Hey guys! online voting for philippine web awards is now avaiable! please cast your vote! Go to http://www.philippinewebawrds.com and click the violet image to start voting. You have to register, i know its a bit tedious but please! haha...

Name: Life at the third row
URL: http://www.lifeatthethirdrow.com
Category: personal

Name: Agile philippines technology center official website
URL: http://www.aphiltech-center.edu.ph
Category: school

Name: Subic bay portal
URL: http://www.subicbay.com.ph
Category: community portal

guys! 3 of the website that i am currently engaged in were included in the semi-finals round of the philippine web awards! yay! and here are they

Name: Life at the third row
URL: http://www.lifeatthethirdrow.com
Category: personal
this is my personal site..

Name: Agile philippines technology center official website
URL: http://www.aphiltech-center.edu.ph
Category: school
this is my company's official website

Name: Subic bay portal
URL: http://www.subicbay.com.ph
Category: community portal
im also working on this one...

and please! i need your support! go to the philippinewebawards site and vote for us! thanks!

So in about 15 days i will be having my pre-oral. And i just cant wait though the software is not yet ready. But i know i can make in time. Im having my full swing of momentum right now. Einstien moment baby! hahaha!

The software is around 60% now. I will let you guys see it one of these days. And i want you to be ruthless in me. Hmm... Ok i should have not said that. I should have not said that. hehe. It will be my beta test so i hope i can get a feedback from you.

That's all for now spokedom! shout!

I read Alfred and Didith's blog and I must say that those are good pieces. And I cant help but to react, not to contradict but rather to emphasize more on the issue. I am in academe for more than 3 years now and Im also doing some professional and freelance software development. Balancing these two is a bit tricky. Giving up one of them is not an option, at least not for me. Teaching is a great profession. For technical people like us it is an outlet for our expertise and passion. It is an area where you wanna share what you know and watch other people grow with it.

Being on the field on the other hand is what we really wanna do. It is where we express our ideas. It is where our creative side comes to life. My point is they are both important so why choose when you can have them both? Now if choosing them both is a considerable option for you, i must warn you that it wont be an easy way. It means double the effort, double the sacrifice. Not to mention double the cost. But its worth it. Not because of the money but rather of the experience. Now i must emphasize on this: the experience. Academe and Industry have a symbiosis relationship that lets reap all the rewards. How? You gain a lot of knowledge from the academe, and with further hoaning, will make you pallatable to the industry.

Now how do we do this? Study more. As long as you have passion to learn dont stop. Pursuing a Master's Degree is a very good option in terms of academe. What more if you have your PhD. Ill site a case for you, here in our place we have a shortage of a qualified dean. The main requirement for a dean is that your undergrad course, master's degree and the college you will be handling should be in the same area. So if your a BSCoE or BSCS grad, a good option for your master's degree is MSCS, MSIT or MIT. In industry i cant find any better alternative but to get a certification. We all know that MCP's are one of the top gainers these days. Software companies nowadays measures their employees skills through here. And if you are a BSCS grad with an MS, getting a certfication will just be a thing for you.

Being in academe and at the same time in industry can be tricky. But as long as you are equipped, you need not to worry anything.

OK, so im really curious about this C omega things microsoft research team is brewing. And i can say im finally getting a grip a grip on it. It has a very noble purpose i may say (in the perspective a deranged developer that is). According to its documentation, the design of Cw is based on three principles. The design of Cω is based on three principles:

1. Asynchronous concurrency and processing of relational and semistructured data are sufficiently important that they should be directly supported in a modern general purpose programming language. The advantages of direct linguistic support include:
   • Stronger compile-time guarantees.
   • Intentions and invariants are more apparent in the code. They become part of the interface rather than being buried in the dynamic flow of control into mysterious library routines.
   • The compiler has more information and so has the freedom to choose different implementation strategies (e.g. performing query optimizations).
   • More natural syntax.
   • Better support from other tools such as editors and debuggers.
2. We should extend an already-popular language, rather than design a new one from scratch.
3. The extensions should be principled. The aim is to take models and lessons learnt from the design of more academic, special purpose languages and try to incorporate them within the mainstream object-oriented framework. In the case of concurrency, we took ideas from a theoretical model called the join calculus and a join-based concurrent functional language called JoCaml. In the case of our data extensions, many of the underlying ideas come from functional programming.

I tried using the compiler, which you can download here, its a command prompt compilation process, just like if youre using C# without VS.NET. (cwc instead of csc) Micorsoft did a provide a sufficient documentation for this. There are PDF's regarding articles and stuff on the Cw's home page. I must say that the streams and Content class are very invaluable. Although its just an expiremental research language and there are no plans (yet) to turn it into a commercial language or either to integrate it in C# or Visual Studio.NET I believe it will eventually catch up in the future because of its built-in support for XML and related technology like XPath and XQuery (you gotta see content classes, its very cool) and Relational Data.

Well, since my pre-oral defense has been moved to October 15 i have a lot of time to do my thesis. At first i was dispappointed about it but what the heck, ill have more time to furnish things out. And as of the moment i have already finsihed at least 90% of the UI (i hope i didnt forget anything) and im now moving to the middle tier components, as they put it Business Logic. As much as possible i tried avoiding implementing data-access in my components. My classes just act as a data holder of my data -- whether from a data-entry or emitted by a stored procedure. Theres one thing i like with doing classes for these purpose: making them bindable to a server control. Its a very neat feature.

Implementing bindable feature to your class is a very easy process in .NET. First you need to implement the IEnumerable Interface to your class and override the GetEnumerator method's implemenation. So you can do the following:

         DataGrid1.DataSource = YourClass.CollectionMember;
         DataGrid1.DataBind();

We are so happy today that finally - after a two-month long waiting - our Imagine Cup prize is here. We recieved an email today from Mr. Sam Jacaba, Education Lead for Microsoft Philippines, regarding the details of the prize. But what really excite us is the small ceremony they will be preparing for us, wow! I hope this celebration will happen anytime soon! haha.

So, for you guys out there who havent recieve the prize yet, be patience! It'll come eventually. Thats all for now peeps! shout!

Yesterday was so tiring, considering that im not getting enough sleep these days. We attended the 2nd day of Y4IT it was a 2-hour driver here from subic. We left 5 AM so that we can beat the traffic. I attended Y4IT last year so i can say that, all in all, this year is better. The day was packed with a lot of discussion but ill just give you the highlights and my "review" on it. by the way im using red hat linux today(for a reason i cant tell, tee-hee) so i cant use that "edit" panel here. So everything will be in plain text, so just bear with me. Back in the highlights:

1. Embedded Systems - the topic was pretty interetsting. the speaker was Mr. Vincent Reno, R & D Manager from ADTX. although he wasnt a public speaker he was able to pull it off nicely. he was able to answer questions, technical ones, gracefully.

2. Java Technology - ok, i know sound so "open-source technology-ish" today, hehe. but the discussion was really worth mentioning. I didnt know that Suns Microsystem already registered java in the open-source bandwagon. although Mr. Matt Thomson, Director Technolgy Outreach and Open Source Program, sounds a bit desperate in gathering "developer" for Java, i can say that it was a very generous offer, hehe.

3. Windoiws Vista - ok, ill try to be honest, it wasnt what i expected. i was expecting a "meaty" and hands-on presentation of Windows Vista but all we got is fair presentation (ok, im really trying to hard now). I think My Jojo Ayson have missed some important details about Vista (WinFS, Avalon, Indigo? they werent even mentioned). In fairness to him, I believe theres a glitch happened in regards with the Y4IT schedule. In our invitation he was scheduled in the 2nd day, but it was moved to first day. and surprisingly, he presented yesterday (which is the 2nd day, hehe).

The affair, all in all, is fun. That the emcess were hilarious! hehehe.. a gay and a *** tandem.. hahaha. They were really outrageous! So thats it for now! Ciao peeps!

The migration of thespoke to version 2.0 has been, well uneasy (i was gonna say the word 'disaster', but im not that harsh, hehe). a lot of glitches have been uncovered. A lot of features removed. The performance degraded. Our haven of thoughts was turned into a frustration site. But im not giving up on this site that easy (hear that!). Yeah this site deserves the wait. I mean was able to stretch my patience with friendster (damn, nothing will beat that! i can see you people nodding, ok and laughing too). So what can we do as of the moment? Find some work-around to deal with things here! And i was able to find one (yay!)

If you noticed our blog comments were lost. To retrieve this back (YES, YOU CAN) you should 'allow' comments on your previous blogs. Now this is the painful part, you have to do it for every previous blog that has a comment. I dont know if theres a better way to do this, please lemme know if there is.

I know in time they will be able to fix our home. Lets just hope that we are still here before that happens, hehe.

I was talking to one of my friend yesterday when we bump into this discussion. We both have an intensive background with ASP / COM development. But now he is into PHP / MySQL while im a pure ASP.NET junkie. The conversion is really techie. We are trying to compare these technologies. On his side, discussing the PHP, it wasnt much of a transition. Though syntactically it was a huge leap the concept of development is pretty much the same. Request / Response Model, Database Queries, we agree ASP and PHP is pretty much the same.

But when i try to discuss to him ASP.NET, not to mention ASP.NET 2.O, he was surprized. "Ibang-iba pare". And i couldnt agree more. ASP.NET has brought a new development paradigm. First in line are server-side controls, which gives you the ability to "access" it as if youre just accessing a control in Visual Basic 6.0. ASP ans PHP both heavily relies on forms and querystring to retrieve data.

Next is the concept of a page as class, i know we've seen this in technologies in JSP but the ASP.NET languages (im a sharpist) are far more expressive in terms of object orientation. Included here is the code-behind feature and the compiled assemblies. Another thing is the tight integration of ASP.NET toWeb Service. This is possible in PHP of course but the .NET Framework provide an extensive support for Web Service. I also showed him the different configuration files in ASP.NET(web.config, machine.config) which are all XML-based.

The last thing that really surprzed him (yeah, again) is the concept of Master Pages. We were the number 1 complainant of SSI before, hehe. and Master Pages just really solved it all.

Though i never convinced him to migrate to ASP.NET  after the conversation he was convinced that ASP.NET is good technology. A choice every web developer can take without having a regret.

Its been  a while since ive posted about my thesis. Im in the full swing of my development right now, and geeky it may sound im enjoying every minute of it. Im about 45% of the entire application, but my phasing is turning to be exponential. How? Well, thanks to ASP.NET 2.0 new features making web application has never been this easy. Here some are the ASP.NET 2.0 feature i have integrated in my thesis:

• Master Pages - Yeah baby! whoever thought of this concept should have a monument! I mean, this feature is a bliss for developers who wants to be in control, like me. Its like you have a page-generating machine. My app heavily relies on this feature since i have around 50-100 pages, and counting. And another great thing about Master pages is that they can have deep hierarchy. Master pages can inherit from another master pages and so on and so forth...
• Web Parts - though i really havent used this in my app, i really wanted to try it.
• Controls - I am just realizing the full potential of controls in ASP.NET. As of the moment i have created 8 controls already. and i must say two of them are my favorites:
  • Prompt Control - I was so happy when i finally cracked this out. whew! the functionality of this control is like a messagebox. If you are deleting something on a database its always polite to ask them if they are sure with what theyre doing. Now this is a server-side messagebox. It has one event 'Accept', the user of the control can write a method for this event using the OnAccept EventHandler. Therefore I can re-use my "Prompt" control whenever, wherever i need to...
  • DatePicker - a small yet very handy control. I always deal with dates when it comes to data-entry with 3 dropdownlist (Month, Day and Year) so i thought why not make them one. and it was a neat idea! i created a read/write property called Value with a return type of DateTime. Whenever i assigned value to this property it automatically sets the 3 dropdownlists appropriately.

There. My latest adventure (ok thats really geeky) in my thesis. By the way if you want ot have a copy of these controls, just lemme know. And FYI, im not using Visual Studio.NET, just like when we did "assyst". These are the tools im using:

• Crimson Editor - my code editor. but im not satisfied here anymore, because currently it doesnt support ASP.NET in its color coding scheme.
• Web Matrix's Class browser - a handy reference for your classes, methods and properties.
• Adobe Photoshop - aaaahh... my image editor
• Macromedia Flash MX - i dont want my app to be flashy, but a few moving pictures is not a bad idea i guess
• Microsoft.NET Framework - for assemblies (csc.exe), web service proxy class (wsdl.exe), gacutil.exe, sn.exe

 

We attended "A Lap aroud Visual Studio.NET 2005" Seminar last Thursday. Its an introductory seminar to Microsft's new product, formerly named "Whidbey", the Visual Studio.NET 2005. Stanley Tan was the speaker. The entire seminar was pretty informative. Although I've been using Microsoft.NET for quite some time now I must admit that Im not a big fun of VS.NET (Crimson Editor rules!! hehehe). But VS.NET 2005 propose a very tempting features that developers cannot ignore. It fully supports Microsoft.NET 2.0, has some radical features (as stanley says "Technologies that will change the world"). The Masters Page feature in ASP.NET 2.0 is fully covered by VS.NET. There's this thing called "Visual Inheritance" that will make templated websites creation a breeze. The SqlDependencies which allow web app to automatically "refresh" data from SQL Server. Theres nothing much radical features that were discussed about the Winforms. Theres this automatic alignment and spacing of controls but nothing ground-breaking. Plus I've seen these features in other application (Macromedia MX 2004 to be exact). But the best part of the seminar for me was the VSTO. The sample application was superb! It calls a web service that returns a picture and post it inside the Action panel of MS Excel... it was really awesome.

 

All in all the seminar went great. Im hoping for a part 2... but a more advanced and deeper topic.

Today is a big day for us! later this afternoon we will be launching the [url = "http://www.subicbay.com.ph"]subicbay.com.ph[/url] website at Boardwalk (its a park here in Subic). We are all so excited! hehehe...

The same team that brought you Assyst (That Winning Entry from imagine cup, remember? hehehe) we are the ones responsible for the development of this site. The site is local portal for subic it showcases all the things that you can find, and do, here in subic. The site has a very light motif. It captures the ambience of subic. Well, just find out for yourself:

http://www.subicbay.com.ph/beta

By the way im still doing the AVP for the site. Im restless but my adrenaline is still rushing. I have a deadline until 2 PM, and im halfway through it. hehehe. later peeps.

Back here in Capstone. Im busy doing the interface of my project. I have decided to choose aggressive-portal look (whatever the hell that is.. hehe). OK, lemme explain. portals by default has blue-light-gray motif. Or within the range of these colors. But lately i have discovered that my real forte is in dark-aggressive designs so its a bit conflicting. So i came up with a hybrid design (conventions, conventions...) I combined portal layout with some dark aggressive design, and i guess i pull it nicely.

I just finished the primary layout last night but something hilarious happened. My keyboard battery went out while im almost done with the design. My momentum was still high so i open up On-screen keyboard to finish the last part of my design (OK thats geeky, hehe). I made a few more enhancements until i felt sleepy. Before i turned my PC off, i took a screen-shoot on my design. "ill out this in my blog, for the blogumentary that im making". Then i doze off.

Now this morning i was excited to show my design to my officemates... when i opened the file we i started laughing, here's why: