All is Lost

Due to some unforeseen situation, my old template got deleted.

I dunno what happened :(

i guess I have to start making backups somehow.

Anyway this is as far as I have managed to remember from my old one.

Star Wars Ep. IV in ASCII-mation

For the die-hard Star Wars fan

The first Movie, Episode IV (A New Hope) in uncensored ASCII.

You're gonna need telnet for this.

Instructions for Windows Machines

1. run command prompt (or in XP, type cmd in the Run dialog)
2. start telnet (type telnet under command prompt)
3. type o towel.blinkenlights.nl
4. prepare to be ASCII-fied

I suppose any other telnet client should work as well. Just connect to the same server.

Have a Nice Day!

Combatron

(It's Nostalgia time...)

Whilst trying to sleep (unsuccessfully) last night due to my sister's incessant and equally idiotic ramblings. I all of a sudden happened to think about megaman/rockman which in turn made me think about a local comic series I read a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away...

"COMBATRON"

The main hero there is somewhat based on the classic blue megaman hence the connection between my musings. I distinctinctly remember the start of it happening ala Green Lantern. We have an injured and near-death alien robotic life form who crashed in Earth who in turn is being chased by his evil alien robotic arch-nemesis named Alkhenato or something like that. An innocent Earthling finds this alien and before dying, the alien bestows upon the unsuspecting kid his uber-combat suit and names him the new "Combatron", defender of the known universe. Just in time because an evil henchman lands and begins wrecking havoc.

Oh, did I mention that along with the combat suit comes a robotic man's best friend named "Rush", oops... I meant "Askal". This Askal can also turn into a jet board, submarine, drill tank the same as Rush of Megaman fame.

In due course, the combat suit gets upgraded a few times. Surprises abound with cool new weapons being discovered here and there. Combatron also happens to revive some old friends of the original Combatron in the course of the story. One is the Yo-yo wielding warrior, Axel. Another is the the robotic she-warrior, Metallica. I also distinctly remember them having a sort of headquarters ala Metroplex of Transformers fame that can be also used as a spaceship.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember anything more about their arch-enemies aside from that Alkh...whatever has a purple combat suit with matching Darth Vader-esque helmet.

I distinctly remember enjoying this series. I even actually collected the comic covers and the comic pages themselves but I can't seem to remember where I stored them. I think I might have thrown them away some time ago. I also remember being disappointed when the series ended abruptly. Ah well... all good things come to end.

(End of Nostalgia time...)

The State of the Nation from a jeepney

Last night, I happened to come across a very interesting jeepney (also called PUJ) while on my way home.

Typical of other Filipino jeepneys, this one is as flashy as can be. There is the customary blinking lights. A 20 watt flourescent lamp keeps everything as bright as day inside. The usual boom box blasting incoherent tunes. The difference would be a fully functioning portable dvd player inside.

It was a quite weird yet humbling experience considering the car I was in only had a casette/radio player. No CD playing knicknacks. No MP3, DVD, VCD or any other D's there are. Not to mention that the system itself has seen better days with some of the buttons not working anymore. To illustrate the situation better, I am usually stuck at the AM band because of a certain unworking button and I can only tune the radio backwards, again because of a certain uncooperable button.

If we are basing the current State of the Philippine nation based on this certain jeepney, all I can say is that we are not in a bad state at all, but my living experience here tells me the truth better :P

Of Eye Infections and Knee Surgeries

For those in the Philippines only...

Have you noticed that whenever the current government tries to arrest some (so-called) opposition member or whomever, that that person suddenly develops some kind of "Eye Infection" or for some strange reason suddenly need some "Knee Surgery" such that they need to be confined in a hospital here or suddenly need to go to HongKong or USA for treatment.

Case in point, please see the recent medical histories of Imelda Marcos or Joseph Estrada, or some of those military commanders involved in the recent EDSA anniversary rebellions.

Why Eye Infection and/or Knee Surgery? Who knows? What weird country I live live in :P

Its the End of the Philippines

Its two days after the 2006 anniversary of EDSA revolution and not only is the situation worse but there is faction against faction against another faction.

Innumerable numbers of coup attempts, vigils, rallies, protests and what-not pop-up from equally innumerable places. While the loyal troops and city-gendarmes run around trying to catch long-dead ghosts and spirits, the President on the other hand is just sitting safely ensconced in her heavily secured Palace. What's more annoying is that there is no central opposition with each faction fighting supposedly for the Filipino people while veiling their true intent of self-satisfaction.

What a nice country I am living at right now. No wonder we don't progress as much as our neighbor countries. I am hoping that things will get better when I wake up but we all know that it's just wishful thinking.

Good Night for now Philippines. Have a Nice Day :P

To be or not to be ... Dead?

I recently found out about an online game called Urban Dead. It's a fairly simple web based mmorpg game. No fancy graphics, just cgi. From the website itself

"Urban Dead is a low-tech massively-multiplayer zombie apocalypse game where survivors and zombies battle for the control of a quarantined city.
If you're a new player and would like to help the evacuation effort, join in the looting or swell the ranks of the zombies"

Now, I'm a valiant zombie crusader hell-bent on hunting the choicest brain... Well, not really, in actuality, I'm still a level 0 n00b zombie named wirubi hehe. But still, in time, I will become the best zombie evar. Scourge of the Living. Plague of the Puny. So if ever any of you happened to stop by the quarantined city of Malton, be sure to look me up and maybe we can share a brain or two. Mrh?

BitTorrent 3 years later

Can you still remember a time when BitTorrent was just a simple download dialog with a few extra information about download/upload and seeds/peers and nothing else? When Azureus and the like were just mere imagination?

I remember my first meeting with BitTorrent. I was just an innocent guy looking for some new chapters of Naruto manga in ToriyamaWorld.com (back then, Naruto was practically unknown yet and its Anime counterpart is still non-existent). Behold, one day they started trial for a new distrubution method called BitTorrent made by a guy called Bram Cohen. They said it would help relieve some of the traffic from their file servers. Being the nice guy I was, I downloaded the client and tried it out. Performance was terrible at first, since only a few people tried it out. Back then, the concept of a bigger swarm giving out better download speeds was totally lost on most of the people. The forums abounded with complaints on the speed. They wanted their direct-download http links back.

Fast-forward a year or so. More people have embraced the practically new technology. New clients with additional functionality have surfaced. Now you can queue multiple torrents. You can limit your download/upload speeds. Blah Blah Blah. About this time, I have switched as well to a visual client called Personal Torrent Collector (PTC). It wasn't the most full-featured client then and it still isn't. What I liked about it was its simplicity. It is now sadly a dead project.

I have since used a lot of different clients.
1) Azureus which is probably the most famous one. I never really liked it. Too many features maybe. And it seemed like a resource hog.

2) BitComet - Currently in controversy. It first catched my attention when I saw that it was written in C++. At the time, most clients were either in Java or Python. True-to-form, it had a faster performance because of its C++ internals. Currently taboo with some private trackers due to some DHT issues. DHT was a new feature added in vesion 4 of the BitTorrent protocol which enabled trackerless torrents and peer-searching.

3) ABC - one of the more popular clients around. I liked it when I found out it didn't pre-allocate files on the hard-disk. So even if you are downloading a 1 gigabyte file, only what you have downloaded is used in the hard disk.

4) μTorrent - my latest find and latest love. It's a full featured client with a clean and easy-to-use and simple interface. Its written in C++ as well so it's responds quicker compared to Java or Python clients. And all of that for a mere 130Kb executable. Yep, you saw correctly thats in Kilobytes. You don't even have to install anything. My current memory usage for it is a mere 2320K. Compare that to some of the resource hogging clients out there.

BitTorrent is here to stay even with all the complaints from RIAA and MPAA. It is merely a tool used for distribution of files. The author didn't set out to create a tool for pirating licensed files but for efficient distribution. What it's users do with it can't be the fault of the author.

The Great Subic Getaway

Whaadaayouknow! I fnally got to put my ever-so-slightly new K750i through its paces and in scenic Subic to boot.

It was a pretty eventful getaway with lots of action and you wouldn't believe how strict the road rules are there. Your everyday driving behavior here in Manila won't be given any slack there. If you see a 'THRU STOP' sign, then you better stop or the cops will be on to you faster than ants on a picnic.


Now, a highlight of the trip would be the safari. After all its not every day you get a tiger less than a foot away and chasing you with hungry intent.

Just imagine how near it would be for me to get pictures like this.

Mr. Chicken, meet Mr. Tiger

... a few minutes later...

To top off the trip, we went tree jumping... sort of...I kinda forgot what it was called, something about sliding and jumping. Anyway there is this cable strung between trees and you go sliding down them. Like so,

And so ends my short little Subic encounter, my only peeve about the whole thing is that the camera man is always the person who's left out of all the pics. Next time, I'm making sure to teach somebody else how to work the camera before going down those trees : )

Oh yeah, the rest of my award winning pics can be had here http://photos.yahoo.com/wilbc

Name change...

Oh look, a name change...

I wanted to internationalize the blog title. The previous one was too localized.

Probably not permanent though. The new one actually sucks, but it was the first thing that I could think of.

XP na pang Pinoy (A filipino version of WindowsXP)

Coming soon to a theater near you! The long awaited Filipinized version of Windows XP, directors cut edition. It's bigger, longer, and completely uncensored. Watch those shelves or you might miss them. I predict that it will be the most über version of XP yet. Throngs of people will line up outside Data Blitz 2 weeks before its release date. It will have have a most glamorous premiere akin to that of Oscars fame. Everybody who's anybody will be there for this momentous occasion. See posters and flyers for more details.

BUT seriously though, a filipino version of Windows XP is not impossible. In fact, the translation is being done right now by the company I'm working at currently. So you really can see it someday soon, that is, when we finish it. I'm one of the handful of people that has been entrusted to create a somewhat literal translation of the interface and supporting documents that comprises WindowsXP. I'm not really sure if its a gift or a curse. It is quite challenging and fulfilling to become a part of something this big. On the other hand, try translating an english EULA with all its technical jargon to your native language. Its murder I tell you.

It's a good thing some experts will recheck it all afterwards because I feel like I've pretty much used up my whole Filipino vocubulary halfway through just one dll of Windows XP. Just wait till you see my strangling and mangling of the Filipino language as well as those of my compadres. Just remember, if someday you read something weird in the UI of Internet Explorer 6, you can blame me for that.

For Great Justice!

Happy Collision Day

Yesterday sure was full of collisions for me.

Collision 1: For a change, our monthly company meeting was held in nearby bowling alley and mini tournament was held. Boy did I really suck. I only got 83 points. Actually, I was doing pretty average at the start but things got really bad by midgame though. I was getting gutterball after gutterball. I used to be able to get at least a hundred a game before but I guess the pressure of having so many people looking got to me. I mean the whole company was there, even the family of the boss was there. The good thing about it though was that there were actually a lot of other people who got even lower scores than I did. On the average, I'd say that I'm in the middle rank. I hate being crappy on the stuff I'm currently doing. It kinda takes all the fun out of it.

Collision 2: I think I'm kind of getting into the nerves of some of the developers at work. You see I was assigned earlier this year to be the Build man. That is, to say, I'm the one in charge of creating the everyday or so builds for testing. It's not a very hard job, All I actually do is compile the setup project that one of the developers already made, assuming it compiles successfully in the first place. Well, it just so happens that yesterday was a kind of hectic day and with everybody excited about the bowling game from Collision 1, chaos ensues. I had to make 3 rebuilds because somehow, there was always something missing from the code. A code fix here and there, an unupdated file, Blah Blah, Blah. Of course, I was in a hurry to get it out since I still have to initially check out the whole build before releasing it to the other testers. 3 rebuilds mean that I had to re test each new rebuild all over again. Not a necessarily enjoyable experience. I think some of the developers thought I was being a bit pushy when I was asking them if i was ready yet, after all I only had to redo it 3 times.

Collision 3: What is it about public transportation and me. I had another harrowing experience yesterday night with a tricycle and one of those trailer trucks this time. No one was hurt seriously. The tricycle was a bit scratched though.

50,000,000 to take back their interweb safer and faster

Woohoo! Firefox downloads have recently broken the fifty million mark and rising even more. Although this only counts the people who actually download from the official firefox websites like Spreadfirefox.com, it is still a significant number. Remember that their counter doesn't factor in the people who download directly from the mozilla.org ftp, nor those who download the source and compile it themselves, nor those who download from third party file mirror sites like download.com, nor those who download once and use the installer on multiple computers.

Internet Explorer may still have dominance for the moment but if they don't improve their browser in the near future, Firefox and other newer, safer browsers will ultimately breakthrough that market dominance of theirs. In the meantime, if you still haven't used Firefox yet. It is no big loss for you to click on that foxy button after my archives list and try out the magic of Firefox yourself.

Making your Windows XP Look Better Lesson 1

Gather around kiddies!

Uncle Wil-B's gonna tell a nice nice story.

Once upon a time, there was this wee little ugly kid called Windows XP.

Every morning he woke up, An ugly Microsoft sign shows up on his face.

And Blue and Green squares runs around and around and around...

One day, he got tired of seeing it everyday so he came to Uncle Wil-B and said "Please take away those ugly blue and green squares and the big ugly Microsoft sign from my face." *cries*

Uncle Wil-B couldn't stand to see a wee ugly kid cry so he said OK...

and after a few minutes of tinkering... Tadaaaahh!

Proud to be a Pirate!


Uncle Wil-B changed the wee ugly kid's boot screen to this new fancy, piratey one.

And the wee ugly kid lived happily ever after. The End!


Props to swissboy for this cool bootscreen.

You can get it and more at ThemeXP.org

Installation instructions included with most of the files there. But in case you were wondering. It is quite easy to change the bootscreen. But if you're not careful, you might end up not being able to boot into your windows box.

Some things to remember:
An SP1 bootscreen is an SP1 bootscreen and won't work with non SP1 boxes. So don't interchange the files.

There are many ways to change the bootscreen. The boot.ini way (safe and easy) and the overwrite the old bootscreen file way (some risk involved). Choose the boot.ini way if you're not too familiar with tinkering with Windows system files.

Finally, read the instructions that come with the files.

After you're all done, you can be assured that the wee ugly kid won't be so ugly anymore. See you next time kiddies!

Beware the Revenge of the Sith Fries

In a Galaxy Far, Far, Away...

The next and last installment in a long running movie franchise has finally come.

Well... on May 19 anyway. Yes, Its the Third episode of the Star Wars saga.

It's the last part to come out but actually not the last part of the story since its in the middle of the story. The first three to come out were actually Episode IV, V and VI. And that the fourth and fifth movie to come out were Episode I and II and . . . What the hell, never mind!

Already movie pundits are expecting it to be as bad as they found Episode I and II to be and Star Wars FANatics just plain don't care and will rave about it any which way they want to.

Me, i'll watch it probably or I could just wait for the DVD set. I can hardly wait although I'm not exactly a true fan of the series and all

Watch out though for the newest and baddest Sith Lord yet.

He's Big, Mean, Round and Brown.

He's Darth Tater!

On the effects of the Indonesian earthquake...

Would you believe our days are shorter now because of the recent Indonesian earthquake that also caused the devastating tsunamis?

Scientists from NASA have determined that we now have 2.68 microseconds less everyday to do our stuff. As if our days aren't short enough already LoL

The earthquake also caused our dear Earth to become slightly more compact. Now we have even less space to live on Earth. Overpopulation anyone?

Another effect is that the Earth's oblateness (flattening on the top and bulging at the equator) has been affected. So... does this mean that earth is now more svelte and slim? Kind of sounds like Mother Earth is on a diet and fitness regimen : )

Get the rest of the juicy details here

I won the lottery last night !!!!

Well, actually it's a lottery with no money involved, but still a lottery nonetheless.

In truth, I was actually the unlucky recipient of a vehicular accident last night. It all happened so fast (which is how all vehicular accidents happen hahaha). I was riding this motorcycle sidecar type public vehicle (which we call tricycles in the philippines, kind of like the tuk-tuk of the Thais but slightly different). And then this whacko in comes speeding from out of nowhere and BANG.

It's all that guy's fault since we have right of way. Thankfully no one was seriously hurt. All I got was a slightly bruised butt (however funny that may sound, it still hurts). Another good thing that happened is that this all happened about 15 feet away from my house so my family was right there to help me : )

And to think that I always thought I was unlucky ^_^

Why I love my books

My most favorite pasttime is reading but not just reading anything of course. My bookshelf mostly consists of fiction of the more obvious genres, that is, fantasy, sci-fi. Why these particular ones is obvious. My life is pretty much boring, which is my own fault entirely. I'm not the type of person who would do something for the sake of doing it. You'd need to poke, prod and push me before I do anything that's overly exciting and seemingly life-threatening. In short, I don't live life on-the-edge. I'm more of the wake-me-up-when-you're-all-done-okay type. Which all boils down to the problem of boring.

What my books give me is an escape from reality. I've been to the bottom of the sea and the center of the earth, Jules Verne took me there last weekend. I have real working time machine, H.G.Wells gave me one a few birthdays ago. I've been to places full of wondrous creatures that will never be heard or seen in this planet. I've seen empires rise and fall in the blink of an eye. I've fought invading hordes singlehandedly and live to tell my story. I've personally seen the goodness of good and the evilness of evil. I've destroyed countless worlds with my death ray for no apparently good reason. All in all, not too shabby for a day's adventure I'd say. And to think that I did all that while sitting down too. ^_^

Welcome to the Year 2005

Wheeeeee ! Happy New Year Everybody !

well... actually there still an hour so so but I won't be here to post it since there's gonna be a pretty big fireworks display that I don't want to miss ^________^

May 2005 be more eventful, positively eventful that is. More Happiness for all and Peace for all and Food for all and new hi-tech gadgets and gifts and candy yeah, don't forget candy and oh!almostforgotgoodbooksandanimeandmangaandIwouldn'tminda
promotionandraiseandmaybethrowinanewpcandblahblahblah.....

Edit: As of posting its almost like war zone outside, I can hardly hear the tv from the noise Whoooohoooo!

Before you say Happy New Year

Time Check: approx. 3 and a half hours before New Years Eve

I'm sure almost everybody has heard or watched about it already. The earthquake and tsunami that devastated a big portion of South East Asia has really made this New Year into a big downer.

With nearly 200,000 people dead, definitely NOT the best way to end the year. One can only assume that 2005 will be better but no one really knows. I'm hoping this won't be a harbinger of things to come : (

If you're still feeling the Christmas spirit i'm sure Red Cross would be happy to accept any type of help you can give. American Red Cross website

That's it for now : )

- Wil-B counting the minutes till New Years ^___________^ -