Isles Tech

If you had been wondering why I had not been blogging lately, it is because of the school workload I am trying to catch up these days. I actually have three long tests to make before I hit the bed tonight, but, well, you know me... I always get distracted with something else. :)

Anyway, I was reading some description how we can mark out something on a surface. Specifically, I am interested right now in the technology of laser engraving, which Wikipedia describes as "the practice of using lasers to engrave or mark an object." Although it used to be very technical and complex, very precise and clean engravings can now be achieved at a high rate. Well, it is still very technical and complex, but the difference now is that you can already buy relatively cheap laser engraving machines
. A quick search at Google reveals a lot of distributors.

Although I don't have the cash yet to purchase my own laser engraving machine, I already have some ideas on what I should be looking for in that kind of equipment:

• the suite of solutions must be comprehensive
• it should be able to produce custom, one-off items, or identical mass-produced ones
• most importantly, it must be able to cut, mark or engrave plastic, metal, wood, glass, stone, ceramic, rubber, acrylic, textiles, and other materials -- and quickly and easily
  

So this is one thing I would be keeping in my wishlist. Well, I'll buy one one day. (Goes off to prepare three long tests.)

After you have installed Samba, you cannot just go to non-Ubuntu computers and try to connect. You have to create Samba users and associate them with Ubuntu usernames.

To add Samba users: $ smbpasswd -a username

To associate Samba users with Ubuntu usernames, open the /etc/samba/smbusers file and add = "Ubuntu username" where get replaced by the username you created earlier and "Ubuntu username" gets replaced by the Ubuntu username.

At the top of all your PHP files (but for most CMS, this would need only be the index.php file), add this:

if (preg_match('/www\.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_VIA']))
{
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
exit();
}

(Change to !preg_match if you want to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com)

I've been using Project Wonderful for some of my sites for sometime now. For a small publisher like me, Project Wonderful brings in cents, but in constant quantity, so I still end up with some dollars at the end of the week. It's not much, but nobody is just going to hand me the same amount of money doing nothing but blog.

I set my Project Wonderful account in such a way that I don't need to approve advertisers. Unfortunately, some advertiser decided to put an ad to a porn site in one of my sites, and I had to find out how to block that advertiser.

First, I have to cancel the bid, so I logged in to my Project Wonderful account, located the ad box, and cancelled the bid.

Second, I went to the advertiser's profile, and mark him as a banned. From now on, he would not be able to place bids on my Project Wonderful ad boxes.

(Another way would be to mark your boxes as for children only, but this doesn't mean that those advertisers will not be able to place ads on those boxes: Project Wonderful ads are not checked prior to being allowed in the system.)

Reference: Project Wonderful help

I must have missed the announcement, and I admit it had been a while since I last visited the main page of the Arellano Law Foundation's LawPhil Project. But this afternoon, while researching for information about drug education in the Philippines, I happened to go to LawPhil.net and saw this:

Take a look at that Creative Commons logo. They are releasing the entire database ("This work") under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Philippines License. This means that anybody wishing to create a free version of Lex Libris from CD Asia and PHIL JURIS from Gigabytes Research Systems, Inc. can now make use of their database!

But not so fast though. They have not clearly defined anywhere what they mean by "This work", and their copyright page is still under construction. Also, all of their HTML still contains this notice:

<!-- COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyrightc2000 Arellano Law Foundation ITC Web Development Team. All Rights Reserved.
Obtain permission before copying codes here.
Web Design and Programming by the ALF-ITC Web Development Team.

The LawPhil Project - Arellano Law Foundation.
Copyrightc2002. All Rights Reserved. -->

Yesterday I blogged about my mounting debt problem, to the chagrin of my 80 or so regular droppers. :) The prices of goods in the Philippines continue to rise, and my monthly salary as a classroom teacher is now simply not enough to make ends meet, since I am financing the education of my younger brother and younger sister, as well as my own at the University of the Philippines - Cebu. My only other talent aside from teaching is writing, but although I had done some professional writing for a local Cebuano magazine*, I had never thought that it is possible to earn from blogging. Of course, I had already heard about payperpost -- almost all of my blogging friends have PPP accounts. But the first time I applied, this blog got rejected. When I complained about the rejection, one of PPP's reviewers emailed me an explanation why the blog was rejected, which made me exclaim:

BTW, I was surprised to receive your email. I never thought you would take the time to respond personally to one of your applicants, esp. that the applicant had been disapproved and therefore economically useless for you.

The next email was even more surprising, something which you seldom see in a market-driven Internet:

I very much appreciate your response Vincent, and I'd like to say that we do not regard our posties as being economically useful or useless. We here in the Customer Love team only look at the fact that you chose us to blog with, and that you should receive the exact same level of service as someone that's been with us since the beginning. :)

But then, I forgot all about my application and the rejection, until I tried creating an account at PPP and the system rejected my usual username. I tried my generic password and I was able to log in, confirming that I did already have a login.

Yesterday, after I thought of my mounting debt, I decided to resubmit my blog. Just a few minutes ago, I received this:

Hello Vincent Isles,

This is a notification letting you know that your PayPerPost blog, Isles Tech, has been approved and is now available.

You can now take opportunities and write about them on your blog.

So that's it then. I've always loved writing and blogging and reviewing things, and this time I'll be paid for doing it. I love PPP :-) (And not just because I will be paid, but because of their excellent customer service when I was yet an economically useless blogger for them.)

To my blogging and PPP friends: welcome me, and I'm one more competitor :-) (But hey, you may not have younger brothers/sisters to educate :))

(* My story Mga Sulat Alang Sa Tulo ka Binuhat - "Letters for Three Persons" is published in the July 2, 2008 edition of Bisaya Magasin.)

My good friend Choy Tura informed me just a few hours ago that the Cebu Institute of Technology (where my younger brother is taking up Computer Engineering) is already raising its tuition fee. The Philippines had also seen the rising prices of gas, which of course affects rice and other commodities -- the minimum fare for Cebu City is even raised to PHP 7.00 now! If that was not enough, CIT moved its preliminary exams to next week, which means that I have to pay for my brother's tuition this week. That, after I had paid for my University of the Philippines matriculation after I enrolled yesterday.

So I finally moved my lazy foot and processed my SSS ID so that I could loan from the system. I have also requested a friend to help me with a credit card application so that I could have some financial backup.

Last night I was awake for some time thinking of how to get rid of some minor debts -- yes, they are still minor at this time, but they will become major in no time. Since I had always been in the habit of planning for everything (following the plan is another thing :-)), I looked up at Wikipedia some ways of reducing debt. I discovered that there is actually a standard set of procedures for this, which is known as debt settlement. I browsed around some more and stumbled upon NetDebt.com - as a newbie domainer the name itself tells me something. I mean, if you are online and you are looking for a debt settlement solution, what would you type but NetDebt.com?

The advantage of an online debt settlement solution is the near anonymity -- you don't have to go to "counselling" sessions with real people whom you may meet some time or another. And then there's the definite advantage of being able to work all from the comfort and privacy of your home or office.

It has been a while since I posted a web opps (you know, those major and minor errors that crop up now and then in some websites). Well, it had been a while since I posted something here at Isles Tech -- my workload at the school and my occupation with the Education in the Philippines Forum had taken a toll at my time. Without further ado, here's another one:

"Those who could not be trusted with small things cannot be trusted with greater things." :-)

Finally, I was first in enrolling in a course in my four years of undergrad and one year of graduate study. After having been given an INC (incomplete) rating by Prof. Roberto Basadre last trimester because I failed to submit three documents (not to mention that my other submitted documents got lost in the limbo, thanks to that Tuesday guard at U.P. Cebu), I moved my lazy foot and did the necessary work this time, to make sure that I don't rush during the last day of the enrolment (which I had been doing at U.P. in my last three trimesters there).

Unfortunately, Frank did something horribly wrong to U.P. Iloilo, where the server for the CRS (Course Registration System, I think) is located. Without power, the server was down, which made me wonder why they don't just outsource the hardware requirements to contractors outside the Philippines. Anyway, I noticed that the enrollment lane this time was much faster: I do have to input a lot into the form which suddenly came back from the depth of forgetting, but the process, once that particular step was done, went very smoothly. It was even faster than with the CRS. (Of course, I know that the processing by U.P. personel after my processing would be longer than if they had CRS.) Even with the CRS down, I was still able to enroll; some of my friends told me that in the University of San Carlos, they couldn't when the custom solution from a local provider bugged down.

The good thing with U.P. is that they have a backup system for almost everything: CRS down? They have the old-time U.P. Form 5. Got an incomplete rating? They have U.P. Form 26, "Permit for Removal of Incomplete/4.0".