Thursday | July 27.2006




Friday | July 21.2006


Grant Morrison - The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth. It's a five year old article worth reading... again.
WildFire on 05:41 PM CST [ link ]



Tuesday | July 18.2006


Yesterday was one tiring client visit. (Buffered blog. So 'yesterday' here means some time last week.)

Productive, I might say, but still... tiring.

Most client visits we can finish in less than five hours. Updates are already planned, logged and ready to be executed and implemented on site.

We have 9 database systems running on approximately 20+ computers in this client, used by 6 different offices distributed in three different buildings.

Add the President's office that we oftentimes visit, their server/IT room which we sometimes raid, and another administrative staff office, all in all we visit 9 offices in a lucky day.



Yesterday's mission involves re-orienting the new batch of staff, and the old ones as well.

Funny how we end up discussing in the span of for four and a half hours, problems that are, in a way, not directly related to the flow of the systems, but which lie more in the manner by which the systems are implemented and are mostly outside the 'direct scope' of the programs.

(You can't program a program that will convince the Admin about the effects of issueR that involve staffL and her fascination about alien life forms and databases, which if you look closely, might indeed help staffC and headstaffQ in the usage of the system.)

Out of respect to the client, we will refrain from delving into that... for now.

All in all we were able to address, give recommendations and point out the advantages and disadvantages of the things they want to happen.

Tiring but smooth. A couple of hours on the bus and we're home. Five hours travel time to and fro and seven and a half hours of presence in the client's site.

Smooth... yeah... until I discovered the next day that I had left a CD in the client's CD-ROM drive containing all the files, source codes, and proposals we have been working on for the past three and a half years.

I'm sure I did freak out for 10 minutes or so... called the gods of thunder and wind... wanted to find a picture of myself, pin it on the wall emblazoned with 'stupid programmer' as its label in a 192-point bold formatted Impact font.

I sms-ed one of the admin staff of that site, but she was not in the workplace.

Another 10 minutes went by with me blaming myself and thinking of how I will design the frames of that stupid-picture frame.

When I calmed down, I knew I had two choices.

One is to brave the storm, tomorrow or the next day, if not today, travel for around five hours and 'rescue' the CD. Transportation expenses, time spent, and probably extra medicines (in case the storm melts my external shields) is of course justified considering the contents of that CD.

The second option is... well... trust in the goodness that exists in humanity, however dormant it may seem these days. That human integrity is still there.

I chose the latter option. I'll take the risk.

Risky indeed it is... but some things are worth believing in.

...

If in the future, this sort of test fails... I have always kept a cybernetically enhanced pterodactyl who inspite of being a pesco-vegetarian for the last 17 years of its 10012 years of existence has been wanting to break out of that way of life since that past 7 years but has not found enough reason to do so... : )
WildFire on 06:19 PM CST [ link ]



Wednesday | July 12.2006




Sometimes I would like to think that a human mind... his thoughts... always scream for a larger arena.

Probably that's why we have blogs. Especially for those humans like me, who in person, don't talk that much.

I only talk much to the persons I hold dear... like my qs... : ]

(Outside that limited circle of comfort zone, you have to yell at me ten times before I'll give you a go-away-nod.)

From philosophical matters, to Luis Royo's art, to her rants... to comics, including, but not limited to, Wolverine, the Dark Knight, Spidie and yes, even the boy scout, Supe.

Ah trust me, comics are much, much better than the re-hashed/re-invented same old boring formula that movies barf out. You know those - origins, then meta meets girl, conflicts come in... then no matter how good the plot may be it always end with one big fight.

Spiderman did that. Even Batman Begins, which is definitely a good movie using the same formula. Even Matrix did that. (And these are good ones... we don't even want to discuss those not-so good ones.)

(I haven't watched Superman Returns and X-Men III though.)

Back to the arena... I have so much buffered bloggable thoughts already that I wanted to share. But in between the time they were initialized in the mind (usually around 3AM before I sleep) and the time ther are suppose to be scribbled here in Dreamweaver, my notepad in terms of things like this... they are lost in transition.

Sometimes I do wish that one human would invent a mind capture of some sort that captures the imprints of the mind.

(Not just like the dream-caching machine you saw in that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie. A real, real-time if it has to, catcher.)

So much have been lost already.

Probably extreme poverty could've been solved if a mind capture like that is already in existence. Probably peace on earth will finally reign. Meanings of life discovered. All bugs squashed and we won't find ourselves endlessly entrenched in PL and OS-related arguments.

In between this time, I usually am able to understand the complex being known as women... only to lose every bit of solutions and formulas in the first light of day.

Ah... too many bloggable stuff... so very little time.

Mind-catcher, bub.
WildFire on 03:33 PM CST [ link ]


You know... Coldplay rocks. Shiver and Yellow from their Parachutes album rock. Every song in their Rush of Blood to The Head album rocks. Now this X and Y album starts to grow rocks on my hair.

Yes they're effective for coding, getting you, the coder, into the coding zone. That is if you can get over the depressing effect they have on some humans.

(The reason why qs hates listening to them she claims.)

Their songs now sit next to my U2 collection of coding songs, SwordFish's soundtrack and NIN's neuron-pounding selections.

Good for coding... good for coding.

Soulful... they are.



A couple of days ago, qs and I were in a taxi on our way to the mall when the vehicle's radio bombarded us with these Barry Manilow songs, then a couple of uber-mushy-first-love-story-type songs of the 80s. Adding insult to injury was a DJ who read life quotes so trite and cheezy they made me want to shove them down his mouth down to his esophagus to his intestines using Thor's hammer coming from three galaxies above...

... programmers should employ every means to avoid these types of songs. It zaps out too much coding energies. These songs kicks you out of the coding zone after which covering TheZone with adamantium walls which span 10-miles equipped with more than enough shi'ar technology to prevent you from going back in.

Again... do avoid these songs.

From what I've heard, they cause impotency and sterility too.

Avoid, you must.
WildFire on 03:26 PM CST [ link ]



Thursday | July 06.2006


Out of respect to those who are linking (and 'hot-linking') to the wallpapers section of TheLair, I am uploading the image below.



These will serve as 'holders' for now for those files, artworks, wallpapers and illuminations that were removed and transferred to a different host.

These files are currenlty linked to my DeviantArt.com account until I can find a secondary host that can cater to TheLair's bandwidth.

The wallpaper section by the way is reuploaded. There are some links though that need to be updated... but most are re-linked and are supposed to be working by now.

OK... it's already 4PM and the codes are calling me.
WildFire on 03:49 PM CST [ link ]


DEPTHCORE: Remix and Repent

I kept on forgetting this.

Depthcore's latest pack, Remix and Repent was released sometime last last week. Awesome pack it is.

If you can't get pass the 2MB flash file intro (bee hee), you can click the Enter Depthcore link. Here's a direct link to the main section and here's a direct link to the Remix and Repent pack.

I, with my current internet connection speed, [a] wasn't patient enough to view the splash [b] started thinking there was a problem with my current flash and browser and [c] started suspecting alien-related covert activities were happening as the file was loading.

After five failed attempts and the paranoia for an alien invasion growing, I decided to view the html source code, grabbed the link to the .swf file and download it manually through GetRight.

Too huge I know.

Not that I don't like it... it is indeed a cool splash with a cool beat (If you haven't checked out the music department of DepthCore, you're missing .01982828 part of your life.)

Some might also whine about the lack of a loading progress bar... but hey, some of us do like punishing humans and bandwidths alike.

As for me... I've learned my lessons already.

But that doesn't mean I won't repeat those bandwidth punishing stunts in the future... : ]
WildFire on 03:44 PM CST [ link ]


William J. Coupe: FoxPro Moves to 12th… No, Stays in 13th!. (via Craig Bailey's VFP: TIOBE and Google Trends.)

Remind me to introduce you to my friend, ONGriej one of these days.
WildFire on 03:27 PM CST [ link ]



Wednesday | July 05.2006


Now if only we could bring these VFP videos back to the academe. That is one sector VFP should penetrate... students, teachers... schools... the molding blocks of the future.

(Now I can hear my previous boss again talking about his 'academe should dictate the industry not the other way around' insights in my mind. (But that's another story for now.))

Visual FoxPro should make its presence felt back in this sector. Besides, there lies the future developers/system analysts and software architects. And yes... lazy programmers.

They may not end up using Visual FoxPro but at least they could learn tons from it and could apply the principles of speed, efficiency and all this 'ultimate RAD database development tool' has been pumping out for years into their future programming languages and applications.

Again, bring Visual FoxPro back to the schools.
WildFire on 07:16 PM CST [ link ]






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