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CE-GNU-LUG keeps, spreads the faith

Max Limpag — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:27:25 +0000

LITTLE John looms large in the Cebu open source community. In installfests, he towers.

My first encounter with John Clark “Little John” Naldoza and his merry band of local open source advocates was in an installfest, a gathering hosted by a Linux users’ group (LUG) where people can bring their computers for installation of a Linux operating system (OS), in about 2000.

CE-GNU-LUG talks about Meego during a meetup last July 29 in TechBar at the Asiatown It Park. (PHOTO BY JONEL ALBACETE AGUTAYA)

Back then, open source wasn’t as widely accepted by people or businesses.

I had arranged, via e-mail, to meet Little John and looked around one of the trade halls in SM City Cebu with level eyes, only to be approached by a giant of a man with an expansive knowledge of everything tech. Little John is a man you look up to, literally and figuratively.

In 1999, Naldoza, Emmanuel William Yu and Ryan Go discussed in Plug (Philippine Linux Users’ Group) the setting up of a Cebu Linux Users’ Group. They decided to name the group phonetically after the festival that helped make Cebu known worldwide.

CE-GNU-LUG stands for Cebu GNU Linux Users’ Group. GNU, for those unfamiliar with open source, stands for GNU is Not Unix, a project launched in 1984 to develop a free Unix-like operating system. GNU provided the framework on which Linux, written by Linus Torvalds in 1991, was developed and distributed.

The mailing list went online via eGroups (now Yahoo! Groups) in December 1999.

I joined the mailing list on July 25, 2001 and have found it very helpful in getting in touch with other Linux and free and open source software (FOSS) advocates in Cebu. Through the years, I was a mailing list witness to how it resolved tech questions ranging from the introductory to esoteric.

If your company runs open source software, chances are your systems administrator is in CE-GNU-LUG.

Naldoza, CE-GNU-LUG president, said the group’s biggest contribution is serving as venue for questions and concerns within the local open source community. “If someone would like some assistance on a software or config issue, someone within the list would be willing to respond,” he said.

Clint Cañada, a FOSS advocate who joined CE-GNU-LUG in 2004, said its biggest contribution is the “increased awareness on open source alternatives among the academe, industry and the general public.”

“Back in 2005/2006 when there were raids in Internet cafes due to pirated Microsoft Windows software, we installed Linux in some of the cafes to help owners. What resulted was at least, Microsoft Office was largely replaced by OpenOffice in some of the cafes.”

The group, with the late tech rock star Manny Amador, then expanded their open source advocacy to schools, helping a couple set up open source software in their labs.

Today, open source is widely accepted, especially in the enterprise. Companies now leverage open source to improve their businesses. The fastest growing mobile phone operating system today is Android, which is built on top of Linux. The Linux desktop is gaining wider acceptance with distributions like Ubuntu. On the Web, open source dominates as companies rely on such systems as WordPress and Drupal and the trinity of Apache, PHP and MySQL to run their sites.

Is a LUG still an important organization today?

“I think it is still as important today as it was when CE-GNU-LUG was formed. You have got a group of people who are generally extraordinary; they are fairly knowledgeable about a technical field; they are generally courteous and good-humored and willing to help, for free,” Naldoza said.

Cañada said it’s time for CE-GNU-LUG to take on a mentoring role. “I see the group probably hosting different beginner meet-ups with regards to programming languages, mobile development and maybe even team up with industry to help promote FOSS further by figuring out areas where proprietary software can be replaced with open source equivalents.”

Naldoza and Cañada said CE-GNU-LUG needs to be more active. The group met for the first time in a long while last Friday at the Tech Bar in Asiatown, IT Park. Naldoza said he wants to see more members and more activities carried out by newer members on advocacy, education, support and socializing.

Cañada also sees the need for “an infusion of fresh blood, especially from younger individuals who are willing to carry on the torch of innovating through sharing ideas through open source coding and collaboration.”

“Today’s youth have such great talent that ignoring their drive and eagerness to create and innovate would be such a waste, especially to the open source movement. After all, who would have thought that a small, hobbyist operating system made by a second year Finnish student, named Linus Benedict Torvalds, released to the Net in September 1991, would become a worldwide hit, and power majority of the world’s servers and the most widely-used websites like Facebook and Google?”

In the cloud? What if it goes up in smoke?

Max Limpag — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 12:54:04 +0000

I wrote this column in Google Docs, the Internet search giant’s free online office suite. I thumb-typed a rough outline on an Android device—a Samsung Galaxy Tab—before I finished the first draft on my favorite desktop, which runs Ubuntu Linux, and edited the final piece in my office PC, which runs Windows XP.

All the time that I worked intermittently on this article during free time from desk work, I did not know precisely the physical location of this digital file nor the number of its copies and iterations. All I knew was that it was in Google’s data centers–precisely where I do not know nor care.

Saving digital office files in the correct location is among the first things you are required to learn on the job, whatever the industry or the size of the company. In our newsroom, file location is something seared into your brain the very first day on the job. Unless you saved your article in the designated folder, editors cannot access your story in the modern-day filing tray called The Local Network.

Writing using Google Docs on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

But when I wrote this piece, this file was just “out there,” accessible whenever I opened Google Docs from any computer or device. Only when it came to lay this article out in the business pages that I downloaded this file into the Sun.Star office network.

Contacts, events

Last week, I added about 10 new people to my contacts database and more than 20 events in my calendar.

As with writing in Google Docs, I added these data just in the Google system–not in my phone or in my desktop. I added the phone numbers and names in my @limpag.com GMail account, went through Facebook to grab their photographs and other contact data like e-mail addresses and did a quick search for their blogs and LinkedIn profiles. But after I added the contact details in my GMail-centered people database, the system then synchronized the data with my two Android phones (beats having to enter contact details twice) in a matter of minutes.

It’s also the case with my calendar. I just added the details in Google Calendar, designated the category (personal, running-, business section-, or webdev-related), chose whether to be notified at a designated time and then clicked save. The system then took over–adding the events to my Android phones. People I share calendars with, newsroom colleagues and blogging and webdev partners, also get automatically updated on the event or task.

That’s how easy living in “the cloud” is.

Every tech person you talk to today will eventually mention “the cloud” in the conversation. And rightly so. Taking advantage of the network for previously in-house tasks is something all organizations should consider, said Exist chief executive officer Jerry Rapes.

Why go to the cloud?

A properly-executed cloud computing strategy offers a company cost savings and access to technology and skills erstwhile unavailable in-house. Why spend to host and maintain mail servers when you can just let Google manage (for free up to a certain number of users) your mail with its vastly superior GMail technology? Apart from e-mail, you’d get a slew of services from corporate instant messaging, documents storage, shared calendar, shared contacts and even a portal. Why host a payroll server that processes data twice a month when you can lease the service from a cloud provider?

But as with any business move, stress should be placed on proper execution. The cloud is not panacea for bad systems or incompetent management.

The cloud offers security issues local networks are shielded by physical limits. To access files on a local network, you will most likely have to be on premises. Not so with the cloud. A security hole can expose your files from an attacker working from his or her bedroom in any part of the world.

Rapes is quick to caution, you are only as strong as your weakest link. That’s why going to the cloud requires good planning and execution. Sometimes, the weakest link is connectivity.

At home, I sometimes have to resort to using LibreOffice’s Writer to write articles when my DSL connection becomes intermittent.

Horrible experience

In 2005, way before “cloud” became a buzzword, I experimented with making the Internet my computer using various Web-based services that, save for Google Reader, I no longer use now. It all came crashing in January 2007, when the Taiwan quake took down the services of my then-provider Globelines for about a month. It gets worse—I almost lost 152 phonebook contacts in an online synchronization gone wrong with my previous contacts database service provider Zyb (the site since been purchased and discontinued by Vodafone).

These horrible experiences weaned me away from the cloud.

But I’ve now gone back. Android provides a good mix of offline access and cloud connectivity–I don’t have to be online to be able to view my contacts or event details. Google Docs, however, needs work on offline usability but Springpad provides a good alternative when offline access is absolutely needed. Dropbox, a cloud-based storage, synchronizes your files among various devices that you have an actual copy in your device; you don’t need to be always online to access your data.

Another reason why I’ve gone back to the cloud is that Internet connectivity has improved tremendously through the years. It’s far from perfect but it gets the job done most of the time. Today, you have several choices of DSL or mobile broadband packages at various prices that were previously unavailable.

Four years after I swore never to depend on online services, The Internet, once again, is my computer.

Showing Windows the door: the case for open source

Max Limpag — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 02:37:26 +0000

THE warnings are ominous. The Pilipinas Anti-Piracy Team (PAPT) is strengthening its campaign against pirated software and cautioning businesses that refuse to have their software inspected that they will “face legal sanctions unless they show proof that they are using licensed software.”

ALL OPEN SOURCE. Editing my blog post on WordPress, a powerful open source content management system, in my Ubuntu Linux workstation.

The warnings come even as PAPT found rural banks, universities and hospitals using unlicensed software in a recent series of raids in Iloilo City. PAPT said they are set to hold more raids in other parts of the country.

In 2010, the Philippines’ PC software piracy rate stood at 69 percent, the fourth consecutive year that it stayed unchanged. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) pegged losses caused by software piracy in the Philippines at $278 million, a staggering amount from the $141.7 million recorded in 2007.

Bigger problem

More than financial losses for software titans, there is a bigger problem caused by rampant piracy—that of people not seeing the alternative digital eco-system to proprietary software of companies like Microsoft.

It’s so easy to access pirated software in Cebu. Several stalls on Colon St. sell software installers for less than P100 a disc—from the latest Windows operating system, Microsoft Office suite to graphics packages and PC games.

People do not see the need to look for alternatives because they do not feel the full cost of proprietary software.

Software costs

In setting up a new Windows computer, for example, you need to pay from P1,995 (Windows 7 Starter) to P6,680 (Windows Professional) for the unit’s operating system. To work with office files like Word for writing or Excel, you need to pay anywhere from P3,300 to buy the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 to P7,900 for Office Home and Business 2010.

And since you’ll be using Windows, you need to buy an anti-virus software to protect your system. A single-user license for Kaspersky Anti-Virus, for example, costs P880. A single-user license for the company’s Internet Security product costs P995.

Add those things up and multiply it by the number of computers you are setting up and you’ll see how expensive proprietary software can be. At the very least, you need to pay more than P5,000 for each unit to get a Windows operating system and an Office suite, which are probably the bare minimum for a workable PC. But many users are able to install these software by buying pirated discs.

Open source alternative

There is an alternative, however, and it’s called open source or free software or software libre (a phrase coined to distinguish it from the free crapware for Windows flourishing on the Internet). These pieces of software are available for free and perform as well or even exceed those of proprietary systems.

If your PC tasks involve mainly working on office documents, browsing the Internet or using Web-based services, you can choose not to install Microsoft Windows and, instead, pick a free Linux operating system. A good distribution is Ubuntu Linux, which I’ve been using since 2007.

As a writer, editor and blogger, Ubuntu Linux is a great system for me. I am able to customize it to perfectly fit my writing, editing and blogging workflows. But for my print newspaper job, I need to work on a Windows PC because I need access to software that run only on Windows.

For office software, there’s no sense buying Microsoft Office if you don’t need features that are specific to it (that is if there are. I don’t know of one.) Libre Office, a fork of Open Office, is a free Office suite that does its job well. I’ve been using Libre Office since its first stable release this year and I can’t justify to myself paying for Microsoft Office. Libre Office’s word processor, Writer, is a good writing application that serves me well.

Software freedoms

But software libre isn’t just about being free of cost, it’s more about offering four essential freedoms: 1) the freedom to run the software as one wishes, 2) having access to source code and the freedom to change the program, 3) freedom to distribute it and 4) freedom to distribute your modifications. These freedoms are what distinguish open source software and drive its unrelenting improvement.

While a transition to open source isn’t without its problems, it would serve small businesses well to invest on time and training for employees. The potential savings and value to be created by working on an open system would more than make up for the initial kinks.

On the road but still “in the cloud”

Max Limpag — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:52:41 +0000

(This is my column for Sun.Star Cebu for tomorrow, Oct. 27)

Two days before I was to run in the Smart Subic International Marathon (SIM) 2009, I finally learned how to properly tie my shoes. It’s hilarious if it isn’t excruciating to have to bend to retie shoelaces that come undone after running several kilometers.

All my life, I have been apparently tying my shoelaces using a Granny Knot, which easily comes undone. I wouldn’t have known any better had I not started running. In longer runs, my shoelaces always come undone and I’d cringe in pain every time I had to bend and retie it.

It turned out that there’s a better way to tie your shoelaces to make sure that these do not come undone. The trick is to use a Reef Knot and a Runner’s World video shows you just how to do that.

TYING MY SHOE. Learning how to correctly tie my shoes using a Reef Knot, which doesn’t come undone, using a Runner’s World instructional video viewed through a Smart Bro USB modem connection.

But first, I had to make the Smart Bro USB modem work with Linux—specifically with Ubuntu 9.04 or the Jaunty Jackalope.

Making USB modems work with Linux, at least in my experience, can be such a pain in the knee. Almost always, you’d have to rely on hacks or unofficial packages and often, you’d still not be able to make it work. In the more than five times that I tried it, I was only able to make it run twice.

Ultimately, I gave up. I don’t go around that much anyway and wherever I may be, I’m usually within walking distance from a cafe or any other establishment that offers free Wi-Fi. Making the USB modems work wasn’t a life or death situation for me.

Well, that was then.

Days before I was to leave for Subic, however, I made a mental note to again look into making the Smart Bro USB modem work with my Linux laptop. I needed to be constantly online because most of the data that I need access to—from articles notes to my 21K training schedule—are on the Web or “in the cloud,” in tech industry parlance. I knew the hotels in Subic charged Lunarglides for their Wi-Fi connectivity and I wasn’t keen on paying that much for the access. I wanted to pay pasaload.

Having read somewhere that the newer models of the unit stood a better chance of working with Linux, I grabbed a colleague’s ZTE MF 627 HSPA USB modem before he could say “10K” and made a perfunctory search for possible solutions.

I spotted one in the Linux Diaries blog of Dax Solomon Umaming. His solution involved adding a repository in your Linux software sources, installing two packages and restarting the system with the Wi-Fi turned off.

I installed the packages before leaving for Subic and crossed my fingers I would be able to make it work. When I got there, I found that the hotel Wi-Fi still cost P100 an hour or P500 a day or a Lunarglide a week. I knew I had to make the Smart Bro USB modem work.

It turned out that I didn’t need to worry. I was able to use Smart Bro after setting the configuration variables Umaming already listed in his blog post.

And that’s how I learned to correctly tie my shoelaces, via an instructional video from Runner’s World viewed through a Smart Bro Internet connection. And it worked. When I tied my shoes using a Reef Knot, the laces didn’t come undone even when I ran several kilometers and even when I still used rounded shoelaces.

The connection was dependable and speedy and pretty soon, not only was I working and browsing as if I never left the Sun.Star Cebu office, I was already checking out a satellite map of my 10K route through Google Maps.

But old habits die hard. On the 10K race itself, I laced the right shoe correctly but inadvertently used a Granny Knot on the left pair. As expected, it came undone and in such a bad time—a few minutes after I had to stop to take a leak, blowing away my chances at setting a personal record.

Neither Linux, Smart Bro or even a Lunarglide could help it.

Building with WordPress: From sketch to prototype to company website in 5 hours

Max Limpag — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:38:34 +0000

Aside from being a good blogging tool, WordPress is also a lightweight content management system that can be used to run such diverse sites as news or magazine publications, personal and organizational websites.

I recently started accepting paid web development work and website management. Several weeks back, I bought a domain, Tugkaran.com (from the Bisaya word for staging ground), and created a static HTML page as placeholder because I did not have time to configure WordPress to run the site.

FROM SKETCH TO WORDPRESS DESIGN. The steps I took from planning a site to deploying a custom WordPress theme for it using Yahoo UI Grids Builder, Aptana, and Bluefish.

But when one of my projects was about to go live, I needed to quickly build Tugkaran because I already placed a link to it in the footer. I spent whatever time I could spare from newsroom and web development work building Tugkaran, 30 minutes or so here, an hour there, a few minutes here.

It took me five hours to go from sketching the site on paper, protoyping the design in HTML, and setting up WordPress with the custom theme. The site was designed “live.” Developing it locally and then replicating the work in the server would take more time—which I didn’t have.

The Tugkaran website still needs a lot of work but it will do for now. I’ll polish it when I have more time. If you want to study the files I worked on, you can download it at the end of this post.

CMS choice
When I was still planning the site, there was no question that I had to use WordPress.

The open source blogging platform fits my need for a lean but feature-packed CMS I can use to run Tugkaran without the hassles of manual publishing—writing copy, laying out web pages, editing links, uploading these to the site and repeating the cycle for every iteration.

I chose WordPress for Tugkaran even if I use Drupal for many of my sites for 5 reasons:

1. I am the only person updating the site. I write all the copy and post all the articles myself. If somebody else from the team writes something, I still need to go over it before the article gets published. Using Drupal for the site would be like using a pneumatic power drill when all I needed was to tighten a screw on a picture frame.

2. I find it easier to take control over the behavior of a WordPress-driven site than one run by Drupal.

3. I work faster with WordPress than with Drupal.

4. I find it easier to design a WordPress theme than a Drupal template.

The blocks module of Drupal makes it easy to add snippets of content into your site and customize not only their display but specify on which nodes or node types they will appear in.

With WordPress, I can do that while lightening the load on the server by directly editing the .php template files to do away with database queries for displaying blocks of content. I’m sure there’s a way to do this in Drupal that I haven’t learned just yet.

5. It’s easier to update WordPress to the latest release. I don’t want to spend a lot of time in the upgrade process for a site that I will be rarely updating.

Tools
All work on Tugkaran was done in my Ubuntu Linux laptop. The only time I used Windows was to check whether the site displayed properly in Internet Explorer (as of this writing, I still have a mistake to correct to make transparency of layers in certain pages work in Explorer.)

The tools I used for the project were:

1. Graph paper
For someone with several online notes repositories and TiddlyWikis, I’m still a paper-and-pen-or- pencil type of guy. For certain tasks, nothing beats doing it on paper and ink. The initial stage of planning a site is among these tasks. I use Konigi’s graph paper to let clients communicate what they want for the website. For Tugkaran, I only needed a quick sketch of what I wanted because the basic design was already percolating in my mind for weeks.

2. Yahoo UI Grids and CSS
I neither have the patience nor the skills to create web layouts that work across major browsers. With CSS frameworks like Yahoo UI Grids and CSS, creating multi-column layouts is just a matter of clicking buttons to build your page.

3. Aptana Studio
In working with web designs, nothing beats Aptana Studio as tool. I used to work with Dreamweaver, which you can use to edit WordPress themes, but when I found Aptana, I never looked back. Not only is Aptana free, it’s also a great tool to work on your site’s HTML and CSS codes and get instant previews of the design. It does much more than that, but that’s basically how I use it.

4. Bluefish
Another great text editor. While I alternate between Gedit and Bluefish, I used Bluefish exclusively for this project because of the code snippets that come with it. Aptana Studio now has code snippets in its code editor but I prefer Bluefish’s implementation.

5. Filezilla
When tweaking the theme, I needed to upload and download files to fix errors (I was, after all, designing it live.)

Design process

Sketch

I sketched my website plan in Konigi’s Wireframe with notes graph paper. I wanted Jon’s Smooth Gallery as centerpiece of the home page. The gallery will cycle through articles I wanted to highlight.

Initial CSS/HTML layout

I then created a basic layout of the site using Yahoo UI Grids Builder. The tool makes it easy to design a basic web page layout pages and specify such things as its width and whether it is fixed or fluid; and the number of columns and rows.

I configured just one page because my plan for the Tugkaran site is that individual pages will have the same layout as the home page–single column in the main content area with four columns under it. I see no need for a sidebar to the main content but if I decide later that I wanted a sidebar, that would be easy to add using the Grids Builder.

If you plan to lay out certain pages of your site differently from your home page, just configure other layouts and name these after the section you want to use it on: archives.html, single.html (for the layout of the individual post—when porting the design to WordPress, you’ll name this single.php), page.html etc. Just study the layout codes and look for sections you can reuse, for starters the beginning and end parts typically can be reused and would comprise your header.php and footer.php templates.)

The advantage of using Yahoo UI Grids for your layout is that it offers a lot of page layout combinations with A-grade browser support. You don’t have to worry about the layout being broken in browsers like Internet Explorer—although I make it a habit to check my final HTML design in Explorer.

If you use Yahoo UI Grids, you can choose to have the CSS file hosted in Yahoo. Don’t worry about upgrades breaking your layout, the CSS file path given to you for embedding in the header is version-specific.

HTML prototype

After getting the website layout code from Yahoo UI Grids Builder, I then edited this on Aptana.

I created three files:

1.) home.html
This file is used for the home page. The layout contains the Smooth Gallery script that pulls content from my Features category (more on this later). After finalizing the HTML layout, I stripped it of reusable elements (header, footer) and then saved it as home.php.

In displaying your home page, WordPress looks for a home.php template file and if it can’t fine one, it uses the index.php file.

2.) single.html
I created a single.html to plot the layout of individual article pages as well as the site’s fixed pages such as the About page. The single.html page is just the home page without the Smooth Gallery code.

3.) style.css
The stylesheet. Since the CSS styles for the layout are hosted with Yahoo, this file contains only the customizations for the design. I also included theme information, which is a must, according to the WordPress Codex:

/*
Theme Name: Tugkaran
Theme URI: http://www.tugkaran.com
Description: WordPress theme for Tugkaran website.
Author: Max Limpag
Author URI: http://max.limpag.com
Version: 1.0
*/

I then looked into which parts of the pages can be reused. The obvious choices are the upper part for the header and the bottom section for the footer. I then marked the the sections in the HTML code to make it easier for cutting up in Bluefish, where I will be working on the individual WordPress template files.

I decided to use the four columns in the bottom row as part of the footer because I wanted these displayed in all pages.

I then looked around for a CSS menu that I can add to the page and found Matt Black Tabs in Dynamic Drive and incorporated it into the design.

Turning design into WordPress theme
After finalizing my HTML design, I then used Bluefish to cut it up into the different .php files that make up a WordPress theme.

I cut the codes in the header section, added and saved the file as header.php. The needs to be inside the element. It is used by some plugins. I then cut the codes in my footer section, added and then saved the file as footer.php.
All that was left in my home.html file was the code for the Smooth Gallery. I added at the start of the file to call the contents of header.php and added at the end of it to grab the contents of footer.php.

Making Smooth Gallery work with WordPress
I then worked on making Smooth Gallery pull content from my Featured category to highlight key articles of the site. The code that runs it is a custom WordPress query:

Davao, Cebu bloggers meet

Max Limpag — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:26:25 +0000

A dozen or so Cebu-based bloggers met in Bo’s Coffee Club on Osmeña Boulevard in Cebu City yesterday afternoon.

Winston organized the gathering by posting an invitation in his site for a meet-up. Winston and Blogie Robillo then shared with Cebu bloggers how they were able to organize the Davao blogging community.

DAVAO, CEBU BLOGGERS. Wilson Ng talks about plans for the coming Mandaue Business Month during the meet-up of Cebu-based bloggers. The business activity in August will have several tech-related events. Click on photo to view larger image.

I came into the meet-up from a meeting with Wilson Ng and Rio Calle on a web development project related to the Mandaue Business Month in August. During the meet-up, Wilson presented his plans for the Mandaue activity, which will include several technology-related events.

During the meeting, the bloggers agreed to meet regularly for coffee on certain weekends. Winston gathered contact details of those present and will be setting up a mailing list to centralize discussions related to Cebu blogging meetings and events.

Among those who attended were Aldrin Ponce, Rodelio Lagahit, Aileen Estoquia, Wilhelmina Sarawi, Kevin Ray Chua, Xerxes Bernadez, and Mark Abitona.

BLOGGING MEET. Blogie Robillo (2nd from right) talks about his experience organizing events for Davao and Mindanao bloggers. With him are (from left) Kevin Ray Chua, Xerxes Bernadez, and Wilson Ng. Click on photo to enlarge.

It was great to meet Cebu-based bloggers and talk shop. I hope meetings can finally be held regularly. I still want to organize a local WordPress users group—maybe next time. In yesterday’s meet-up, I was able to hand out my last three Ubuntu CDs (the others have all been claimed by Sun.Star Cebu readers).

Since I came into the meeting with Wilson and Rio, it’s quite understandable that I’d be mistaken for a Ng Khai employee. Sorry, but I’m not. I work full-time for Sun.Star Cebu but I run my own consultancy for new media projects. Right now, however, I’m considering spending more time on new media projects that I have long wanted to start. Interesting times.

Cebu bloggers to meet tomorrow

Max Limpag — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:44:01 +0000

Several Cebu-based bloggers are set to meet tomorrow
at 2 p.m. in Bo’s Coffee shop near Capitol and Cebu Doctor’s Hospital. The meet-up is being organized by Winston, the blogger at BatangYagit.com.

Quite a few Cebu-based bloggers have already confirmed their attendance. I’m also attending the event and, if I can remember to bring them, hand out the remaining Ubuntu CDs still not claimed by Sun.Star Cebu readers.

Many of those attending use WordPress to run their blogs. The meet, organized by Winston so that he can meet Cebuano bloggers, might be a great time to start a local WordPress users group, what with Blogie Robillo attending.

If you’re a Cebuano or a Cebu-based blogger, let’s meet tomorrow
at 2 p.m. Manny Pacquiao‘s gonna win anyway. If not, we can drown our collective sorrow on espresso.

Despite existence of open source products, many still use pirated software: CICT secretary

Max Limpag — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:44:05 +0000

THE Philippines still lacks awareness of and support for free and open source software (FOSS), Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) Secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III said yesterday.

Chua, in his speech during the opening of the Philippine Open Source Summit at the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) early today, said that despite the existence of FOSS products, many Filipinos still use pirated software.

OPEN SOURCE SUMMIT. The Philippine Open Source Summit at the Cebu International Convention Center. Click on photo to enlarge image.

“Regrettably, however, the more common option for many users is the purchase of pirated copies of proprietary software. There is, therefore, a need to bring open source to the awareness of users as a legitimate option and to provide the required support for its implementation,” Chua said.

Open source software are those released under a license that legalizes sharing of the application and building up on it. It got its name from the requirement of making the source code available with the software.

Unlike some countries that require its government agencies to use open source software, Chua said the policy of the CICT “has always been freedom of choice.”

“We believe that the marketplace should decide the use of proprietary software versus open source software. We just need to make sure that there exists a fair marketplace and that the consumer is fully informed of the available choices,” he said.

Chua said the CICT uses FOSS in several of its projects. He said the eGovernance Center of Excellence in Quezon City “is a showcase of open systems technology and solutions.” The CICT, he said, is also introducing FOSS through education-related projects such as the iSchools and eSkwela. The projects provide students with Internet-enabled personal computers (PCs).

Chua said they decided to use open source software for the projects because of its “cost effectiveness relative to proprietary solutions.”

UBUNTU HEAVEN. This booth at the ground floor of the Cebu International Convention Center gives away free Ubuntu CDs. The Ubuntu shirt at the back, however, isn’t for sale or giving away. Bummer. Click to view larger image.

“Put simply, cheaper computer labs means more computer labs that we can roll out,” he said.

Chua also said that the Nettop ng Bayan, a project that aims to provide low-cost PCs to the public, was able to meet its target of less than P10,000 for an Internet-centric PC because of the use of open source software.

CICT urged members of the open source community to work together to “make Filipinos aware of the many benefits that (open source software) has to offer and that they have a cost-effective alternative to proprietary solutions that does not involve software piracy,” he said.

Ready for prime time

Global Gateway Venture Capital (G2VC) chairman and founder Winston Damarillo, meanwhile, said key indicators show “open source is ready for prime time.” Damarillo is the founder and chairman of Exist Global, Inc. He is also the executive chairman of Morph Labs, a company that offers software as a service.

MORPH, EXIST. The booth of Morph, G2VC, and Exist. Open source in Cebu got a huge boost with the opening of these companies here.

Damarillo said that among these indicators are open source products that have become market leaders, notably Apache, the dominant web server in the market.

Open source products, he said, have also become models for collaboration and drivers of software entrepreneurship. They also boost the compensation of developers by as much as 30% to 40%.

Open source has also been recognized as “de facto point of innovation,” Damarillo said.

From here on, Heron

Max Limpag — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:20:15 +0000

Today, the new Ubuntu Linux version—8.04 the Hardy Heron—will be released. I have been using the beta or test version for the last two weeks and have found Ubuntu to be easier to use and install and its whole computing experience better than ever.

I had initially decided to stay away from using the beta version—the amount of updates you have to download on the run-up to the final version can be huge. I had several urgent tasks and didn’t want to deal with regularly updating my laptop.

HARDY HERON running on my MSI S260 laptop. Click to enlarge photo.

But Chin Wong made me do it. The devil, in turn, made him do it, or at least that line kept playing in his head as he installed the beta version in his desktop computer. During the installation, he had problems with sound in his system.

A day later, however, he posted a fix to the problem.

That broke my resolve to stay away from the Hardy Heron beta and proceeded to install it, as opposed to upgrade, in my MSI S260 laptop.

Clean install

I’ve never upgraded Ubuntu in my laptop. What I do is perform a clean install of a new version. This is a habit carried over from Windows and retained because I hate to wait for downloading of files to complete while doing an update to a new release over the Internet.

A new install, after all, takes just a few minutes and I take pleasure at customizing my installation all over again.

I downloaded the beta version of the desktop edition via Bittorrent and burned the ISO file. Installation was a breeze and after just a two-stick cigarette break, Hardy Heron was already running in my laptop.

The first thing I did upon logging in was check for updates. The update manager listed 287 files to download, amounting to a whopping 128 megabytes. At least two more update queues had more than 200 megabytes of files each.

UPDATE QUEUE. When you install the beta release, be prepared for frequent application updates. If you install the final release, you won’t have to download huge file updates. Click on photo to enlarge.

What I did was I left the laptop on and worked either on my office desktop or my Asus Eee PC.

If you want to go over the details, including the minutia, of the new things in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, just go to the Ubuntu website. Hardy Heron is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, this means it will be supported for three years.

Desktop eye candy

Compiz, with all its snazzy desktop effects, is installed by default in Hardy Heron but not its configurations manager. It’s easy to add it, though, through the synaptic package manager, just look for compizconfig-settings-manager.

The network manager applet has improved compared to when I last used it in Feisty Fawn and I saw no need to install wicd, my manager of choice for LAN and wireless connections. Firefox 3 beta was installed by default but then removed in one of the updates. I just reinstalled it after a few days.

GET YOUR DOCK HERE. Avant Windows Navigator, a cool applications launcher dock, can be easily installed from the repository. Click on photo to enlarge.

Avant Windows Navigator or AWN, a cool Mac OS X-like dock, is now in the repositories and can be installed easily using the package manager. If you want to start AWN, just include it in the list of startup programs in System > Preferences > Sessions. The command is avant-window-navigator.

Using Bluetooth also seems so much easier in Hardy Heron. In previous versions, I had to wrestle with using the command line to detect my Bluetooth USB dongle. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I gave up (what can I say? I’m lazy). With the Bluetooth tools in Hardy Heron, pairing is easier. I haven’t tried sending files from my Sony Ericsson P1i, though, because I encountered an error that I had no time to check yet.

Hardy Heron also comes with the latest stable version of Open Office, which is 2.4. If is a full office software suite for writing documents, creating presentations, managing spreadsheets, among other tasks.

JDarkRoom

But while Writer is a good writing software, I’ve always preferred to write my first draft on the minimalist and full-screen editor JDarkroom.

NO-DISTRACTION WRITING. I write my drafts on JDarkRoom, a minimalist and full-screen editor.

It’s easy to install JDarkRoom in Ubuntu. Just go to this site and download the jar file. To start the application, just open up a terminal and navigate to the folder where you stored the jar file and then type java -jar JDarkRoom.jar.

To save myself from the tedium of having to do this every time I needed to write something, I created a batch script using instructions in this forum post. In my case, I saved the JDarkroom jar file in its own folder in my home directory so my script is:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/max/jdarkroom
java -jar JDarkRoom.jar

After that, I CHMODed the file, again using the instruction in the forum post. I could now start JDarkroom by typing jdarkroom in the terminal. But, as I’ve repeatedly said, I have a terminal case of hatred for the terminal and so I created a panel launcher using whatever icon I could find in the system that had a pencil on it.

Web development tools

With my writing tool installed, I proceeded to add other web development tools. The first program I added was Bluefish, a really good text editor that I use alternately with gedit, depending on my mood. I then added Filezilla for my FTP needs.

Since I use versioning for some of my work, I installed the SVN Nautilus scripts via the package manager but couldn’t get it working. I just installed RapidSVN, taking time to say a short prayer for the emergence of a Linux tool akin to what TortoiseSVN does in Windows.

With all the other tools installed, I then went on to download Aptana Studio, a really good IDE for web development. Aptana is my HTML and CSS editor of choice and I use it extensively for initial work with WordPress themes.

I installed Aptana Studio last because I thought I’d encounter problems with it. It turned out installation was as easy as just unzipping the downloaded file. I then created a launcher for Aptana using the icon from this site.

The Hardy Heron beta did not come with Wine, a software that allows you to run Windows programs in Linux. I wrote about installing Adobe Photoshop 7 in Linux previously. The current Wine version allows you to install and run Adobe Photoshop CS 2 in Ubuntu Linux smoothly. I had to install Photoshop because I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use Gimp (soon, I know, soon).

Adobe Photoshop CS 2 running in Ubuntu Hardy Heron using Wine.

Overall, Hardy Heron is a great release. With its ability to be installed in Windows, I’m sure more people will be trying out Linux for the first time using the Hardy Heron release.

I told a colleague, who is about to embark on a career-changing project, to use Ubuntu for the computer component of his program. He agreed and I’m excited for it to start.

Since I started using Ubuntu last year, I’ve never encountered major problems in my laptop. Maybe I’m just lucky with my MSI S260 hardware since I still read posts trashing Ubuntu hardware support.

The only thing that’s not working in my laptop is the built-in card reader. I tried looking for fixes last year but just gave up and bought a cheap USB multi-card reader.

Part of me keeps saying Hardy Heron will be the last version in this laptop. I don’t know whether its specifications can still meet requirements of coming development releases. But let’s see. Six months from now. But from here on, it’s Hardy Heron.

Reporter’s notebook

Max Limpag — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:21:49 +0000

I finally got my Asus Eee PC last Wednesday. It has, since then, replaced my main writing gear: an MSI S260 laptop running on Ubuntu Linux.

Several reporters and editors in Sun.Star Cebu had wanted to purchase an Eee PC since the start of the year but we couldn’t get a supplier with enough stocks to provide the initial 10 purchases. Cebu shops, I was told repeatedly, had waiting lists for purchases.

TRULY MOBILE OFFICE. Trying to beat a column deadline using the Asus Eee PC in a beachsite resort in Argao. These are my mobile work tools: the Asus Eee PC, a Moleskine reporter’s notebook, and a Sony Ericsson P1i. Click on photo to enlarge.

The two boxes of Asus Eee PC arrived at the office last Wednesday. We got the 4G model. I chose the pearl white version but at the back of my mind, I was still thinking of the Lush Green version of the 2G model.

For such a small device, the Asus Eee PC packs a formidable arsenal: Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, 3 USB ports, a built-in webcam (4G and 8G models), a VGA port for external displays, built-in stereo speakers and a microphone, and a built-in MMC/SD card reader. Any more feature and it could probably write a story for you. But it’s best feature, I think, is that it runs on Linux.

I talked to two Scandinavian open source guys recently and I asked one of them, a Linux and Asterisk geek, whether he thinks the Asus Eee PC will help introduce Linux to mainstream computer users. His answer: absolutely!

For many in the newsroom, the Eee PC is their first encounter with Linux. I have been repeatedly promoting open source, including Linux, among my colleagues. Still, I was apprehensive on how they’ll take to the version of Xandros that runs on the Eee PC by default.

INSTALLING JEDIT. Installing JEdit on the Asus Eee PC for some code work. Click on photo to enlarge.

My newsroom cubicle neighbor was a cause for particular concern (needless it turned out later) because among his questions to me when I talked about the difference between the Eee PC and a regular desktop was: what’s an operating system? But a day later, he had upgraded his Skype installation to enable video chat support. That’s how easy the Asus Eee PC “Easy Mode” is to use.

The Eee PC costs less than a high-end cellphone but is worth more.

It’s so small and light it feels as if it doesn’t add anything to your luggage. The MSI S260 I use is small and yet, after a while, I get tired of lugging it around with me all the time.

Since it uses a solid state drive, it boots up quickly. This and its size make using the Eee PC to write notes for articles such a convenience.

I still haven’t asked the reporters who bought the Eee PC for feedback on their use of it but I’m sure the experience will be a positive one. I’ve used the Eee PC to work on several articles (this blog post among them) in blocks of free time I have in the newsroom.

EEE PC SHIPMENT. One of the boxes of Asus Eee PC units for Sun.Star Cebu editors and reporters. Click on photo to enlarge.

I’ve used the Eee PC to continue writing, send and check on e-mails, monitor the websites I’m running, upload photos for blog articles, and write a blog post even during a trip to the far-flung town of Argao in southern Cebu. Every once in a while I’d turn it on to continue working on an article when my wife and the kids are busy checking out the Spanish architecture you still see in the town up to this day.

Argao, which I’ll write about later, offers free Wi-Fi access in the town plaza. It was deployed last year by the municipal government. The Asus Eee PC also picks up Wi-Fi signals well, better than my MSI S260. I haven’t checked but maybe it’s using a better chip. A signal that’s only, say, 70 percent in my MSI S260 is picked up in the 80 percent plus range in the Asus Eee PC.

The first time I used the Eee PC, I promptly checked on the popular EeeUser website, whose forum and wiki provide a lot of tips for users of the device. I also checked on J. Angelo Racoma‘s Asus Eee PC journal, which has a lot of great articles on the gadget.

WRITE ANYWHERE. The Asus Eee PC makes it convenient to work on articles and blog posts whenever you have free time. In this photo, I’m checking the connection of the free Wi-Fi deployed by the municipal government of Argao in its town plaza. Click on photo to enlarge. (Photo by Max Dylan Limpag)

I initially thought of using the full desktop or advance mode but chose to stick to the easy mode for at least several weeks. The only application I’ve added is JEdit for some code work. I checked around for instructions on installing Bluefish but couldn’t find any so I installed JEdit using the instructions here.

I also installed SublimePorte’s launcher editor to edit the icons and add more launchers. I’m thinking of adding Gimp later to edit photos for blog and website articles.

My first few days with the Asus Eee PC have been awesome. It truly is a writer’s notebook, or sub-notebook if you’re technical about it.