The Geek Brewery

Someone should have been or is gonna be reprimanded really soon for forgetting to renew bayandsl.com!

I can’t wait for the deletion of the domain. I’m quite interested on buying the domain once, or if ever, it becomes available.

Tomorrow is the start of classes for the second semester in UP Diliman. Students will be confronted with new class schedules. Yikes!

Fortunately for those who are lazy enough to take a peek on their form 5 from time to time, there’s this Google Calendar SMS notification for you. Google will text you your next class minutes or hours before your class, based on your preference.

You just need a Google account (which is free) to enjoy this free service! (more…)

I’ve learned about this website, Surviving the World, after a friend posted a link to one of their entries in Plurk.

Surviving the World is a webcomic focusing on all shades of life, from science to literature, politics to sports, romance to religion, and everything else in between. –Surviving the World FAQ

The website is updated daily so you don’t have to worry not having a daily dose of STW.

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Short rant. Wow, I am busy that I can hardly update this blog.

Did you know that most Globe Broadband packages comes with WiFi minutes?

These WiFi minutes can be used in any WiZ hotspot (Wireless Internet Zones) around the country, including most Starbucks coffee shops.

Instead of paying a hundred bucks an hour for Internet on your next visit to Starbucks, just don’t forget to copy your Globe Broadband username and password and redeem your two free hours per month. The format of the username is [alias]@globelines.com.ph where alias is the username you gave when you applied. The default password is your account number which is reflected on your bill.

If you are quite unsure of your username or password, you may call their hotlines @ (02) 9198888. The number is toll-free if you dial the number from a Globelines landline, local landline or Globe Telecom mobile number.

I am officially enjoying Google Map Maker now.

Google Map Maker is Google’s crowd-sourcing tool to gather geographical information and turn them to maps. Google Map Maker was launched in the Philippines October of last year. Due to the positive response to the product, Google deployed Map Maker data in the Philippines to Google Maps.

I always loved the idea of crowd-sourcing (like Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, etc). There are other similar online tools out there such as OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia. My only problem with OpenStreetMap is that their default editor doesn’t have satellite imagery which makes it hard to point areas of interest or identify location of roads unless you have GPS. Wikimapia, though, uses Google’s imagery but their moderation scheme is not good at all. I find it very prone to vandals. (more…)

Last Friday, we had our Globe Broadband connected at the apartment. Globe Telecom deployed a PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 as our ADSL modem. Since we wanted to share the Internet connection throughout the room, we bought a Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router.

Configuring the PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 to work with Linksys WRT54G2 wasn’t that easy. Here’s a rough guide on how to do it. This guide must work with other models (such as Hurricane 9200) and other brands, but the steps will differ. (more…)

Globe Telecom uses a transparent proxy on it’s http.globe.com.ph access point. This means when you open a website, it passes thru their server for caching or whatever purpose it might server before it reaches your cellphone or computer.

URL of image when not cached.

I’ve noticed though that they replace the URL of images inside <img> tags with another URL on their server for caching. This, in turn, causes some problems with web applications that requires authentication and generates images on the fly such as StatCounter. This replacement/caching process is only done when Globe Telecom detects that you are using a web browser on a computer or on a mobile phone (I curl-ed this website and the output did not have any URL replacements).

URL after caching. Notice, the cached and compressed image is in Globe or a third-party partner’s server.

As a workaround, you can spoof your User-Agent by modifying the headers of your requests. You may do this in Firefox by:

1. Going to about:config. A warning will have to scare you but just continue.
2. Then, find the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting. Using the filter above may help you find it.
3. Once you find it, double click the entry and change it to whatever you want. For it to work, it should not contain words like Mozilla, Firefox, Safari or other web browsers. I’ve changed mine to MikkoFox.

Have fun browsing without cached images.

The Long Short Story

Some three days ago, I was complaining to RapidVPS that my websites were loading really slow. I logged on to my server thru SSH and checked the server load. To my amazement, it was on it’s 300+ mark. Way above my 1.00 average. The servers running my account could have been boiling by that time.

It was around 7 hours after my first ticket when they responded. They gave me a very surprising surprise. RapidVPS permanently suspended my hosting account after it sent mass-mails to tons of people, thus spiking the server load which was detrimental to their services. They said my data was too risky to host. Up to now, I don’t know how it happened. As far as I knew, I did not have any cron job on that account. Someone might have sneaked in to my server and ran a really bad script using my account.

So I was forced to host a 503 (maintenance) page thru DreamHost to avoid search engines to remove my pages from the index while waiting for the backup of my files to be sent back to me. It took me around 36 hours to get a reply. By the 40th hour, I got a link to a tarred file of my backups. I immediately logged in thru my A Small Orange (ASO) account thru SSH and wget-ted the file. Sadly, I can’t untar the file on my ASO server since I only had very limited web space. Tandandandan.

What I did was I sent a request to A Small Orange to untar my files and copy the files for The Geek Brewery to the root of conradmiguel.com. I also asked them to import my SQL databases. Within five minutes, I got a reply. They were willing to help me out even if it was not part of my subscription. A Small Orange, FTW! (more…)

UPDATE: It’s confirmed. The new name will be Bing (http://bing.com). Rumors are spreading that they will launch it on May 29, 2009.

There are various reports in the Internet that says Microsoft is doing a rebrand of Live Search, their very own search engine. Live Search lost its luster in the search engine game, just as how Internet Explorer lost the consumer’s trust. Microsoft’s several failed attempts to buy Yahoo may have led them to do the rebrand.

Rumored potential names of the search engine reboot are Bing, Kumo and Hook. Both bing.com and kumo.com are already on the hands of Microsoft, while hook.com is still owned by another party. (more…)

Google is buggy right now. It even tagged itself as an unsafe website. Rumors have been spreading that the issue’s scope is worldwide — this I can’t confirm myself.

The bug shows up when opening an entry from the search engine results page.

Translation of the error above. Warning- visiting this website may harm your computer.