KENNETH PORIO | the blog

With the previous post I had because of my desperation of having a mobile PC, I'm considering the pros and cons: PROS: I can have a computer that I can work on wherever I go. I can have something to work on when I am in school. I can just tote it off from the bag and compute al pronto (if it will be a netbook or a smaller/lighter laptop). I can do my programming and typing tasks right there. I can surf the Internet at school without paying additional fees using computers at the IT Kiosk, the CSM Library, or the ILC/LRC. I can have a computer that runs on batteries so AC power will not be much a problem when I run it at home or at school. CONS: My family has a limited budget; we have to tap relatives. I have to suffer more luggage load (if ever it will be a full-sized laptop). My brother or sister might borrow it in case he will need it at school. I might still use our desktop in case it will not function as expected (if it will be a netbook). ...and the list grows. So, what ...

This year, I'll join my mom in celebrating the Simbang Gabi, a 9-day eucharistic activity before the start of Christmas. Yes, this is very hard for me personally since I've been on hiatus from the Lord of the Harvest (LTH) Christian Community since April, and I've been on a faith crisis since I left the leadership of LTH. Yes, I missed those days being with LTH, and I only meet my church fellows at school or whenever I bump with them. "Kumusta," one leader asked me, "dugay na ta wa' nagkita..." I kept silent of the reasons why I went off with attending services at LTH. I don't know if leaving LTH was a good reason. I don't know if leaving the G12 system was a good reason. I felt it was quite a very stupid decision to make since many have left G12 churches because the system is rigid and bureaucratic. My parents condemn Christian churches, because they allege them of getting too much from its members. But I don't think all of them ...

Hey there! After I attended the Mindanao Conference for I.T. Students 2010 last 03 December 2010 at the University of the Immaculate Conception - Bankerohan (happy fiesta!), I was briefed with what I will expect to get into after I finish my studies in my chosen degree program. Interestingly, I had the opportunity to use a social software that was shared by one of the speakers of the event. Eric Su , co-founder of the company that makes this particular service, shared to us about what do we have to do to ensure our survival as we pursue our careers. While doing that, he plugged-in the social service he is proud having - PicLyf . It's a photo-sharing service which lets you share, tag, and note photos and distribute it to social networking and blogging platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Blogger and Wordpress. The home page tells you their strategy directly: It's fun, It's fast, It's better.  While many social services say so, people can't tell the d...

I desperately need a mobile PC. Why is that so? Since the start of the 2nd semester, I have been thinking of having a mobile PC with me aside from the age-old Pentium 4 desktop (but with Hyper-Threading Technology, mind you) we have at home, I need something I can bring for me to type codes, make papers, edit photos or videos, and somewhat kill my boredom while I'm in UPMin. With my current roster of major subjects (i.e. CMSC128 - Software Engineering, CMSC 130 - Logic Circuits [the one I'm repeating now], and CMSC 142 - Algorithm Design) with a dash of extra subjects (JAP 11 - Elementary Japanese 2, and ENG 10 - Writing Scientific Papers), I thought this will be a very demanding semester for me. Imagine - writing documentations, coding systems, simulating circuits, testing algorithms, memorizing grammars and formulating topics - that's a load of tasks I have to do every now and then. Aside from that, as I am currently with Himati, the official student publication, I ...

 Maria Ressa , outgoing ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs chief, was featured in a special episode of ANC's STORYLINE . The stories that shaped her, from her childhood, her education at Princeton University, her stint at the Probe Team, her career at CNN, and her leadership in ABS-CBN News. I watched this episode on ABS-CBN while I was staying in a relative's house in rural Panabo City. I tweeted that whole evening about the powerful messages Ressa has shared in that special. She is beyond compare when she relayed this statement, to quote: I am a journalist... I am also a Filipino. Another quote, relating to the August 28 hostage crisis: Women have more balls than men .  That's to relate women currently leading TV news organizations in the country, namely Maria Ressa in ABS-CBN, Jessica Soho of GMA and Luchi Cruz-Valdez in TV5. Enjoy watching the 3-part video on YouTube. Feature in this blog is the first part of the special. KENNETH

CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Maguindanao massacre, last November 24, 2009. She interviewed Maria Ressa, former ABS-CBN news chief and former CNN reporter, and Mustafa Haji Abdinur, Somalian journalist. What on earth spurred this massacre in southern Philippines?  -Christiane Amanpour Part 1: Part 2: KENNETH

November 16, 2004. I was back from school. From pissing off another classmate, and happy serving the Chinese department. I glued to the TV. Looking at very graphic scenes. My young mind wondered what it was. It was from a hacienda. Haciendas were a teleserye fantasy. Rich people live there. But no . I was wrong. The real people who live in these fields were peasants, struggling for living. Ang maralitang mamamayan. Nais makamtan ang kapayapaan. Laban sa mapanupil na kapitalista. Huwag kaming palayasin , hiyaw ng mga maralitang manggagawa, ngunit ang pamahalaa'y bingi sa kanilang sigaw. Gunshots. Bang. Bang! Stones. Klunk. Klunk! Blood and Gore. Splat. Splat! And death laughed at them. Twelve farmers. Two children. Drowned by their own blood. Good riddance to their lives, Gloria taunts them. But we will never bade goodbye to their struggles. It's still there, crying in anguish and pain. Where is katarungan? Saan na ba siya? She may be ...

March 2010. I flunked my final examination. I ruined my practical laboratory exam. I almost destroyed an IC. I wanted to pass...but it was not enough. Just because... ...my mind was jumbled between 0101 0110 1010 1010... ...and John 14:12, and Philippians 4:13, and Romans 13:1. ...between an adder-subtractor, ...a cup of Java, ...and winning souls and making disciples. I lost the battle. I was perked up. I was drunk. But I didn't sober up. I didn't recover. Five. Cinco. Cinque. Go. Wu. Lima. Singko. I made another failure. June 2010. Done with the failure.   I'm looking at new possibilities. Fell in love with Scheme. Fell in love with Prolog. Fell in love with Ruby. Fell in love with Python. Fell in love with PHP. Fell in love with MySQL. Fell in love with Maxima. I was so in love with languages. Again. Felt like the C was a stone's throw away. Then I moved on. I wanted to enjoy life before I leave this school. So, I shar...

Sinabe ko na nga ba... Windows is as evil as Mac! Nang sumulpot si Linux in the computing world, with its many distributions or flavors, biglang naiba ang pananaw ng maraming mamamayan sa paggamit sa personal computer sa kanilang sari-saring pamumuhay. Sumulpot ang maraming Free and Open-Source Software na naging pang-kiliti ng masa sa kasalukuyan katulad ng Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Audacity, at iba pa . At habang nangyari ang mga ito, Windows was having thoughts to partner up with Mac due to the increasing competition against the FOSS movement. So they did. Kahit pangit pa rin tingnan ang Windows 7 at kahit nakaklula ang mga graphics ng Mac OS X 10.7 Snow Leopard, they are still closed-source, proprietary software!  Linux, along with its FOSS peers, is persecuted by the increasing aggressiveness of proprietary software providers - bilking users of their freedoms and their money. While these worldviews of these major operating systems differ, there i...

Beginning November 2010, ASL will begin to test drive a new customized template, begin to test its integrity for the web, clean out any unnecessary widgets and bring out its new online presence. This will be the start of A Stellar Life 5.0 Alpha . ASL 4.0 is very intuitive, yet it doesn't give out the full potential ASL wants to convey. With my busy schedule, I could not regularly update this blog yet I do update my Twitter and Facebook accounts regularly. I'm planning to interconnect these social media to my Blogger and Tumblr blogs to widen up opportunities for me to improve in my blogging. I can even integrate my new YouTube page to begin my new personal vlog, and a link to my Himati vlog coming soon. I'm planning to do an image overhaul of ASL. Maybe change the logo, the color scheme, the font styles, and even its name and image ! I'm changing the image of my blog if possible to further widen my identity as a programmer, a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) ad...

Hello there, FOSS fans! I'm really enjoying my Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" with all the desktop effects I can put in it. My PC is relatively old - A Pentium 4 2.40 GHz, with 512 MB RAM and nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card with 128 MB external graphics memory. But these requirements are just alright to install those desktop effects via Compiz Fusion. But with the right drivers (you have to separately install the proprietary nVIDIA drivers in Ubuntu), I can install Compiz and the wonders begin. Some of the desktop effects enabled on my PC are Desktop Wall (you can literally have separate "desktops" in most Linux distributions, add Desktop Wall or Desktop Cube for more excitement), Water Effects (reminds me of splashy effects in Mac OS X's Aqua interface), Scale (an effect similar to Mac OS X's Exposé), Window Switcher (similar to Windows Aero's Flip3D), Animation, Wobbly Windows (I like things "elastic"), and Transparenc...

This is a story I made from my high school days. I am a little mouse. I live at a hole in a wall of my master’s house. In the morning I always like to sleep. In the evening, I wake up to find some food at my master’s trash. If I’m lucky, I could find some delicious leftovers that had been there after my master’s dinner. But if my master’s not around, I always go up hungry. One morning, I didn’t feel sleepy. So, I went outside my hole to look for a snack. I saw a delicious apple pie from the kitchen window. There I saw the nice view from outside my master’s house. There are plants, people, and things that brought up my curiosity. I thought I really want to go out so I can know what the outdoors look like. So, I opened the window and I went outside. Wow! What a nice view! I cannot imagine that this is the outside world! There were plants, people, and curious things. But, a wheeled thing is approaching me. I was very frightened, so I ran as fast as I can just to avoid that thing wi...

Alright. I know my immediate  boss in the publication would love to see what are those Wi-Fi hot spots in downtown Davao so he could update those online services of ours if ever he's there. I know he's bothered from the uber slow connections in UPMin's Wireless Kiosk. Here's a list what I found from a source : Apo View Hotel Lobby A Whole Latte Love ACacia St. Juna Subd., Matina Basti's Brew, Victoria Plaza Blugre Cafe, Landco JP Laurel Bo's Coffee, Metro Lifestyle F. Torres St. Casa Leticia Hotel Camus St. Chowking Bolton Chowking Bajada (outside Victoria Plaza) Coffee Pod F. Torres St. Cups and Lowercase Business Lounge Torres St. Figaro, Chimes Mall Sales St. (Chimes Mall) Formula Pete's - Autoshop JP Laurel Gaisano Mall First Floor JP Laurel Grand Regal Hotel JP Laurel K1 F. Torres St. Karl's Koffee Korner, SM City Quimpo Boulevard Kasagingan Coffee Shop F. Torres St. Marco Polo Hotel Cor. CM Recto and Roxas Sts. Matina Town Sq...

Many Roman Catholics become fanatic about statues of the Virgin Mary whenever one of them showed signs of "crying" or "weeping". Mary statues which bears some sort of "tears" of "water" or even "blood" make some very, very scared about what is happening. Many would say this sign indicates that the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, is "crying for the people of the earth" because of their "sins." She "cries bitterly" because mankind has not been kind to God. Skeptic scientists would refute this reason and point out that it is just some degradation of the material used in constructing these images of the Blessed Virgin. They say that the resins that bind the image's eyes were just naturally weathered. Or some would point to some water source that dripped into these statues. But would you really believe to the fact that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is crying, in anguish and in pain, even today? Click th...

Hello guys! I just obtained an ISO image of the new LTS (Long-Term Support) release of Ubuntu Linux operating system. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) is the latest stable release of this distribution at this time of writing. The next release of Ubuntu is Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and will be released on October 10, 2010 (talk about the triple-10 hype, huh?) Through PowerISO, I accessed the contents of this CD image. For now, I installed Ubuntu inside Windows using Wubi. With only a few exceptions, Ubuntu in Windows ran just fine and smooth on my PC. (Considering it's a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 PC with only 512 Mb of memory)  I discovered that this version of Ubuntu Linux can now support mobile broadband devices such as USB modems such as the ones available here in the Philippines, namely Smart Bro, Globe Tattoo, and Sun Broadband Wireless. I have a Smart Bro Prepaid USB dongle, a black & orange-colored ZTE MF627. I tried to connect this to my previous version of Ubuntu (8...