Destiny Cable Internet

I need Internet access at home since, as a consultant, I often work offsite and while the QSR offices are close enough to walk, sometimes I just need to work past midnight or on weekends. I can still get to QSR on weekends, but it's just nice to be able to work from home.

I considered DSL (mainly, PLDT MyDSL), but i decided on Destiny Cable Internet due to price and the fact that PLDT MyDSL is capped at 384kbps while Destiny has no caps. Of course it's cable though, so the bandwidth is shared. Destiny just doesn't do any bandwidth capping at all. The management thinks that the thing to do is just to provide the bandwidth (their bandwidth is greater than they need,that is, they buy more bandwidth than actually distribute). I like that attitude, even though it might be better for me (or for the generic customer) to have a cap so that bandwidth hogs don't slow down everyone connected to the same node.

The service has been pretty good. I'm getting consistent downloads in the 400-600 kbps range. I haven't really been monitoring very much yet, or consistently enough. But I'm waiting to get to 1Mbps. QSR has destiny bandwidth too and once or twice I've seen downloads in the megabit range.

Of course, to people from the U.S. (all my brothers and my sister have been through here lately to be with my stepfather before his heart surgery) that's not much. 1.5mbps at home is pretty common there, if you're close enough to a telco switch. But 400-600kbps is great here. and i'm confident that Destiny will continue working on their line quality and will eventually keep me in the megabit range continuously.

Not that I can do all that much with that bandwidth. But it'd be great to have it when necessary.

at-spi really slows down evolution

I couldn't stand how slow evolution was anymore. I know that I'd fixed that problem long ago (with some sort of gconf-editor, ah, edit). I remember that it was some sort of accessibility thing.

Well, I reinstalled linux a while ago and I got evolution slowness again. I've finally found out what I need to do to remove the slowness.

urpme at-spi

Back when I was still installing mandriva, I thought I'd try out the accessibility stuff to see if mandriva was good enough to use for blind people. I still don't know since, well, I can't get gnopernicus working on this laptop. Maybe I can try it out on a desktop. If it's usable then, I may try to get my brother in law (great programmer, and blind) to try out linux.

For any blind programmer, I think the thing to do is to work in linux since the command line development environment and demand for command line developers is high in linux. In windows, well, he programs in VB, and he's pretty good at it, but he's always going to be hobbled by the
graphical emphasis of VB and the command line weakness of Windows. It's probably a great environment for blind computer *users*, but it's a terrible development environment for a blind programmer.

2005-May Part3 Camiguin-White Island-Lechon

We were going to have our wedding at Camiguin Highland. It's a very new hotel and the building, rooms and restaurants are very nice. They haven't deteriorated yet due to time and the filipino inability to maintain anything.

The friends who were with us on the Canopy Walk in Claveria, Misamis Oriental and the whitewater rafting in CDO (pics sometime in the near future) came over to Camiguin with us on Friday, and more

Friends from Manila, in a jeepney arrived on Saturday
.

After lunch and siesta at Camiguin Highland

we got on a two hired multicabs and went to Katibawasan falls (short picture taking trip, the pics below are from another trip later in the month, but they give an idea of what it's like)





I like going under the waterfall (well, a bit behind, right under the waterfall the weight of the water is too great, it would knock me out).


Sometimes, the pictures from that are creepy.


We then went on to Camiguin Action Gecko Galactic Headquarters

to pick up the lechon


The lechon is a bit denuded because there were two multicabs and naturally, there was some lechon skin picking on our multicab :-).

There are several jump off points to White Island, but the most popular is at Caves Dive Resort, where the Camiguinaction Diveshop is located.

I've heard of a spanish woman who swam to White Island from one of the Agoho beaches, but we took a pumpboat there.


They're usually around PHP 350 for a roundtrip. It can cost less than that if the boat can go fishing and pick you up, but it's more convenient to keep the boat so that you can leave whenever you want. It's very hot after 9AM and before around 4PM so most people go at dawn or in the late afternoon.

This summer, the locals from the Agoho shore built some bamboo and coconut leaf shelters.


To be continued

Stupid security rules

There is a tidal wave of stupid security rules all over the place these days. Most of them I don't mind since they don't affect me much. If malls insist on looking at my belt bag (fanny pack, to americans) and checking my lower back to see if there's a gun in there, I don't mind as long as it doesn't waste my time, or not much anyway. And mall searches only cost me maybe 3 seconds everytime.

MetroRail searches tend to cost more, but it's usually only 5-10 seconds (if there's someone ahead of me), so I don't care much either.

Of course, ideally, this stupidity should be stopped anyway since, really, if anyone with half a brain wanted to bring explosives or a small gun or dangerous chemicals anywhere, it's pretty much impossible to stop. Well, OK, so maybe it takes more than half a brain. But really, it would be trivial to smuggle in something dangerous (that's not perfume in that perfume container, that's alcohol, or, in combination with a lighter, that perfume works as a small flamethrower. how about that kerosene (or some other flammable but not so strong smelling liquid) in the shaving cream container? how about just that lighter. a terrorist could break five bottles of vodka in the wine shop, set it all on fire, and then start throwing more bottles of alcohol in there. five seconds, tops.

Those searches don't increase security (i'd link to schneier or someone, but I'm too lazy, Oh, ok, Bruce Schneier's site, they just inject inefficiency into everyday life.

But again, I don't mind them too much. Stupidities that cost me almost nothing I ignore. Sometimes (as with the cell phones or CD players on airplanes thing, now how dumb can an airline (or another, or maybe it's just the civil aviation board [can't find the website with a quick search and not interested enough to spend 30 minutes on it] be to not revoke the ban on CD players when there's no reasonable way for CD players to be a threat to avionics or control systems?) I flout them if they're sufficiently inconvenient.

On the other hand, yesterday I was at the University of Santo Tomas Hospital and the guard wanted me to leave my laptop. Now my laptop is my other life. I'm not leaving it ANYWHERE. So I said no. He said to leave the power supply then. I wouldn't leave that either. If it gets lost, it would take months to get a replacement from overseas (it's a Winbook, not a common brand in the Philippines). Finally I left the cable (detachable) that connects the power supply to wall power.

I don't see what the deal is with laptops though. Are they concerned about the wifi or the CD player interfering with avionics, I mean, hospital equipment? All the cell phones in the building are already doing that and I don't see people dying every second due to GSM and bluetooth and maybe even the occasional IR and (Lord forbid), laser light from a leaky CD-ROM player interfering with avion...hospital equipment. So maybe they're concerned about people connecting to an unprotected LAN connections and sniffing the network? they should use switches then! or, no, there aren't any LAN connections, this is an old building. No Lan connections anywhere.

So the only thing that comes to mind is that they're concerned about people stealing electricity. But that's yet another stupidity. This is a hospital where they have airconditioners everywhere. That's where they need to be saving electricity. Pissing off paying customers (what does it cost to be confined in a room there, maybe PHP 2000-4000 a day?) is counterproductive. I had a similar experience at Clinica Manila in SM Megamall. I was there with Sol and while waiting, I wanted to plug in. They're against electricity theft too. But the way I see it, anyone with a laptop who wants to plug in is a potential customer who could afford a laptop. They should be *encouraging* those people to plug in, so that they'll feel comfortable and warm and fuzzy and will keep coming back for health services. As it is, I'm not going to Clinica Manila for anything.

I couldn't do much about UST Hospital, but I can write this blog and castigate them in public. Maybe if enough people ask them about it they'll rescind that rule and maybe even bend over backwards and offer free wifi throughout their hospital. I rather doubt it, but wishes are free.

Maybe someone in there is smart enough to understand what a marketing coup that would be, free wifi in the hospital, on a budget of maybe PHP 5000 a month for the bandwidth and less than PHP 250,000 for the access points, wiring and router (and maybe another PHP 50,000 for the services of the company that would install all that, although they've got a computer science and engineering college in there, they could do it for free with student labor).

vim settings i always use

set ruler
set noincsearch
set nohlsearch
syntax off
set ts=4
set ai

i should probably also use
set ic

ok, that's it, i will :-)

No handsfree

I thought I'd try the handsfree headphones/mic for my Sony-Ericsson K700i phone. Not because I needed it for calling (we don't call, in the philippines, it's too expensive, and it's impossible to do hands free SMS texting), but because I thought I'd try the phone's radio feature.

The bad news is, I'm giving up. FM radio, even in Metro Manila, is execrable. The DJs are terrible, the station identification items are incredibly stupid, the ads are ads and the music ranges from oldies with nothing left but sap (if they ever had any meaning in there at all) to rap and R&B which, frankly, I can't get into, there is nothing there for me.

Even the classical music station, and the jazz station, when I could get them (the signals were sufficiently weak, I could never get a good enough fix, or the surrounding stations were so strong they overwhelmed the signal. But maybe that was just the phone) aren't worth much. I may try to get those stations again. But If i can't, well, they might as well not exist as far as my handsfree listening on jeepneys and the Metro Rail system are concerned.

I thought that there might be an AM receiver on there. On AM things are much the same, but at least there are the occasional (very occasional) entertaining talk shows. But there's no AM option, so I'm hanging up the handsfree set. Or maybe not. I might just find some MP3s, resample them down to much smaller sizes, and use up the 40MB memory of the phone for storing them. If I can get the MP3s down to 1MB or so (mono since i don't like being not able to hear things that are happening around me, very low sampling rate so the space requirement drops :-) I might get back to using it. Although if I rip or download comedy shows it's going to be very disconcerting for the other people on the jeep or train :-)

svn keyword "Id"

svn propset svn:keywords "Id" [files]

2005-May Part 2 - Canopy Walk in Cagayan de Oro

sol and I took the whole of May 2005 off in preparation for the wedding, the actual wedding, diving and honeymoon travel. There will be blog entries about all of those later. There are a lot of pics and, actually, I haven't organized everything yet. I need to get pictures of the wedding itself from friends since we don't have any on our own camera (forgot to assign someone to take all the pics, we had kublai or jen in mind for that, but they were late for the ceremony).

On May 3rd we went to CDO to meet friends and go whitewater rafting (blog entry for that and pics, later). The rafting was on the 4th. On the 5th we went on the Claveria Canopy walk. There are two or three canopy walk adventures in the Cagayan de Oro area. The Claveria one is the first and the best.

It's a long drive (maybe 2 hours) to the jump off point. I'm sure everyone has pictures taken there. So did we, of course.



That sign says that it's 1.5 kilometers to the top station. It's not a difficult walk, but there is going to be sweating. Also, both times that I went on the canopy walk it rained (at different parts of the course). So don't bring anything large that needs to be dry. Or bring a drybag. The top station is a platform from which we clip on to a zip line




and are lowered to the first station proper.




There was a light drizzle when we got to the first station and the view of the forest in the mist was nice.




From the first station it's just walking over hanging bridges (while attached by 2 clips to another line above).



The bridges, and the line to which everyone is clipped, are very securely attached to the trees.



There are five stations altogether (with, I think, one more not in use, and possible additions as the site is enhanced, the organizers talked about a very long zip line down to the bottom of the valley and a river traverse back down to the pickup site). The bridge to the last station is downward, some people have trouble traversing that. It's all very safe though. At the fifth station, there is a break for lunch. It's usually lechon manok, puso (rice in palm leaf wrap) and some other things. Naturally, there had to be a picture of the lunch group.



There are lots of great views of trees and forest plants. These next ones are of plants that grow on trees.





This is what it's like to look down :-)


And in the distance, it's a little sad to see the contrast between the forest and the farms where forest used to be.

Mandriva, kernel 2.6.11 and cpufreq

I installed Mandriva 2005 and my scripts for slowing down the CPU stopped working. Well, the cpufreq stuff has been modularized and now, with the stock 2.6.11 kernel that comes with Mandriva I have to modprobe p4-clockmod before the entries in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0 become available.

I'm glad that it's all still there though, I was thinking I'd have to config and rebuild the kernel, something I try to avoid when running at 2.4Ghz in an un-aircon room :-).

Pleasant Dumaguete experiences

Dumaguete is very nice. I wouldn't mind living here, if there were a good way to make a living.

The city isn't extremely large, noisy, busy, polluted or traffic-ridden. It's sort of what Cagayan de Oro was 15-20 years ago, or maybe not. More like 30 years ago, but with all the modern improvements (DSL internet, cell phone connectivity, motorcycles).

When we arrived there was one taxi and we didn't want to take it since I don't like taxis whose drivers act like pimps. We took a tricycle on a short tour of the big hotels. It's Santacruzan month, so when we went to the C&L Hotel (very nice, I had a good feeling about it) they had no space. Chris, the receptionist was very helpful though. She called around to two or three hotels and got us a room at the Coco Grande Hotel (also very nice, newly remodelled).

I'll be posting something big in a few weeks (need some time to get the pics ready and to get other pics from others who took pics at the wedding), I'm taking this opportunity though to post short impressions that don't depend on pics being ready :-)

Webmail and internet cafes

I'm in Dumaguete, at the SurfShop (an internet cafe right by Silliman University). They have kindly allowed me to use my own laptop for going online. I asked the other internet cafe just a house down (MC )and they didn't let me do the same.

It's nice to be able to work with an internet cafe that knows what they're doing, or at least are helpful and flexible (it's likely that the other cafe is run on fascist leadership lines, something far too common in the Philippines, so that the staff won't allow anything they don't explicitly know is allowed, and they won't call the owner to check if they come across something that's not allowed, here at the SurfShop, they called the owner.

Now, I'm perfectly willing to just surf around on insecure internet cafe PCs (they're invariably windows and, i'm sure, just chock full of viruses and spyware no matter how fascist the security posture because, well, it's just basically impossible to secure windows computers that are open to be used by the public), but I'm just not going to trust any important passwords to internet cafes. As it happens, I had to send an email, so I just created a throwaway email address (bopolissimus_temp@hotmail.com) and used that to send the email, and then all I did was surf around.

But now I brought my laptop over and I'm online, so it's downloading my gmail and I'll read and reply offline (that's around 2 weeks worth of email and there's going to be a lot of it).

evolution spamassassin and gmail on slow links

I'm on camiguin and the internet access here is slow. I was trying to download my gmail to evolution and it wasn't working, I was getting frequent timeouts (gmail would stop responding). Finally I thought to turn off the automatic spam checking in evolution. Now, the CPU isn't pegged at 100 percent and i'm getting my mail. The mail still takes a while to arrive, but at least I'm not getting disconnected from gmail so often.

I'm using the 2.6 kernel's CPU frequency scaling control functionality to set my laptop at only 300Mhz. that's not why i was timing out though, since even at 2.4Ghz and with remote checking disabled, it was still timing out. SA is just fat and slow and should be disabled when checking gmail on slow links.

I'm running at 300Mhz because this laptop runs so hot (it's not a low power CPU) that it would burn my thigh. I work around that by putting the laptop on top of a hardbound book, but then the CPU still runs so hot when i'm doing CPU intensive things (e.g., compiling postgresql, or the kernel, or even just some modules in the kernel) that the laptop will beep three times and turn off without giving me the opportunity to shutdown properly. Running at 300Mhz lets me do anything I want (albeit slowly) and not run the risk of heat related outage. I've tried at .600,.900 and 1.2 Ghz and those all work too, but i'm being conservative since i don't really need all that power anyway.

Wedding Dives

Sol and I got married on the 8th of May and we're taking the month off. It's been great. Details later, but these are notes to myself so I have an idea what to elaborate on.

1. whitewater rafting and canopy walk in CDO area with tim, tina, mace, mark, hazel. great fun. some pics of canopy walk, but need to develop the underwater camera pics for whitewater rafting.

2. came to camiguin friday, rested that day, saturday many manila guests arrived, the younger set went to white island for sunset, bonfire, lechon and beer. great time, great pics.

3. sunday was wedding day, but that was still for the evening. in the morning we had organized a group trip to mantigue island. sol and i were going to dive the wall with barb, salve and katya, and diggi was going to conduct intro dives for seven people. everyone had a great time. pics in a future, more complete post.

4. wedding sunday afternoon. at the last minute (well, 3 hours or so before the last minute), judge borromeo determined that it would be possible to have the ceremony at the hotel, so that's what we did. that made things much more convenient and everyone could look on. short wedding ceremony, judge quoted from shakespeare. good party after, with tina and cecil emceeing. we forgot some things (sparkling wine poured at all tables for toasts, so eugene started the water toast :).

5. we started the advanced open water diver course. great dives. navigation at tangub, peak performance buoyancy at old volcano, drift dive at white island today, night dive at tangub tonight. deep dive tomorrow at old volcano. or maybe canyons.

it's been a great 1.5 weeks so far. the rest of the month is going to be awesome. and then i'll be excited to go back to work.

Cagayan de Oro online phone directory

I had to get phone numbers for some Cagayan de Oro hotels so that friends who were going there could query prices and book (they still don't have web sites, or the web sites don't come up early enough in google) and I remember that there's a handy site for searching for CDO phone numbers. CDO-ID is a searchable site for numbers.

Now, the front page hasn't been modified since around 2001, so possibly the phone numbers aren't the latest either, but most of the numbers will still work.

I remember that when I used to work for an internet provider in CDO I wanted to do something like CDO-ID too. Years before that I'd gotten hold of the Misortel phone data and had a searchable site (long gone now, hosted by weblink i think). Well, I tried to get the data out of the telcos, but they were incredibly unimaginative and I never really could get the data out on a regular basis so that I could have a reasonably up-to-date directory. Eventually I gave up trying, particularly when I found out that CDO-ID already had a site.

This resistance to putting up phone numbers on the internet is a major stupidity for any telco. After all, if the phone numbers are online, people can search for them and they're then likely to make long distance landline calls. The cellular telcos should probably also do something similar, at least for their postpaid accounts, and maybe some sort of interactive prepaid directory too (aliases allowed, but maybe filtered for obscenity and illegal names). That would probably drive up voice traffic.

But I don't see the celco's doing that either. They don't like change, despite their business being founded on technology, where change is so fast, it's essential to embrace it.

Istana Bali

I was with sol at Club 650 (Libis, near Shopwise and Eastwood) yesterday for badminton with friends. After the games we went up to Istana Bali, a new restaurant there. The food was OK. A bit overpriced, but that's just me, newly in from the provinces and eternally afflicted with sticker shock. Except for the draft beer. A mug of draft is only PHP 25. That's cheaper than the Pale Pilsen, SM Light, Super Dry and Strong Ice! In fact, it's almost half the cost, since the other beers are either 45 or 55 (i wasn't paying enough attention to remember exactly).

I'm going back there. Not just because of the draft (although that's a big deal) but also because it's pleasant, cool, the restaurant is new, so the owner and the staff are doing their best to make a good impression. We ordered one item and changed it to a lower priced item, but the bill came back with the original item on it. It was certainly an understandable mistake, I'm glad I caught it, but I'm sure it wasn't intentional. But because of that we got another (small) item taken off the bill and the owner apologized for the mistake and was very nice about it. That's not something I see a lot and I appreciated it.

one letter passwords

I was listening in on a conversation on passwords the other day. One of the people in the conversation mentioned that they knew someone whose password was "A". Just the one letter. And there was a conjecture that maybe that was a really hard password to guess since, most people would think 3 was short and no one would think that anyone would use a one letter password. This was for windows login passwords, so it's not something that would normally be attacked via brute force somehow, although in an organization with lax password controls, the same password might also be used for email, file shares, etc. In which case the situation suddenly becomes worse.

Anyway,I thought about that a bit, and yesterday the refutation came to me. A one letter password is a dead giveaway because it's so easy to shoulder surf. It's not even necessary for the shoulder surfer to actually see what's being typed. It's sufficient to see that only one character was being pressed. After that, it would be trivial (in the lax organization, more security conscious organizations would have failed password limits and timeouts) to try all the one character printable characters on the keyboard and log in.

usb thumbkey svn repository speed

I store (most of) my source code in a USB flash drive. Originally it was ext2 (because my previous thumbdrive was ext2, because i couldn't put reiser on it, at 32MB the old drive was too small and reiser wouldn't mkfs on it). Yesterday I got frustrated because commits were taking too long (small commits, but they were taking 2 minutes or more). So I did an svnadmin dump and also tar-gzipped the repository and rebuilt the filesystem as reiser.

Reiser said how much of the disk it would eat, and then proceeded to make the filesystem. After the load, checkouts, commits and updates are very much faster. I think I'll stay with this. I'm not sure what the problem was though. It might just have been that svn was trying to update too much data there (maybe the strings file, which is 6MB) and was just slow yesterday. Or it might be that reiser is just doing something good and it's a better match for SubVersion. I'll keep track of when it gets slow again. If it never does, then I'll stick with svn, but if it does get slow, I'll try xfs and jfs for svn, just for fun :).

long time

The older I get the more memories recede into a haze. But some things stick. One event I particularly remember had me with my face being pushed in the grass by some neighbors. I'd probably been snotty or something, and so these two kids (they were smaller than me, so it was only fair that they gang up) started beating on me. I put up a good fight, but eventually the sum of their masses began to tell and they had me on the ground eating grass.

My brother was at home, maybe 200 meters away, but he seems to have noticed the commotion. Instead of going out the front gate, he climbed the back fence, ran over, and took the boys off me. He didn't go and fight them himself (he probably knew that I'd been snotty :), but it was cool that he took them off me so I could get up.

Then we went home. No fuss, just a regular day.

boost regex!

I posted on the PLUG mailing list about regex libraries in C/C++. Matt Baluyos pointed me at PCRE and paolo falcone pointed me at Boost. I decided to go with boost because I couldn't stand the PCRE library.

That's not to denigrate the quality of the library, it works, very well. I use PCRE implicitly in PHP and it's a great help and is incredibly easy to use there. But C is now just too low level for me and while I can work there, I don't like it much. If I can, I work in PHP (perl is far too ugly for me, although that could change if i were to work in it instead of just reading it). I'll be working in java soon, but I tend to have a bias against it for small projects. I'm sure it's great for large projects, but even there, the libraries and frameworks seem over-engineered. But that's probably just a function of the fact that they're large enough that I can't get my brain around them in a week.

For anything lower level that I can't do in java or php, i like C++. And that's where I use the boost regex libraries. I've written utility functions that hide some of the details of the boost implementation (just pass string pattern, string data, vectormatches, and internally it does everything else). there's also a similar set of utility functions that passes the pattern as a regex const reference instead (so that patterns that are used all the time aren't re-compiled).

it's very nice to be able to say:

vector matches;

if ( re_search(pat, line, matches) )
{
for (int ctr=0; ctr < matches.size(); ctr++)
do_something_with_match(matches[ctr]);
}

php, popen, stream_set_blocking(...,false)

So I thought that I could make a "multi-threaded" (but not really) program in php by using stream_set_blocking. Well, the things I need to do simultaneously involve calling popen on external programs and then reading the data and doing something with them.

Well, popen doesn't work with stream_set_blocking(..., false), so I can't do things that way. Unfortunately, I've spent a week or two setting up the framework for all this (so it would be easy and convenient) but now I find it can't be done.

Oh well, time to give up on trying to do that in PHP then, and just buckle down to doing it in C++ (the original version is in C++, but frankly, I just don't want to maintain that code anymore, no choice now though).