As it turns out, Intel’s moblin and Nokia’s Maemo merged early this year.

Too late though. I only found out about it just when I installed moblin. But so far, the interface is very snappy and its pastel feel is pleasing. Good thing with MeeGo, you have the option to choose between a Firefox-based or Google Chrome-based OS.

Test post from WordPress for Android.

Pardon me for stealing the title from “Up in the Air” and from Manila Design Week’s “What’s in your bag?” So this is me trying to get back on blogging. Let’s make this short and quick.

This post is some kind of overview for my next posts (stuff inside my bag). There were three things on my mind to share but when it was time to put it into words, only two surfaced: the Android phone and the netbook.

Pretty interesting discoveries from experimenting the two devices. Unlocking and rooting an Android phone, developing on Android and moblin.

Here’s to hoping that the next post isn’t half a year away.

Our old house is for rent. What’s a developer to do when trying to lease a house? Build a Facebook app! Oh, and yeah, I’m not referring to the property developer kind but the computer geek kind.

House for Rent on Facebook

The house is in Alabang Hills Village, Muntinlupa City, Philippines. It’s south of Manila nearby to reputable schools and hospitals. In summary: it has 4 bedrooms, 3 toilet and baths, a library and a garage for 2 to 3 cars. All in 420sqm.

Saw this at TEDxManila yesterday. Very inspiring!

I’m back and just finished moving the blog to the virtual server that I acquired not-so-recently. I decided to try out Slicehost.

In a series of experiments one late night, I wanted to try the Flash demos for the Facebook platform. But I thought to myself that non-production things shouldn’t be hosted on our server.

Electricity, Internet and phone services now totals to a significant slice in my monthly expenses pie chart too. Take note that the decision was made at 5AM on a Saturday! At that point in time, I was rushing to wrap things up. There’s this idea that I’m waiting for where the Slice pays for itself. Let’s hope that that time arrives soon.

P.S. Do check out our Facebook App. That’s what keeping me, err, “busy” lately.

Woke up the other day with a thought about Yahoo!’s slow death (yes, straight from the bed).

What if pieces of Yahoo! get acquired one after the other? Just like pirates waiting to salvage on a burning wreck. It’ll be a mad race to get Flickr, Delicious, Mail, Messenger, Ask and Pipes! That would be fun to watch.

Somebody please publish a list of Yahoo! products and services sorted by its value. It looks like a better way out than slowly killing the whole thing and laying off people.

On another thought, Yahoo! should really open source their Messenger. We have another wave of worms that sends weight loss spam from infected users. The next best thing that they could do is publish the protocol so file transfers on libpurple works as it should. I am that selfish.

If you’re planning to make your own mailing list software from scratch, bouncing messages will be one of the cases that you’ll have to handle. Fortunately, the magnificent D.J. Bernstein came up with VERP.

VERP stands for Variable Envelope Return Path. Bernstein, original author of qmail, djbdns and daemontools among others, has the technique published on his site.

In summary, this is what you need to do for VERP:

• Create a catch-all or variable mailbox
• Set the return path in a format that the recepient address is still readable
• Fetch all email with formatted to your return path
• Process your bounced message

The following is an example return path for a mailing list called foo:
foo-admin-john.smith=example.com@yourdomain.com

To set the return path with PHP’s mail function, pass the return path in the additional_parameters like the following:
mail('john.smith@example.com', 'Hello, world!', 'How are you doing today?', '', '-ffoo-admin-john.smith=example.com@yourdomain.com');

Below is an example for fetching bounced messages with VERP from a POP mailbox with PHP’s IMAP extension.

<?php
$mailbox = imap_open('{mail.yourdomain.com/pop3}', 'foo-admin', 'password');
$mailbox_info = imap_check($mailbox);
for($i = 1; $i <= $mailbox_info->Nmsgs; $i++)
{
  $msg_overview = imap_fetch_overview($mailbox, $i);
  $rcpt = $msg[0]->to;
  if(substr($rcpt, 0, 9) == 'foo-admin')
  {
    $target = substr($rcpt, 10); // exclude 'foo-admin='
    $target = substr($target, 0, -15); // exclude '@yourdomain.com'
    $target = str_replace('=', '@', $target); // revert '=' to '@'
    processBouncedEmail($target); // do whatever you want from here
    imap_delete($mailbox, $i); // you can delete the bounce message too
  }
}
imap_expunge($mailbox); // deletes messages marked with imap_delete()
imap_close($mailbox); // close the mailbox 
?>

That’s how simple it is. I thought it was complicated too.

Although I use Fedora on my laptop, Ubuntu has always been my recommendation for those who want to try Linux. A friend told me that he switched from KDE and shared tales of how it greatly improved. This led me to randomly blurt out to another friend to try out Kubuntu.

To cut the story short, I made the switch from XFCE to KDE too. It’s quite responsive on my aging laptop and their compositing is surprisingly easy on resources.

Installation is easy (for Red Hat, Fedora and other derivatives):

# yum -y groupinstall KDE

I scored on an 80GB iPod Classic at the Microwarehouse Sale. It replaced my retired 60GB iPod Photo. I happened to be at Fully Booked during the Christmas rush and got this fancy, cheesy skin for that MP3 player with a hard disk.

It comes with a screen protector and the sticker will not stain if you remove it (3M). That should reduce the scratches that it’ll get, unlike what happened to the previous iPod that was badly battered. If only the skin can save it from dents as well.

Damage was around P600. They also have skins for the iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPod Video and laptop lids. I wanted to get one for my dear old laptop but the Google Code sticker and scary battle scar are sentimental to me (at P1,300, I didn’t have extra cash to burn that time too).

I like the brown and mossy tone. Makes it look like a Zune. After putting it on, I suddenly got this tiny fascination with whales.