Archive for July, 2010

Apple updates iTunes and other Apple ramblings

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Apple Releases iTunes 9.2.1 and iOS 4.0.1

After all the iPhone 4 antennagate drama, Apple finally sends out news about their latest iTunes and iOS release. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, the iOS update only has one update, being this: “Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.” Sounds pretty straightforward, so I’d skip the explaining part. Whether it contains unicorn dust or other magical potion is beyond the update text.

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Read full article at thepoc.net: Apple updates iTunes and other Apple ramblings

Tech for disaster coordination and management

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Raindrops will keep falling on our heads this season of the year, and yet this rainy season’s starter already induced headaches for our new administration with regard to its disaster management tactics. First was the alleged erroneous forecasting by PAGASA, and the most heartbreaking of all is the lack of calamity fund for the rest of the year. Seriously? We only had like one or two series of rains, not even storms, these past few months and the past administration already spent 70 percent of our calamity funds? Talk about disasters!

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Read full article at thepoc.net: Tech for disaster coordination and management

Drooling Over Databases: SQLite, PosgtreSQL, and CouchDB

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I’m pretty excited about this article because I’m a database fanatic / addict. For those who don’t know what a database is, simply put, a database is where your data is stored and defined (whether by a schema or by documents). You use databases everyday as long as you use a computer, a cellphone, or even a website. And for the past weeks, we’ve seen awesome news from the open source database systems community, which means we will have upgrades on how we use our databases. I’ll start off with something very new and fresh.

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Read full article at thepoc.net: Drooling Over Databases: SQLite, PosgtreSQL, and CouchDB

Going data-portable without the Portable PC

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Last week I got yelled and scolded by my little sister complaining about me forcing her into using OpenOffice.org for her assignments. So while she searched and scoured the net for all her copy-paste work, I was yapping at her about paraphrasing and translating her articles herself instead of searching some content in the Tagalog Wikipedia and just dragging those texts to OpenOffice. She asked me why we were using OpenOffice in the first place and the jerk in me told her that if she has money to buy us MS Office and MS Windows, I’d be glad to install it in my own computer. The FOSS advocate in me, on the other hand, told me I should make my brothers and sisters use FOSS and make a case study out of them (which is being chronicled in my FOSS articles here, mwah-hah-hah).

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Anyway, back to the story. I had her save the file in OpenOffice’s ODT format and I told her she should just save the file into my USB stick and head to the nearest computer shop to print it (I’d be buying a new printer hopefully soon). The next day, I got the scoldings and the yellings.

Read full article at thepoc.net: Going data-portable without the Portable PC