My trip [with the girlfriend] to the south has concluded. The southernmost destination we reached was Pearland, Texas (a few minutes south of Houston). We drove down south and we tapped 15 out of 50 states (total of 19 for me all-time). During the trip, we were able to briefly observe and extract the differences between these states (in order of path): New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tenessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia.

A more thorough recap of the trip will be published when my head has cleared. Right now I’m still a wee sleepy and tired because I’ve just finished a 30-hour driving trip back. It was a fun & educational trip. Though we had to adjust the orginal planned path, the trip was still worth it. 31 states left for me to venture.

I’m officially unplugged from further inter-networking and computing in the next two weeks effective as of this hour. All of my electronic communication devices will be turned off. I will be unreachable. I may be travelling during these weeks so expect new pieces from me.

Later alligat’r

Syet na malagkit!

Yes, yes… It’s been a while since my last entry and I’m once again nagging about standards. A week or two ago Hotmail release a new version of their webmail and guess what ladies and gentlemen? YOU CANNOT COMPOSE AN E-MAIL USING CHROME!!! I’ve grown to like the browser, y’know. I “exceptionally” love it when I hit the HOME button and Chrome would show me my frequently-visited sites. It’s one of the awesomest feature the browser has. Of course the drag-&-drop feature of its tabs brings more coolness to the experience.

All that became history. I am a huge fan of Hotmail and no browser will tempt me to move out of that service. An email address for me is very very significant. If you can’t find me anywhere else, you can find me @ hotmail.com That has become my permanent address since I started computing 10 (or so) years ago. Yes I’m quite new to computing.

Anyway, if you’ve been counting along with the counter above (the homepage) it’s almost time. What would it be, what would it be?

April 23, 2008 @ 5:28PM —
Personally, I like tabbed browsers because I don’t like a clutter on my taskbar. Latest browsers these days have tabs. This is the feature that I like about Firefox since its first release. I advertised Firefox to co-workers and installed a version in each workstations. About two years ago, I removed all installations of Firefox at work and in my home PC. The reason is that Firefox is taking up so much of my resources when I am using it. Another reason is that since I work in financial services, I have to use IE5-IE7. Why? Because of ActiveX.

November 4, 2008 @ 10:18AM —
Everything at work are Windows-based. From old system to new, they are all programmed in Visual Basic and ASP. I’m currently deploying a web-based application for our agents and the application is written in ASP scripting. The application is not install-friendly nor it is portable. Since it is using ActiveX, it can only work in Internet Explorer (that is why I can never abandon this software). Also, I have to open security holes from the agents’ computers (the only thing I can do the most is add the site in the Trusted Zone). That means if they are using Vista, they would always received scary warning each time they use the application. In addition to that, a 10-minute setup would take me hours in Windows Vista.

So what is wrong with this setup? Well it is no secret that ActiveX is compromised. With that in mind, a firm like us should avoid it at all cost. There is a much better way to keep track of users and that is through digital certification. Public-key cryptography was so revolutionary that it ought to be used in situations like ours. Also, by abandoning ActiveX, portability issue is solved.

I hate to say this, but so far I’ve been interacting with web applications that are not (or are improperly) using digital certification. There are only 3  web applications that are properly using certification and it really resemble their reputation.

Why are programmers not doing this? My guesses are:

• Lack of knowledge in security.
• Lack of time.
• Lack of resources.
• Satisfied as long as the application works according to basic specifications.

In our case, it’s probably because it’s done in a rush and only a single person in-charge of web programming. How I wish I could setup a team and time to do this.

I had to wait a week before writing about the latest addition in my network — the ASUS Eee Box. If I may, I would say that the Eee Box is ASUS’ answer to Apple’s Mini PC; only smaller. The unit weighs 3lbs and is 1-inch thick (8.8×7x1) only. It comes with two mounts — one is for desktop mount and the other is a wall mount or like what ASUS advertises, the unit is mounted behind an LCD monitor to get the effect of “no box PC”. The box comes with wired keyboard and mouse. Of course if you chose the wireless route, you can do so because the machine already comes with wireless adapter (and antenna for range maximization). Knowing me, this featureis of course disabled. The machine is also very quiet and does not take up so much power consumption. The Box is also DVI ready so if your monitor has DVI, that would be great. For an average user, it won’t be a difficult computing because the Box is pre-installed with Windows XP Home Edition.

The Box!!!

Why did I have to purchase this gadget? For one, I wanted to test it and it’s cheap enough to experiment with. I plan to install other *NIX flavored OS in it instead of Windows. I also needed a PC that can serve MySQL database and it shouldn’t take space in my workspace and won’t consume so much power. Eee Box is the perfect specimen. The Box has been running since I bought it an a few restarts were executed because of Windows’ unfailing releases of bug fixes (don’t they get tired of this why not release a less buggy software instead).

I only recommend the  Box to an average user. Average I mean a user who only does: web browsing, chat, email, music, photos, occasional videos, word processing. I don’t prefer this to a hardcore user who may wish to do audio-visual editing and multi-tasking applications although it’s hyper-threading. However, it’s enough for daily computing.

Because ASUS Eee PC S101 is coming out next week! I’ve held MacBook Air and it’s as heavy as my EeeBox. My 701 with cover on is still lighter than MacBook Air. In UMPC standards, that’s like a desktop heavy. For $1000 less, I would go with a thinner and lighter S101. Though it comes with Microsoft’s Windows XP Home, I can always install another OS that I favor. What I love with the Eee series is boot time. Not much of a wait time when booting (on/off).

I can buy 3 S101s with one MacBook Air.

To create a database and give a user privilege to that database:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE temp;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON temp.* TO 'bob'@'EEEPC'
    -> IDENTIFIED BY 'alice'
    -> WITH GRANT OPTION;

The privilege is full for Bob for all tables contained in the database called temp. Here, I explicitly defined the user’s host. That means Bob can only access the server if he used my Eee-PC. Even local access for Bob is not allowed because I did not add ‘bob’@'localhost’ in the GRANT command.

Given a cell Name containing two (2) words: First Name & Last Name in the format FIRST[:space:]LAST. We need to create a cell for the first name & another cell for the last name. If we are given hundreds of rows of names, a quicker way should be found. With the use of formula, we can easily extract the names in 2 minutes.

Let’s say that the FULLNAME is in ColumnA, we need to fill ColumnB=FirstName & ColumnC=LastName:

B1 = LEFT( TRIM(A1), FIND( " ", TRIM(A1) ) - 1)

C1 = RIGHT( A1, LEN(A1) - LEN(B1) - 1 )

It’s really pouring today. I underestimated (or rather unaware of) the capacity of this morning’s rain. Seasons indeed is now backwards. This kind of rain should only be witnessed during the Spring. Here I am very wet because I walked from the terminal to the cafe. I didn’t use the Subway because it’d be an extra hassle and I wouldn’t be able to write this entry. I’ll still be wet if I took the train. Since it’s cold, that means the water hitting me is also cold. I’m chilly right now, but who isn’t.

I have an umbrella for those who are curious. However, if a falling sheet of rain is blown by a powerful wind, the direction of rainfall is slanted down. Assuming the rain falls at 15° angle and the wind blows from NEWS (my route is a wind tunnel), with reference to a standing person, the result would be cone-shaped. Imagine a cone-shape rain fall with me in the middle of the cone and imagine the rain to be massively strong. The mushroom on top of the cone would be my umbrella, but the attack of the rain is below. Get the image now? If you do, then you’d know that I’m wet from my foot to my knees — soaking wet. I haven’t even factored in the flooded intersections I have to pass through.

With the climate change, rain boots is really trendy. How would I look like in a pair of rain boots while going to work? That would be a sight.