. Amazing!

I also loved the way we ate our merienda. Yesterday, we ate our merienda with a calculator. We discussed on what prescaler to use for timer0. We ended NOT using prescaler so we had to set a bit to a particular logic just to realign the prescaler to the WDT (watchdog timer). It was a nerdo moment!

Hahaha. I really learned a lot from kuya Franz, and it was a nice experience. He told me that I can go to their house if I want to learn something new from his projects. He encouraged me to continue learning embedded systems; which is a part of my plan for this summer. Weeeee, microcontrollers are the best.

That’s all for now!

Disk Knight is a beneficial virus I have encountered countless times. It’s annoying; especially its way of silent multiplication. It installs itself to the host computer; then infects every drive (usually the flash drives) the host computer gets direct contact to.

I’ve read several methods online on how to remove this nasty beneficial virus. One of the easiest method I found was to download a batch file by Islam Adel; execute it to your computer and poof, no more Disk Knight.

Here’s the file: Disk Knight Remover.

Hey guys!

Loyal visitors of this blog must have noticed the sudden decrease of my blog’s load time. No, I did not switch to a new webhost. This speed-up is attributable to a new WordPress plugin - PHP Speedy.

PHP Speedy is a plugin that joins your JavaScript and CSS files before loading it to your browser. It also removes unnecessary line breaks to your rendered PHP or HTML files to save file size thus shortening load times.

Try it now and feel the change.

Are you looking for tools to remove the Funny UST Scandal virus? Then, you are on the right track.

Early this afternoon, I was trying to compile an assembly program coded by me when it failed. I tried other assembly programs; the same thing happened. I was reconfiguring my IDE’s settings when I started to suspect my firewall of blocking the assembler. I turned off my firewall and poof, it worked.

AFTER the incident, I forgot to reactivate my firewall. I was clueless that something was happening inside our PC until…

I was conversing with a friend with Yahoo Messenger. I was horrified ’cause my mouse started to move in different directions; and it was typing something on my status bar. It was sending a message to all of my friends.

And it was the Funny UST Scandal.

If you’re looking for a fix, there’s this Visual Basic Application made by a Filipino. It reverts all the infections made by the virus; making your computer clean of traces of the nasty virus.

You can download the fix here.

Good luck.

Finding a WordPress theme for your blog is like searching for a lost ant in a rice field. It’s true; with the vast collection of WordPress themes available online.

Here at Build that Geek, I can help narrow down the choices by posting top 5 WordPress themes according to genre. Not only that, I also give out at least a link of a live blog (not a demo site) using the theme.

Our spotlight for the moment goes to Neat WordPress Themes.

Blogging Pro by Design Disease
[theme (requires plugins)] [required plugins] [theme w/o plugins] [live preview on a real blog]

Blogging Pro is a neat three-column WordPress theme. It uses light colors; blue and orange. It’s typography is at par; very readable and has enough whitespace.

You can see Blogging Pro in action at J. Angelo Racoma’s The J Spot.

(more…)

For those people who haven’t heard about our experience with McDo last week, you better read my post “The Horrible 8McDo Experience“.

A few days ago, my McDo post still ranked 4 on Google’s SERPs (search engine results page) for the keyword McDo. But just recently after trying to check its rank on the world’s best search engine, it lost its way to top 10. So, I tried viewing the top 100. It was still not there. Same was true to top200, 300, 400 and 500. Then I tried searching the exact title of my post, The Horrible 8McDo (McDonalds) Experience, still wasn’t there.

UPDATE: It’s back to the TOP 10.

This incident leads to an accusing assumption that McDonalds may have requested the removal of my post search engine entry to Google. It’s quite unfair in my part. I worked hard for my negative review to appear on Google SERPs top rank; then everything will just go to waste!

If ever McDo requested Google for my post’s removal to the SERPs, I’d like to congratulate them for communicating Google right before they contacted me. Nice strategy to cover up your damn bad service!

Anyway, one of McDo’s staff emailed me five days ago and told me to expect a response from them very soon. But to date, I still haven’t received any response from them. I bet they’re giving me another false hope; just like what they did to us last week!