luis is a co-founder and social software architect at SyndeoLabs, and a director at Exist Global. he likes building small web toys a whole lot. More ...

quick links to the good stuff

• 25 First Dates 25 May 2009
• True Crime: Confessions of a Criminal Mastermind 17 Feb 2009
• Finding Your Soul Mate: A Statistical Analysis 27 Jan 2009
• Sex and Schrodinger's Cat 07 January 2009
• An Extended Rant on Heroes 26 September 2008
• Zero Barrier 05 May 2008
• Sweatshop Blogging Economics 08 April 2008
• The Doomsday Singularity 25 February 2008
• Piracy and Its Impact on Philippine Music 21 January 2008
• The Manila Pen-etration by the Hotelier Antonio Trillanes 29 November 2007
• Journey of a Thousand Heroes 17 December 2006
• Shake, Rattle & LOL 30 December 2005

elsewhere online

• Last.FM
• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Plurk
• Multiply
• Stumbleupon

• 2

  The End.

  26 Apr 2007

  We’re going to start the official turnover from highfiber six to the new highfiber zero within the next few hours folks, now that I’ve finally completed the last few items on my must-have-before-launch list. The process should be completely transparent: within the next 24 hours, everyone going through http://highfiber.org will see zero edition instead of 6. The server containing 6 will be taken offline within the next 2 weeks, as soon as I figure out how to download and archive the five-years-worth of data that’s currently on it. (Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I have enough space available to archive the 40gb or so that 6 currently consumes.)

  Those of you who still don’t have accounts on zero edition should probably head on over to http://dev.highfiber.org now, as there will be an inevitable rush during the first few days of the turnover. The transition time is hard to estimate, so if you have stuff on 6 that you want to archive for your own purposes, you should do so now. I’ll wait until 9pm Philippine time to flip the switch, after which it may take between 6 and 24 hours for worldwide propagation.

  I want to thank you all for sticking by highfiber for so long, and patiently waiting for me to get my act together. It took awhile, but I think we’re finally on the right path again. Hopefully you all do, too.

  Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

• 0

  Twitter!

  25 Apr 2007

  We’ve been experimenting with Twitter () here at the office as a way of keeping track of what everyone on the team is doing at a given moment in time. Twitter is basically a very simple service that allows you to write a short, 140-character message that your various friends and contacts can then view. Currently we’re using it as a kind of passive progress-update: I may not always want to know what each of my coworkers are doing, but when the info is required, I now know where to look. (Depending on the situation, it’s cheaper than a phone call, and far less intrusive.)

  I have to say that I’ve been really impressed thus far: you can update your status from any IM, any mobile phone, the website itself and/or a very cute MacOS application called Twitteriffic. I’ve only got 7 friends on my Twitter list at the moment, but we’ve been having a lot of fun broadcasting our current whereabouts and activities to the rest of the people on the team.

  If any of you are interested to see what I’m currently up to (e.g., fixing highfiber bug #39295001) you can see my status at as well as a historical view of all my previous status messages. (And if you want to try it out yourself, be sure to add me to your friends list, ok?)

  Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

• 217

  Globe Visibility

  19 Apr 2007

  Finally got my Globe Visibility package yesterday, after dilly-dallying for almost a month. So far, it’s like a really, really good dream: you stick the iPod-nano-sized modem into the Mac’s USB port and presto! HSDPA speeds anywhere in the metropolitan Philippines.

  This is one of the few devices that I’ve bought from a telco that I was quite happy with, end-to-end. Everything from the guest relations officer who helped me test it at the Rockwell Globe Hub, to the time to activation (a little less than 6 hours) was all quite impressive.

  Thus far, I’ve only spent a total of 5 hours online with the modem (a Chinese-manufactured bit of kit called the Huawei E220) and have tried it at a McDonald’s in the Fort, and my condo in Eastwood. Both times I was really quite impressed by the performance.

  To put some real numbers on it:

  I was able to get some very decent download rates from my bittorrent client Xtorrent — about 60K/sec downstream and a very healthy 45K/sec upstream. (Bittorrent is a great, real-world way to benchmark a connection because it’ll give you a good idea of how other latency- and bandwidth-sensitive applications like Skype or iChat will fare, and it can max out your total bandwidth really quickly.) As a quick comparison, my PLDT MyDSL 768kbps subscription, which I was paying PhP995.00/mo for, could do roughly 70K/sec downstream and 35K/sec upstream.

  So Globe Visibility isn’t what you would call a “DSL-killer” by an stretch of the imagination. It’s a niche product for people who really must have the ability to get online no matter where they are. Its price-point is also quite prohibitive: PhP2,000.00 to setup and PhP2,000.00/mo for two years. Getting a Visibility plan involves all the same hoop-jumping and rain-dancing as getting a postpaid mobile phone, so there’s a certain amount of hassle as well. It’s also not the solution if you are looking to get the fastest possible Internet connection, as it’s slower than even the slowest DSL plan. (It’s roughly equivalent to a 512mbps DSL connection, from what I’ve seen thus far. If you read the HSDPA specification though, it can supposedly handle speeds of up to 1.8mbps, although I have yet to see anywhere near that from my brief tests.)

  However: if you’ve got the kind of job that requires you to be able to jump online at a moment’s notice (like say, if one of your web servers failed), then I think this is one of those rare occasions that I can recommend a really decent solution.

  Posted in Uncategorized | 217 Comments »

• 967

  Highfiber Zero

  17 Apr 2007

  (This article was originally posted at highfiber.org, 17 April 2007.)

  The first edition of highfiber went online in november of 2001. At the time, it took me two weeks to design and build the whole thing end-to-end. we debuted with 10 articles and a pool of 5 writers. by the sixth edition (which we released in 2005), my development timelines had begun to exceed 90 days, and the amount of time i had to devote to managing the website itself was very close to that of a part-time job. Last year, i took a step back from actively managing highfiber, to see how long it would survive without my direct involvement. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, day after day, fresh content was being properly published to the frontpage by our patented pat/poke system (a precursor of Kevin Rose’s Digg.com; I’m still waiting for my check) and week after week the community would continue to grow in size. At last count, there are about 39,593 accounts in our users database (about 75% of which are undoubtedly smurfs, but I guess that’s beside the point).

  i’ve been thinking very seriously about shutting highfiber down for months now, because of the fact that i think it has reached the upper limits of what it originally set out to achieve. this was due both to my (relatively modest) level of technical experience at the time, and the rules system we put together that gave the site so much of its attitude. However, i found that the more i thought about it, the more it became obvious that just closing our doors completely was the wrong way to go. The community was still there, they just wanted something new to do.

  i’ve learned a lot since 2001, and in many ways, the months after i left highfiber have easily been the most educational period of my life. version one took me two weeks to build, version six took 12, and our all-new edition took about 35 total working hours. as you can probably imagine, it’s a small project, but it has a lot of room to grow. that’s actually the reason why i decided to call it “version zero” instead of simply following the current numbering. we’re retaining nothing from the old site and are forging a completely new path together, armed with some spiffy new gear.

  welcome back, everyone. it’s been a long time.

  Posted in Uncategorized | 967 Comments »

• 4

  The Lost Tomb of Jesus

  7 Apr 2007

  I wanted to write about something appropriate for the Holy Week, and I guess this inflammatory National Geographic special (directed by Simcha Jacobovici and produced by James Cameron) about the discovery of Jesus’ family tomb in Israel seems as good a topic as any.

  Quick background: in 1980, a tomb was discovered by construction workers who were laying the foundation for an apartment complex in Talpiot, Israel. Inside the tomb were 10 ossuaries — small limestone boxes that contain the bones of the dead. 6 of them had epigraphs carved into their sides: “Maria”, “Mariamene”, “Jose”, “Judah”, “Matthew” and of course, “Jesus, Son of Joseph.” Interestingly, Judah’s ossuary also contained the additional nugget “Son of Jesus.”

  Jacobovici’s documentary goes to great lengths to confirm its various theories, namely that the tomb discovered was that of Jesus of Nazareth, that he was married to Mary Magdalene and that Judah was the name of their son. As I watched the 2-hour special, I could almost hear the torches being lit and the pitchforks being brandished.

  National Geographic itself is of course, riding the hype created by the controversy pretty well. (The fact that it chose to release the special a few weeks before Easter was particularly telling.) Scholars, critics and opinionated bloggers have come pouring out of the woodwork to decry the documentary’s various claims. The general secular consensus is that even if the theories put forth in the feature were true, it would not threaten Christianity’s core beliefs in any significant manner. (That to me sounded a little like desperation, but whatever.)

  People that have read this blog for awhile know that I’m not a big believer in religion, and that I have a particular dislike for Roman Catholicism. I find it to be a manipulative, power-hungry, profit-driven machine, with little or no real relation to early Christianity other than the fact that it names Jesus as its central figure. That said, I do acknowledge that a change in collective mindset is a long and painful process. I’m hoping that widely-consumed works like The Lost Tomb, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and (God help me for saying this) the Da Vinci Code will open people’s eyes little by little.

  More information on The Lost Tomb here.

  Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

• 6

  Serenity named top sci-fi movie

  3 Apr 2007

  Joss Whedon’s 2005 cowboy sci-fi was voted best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll, beating Star Wars (which placed second), Blade Runner, Alien and The Matrix. Like I keep saying, you can’t stop the signal.

  Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »