HYPERAXE

For today, the whole Filipino nation stood still as our boxing hero Manny Pacquio fought it out with Mexico’s boxing great Erik Morales. Everyone were fastened to their sits infront of televisions or movie houses as the two boxers started exchanging punches and danced around in a 12 round bout.

The fight was really great, and the first few rounds were filled with so much excitement as the 2 boxers became aggressive trying to pin down each other and prove to themselves who’s the best fighter between them. Come Round 7, Morales started showing signs of fatigue but Pacquiao continued to be strong and threw devastating punches as he continued to dance around the ring. Round 10 decided the fight of the 2 boxers as Pacquiao’s left hook which hit Morales in the face brought down the latter to the canvas. The next scene was even better when Pacquio continued to throw punches to Morales to put an end to one of the greatest boxing fights especially to the Filipinos.

As far as I know Pacquiao is the first boxer to have ever beaten Morales by means of a knockout in his professional boxing carreer so this is one memorable fight.

To Manny Pacquio, congratulations to you and thank you for making us Filipinos proud.

Well, it’s been a while since I tried out BlogExplosion or let’s say became active with it. But tonight, I decided to just pay it a visit to see its latest offerings and also read some blogs.

I guess BlogExplosion had come a long way since I joined it last year. Now they have this chat and shoutbox and what’s cool about the chat feature is that it has audio/video capabilities.
Just out of curiosity, since I have access to my web server’s real-time access logs, I tried to see if my blog really gets visited when I surf other blogs through BlogExplosion. And guess what? It really works and the blog stats on BlogExplosion is even accurate.
To the BlogExplosion team, keep up the good work guys, and keep those cool features comin’.

I’m watching this TV show right now and there’s a few comments I want to make so I grabbed my mobile phone and took a picture of what’s on the TV screen and sent it to my blog:

Friendster VS MySpace

This is the first discussion on the TV show by the time I watched it this morning. I’m quite disappointed with the outcome of the debate or discussion since I am not expecting such answers from the guests of the show. I don’t know these people but I supposed they are IT or techie people who were invited because of their knowledge of the topics that were discussed.

This is supposed to be a debate so what I expect is that the guests would have a stand on what’s the best online community site. Friendster and MySpace? But sad to say, after the discussion most of them answered they like both. “Both?”, that was my first impression. One guy, answered he like Friendster, but after hearing his reasons, it’s as shallow as, saying “I like Friendster ‘coz I haven’t used MySpace, but will try it out”.

After hearing their discussions, I don’t think they really know the details of each site and their good side and bad side for the users of the site. One even commented that he’s into blogging now so he haven’t used Friendster or MySpace that much since he started blogging. What is that supposed to do with the topic at hand? I mean, if you were to be asked your stand about some issues, just stick to it and give the details of your preference. Geesh! I really expect better answers, but then again they have their own opinion, but on a debate like this, well, I just don’t know if things went right during the show.

Well, I’m sure that anyone who would be reading my blog would ask, “Hey, how about you? What do you prefer, Friendster or MySpace?”. Hmmm.. do I just say, I like both? Hell no! My answer would be Friendster. Why? It’s because here in our country, Friendster’s popularity reached the point wherein most people you meet online would invite you to add him or her in your friendster account. Moroever, Friendster and MySpace have more or less the same features, but popularity wise Friendster would be a top choice from where I live in. Moreover, Friendster had been supported by the major telecommunications company here and introduced Friendster mobile. It makes anyone now with a cellphone to access his Friendster account and communicate with his friends through Friendster. That alone can justify my stand on Friendster being my choice over MySpace.

Music in the Philippines and the Music Players

This is the second discussion for the show (see picture above). Still, I am not quite impressed with how the discussion went on. One of the guests is not even that familiar with ITunes, and the host even had to explain how it is being used. Oh well, I don’t blame them since I am not even a fan of ITunes.

One guy, commented, that here in the Philippines, IPods are selling like hotcakes. Really? I’m not really sure if it’s true. Maybe for the Class A people of yuppies or techie geeks that earn a lot of money, but the general population is not composed of such people. As far as I know, most of the people rather invest on cellphones with built-in MP3 players than IPod. I myself, can’t really justify why should I buy such expensive IPods wherein there are a lot of cheaper alternatives with more features. I have a 512MB MP3 player and I’m very happy with it. Besides, it has something that an IPod doesn’t have.. an FM radio. Correct me if I’m wrong, but an IPod FM tuner would still cost quite some amount of money, and my cheapie MP3 player have it built-in. I know that you really can’t compare a 512MB MP3 player and and IPod, but then I just would like to express satisfactions for a cheaper alternative of IPod.

For me, digital music in the Philippines has been great, and it’s because of PIRACY. There’s a lot of places here wherein you can buy Audio CDs and MP3 compilations. The internet also has a lot to offer in terms of free music and pirated stuffs. As a musician myself, I also think it’s quite unfair for music makers or artists to have their product of hardwork and creativity to be given freely to the public without their consent. But then, it’s something that can’t really be stopped unless something like ITunes Music store which offers songs for $0.99 is launched here. Well, if a company can offer songs to be downloadable online for let’s say P5.00 or less, then I think that is something that would sell like hotcakes. That case can also be applicable to videos but of course it should be a bit more expensive than audio downloads.

Well, that’s my view for the TV show. No offense meant guys, I’m just expressing my opinion of something I watched.

Today, I decided to upgrade my PHP installation from version 3.2 to 4.4.1.

Initially, I tried upgrading to PHP 5 but sad to say it’s more complicated than I thought and I didn’t have much time to tinker on it since I’m quite busy with work. For some reasons the default PHP MySQL client was removed on PHP 5 and I’m still not sure on how to add this module back, so the next best version I can install was PHP 4.4.1 so I went for it. Everything went well during the installation of PHP 4.4.1 except for one of my site where I host a Simple Machine Forum.

After upgrading to PHP 4.4.1 I wasn’t able to login to my Simple Machine forum and I’m getting prompted to check my browser’s cookie settings. I was surprised to see such error since I haven’t changed any cookie settings in the browsers I used (IE, Firefox, and Opera), but nevertheless I double checked and it seems ok to me.

Next thing I did was to check the error logs of my forum site and found this line:

Only variables should be assigned by reference in …/Sources/Subs.php on line 232

And looking at the line of the code mentioned in the error log it was something like this:

$ret = &mysql_query($db_string, $db_connection);

So there was the culprit for the problem. After much tinkering and research on the changes from PHP 3.2. to PHP 4.4.1, I finally found the solution. It was as simple as rewriting the above line to:

$ret = mysql_query($db_string, $db_connection);

Well, after the change, everything went well for my Simple Machine Forum and users were able to login again.

Just now I upgraded my WordPress blog to version 2.0 and I’m glad I did the move.

There were a lot of improvements on the upgrade. To name a few I like the most:

• Improved admin page and slick design
• Built-in spam filter and DB backup plugins
• A much improved post editor which more or less makes posting not only easier but rather more enjoyable

I have yet to test speed and performance when I get home so I can test my blog from a different network.

Well, I guess WordPress is really the best blogging software around there. To the WordPress team, congratulations on a job well done and keep up the good work.

It’s spring cleaning day today in the office, so I actually spent the day clearing up my desk with old documents and stuffs, as well as doing some server upgrades and file cleanup in our file servers. We do this spring cleaning on the first day of work every year which happens to be today, so no coding stuffs or project related tasks for me except for a short meeting in the afternoon for some UI discussions of my current J2ME project.