I’ve established a good reputation with being careless with restarting services. For those that can’t afford a second of downtime, you can check if your configuration is sane. This ensures your service won’t go down longer than expected while you look for that syntax error:

apachectl -t

I remember running across that before but forgot how to do it. Found it again while trying to trim down Apache’s Fancy Indexing.

Update: Ha ha! Silly me. I was going to add this to the init script so that it won’t restart if the syntax check failed. It turns out that it’s already in the script under the reload function (I’m using CEntOS).

I was supposed to blog about this earlier but I was too busy the past few days to post it. Besides, that entry was a bit negative. For me, the thought of a programming contest is very lame. A member of a team that got in a previous world finals gave a talk and he pointed out that the contest does not promote efficient code (sorry, forgot his name). I agree with him.

But the contest is not that bad at all. It still challenges one’s capacity and performance when it comes to logic. Maybe someday the contest can also have another category for efficiency.

The contest was a success. It didn’t go smoothly though. I found it very ironic that, as people in the field of computer science, the organizers were announcing the computers assigned to the teams. They could’ve at least used the nearby computer that was connected to the projector. I think an hour was wasted just by doing that. Or they could’ve called all the team coaches and gave the assignments.

Also, the school wasn’t that prepared too. Some computers didn’t compile and most had hardware problems. It’s good that the school decided to make yabang and hosted the event. The students get new computers this school year, yay (I hope)!

Now that the contest is over, we now have a benchmark of l33t skillz from 24 schools with a total of 50 teams. The last time I saw the scoreboard, the top three are teams from UP Diliman, AdMU and UPLB. The first team I found from DLSU was at 6th. The team from DLS-C that scored the most was at 19th.

There you have it. If your kid wants to take computer science, send him to UP or the Ateneo. But coming from a La Sallian school, it makes me feel guilty not to be defensive about it <snicker snicker>. That doesn’t mean that most students in the respective schools are as good or as bad as those in the contest. Go UP! Op course, I have to side with the lesser of two evils.

It was also great to see Doc Mana in person (I’ve been following his blog). He does make a good point that contests like these should be treated with glamour and prestige like the varsity teams get in UAAP. It doesn’t have to be televised (us geeks are shy people), just better funding. This should also increase geek culture in the country. Healthy competition is good.

Good luck to the teams that will be going to the regionals! Here’s to hoping for better ICPCs in the next years.

By the way, it’s really De La Salle-Canlubang, not DLSU-Canlubang. I have to be anal about it.

• I’ve had a couple of crashes (mostly when the battery is almost low on charge). Then sometimes, it takes more than one reset for it to come alive. What else can you expect with a Microsoft product?
• In the messaging system, it would be really great if I had a way to filter incoming messages and a way to sort messages into folders.
• Having no keypad has its downsides. I am given several character/text input methods. One of them is the Phone Pad (a traditional phone keypad emulator). It feels different because you don’t get tactile response (similar to Maddox’s description). I wonder how it’s different with the iPhone specially that it uses a QWERTY keyboard. I am fortunate enough that it recognizes my handwriting so I prefer to use the stylus.

Hmmm… that’s pretty much it (for now). I thought I had more to say. Other than these small complains, I’m quite satisfied with it.

• arCHMage
  Tags: python chm
• Free softphones for Windows, MAC, CE, LINUX
  Tags: voip fwd
• Blog ni Inday
  Tags: humor inday

I accidentally dropped my mobile phone earlier this week. Just when I really needed it. I was forced to buy a replacement and failed to resist the temptation of a second-hand Xda II.

Anyway, it sorta reached my expectation. My main purpose excuse for getting a PDA phone is to fulfill my need to read eBooks. Also, it would be really awesome if I could read my RSS feeds and access my servers via SSH through the phone. I’m starting to put the calendar and notes features into good use.

So I took the 64MB SD card that’s been hiding in my laptop for ages and loaded a book on Python in CHM and another educational magazine with lots of images in PDF. The phone came with a PDF reader and I downloaded a free CHM viewer but the problem is that both applications took too much resources to load my files.

My work around for the CHM is very simple. I extracted the HTML files using arCHMage then used IE to view the pages individually.

sudo yum -y install archmage
archmage /path/to/your/file.chm /path/to/output

Then for PDF, use the ultimate image manipulation tool, ImageMagick. You might want to check first if you can natively view the PDF without eating up too much resources. Converting to JPEG takes some time and quite a lot of memory. Plus, with little-to-none readable text at twice the file size, you might want to reconsider.

sudo yum -y install imagemagick
convert /path/to/your/file.pdf /path/to/output/prefix%03d.jpg

I haven’t tried the available tools for Linux that will allow me to sync with Pocket PCs but by the looks of it, development is still at its early stages. It also sucks that my SD card reader works only half the time.

I’m looking into having this phone traded in with an Xda IIs when I get enough money (it’s getting a lot harder to sell crack nowadays). I think buying an SDIO wifi card is not worth it.

• The Porn Talk
  Tags: porn
• Philippine Government Web Servers
  Includes OS and ISP; Side Note: Guess what OS NEDA servers are using!
  Tags: philippines servers list
• Build a Remote Control Deadbolt
  Tags: diy electronics
• Hide-a-Pod
  Conceal your iPod in a Zune
  Tags: zune ipod gadgets
• How to speed up Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu
  Tags: firefox linux

If the doctors and nurses have shows targeted to them (Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs et al), we folks in the überkewl IT industry have a TV series dedicated to us too. I was LMAO at the jokes. Literally.

One of my favorite jokes is at this video clip (2:52).

• World Vision Development Foundation
  Sponsor a child for only PhP450/month
  Tags: charity
• Mumbles
  a plugin driven, modern notification system for Gnome
  Tags: gnome linux
• gcalcli
  Use Google Calendar on the command line
  Tags: google calendar gcal cli

Until Monday (October 8th), you can help organizations that are doing something about breast cancer. The Boobie-Thon is an annual event run at the first week of October.

There are two ways that you can help: 1) by submitting a picture of your boobies (no faces, just boobs) or, 2) by donating cash. You don’t have to submit bare boobs. Even manboobs are accepted. Then donate at least $50 and you’ll get access to bare boobs.

Remember Kitta, the cute Flickr chick that does HTML and CSS? She submitted a photo of her rack this week. Yay! No links to any of her pages. She might find this entry.

I also heard on the news that the Philippines has the most deaths by breast cancer in Asia. I forgot how much but it’s somewhere around 5 digits. I also forgot which politician was pushing for a bill to have at least one breast cancer center in every city or municipal.

Save the boobies before it’s too late!