TechCrunch Tech Presidents Endorsement: Obama and McCain

He is staunchly in favor of net neutrality, and has promised to make it a priority to reinstate it in his first year in office. He has proposed intelligent programs for increasing technology education and access to children. He doesn’t believe the FCC went far enough in their proposed rules for opening up the 700MHz spectrum auctions. He wants to see increases in the number of H1-B visas given out each year. He strongly supports research into renewable energy sources and he has a realistic, market based approach to capping carbon emissions.

...More importantly, though, Senator Obama talks about the future with a sense of optimism that the other candidates seem to lack.

...Senator Obama is the candidate of optimism and leadership, and he will be getting my personal vote.

While the endorsement for Obama was an easy and obvious choice, on the republican side, it seems TechCrunch went for the lesser (least) evil.

Choosing Senator Obama for our Democrat endorsement was relatively easy. We had a lot more trouble with the Republicans. The trouble comes because, based on their positions on the issues, none of them are the perfect candidate.

3 Years

Happy Anniversary Beh.

Flicking the Switch soon

I'll be moving this blog to my own domain soon*. I actually tried it for few minutes but I encountered some missing files (images). This is probably because of how my current template refers to the images. As soon as I find the time to fix them, I'll be at mark.gamis.info (the real thing, using CNAME records in my domain provider's DNS server). Right now i'm just using redirect to point requests to mark.gamis.info to my blogspot address, so everything is still under blogspot. Hopefully that changes soon :)

(You don't have to worry about updating bookmarks / feeds though, may dear (sigh) three readers. Blogspot will be properly redirecting requests to the new domain as soon as I flick the switch)

Quick: without hitting CTRF - F, what's the most abused word in this post? (besides "the" and the likes you smart-a**)

Boy Wonder

You are the reason why keep going on... Love you Sam.

On the G-2 Bombing

Picked this up while perusing MLQ3: Ayala offers more proof of G-2 bombing.

Whacha lookin at?

OLPC XO Sugar UI Tour

I've been very curious about the User interface of OLPC's XO Laptop. Codenamed Sugar, the XO OS is a Fedora derivative (Version 2 of the XO Os is based on Fedora 7)  with a very radical user interface designed for young minds (and a limited screen).

Tonight I was able to test drive it. I wish I could say that I got hold of an OLPC XO (what they actually call the laptop) but nope. Instead, I found out that there are qemu images (qemu is an open source virtualization engine like VMware) for the XO Sugar builds.

What you need is the OS image is a hefty 228MB download, (thanks God for the fast internet), qemu and this excellent XO qemu Emulation quick start page.

There are also images for other virtualization engines, if you're more comfortable using them instead... More details here.

Enough words... on to the screenshots:

 

for full-size images, you can go directly to my picasaweb album.

Jive Love

JiveSoftware has become one of my favorite open source companies this year, having discovered their great collaboration offerings*. We have deployed their openfire XMPP server here at work (convincing people that it's better than using YM or IP Message is another thing, :p ).

The reason I'm blogging about them now is that I just found out about their free licenses: Jive is  offering free licenses (unlimited I assume) for OpenSource developers and user groups for their Clearspace X and Jive Forums products.

So if you're working on an open source project and you're thinking of building a community around your project, you may want to take a look at what Jive's offering.

*also, I really dig their kickass web site design.

iPhone in Thailand?

Coming from an Apple rumors / news site (albeit a trusted one), Thailand telco firm Advanced Info Service (AIS) is said to be in talks with the Cupertino company to bring iPhone to the country (Thailand).

Now it makes me wonder if any of our own local telcos are also engaged in talks with Apple to bring iPhone here.

I don't usually take pride in our country being a prime mobile market, but now I am, because we are! Therefore, we must have the iPhone before it reaches Thailand... Globe / Smart / Sun? Ano ba yan? :p

6mpixel.org

On the lookout for a new baby? This site has the best explanation why it may not be the best idea to go for a compact digital camera with more than 6 megapixels. If you really must, get a Digital SLR instead.

Sun Acquiring MySQL

From Jonathan Schwartz's Blog:

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

This is nice. Sun is exceptionally beating expectations in recovering from their slump. And more importantly, like IBM and other pioneering companies, this move further puts Sun in a position that really understands and embraces the economics (wikinomics if you will) of openness.

MacBook Air

Two words: 3 lbs. 0.6 inch thick. (ok, that's 5, but you get the point)

Syempre ibblog ko, sayang naman yung pinuyat ko kakahintay ng keynote ni pareng Steve Jobs. :)

Good morning everyone.

New Mac Pro Desktops and Xserve Servers

Apple just released upgraded Mac Pros and Xserves last night, but I won't go into the details here. It's everywhere, so just google them (or go to Apple's site). What I'm particulary excited about is the fact that they did this with barely a week to go before Macworld, that same Apple event where the world first got a glance of the iPhone last year. With this two announcements getting out early, industry watchers say only one thing: Apple has (a) much better announcement(s) next week. New slim macbooks? New iPhones? The Newton's reincarnation? Whatever they are, someone's going to sleep late one night next week. :)

( ..just trying start this blog rolling agin. :) Happy New Year everyone!! )