In an effort to leech off the current god-like status of Herr Pacquiao, new "alt rock" band Protein Shake recently released a single entitled "Pacman" as a kind of tribute to everyone’s favorite videoke endorser/pugilist. I say "kind of" because it’s marketing at its most banal. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with pushing out a publicity-whoring song like this (unless you’re one of those purists that believe that music should be created for music’s sake) … hell, Pacquiao is an unstoppable marketing behemoth at this point, and everyone from PGMA to Darlington socks has been vying for scraps of media mileage fallout. My issue isn’t with the fact that some newcomers decided to give their careers a boost by piggybacking (God knows this is probably the biggest single they’ll ever release) … it’s with the actual song (which, as you can probably guess from this entry’s title, was penned by none other than Mr. DVDX himself).

With lyrics like "‘Pag Nakipagbakbakan / Tutumba ang kalaban" (and I’m not even gonna bother translating that into English) punctuated by shrieks of "Pacquiao! Pacquiao!" you have to wonder what it is that emboldens Marasigan to continue writing lyrics. Without being facetious, can you honestly say that this is any better than the crud churned out by Lito Camo?

Listen to the full-length abomination here.

Being a third-worlder born-and-bred, one of the first things I set up upon acquiring the Macbook Pro last week was file-sharing in OSXland. (This is the part where a more responsible blogger would admonish his readers to only download files that are provided under a free license. Shyeah right.)

As I stated in my previous entry, the bittorrent client I’m currently using, Transmission, leaves a lot to be desired. Basic things like being able to manage the files within a torrent (e.g., select which specific files you want to download, or prioritize the order in which you want to download them), are curiously missing and if you’ve had any amount of experience with bittorrent, you know that those features are must-haves. (For example, if you were downloading an entire season of Lost, you wouldn’t want to wait for all 24 episodes to finish downloading before you started watching the first one, right?) Practically the only thing impressive about Transmission is that its icon actually displays the current download and/or upload rate, which can be handy.

In terms of alternatives, you’ve got Tomato (uber-basic) and Azureus (which I like to refer to as "The Microsoft Office of bittorrent clients"). Neither of them are viable alternatives if you want to a) have a reasonable amount of control over your torrents and b) still have enough system resources available to run a browser.

Recently, there’s been some excitement over the heir apparent to Transmission, XTorrent, developed by the creator of Newsfire and Acquisition, David Watanabe. Although it shares a lot of Transmission’s core library, it’s gathering momentum pretty quickly and should probably achieve a relative feature parity with the de facto standard uTorrent fairly soon. Transmission, meanwhile, has not released anything in nearly 5 months. Currently, XTorrent’s killer feature is the ability to search various torrent sites directly from its interface; like its brother Acquisition, it also integrates very neatly with iTunes, automatically appending downloaded audio and video files to your iTunes library as they complete.

An inordinate amount of each of my days (a good 90-120 minutes) is spent driving to and from work, and I’ve been listening to a lot of local radio as a result. I’m not much for pop music so I’m usually tuned to either 103.5KLite or NU107.5, both of which lean toward a more rock-friendly selection.

The past couple weeks, the after-work timeslots have been dominated alternately by Kjwan and/or Sandwich, and let’s just say that it hasn’t been very pretty. I’ve never liked either of these two bands very much, and their current singles are very nearly the musical equivalent of fecal matter in your coffee.

Kjwan’s "Pintura" (listen to it here)
With a riff that takes way too many cues from early 90’s Rage Against the Machine (my first thought: hey this kinda sounds like a lame "Bulls on Parade"), and Marc Abaya’s signature, self-congratulatory vocalizations, this is the kind of rock song that you simply cannot take seriously. Abaya has this to say about their recent stint at the #1 spot on NU’s weekly countdown:

We did it! Today, we made it to the top of the NU107 stairway to heaven
countdown! I am so happy and am still trying to take it in by calling
my bandmates and screaming AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Nuff said.

Sandwich’s "DVDX" (listen to it here)
Raymund Marasigan is the kind of artist that values quantity over quality, and has made quite a name for himself churning out uninspired "alt rock" drivel by the boatload. DVDX belongs to a sub-genre I like to refer to as checklist lyricism. Like their compatriot Cambio’s "DV," "DVDX" does not, in fact, have lyrics; instead, its "writers" created a checklist of keywords related to the theme of the song, and simply strung them over the music. In DV’s case, it was street names, in DVDX’s case, it was video categories. Neither song is even remotely interesting.

… or "Jesus Christ, that is one huge-ass laptop."

So I got the Macbook Pro yesterday, and that bit above is exactly the first thought that popped into my head upon seeing it. Sure, I’m probably just biased from working exclusively on a 10-inch TabletPC for the past 2 months, but seriously, this is one huge-ass laptop.

The big difference, I think, is the wide aspect ratio that it follows (the monitor resolution is 1440 x 900, a strange proportion for those of us used to the comfort of 4:3). So although it’s a few pixels shorter than a standard 15.4" laptop, it’s also significantly wider. That means that you have enough space for a bigger keyboard plus some nice looking speaker grilles on either side of the machine.

Unfortunately, I have yet to actually put the machine through its paces (I spent all of yesterday in an installation frenzy). The most I’ve done is maintain a couple of YM conversations while playing music, downloading some torrents and installing OpenOffice. I might as well have been working the Calculator for all the stress that put on the system. Over the weekend I’ll probably try doing some 3D games or something along those lines, if I can get around to it.

Although my experience overall has been pretty favorable, I do have a few quick gripes.

1. For some reason, I cannot get my PLDT MyDSL connection to work directly with the Mac. This was frustrating beyond belief yesterday because I had so much software I needed to download and install (web development as a profession requires you to accumulate an inordinate amount of utilities, plugins, widgets and whatnot; it takes forever to get properly setup). PLDT Tech Support had no idea what the issue was, and all I got after 30 minutes on the phone with them was a half-hearted promise to escalate the matter to their technicians.

2. YM for OSX is supreme suckage, both in its older, stabler version, and in the new beta. I’ll probably uninstall it and switch to Adium pretty soon. (Google Talk doesn’t work either.)

3. Transmission, the de facto Mac bittorrent handler, is pretty so-so. It’s decent enough, and if I didn’t know that it was possible to have twice as many features in one-fourth of the file size and memory footprint — *cough* uTorrent *cough* — I’d actually think it was above average.

On the flip side, there’s a crapload of things that are far easier and quicker to do on a Mac than on a PC. Quicksilver alone is unbelievably efficient (on my old desktop, I was using a combination of Launchy and Google Desktop to accomplish the same thing), and little things like installing Applications or Fonts are really easy.

The other utility I’ve found to be really cute/ridiculous is Lilt, an app that takes advantage of the ambient light sensors on the Macbook to detect hand gestures. So, theoretically, you could wave your hands to the left or right to, say, switch to the previous or next track on iTunes. I say "theoretically" because I could just barely get it working when I tried it (the left sensor is unfortunately a lot more sensitive than the right one, so the results are not very consistent).

Lilt also reads the tilt of your laptop and can assign actions to say, the laptop tilting forwards, or leftwards, or whatever. I’ve yet to think of a use for this other than perhaps when I happen to be at a rave party with my Macbook (and I could thus swing it over my head and have it quickly scroll through a series of Flickr photos or something equally silly).

More stuff as I discover them. 

If all goes according to plan, I should be picking up my new Macbook Pro tomorrow afternoon from Apple specialists extraordinnaire Ynzal Marketing. This switch to Mac has been a REALLY long time coming for me, considering that it is pretty much the most perfect machine I could possibly get as a web developer. (MacOS is the only operating system that supports both developer-friendly Unix shells AND designer-standard Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator without having to dual-boot or install a whole mess of libraries. And any system that comes with my editor-of-choice, emacs, installed standard deserves some serious kudos in my book.)

I’m only vaguely familiar with MacOS and all of its various inner workings so I’m going to be taking the day off tomorrow to study up and start figuring out how it’ll integrate into my workflow.

The big concern in my head right now is how to leverage my other laptop, the HP TC1100, for maximum benefit. Basically, I need some way to develop our websites on the Macbook, then view the results on the TabletPC, so that I can quickly test on Windows IE, Windows Firefox, Windows Opera and Mac Safari. (I suppose you could say that the ideal setup would be to have 3 monitors hooked up in a line, but that’s ridiculously extravagant. It’d be pretty cool though.)

Precisely how to do this is something I haven’t figured out yet though, because my work environments are kinda … non-standard, I guess you could say. I have 3 primary ones at the moment:

1. My condo unit (where I spend 20% of my working hours each week), which has one Ethernet cable going into my DSL modem, but no Wi-Fi router.
2. My office (60% of my working hours), where the office-wide Wi-Fi network allows me to get online fairly easily.
3. Various coffee shops with Airborne Access (20% of my working hours).

The question is, how do I move between the three places with both the TabletPC and the Macbook, and maintain their exclusive peer-to-peer relationship over Wi-Fi? Off hand it doesn’t look like there’s a way I can easily do that AND have a working internet connection, since a peer-based, ad hoc wireless network would supersede the global one that serves as the Internet gateway. (Apologies if I’m mangling the terminology here … networking is unfortunately not my strong suit.)

The only way I can think of is to have the Macbook physically plugged into the bigger, Internet-providing network via a LAN cable, then share that Internet connection (as well as documents and data) with the TabletPC via Wi-Fi. That’ll work for both the condo and the office, but it looks like I’ll be out of luck whenever I work at coffee shops (i.e., one of my laptops won’t have an internet connection or a way to share data).

Apart from that little hitch, everything should be smooth sailing though. I’ve been doing a lot of switching-from-Windows-type research so I should be armed with enough knowledge beforehand that I won’t just be lumbering about blindly.

Whew. Can’t wait till tomorrow :)

For me to say that Casino Royale was the best Bond film ever made would be marginally disingenuous, as I haven’t watched enough of them (i.e., I’ve only seen about half of the 20 other entries), to make that claim. (The reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes have though, and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.) I can definitely say, however, that it is at least the equal of Batman Begins in its attempt to reinvent a well-loved character, and give it a breadth and depth that were lost on the previous films.

Craig sizzles in nearly every scene, and it’s probably because he plays it without any of the cool, stylish condescension of the other Bonds. There’s a lot of rage and a lot of roughness in this early Bond, and he gets pummeled bloody all throughout the movie, gadget-less and without any of the requisite repartee. And did I mention the film spends a good half-hour watching Bond play Hold ‘Em?

Dialogue is also surprisingly well-written due, I’m sure, to the later contributions of Paul Haggis (Crash) to the script. The action hops from Africa to the Bahamas to Montenegro to Venice, and there’s not a single moment where I wasn’t utterly riveted. (One would argue that the third act is overly-long, but it necessarily needed to setup the final confrontation.)

Like Batman Begins, this is the first movie to explore why our protagonist thinks and acts the way he does. Like Bruce Wayne/Batman, Bond has been hardened by his mistakes, and has chosen to play a role in order to do his job. Brilliant.

So it was World Usability Day yesterday, and as promised, Hans and I gave a 90 minute lecture at DLSU Manila on "Web 2.0 and Usability." I went over our work at mobiuslive.net, talked about the stuff we were doing and the inordinate amount of crud we could still improve, and answered a surprising amount of technology questions. (It was fun to be able to talk about Ruby and Rails without having to intro with "what is a scripting language?")

I’m gonna try to avoid the whole "UP students do this, and DLSU students do that" comparison (the last lecture I gave was to a UP student org), but I will definitely say that UP students laugh a whole lot more. Either that, or I was just being thrown by the fact that I was sharing the stage with Hans about a third of the time, and was thus not making as many jokes as I normally do.

Yesterday was the first time I lectured without starting out rough during the first 30-60 seconds. Like the proverbial Windows desktop, my startup process is normally a bit rocky (I forget basic things, or I enunciate badly), but yesterday I was more like a Linux server, which felt really, really great. That isn’t to say that I didn’t have a few rough spots of course, but I think I’m definitely getting better at it (after a grand total of 3 attempts this year).

The Makati Police Department debuted their new website today, in an effort to modernize their operations. I know that a lot of people are expecting to hear me pan the living crap out of it, so I’m going to try to be as diplomatic as possible.

… No, seriously.

After a little bit of poking around in the source code, I discovered that the website was developed by this one-man operation. I don’t know anything about him other than the fact that he goes by the name of "SevenInk" (no relation to INQ7). Mr. SevenInk is apparently the single most religious web designer on Earth … well, ok, maybe the second to these guys. It’s kinda unfortunate actually, because his spiritual disposition isn’t the only thing I have issues with. (See my recent anti-religion entries here and here.)

But I digress. (If it’s Allah’s will that the Makati PNP website be designed by a devout follower of Jesus, then good on ya mate!)

I’m kinda in hardcore usability mode right now because I’ve been prepping for tomorrow’s lecture at DLSU, so most of my problems with MakatiPNP.com are with regards to font sizes, layout and the presence of that superfluous splash page. So, yeah, to just get those boring, obvious issues out of the way: usability on this site pretty much sucks. There, I said it.

Now on to the more interesting stuff:

1. There is something seriously wrong with those header graphics. At the risk of being facetious, is there a reason for the L337-speak capitalization or the grungy "crime" font? I honestly kept expecting a Nickelback song to start playing in the background with every new page I loaded; the Myspace feel is a tad overwhelming.
2. Why do police websites always have an image of the head honcho on their main page? The NYPD, the LAPD, and even the friggin’ New South Wales Police Department in Australia all have them. Perhaps I’m not fully understanding the purpose of having a police chief’s mugshot on a law enforcement website, because I honestly cannot see a compelling reason for his image and bio to be taking up precious front-page real estate.
3. You gotta love that email. According to INQ7 (no relation to SevenInk), the Makati PNP website’s central feature is the "Email Mo Kay Hepe" functionality, which allows visitors to communicate directly with the police chief. The funny thing is, their little feature is nothing more than a simple "mailto:" link to an email address. You’d think they could’ve at least added a simple contact form or something. Or at least used an email address that didn’t end in "yahoo.com.ph."

All in all, this website was neither surprising nor particularly engratiating. I do believe that every governmental organization needs to have an online presence, but I kinda wish that it be standardized in some fashion. I get that most of these websites are developed on tiny budgets (I’m not even gonna comment on the likelihood of kickbacks), so standardization is the only way you can make sure each site looks and flows decently. In other words, someone needs to be willing to spend a certain amount of money to develop an architecture and "branding" manual that can be used across all agencies. As long as the manual itself is solid, it will no longer matter who the individual agencies hire to build their websites, as long as they can read English and follow directions. It’s not the most intellectually-stimulating of solutions, but at least it’ll get the job done right.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, author Jared Diamond talks about how environment can play a significant, often unyielding, hand in a civilization’s progress. Factors like temperature, the availability of domesticable livestock and the presence or absence of disease, among other things, combine to create natural honeypots for fledgling civilizations, such that peoples in Europe have developed at much quicker rates than their brothers in Africa, or South Asia.

Consider the fact that, of all the equatorial nations, there is not a single one that you could currently describe as "developed." The sole exception would be Singapore, although the nation from which it was borne, Malaysia, is hardly first-world. (Singapore is singular proof that technology can prevail over environmentally-related drawbacks.)

What’s the difference? In many cases, it boils down to temperature (pun intended). Tropical environments are patently difficult to cultivate, for one thing. The sun bakes a tropical landscape for the better part of a year, and rain is unpredictable, both in volume and in frequency. Most civilizations that grew within these environments were hunter-gatherers, because rudimentary farming was nearly impossible to pull off. The consequence was that most groups became nomadic (they were forced to move from place to place as food sources were expended). Their population was also smaller, due both to the fact that food was difficult to come by, and having infants to carry around made them less agile. More importantly though, hunter-gatherers could not diversify their individual roles within a tribe as much as a farming society could, i.e., every member was often focused purely on food acquisition. This slowed the emergence of important concepts such as hierarchical leadership or military units or (later) scholars, which were all key to the rapid growth of farmer groups (being able to predict food availability and having superior food storage allowed some members to focus on other aspects of living).

High temperatures are also conducive to insects and disease, which can be doubly devastating when you consider that hunter-gatherer groups are already poorly equipped to deal with illness.

One of my favorite anecdotes from Guns, Germs relates to the Aboriginal Australians, who are widely acknowledged to be one of the oldest civilizations on Earth. Inhabiting the continent of Australia for over 40,000 years, these groups were theorized to have travelled over land bridges from New Guinea or by boat across the Timor Sea. Unfortunately, Australia wasn’t exactly the easiest kind of landmass to cultivate and the aborigines were almost exclusively hunter-gatherers. Their tools included wooden spears and the signature boomerangs, and they were expert fishermen. The only problem was: they were still in this prototypal state in 1780 (!), when the British began to colonise the continent. To put this into perspective: halfway across the world, at roughly the same time, Benjamin Franklin was coming up with the idea of Daylight Savings Time in France, the Society of Gentlemen in Scotland were busy publishing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and American politicians were eating ice cream in Philadelphia.

The result was, as one would expect, fairly lopsided. The natives were driven out of their lands, or enslaved outright, and their population declined from about a million strong, to less than ninety thousand in the space of one and a half centuries. This stark contrast between the aborigines and their new caucasian bunkmates is the same thing that has happened all over the world, with European colonisers making huge scientific strides and subjugating other, less adept civilizations with superior technology.

Diamond’s book is a great eye-opener in that it postulates why pre-history (and subsequently, modern history) unfolded the way it did. I’m about 60% of the way through so I have yet to see if he proposes any solutions to the problem (if solutions to rectify the inherent imbalances are even really possible at this point in time). His writing style can be a bit technical at some points, particularly speaking of botany and animal biology, but overall it’s been a fascinating read. Check it out here.

Got a bunch of interesting comments on Sunday’s entry about Sam Harris’ "The End of Faith":

From cookie: Im intrigued though by Buddhism which by some way doesnt fit in the
same template as Islam and Christianity. So far its the religion I see
and appreciate that merely practices what you describe as morality
without prejudice; and that doesnt attempt to force feed itself as the
only path to salvation.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast recently where he asked, as a way of pointing out the fundamental differences between certain religions, "Where are all the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?"

Martyrdom is core to Islam in a way that is just different from other religions, and we’re living in a world where these fanatical martyrs don’t just run screaming at you with swords drawn anymore. Nowadays they step into buses with C4 strapped to their stomachs, or fly 747s into office buildings. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves for Allah hasn’t dwindled over the centuries, but the weapons available have gotten a hell of a lot nastier. I mean, seriously, what happens when one of these guys gets a hold of nuke?

From becypher: 72 virgins in this life is rather achievable than getting this 72 after
life. Cumulatively speaking though. Why blow up yerself.

You have to look at it in the context of the religion itself. Islam is one of the most conservative religions on the planet, and they know it. To be offered a chance at being the alpha male in one big orgy in the sky, when your women here on earth can’t even bare their ankles … well, I’d say that’s a pretty heavy incentive, don’t you?

Dairokutenmaoh: What’s so holy with "holy war"? What’s holy in decapitating infidels?
What’s holy in blowing yourself up? What’s holy in imposing your
"faith" on a swordpoint? And to think they preach of a "loving and
benevolent" God.

One of the things we have to come to grips with is that our religions (possibly with the exception of Buddhism, although I don’t know this for a fact) have built-in defenses against non-believers. The Bible and the Koran are particularly vehement about what to do when your neighbours worship other gods. One of the justifications for the Spanish Inquisition was a statement made by St. Augustine himself, declaring that if torture were appropriate for those broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws of God. And the irony of it is, these acts of violence are holy, when viewed in the context of the religion in question.

Check out more of Sam Harris’ articles and essays, including a particularly biting response to a Christian reader here.