Similar aircraft to the Yemenia Air Flight 626’s aircraft. An Airbus A310 used by Yemenia.

Several hours ago, Yemenia Airlines Flight 626 (Yemenia Air Flight 626 or Yemenia Air Flight 627) carrying 154 people including 11 crew was reported down in Indian Ocean the coast of Comoros, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. The fleet used was yet another Airbus, specifically an Airbus A310. This is the second fatal crash of an Airbus this month.

UPDATE: A Wikipedia article on Yemenia Flight 626 has already been made though not much details are available as of the moment.

UPDATE: According to Yemen’s civil aviation authority, some bodies were already recovered on the crash site. Civilian and military boats have already been mobilized for search-and-rescue operations.

Yemenia, posted two emergency numbers, +967-1250-800 and +967-1250-833.

I am a big fan of Airbus fleets. Airbus has an excellent safety record, but what’s happening to their fleet lately? I hope things would get clear as the investigation of these two separate flights progress despite reports that Air France Flight 477’s black box has sunk at great depths that may render it irrecoverable.

If ever it’s Airbus’ fault, I hope they’ll make necessary revamp to the respective aircraft system of all upcoming and existing Airbus fleets.

Related Articles

• Yemenia Flight 626 by Wikipedia
• Yemeni air reported down in Indian Ocean by CNN Wire
• Yemeni plane crashes off Comoros, 150 on board by Reuters

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.

1. Place the modem to bridge mode.
   • Connect your modem to the computer thru the Ethernet (CAT5) cable.
   • Fire up your browser and go to http://192.168.1.1/globe
   • Go to WAN Configuration under Internet Interface.
     • You will be asked for a username and password. Use this:
       Username: Admin
       Password: 3UJUh2VemEfUtesEchEC2d2e
   • At the bottom of the page is the list of existing configurations. Delete them all by clicking the trash configuration.
   • On the same page, create a configuration. Fill in the VPI, VCI  and Channel Mode settings with the following:
     
   • Disable DHCP Server. Under LAN Interface, go to DHCP Settings. Choose None and click Apply Changes.
   • Disable routing. Go to Routing under Advance. Choose None in Default Gateway and click Apply Changes.
   • Restart your MODEM. Under Admin, go to Save and Reboot. Click Commit and Reboot.
2. Disconnect the modem to your PC. Connect your PC thru Ethernet (CAT5) cable to your wireless router. Use any port in the wireless router EXCEPT the Internet port.
3. Configure your router.
   • Fire up your browser and go to http://192.168.1.1/. The username is blank and the password could be one of the following: admin, password, pass.
   • The default page is the basic setup page.
   • Find the local IP address field. Change it to 192.168.1.2 to avoid conflict with your modem’s I.P. address.
   • After the changes are committed, you need to go to 192.168.1.2 and login again.
   • Still under basic setup, change Automatic Configuration DHCP to PPPoE.
     
   • Enter your Globe Broadband username and password.
4. Connect, connect and connect. Connect the Ethernet cable from the modem to the wireless router’s INTERNET port.
5. Do a hard reset of  your modem and wireless router by depriving them power (unplugging) for at least 10 seconds. Power them up and enjoy!

If you run into any problems, just comment and I’ll try to answer them if I can.

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.

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!

DreamHost and A Small Orange Promo Codes

The Geek Brewery is hosted at A Small Orange again, whilst my other websites are on DreamHost! It’s surely time to celebrate. That’s why I am giving out DreamHost and A Small Orange promo codes.

THEGEEKBREWERY DreamHost Promo Code

Use THEGEEKBREWERY promo codes and get $97 off on a one-year unlimited web space and bandwidth order. That’s $119.40 – $97 = $22.40 a year or roughly $1.90 a month. It comes with a free domain, woot!

THEGEEKBREWERY A Small Orange Promo Code

You may also use THEGEEKBREWERY at A Small Orange and get $5 off on any order. It’s quite small but A Small Orange is more than worth the price. You get super fast support, faster than DreamHost and RapidVPS. Plus, they have plans for as low as $25 a year. The Geek Brewery is on a Medium Orange plan worth $10 a month. All of their plans come with a free domain!

I’ll be staying at A Small Orange, hahaha.

The Philippines gained it’s independence from United States of America last June 12, 1988. This means we’re celebrating our country’s 111th year of independence!

Google is also celebrating Independence Day with us. Thanks to ate Aileen Apolo for plurking about the Google Doodle for the day!

I have upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8 codenamed Baker, thanks to Twitter’s (follow me) trending topics option. I upgraded my blog manually by uploading the latest WordPress tar file on my website’s root folder and untar-ing it on my server thru SSH. It was my first time to access my web server thru SSH as I only had my shell access activated today.

The upgrade process went smoothly. Since I already had access to my web server’s shell, I was able to fix all security issues especially the permissions stuff. The process of changing the permissions was smooth, I just used issued the chmod 755 /wp-includes /wp-admin -R command.

One of my favorite features introduced in WordPress 2.8 is the syntax highlighting (they call it CodePress). It’s easier to identify functions, html tags, attributes and parameters now. One thing I don’t like in CodePress though is that it doesn’t produce a tab (the whitespace) when the TAB button is pressed, instead it shifts its focus to the next clickable element just like before. An autocomplete feature for CodePress would also be a very great idea.

Other new features are the theme browser, improved screen options and some speed optimizations.

The only problem I encountered was when making a post, specifically saving it (even as a draft). It dumps the following error: Fatal error: Call to undefined method SearchSpider::_weak_escape() in /some_path/here on line 478. After Googling the problem, I learned that it was caused by the Search Unleashed plug-in. I had no other choice but to disable it.

I was looking for related articles on my post UP Diliman start of classes, moved when I saw this article from Inquirer.net.

Share your insights? What can you say?

The move was a precautionary measure against the spread of A(H1N1) virus. Yesterday, a suspected A(H1N1) case was confirmed NEGATIVE by the Infirmary (UP Health Services).

Student’s registration will also be extended.