29
Jun

On PBB

You know, I marvel at disgruntled Pinoy BoboBig Brother fans. You know, they keep on ranting and ranting about favoritism, posting and posting on forums against someone inside that housemansion, even writing an open letter. I can only shake my head in amusement on such foolishness.

Can’t you see it? The more you rant, the more ABS-CBN gets happy! You are driving their ratings, their profits. Such publicity, even if negative, brings cash. They will just take things in stride and count their money.

If you want ABS-CBN to take notice, it is actually easy. Don’t watch. Don’t vote. Simple as that.

Otherwise, all your rants are useless.

(No, I don’t watch the show. I don’t like to waste my time and electricity. I’d rather sleep.)

29
Jun

Insulate UP from politicians

After reading Victor Villanueva‘s latest blog post, I am troubled.

Sure, I made fun of it in one of my comments (“kalevel na ng AMA ang UP – sa tuition fee”), but that is in jest (BTW, the Php1500 per unit is greater than AMA, in fairness). The recent increase in tuition fee at the Premier State University is sad and maddening at the same time.

He stated some numbers, which I liberally quote:

Months later at the beginning of a new academic year, only less than half of UPCAT (UP College Admission Test) passers showed up to enroll in the different UP units. In Los Banos and Mindanao, less than 17% of passers enrolled. In Diliman, the entire College of Social Work and Community Development has one freshman. In courses like BA Malikhaing Pagsulat, BA Araling Pilipino, and BA Filipino, none of the passers showed up to enroll. Thousands of the country’s best and brightest students as assessed by the UPCAT didn’t pursue their dreams of affordable college education in the country’s premiere state university for it has indeed become increasingly expensive, commercial and prohibitive.
xxx
As of a few weeks before the beginning of classes, only 5% of incoming freshmen were able to avail of full scholarship. The rest, including those who are applying for lower tuition had to pay the full amount while they wait without assurance of refunds. Some families had to resort to selling their valuables and engage in loans to be able to send their children to UP.

Such is the state of education in this country – appalling.

Is there any way we can make the UP (at least) independent from political shenanigans? Sure, the Congress has the power of the purse, but can they at least not be parsimonious when it comes to state universities and colleges (SUCs)? Can politicians spare SUCs from their personal agendas?

With the persistent corruption problems and tax loopholes, the State is hardpressed on producing funds, hence the government policy to let UP generate its own income. I think UP’s Alumni Affairs should exert more effort in getting alumni to help out (calling UP alumni who made good money). The entire UP community should help out so that the university can generate steady income out of its own resources. I don’t think selling UP land is feasible in the long run. Why not lease these idle lands instead? How about forfeiting all assets of convicted plunderers in favor of UP? (Assuming that the Ombudsman can win all its plunder cases.)

Ultimately, it is the State’s primary duty to support the UP. The politicians who screw up the future of state scholars should be punished in whatever means possible. At the same time, we must help in ensuring that UP can educate our children and their children, first by paying our taxes, then by voting for the right leaders, and holding corrupt officials accountable for their sins.

29
Jun

The Lessons of 2007 Elections

Now that the show’s about to be over, it is time to take stock of the situation and talk about what can be done to prevent such a thing from happening again.

The so-called poll watch arm and parallel count arm are finally exposed to be inutile organizations. With all due respect to their volunteers, Namfrel and PPCRV are in truth powerless organizations. It is I think unfair to the volunteers that they had reported problems but their organizations did nothing. As in they did nothing at all, except perhaps reporting these problems to the public. But what had that accomplished? Aside from tainting Migs Zubiri’s impending victory, nothing. The system remains the same, and will probably operate again come next election.

The problem is that the system doesn’t give credence to whatever these organizations found. Namfrel did not count the votes from Maguindanao because its volunteers had not witnessed how these votes were counted. So the fact that one of the citizen arms failed to witness the counting doesn’t count to Comelec and to the Supreme Court. In short, the Comelec simply ignored Namfrel and PPCRV’s findings.

The watchdogs have failed to stop the dogs from doing dog-dastardly acts. They are watchdogs without teeth.

Then there’s the issue of command votes. This is inherently against democracy. It also has no Islamic basis. I leave that to Islamic scholars to debate, but using shura to order the people to vote this way and that way violates the very basic definition of how we choose our leaders. At best, command vote is almost synonymous to show elections. You know, why have elections when you can compel the people to vote this way?

(I overheard someone saying that the Maguindanao vote should be disregarded since these people abdicated their right to vote because of the so-called command vote. Hmm….)

And there’s the Comelec. No foul word can ever describe the present Comelec. Do I even have to list Comelec’s sins? From the Cayetano screwjob that failed to withholding the list of partylist nominees, this Comelec has done it all (if you know other despicable acts by the Comelec, list them in the comments section below). It has done everything with glee. Its sins are blatant, foul, unforgivable.

I love this line from Dean Jorge Bocobo: “In the hands of such as its (Comelec) present stewards, Democracy becomes a Whore“. And indeed it has.

In the same post and in other posts, DJB argues for an automated election system. While I am not against it, I believe it is an incomplete solution. In any system, the weakest point is always the people within it. Automated systems are made to minimize the impact of human “errors”, but there is never a fool-proof system. I understand the impetus for automation, since it is hard to correct human character defects. In the long run, though, we will keep on designing systems, but all of these will be defeated by human “defects”.

After all, the current system has safeguards and security features (supposedly), but all of them were defeated by the election “operators”. So I think an automated system can also be defeated by determined operators who are motivated by greed (a character defect).

It is a cycle, I know. That is the real problem, and a solution is not in sight. Character change, combined with an automated system will probably help us solve this problem.

To recap:
1. The Namfrel and PPCRV are inutile organizations, watchdogs without teeth.
2. Command vote is inimical to democracy, a violation of the basic tenets of suffrage.
3. The Comelec is one organization that needs to be changed from top to bottom.
4. Automation, plus character change, will improve the elections in this country.

28
Jun

Free Opera for Wii Ends June 30, 2007

Nintendo Wii owners who have not yet downloaded Internet Channel powered by Opera are reminded to download it now while it is still free (and the downloaded Opera browser is free for the lifetime of the console). The last day for the free download is June 30, 2007. After that date, you will have to purchase it from the Wii Shop Channel.

28
Jun

SE: No more new firmware for P990i, W950, M600i

Bad news for Sony Ericsson P990i, W950, and M600i users.

Sony Ericsson has announced that it is stopping from developing new firmware updates for the said phone models. Here is the official statement (taken from SE Developer Forum):

Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in getting this info. No new firmware is planned to be released for the P990 and W950 after R6D23 released on June 15, 2007 via the Sony Ericsson Update Service. The last firmware release for the M600 was R6A16.
I have got an official statement from Niklas Sivander who is the Head of Product Management, Open OS.
So here it goes:
“These firmware releases meet the requirements of bug fixes prioritized by our operator customers and the Customer Services organization within different markets. The decision to freeze the P990, W950 and M600 firmware versions at this point has been made based on meeting these requirements. As with any phone project, no product is ever completely flawless. Any remaining issues are of course unfortunate, but we feel that with the level of quality on the latest P990 firmware we now have a good, solid product.

Due to all heavy features in P990, the need for RAM memory has grown. When running multiple memory-consuming programs at the same time, the available RAM memory runs low and sometimes results in the memory manager closing down one of the applications. We have been working on improving memory management during the whole lifecycle of the P990. The low RAM memory situation for the P990 will unfortunately remain for the heaviest users, and would not be fixed by a new firmware update since it’s hardware related. Multi-tasking on the P990 however works satisfactory provided that you don’t run too large and memory-consuming programs at the same time. Performance improvements have indeed been made for the new P1 phone compared to P990 and the user RAM available for applications has been increased with >400%, significantly improving multi-tasking performance and application behavior so that you can run a lot heavier programs simultaneously.

Many users are comparing the P990 with the stable and relatively problem-free predecessor P910, which was an excellent smartphone. The P910 was based on an earlier Symbian OS and UIQ platform version with only an incremental software development update from the P900 (Symbian OS 7.0, UIQ 2.1), which made the development work a lot smoother at the time. With the P990, the Symbian OS capabilities have however expanded quite significantly and as with any major platform update, this was expected to introduce some new issues to solve. Sony Ericsson however underestimated the complexity of the development work for UIQ 3 and it took longer than expected to implement and quality assure things like the platform security mechanisms, the multimedia framework and other advanced connectivity aspects like 3G, videotelephony and WiFi. It has been a tough journey for all of us. Please extend my thanks and appreciation to the user and developer communities for all their patience, support and feedback which has helped us identify bugs and improve both existing and upcoming products.”

As an owner of M600i, I don’t know what to say. Earlier today, the phone had restarted by itself, “to optimize performance”, it said. I get KERN errors when opening images that are large. Opera won’t open unless other apps are closed. P990i users are in a tougher situation, since that phone has a lot of features but with a pathetic RAM.

Now, SE users are threatening not to buy any SE phones, since they kill support for these phones that early. Maybe I should jump ship as well? (My M600i was purchased last February.)

(via Just Another Mobile Blog)

28
Jun

PDF spam ongoing

Recently I’ve been getting spam email with PDF attachments. I already got three since yesterday.

The email comes with random sender email addresses, no message body, and subjects containing the file name of the PDF attachment. The PDF attachment invariably contains garbage about certain stocks.

McAfee believes this is a logical evolution from those image spams of yesterday (I’m sure you got some of those). From the McAfee Avert Labs Blog:

A large “pump-and-dump” stock spam campaign is underway, but rather than including the content of the spam in an image file, this campaign includes the spam content within a .PDF file. The stock spam is believed to be sent from Stration infected computers, as this spam campaign closely followed a new W32/Stration worm mass-mailing which contained a number of .PDF files, and Stration has been associated with pump and dump spam in the past.

The attachment is not malware. The email is a nuisance, though.

27
Jun

Two years ago today…

Someone went on TV and said the most infamous words of 2005:

I am sorry.

Guess who?
(I know I should have posted this at the other blog, but I cannot access it via phone. The culprit is the WP Mobile plugin.)

27
Jun

Two macho stories (UPDATED)

With both of them showing much bravado and machismo, I wonder who among the two will blink.

I am talking about two sets of personalities.

1. The Commission of Elections v. Lintang Bedol

The picture was jarring, to say it nicely. Seated on an empty table, the person was wearing a green-striped shirt, slouching like a Mafia boss, with a gun holstered at his right side for his audience to see. He had just lost important election documents and even proud to announce the loss, feigned that he received no summons while he had himself interviewed by reporters, snubbed his superiors, and dared them to have them arrested. “Sige (Go ahead). That means they have plans to file a case against me. I can post bail,” he said.

The commissioners of Comelec, having been snubbed by this man while cavorting with reporters, had enough, called his bluff and ordered his arrest. One commissioner was mad enought to issue strong words against him. “Let us see what he will do. I think he will start cringing like a cornered rat,” the commissioner said.

Poor Comelec. The arrest order is just bravado. Bedol can always do a Garci, and the question is not whether Bedol will do a Garci, but when. If the Comelec wanted Bedol arrested, you don’t call a press conference to announce that you’d have him arrested. If the Comelec is sincere in its efforts, it could have issued the order to the AFP and the PNP and present Bedol to the media upon capture. But no, they chose to telegraph their punches, and I assume Bedol will be on the run soon. The Comelec’s actions only prove one thing – it’s all for show. So, enjoy. Run, Bedol, run!

(In a text message flashed at DZMM TeleRadyo this morning: Pwede ba namin bugbugin si Bedol pag nahuli namin sya? My answer: go ahead, make my day.)

2. Aquilino Pimentel III v. Juan Miguel Zubiri

And since both the Comelec and Bedol had decided to screw up Maguindanao, we now have two scions of politicians who are willing to gang up on each other to attain the last slot in this year’s senatorial elections.

The first one has cried foul when the Comelec was hell-bent on canvassing the votes from Maguindanao; some people had alleged that the Maguindanao vote was tainted with fraud. (One of those who raised noise was killed.) He filed a case before the Supreme Courts, which some quarters saw as premature.

The other one has been noisy since Heaven knows what, proclaiming to the whole world that he will win. He was trailing the first one by more than a hundred thousand votes. The second one claimed that when the votes from several places were counted, he would overtake the first one. Now that only Maguindanao is left, he is now hell-bent on having the votes from that province canvassed, even if several consistent poll fraud allegations were aired and Bedol “lost” important election documents from that province.

Both of them show bravado, but Migs Zubiri is more consistent in his actions. By his illogical blustering, he shows that he is, as the blogger behind The Philippine Experience had said, a spoiled brat.

What Zubiri can’t see is that, even if he wins, it will be a tainted victory. His mandate will always be in question, just like how the mandate of the present occupant of the Fortress by the Pasig is in question still, three years after. He has unwittingly put himself in a deep hole of mud, and in the end, if ever he “wins”, he will find out that it is an empty one.

UPDATE:

The Comelec’s threat to arrest Bedol is a show. Imagine, a day after calling Bedol’s bluff, PNP has yet to receive the arrest warrant. And then there’s the Palace offer of protection to Bedol. What a show!

26
Jun

RIP, Jonathan Tiongco

What’s with this day? First, Chris Benoit, now Jonathan Tiongco.

From ABS-CBN News:

A Quezon City Police District spot report said Jonathan Mallora Tiongco, 36, of Ideal Subdivision in Fairview, was severely injured after he accidentally rammed his Toyota Avanza (ZHE 496) into a dump truck right across the Commission on Audit building on Commonwealth Avenue at 3:50 a.m.

Concerned citizens brought Tiongco to Far Eastern University Hospital where he died at 5 p.m. His remains are now interred at St. Peter Funeral Homes along Quezon Avenue.

His claim to fame? Read this from Inside PCIJ.

Oh well. Karma took its own sweet time.