On February 1, 2017, it was reported that a sleepy system administrator accidentally deleted the production database of a majorly popular source code hosting site GitLab.com, which hosts the source code, version control and associated metadata of a lot of companies and organizations. Restoring the database from backups likewise failed, as apparently it just so happened that five different methods of backups had all failed for different reasons. What does this teach us?
January 22, 2017
I hereby introduce to you Sling, a general-purpose object oriented programming language that is meant to be used for all kinds of software development purposes, targeting multiple platforms and different execution environments. Sling by design encourages productivity, maintainability and well formatted, well structured source code.
July 17, 2016
I am happy to note and announce that GitHub now fully supports the EQ programming language in GitHub code repositories. EQ source code is correctly classified as EQ, and the files are nicely syntax highlighted when browsing them through the browser. Support for EQ was added in the Linguist project and whoever would use Linguist will also be fully EQ aware. Thanks to the nice folks (Paul Chaignon) from the Linguist project.
March 14, 2016
80 million dollars was robbed from a bank in Bangladesh through purely electronic means. In the aftermath, it has been said that the Philippines must also take "cyber threats" seriously. I couldn't agree more. But do we really understand the level of that seriousness? Do we actually understand how severe the state of the Philippine ICT infrastructure really is? It just might be worse than you thought.
January 27, 2016
Entering a new year very often brings with it the need or desire to evaluate, improve or change things in life, work, and otherwise. This change of year has certainly been no exception, and to commemorate all of the things that have been unraveling during the past month, I have also taken the liberty of upgrading my personal web presence here in terms of the technology platform, layout and design, and most notably, with a new tagline: "As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another". Here's why:
January 23, 2015
We have spent the past few weeks, and the latter part of last year, teaching programming to non-programmers. This is really something that has been great fun for all of us (teachers and learners alike). Imagine teaching someone who knows nothing about programming, you're given five days, and they're expected to have made notable progress in the end. How would you do it?
October 10, 2014
Recently I have found myself having an incredible amount of things to do. This might have also been somehow noticeable in my blog here. But despite having my head torn around in different directions, there is one consistent thing that I've been wondering that keeps me going when I move from place to place, from meeting to meeting, from convention to convention: How is it that the software development industry is so very deeply committed to the concept of virtual machines, interpretation and/or JIT, and automated memory management through garbage collection?
June 6, 2014
Just a couple of years ago, Symbian was the coolest thing in the mobile industry. Then it got old and was succeeded by Maemo and then Meego, and then they were all discontinued. Before there was Windows Mobile, and then it was also discontinued. That was replaced with Windows Phone 7, which was also discontinued, replaced by the technically completely different Windows Phone 8. Windows XP was the king of the world, and was recently discontinued as well. Eight years ago there was no Android or iOS, but now they rule the mobile market. Very recently, Blackberry was the king of enterprise mobility, but is now struggling for its very existence. On a regular cycle, the industry keeps changing and changing. And it does not seem like this is going to end.
February 8, 2014
Flappy Bird is very visible right now. Whether we want it or not, it jumps to the top of our news feeds and friend feeds, and our friends are sharing Flappy Bird related links, videos and articles all over the place. I am no different: The game has popped up on my feeds for some time now, but up to today I've been fortunate enough to be able to ignore it. Because, well, let's face it: It's ugly. It's uninteresting. And I rarely take interest in uninteresting things. But this morning it came "closer to home" so to speak, when my son showed the game to me on his phone in the breakfast table. Immediately I knew what it was because it's all over my news feeds and being talked about and blogged about all over the place. So the time of being able to ignore it was over, and perhaps it was about time.
August 27, 2013
Like many technologically oriented people, I am a big fan of high resolution screens. Instinctively I feel that the more pixels there are on the screen, the better (who feels the same way?). And that's definitely a big reason why I've been happy when using the Macbook with the 2880×1800 pixel 15″ screen. While I would have a number of things to say abo the overall software experience (some good things, others .. not so good), in this writeup I will focus on scre resolution matters. Because that one alone has been a fun and educational experience ..
