Dear People of PLUG:
A week ago I received a proposal from a company called Firsteventsasia (Firsteventsasia.com).

They do events, and are holding one of those generic IT ones called 'Philippine Information Technology Expo and Business Solutions Summit' on Sep 30 - Oct 2 at Philippine Trade and Training Center, Roxas Blvd.

Anyway they want an ex-deal. They are giving us a venue for an EB / gathering in exchange for plugging their event on our website.

Here's the text from their proposal:

Philippine International Information Technology Expo 2008 Information Technology for the Enterprise "Bridging Digital Divide in the Country Today"

On Sept. 30 - Oct 2, 2008, we will be holding the Philippine Information Technology Expo and Business Solutions Summit with a theme "Bridging Digital Divide in the Country Today" back to back with a IT Jobs Fair at the Philippine Trade Training Center Roxas Boulevard Pasay City. .

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
- Multiple Conference Tracks with top level executives speaking on the podium!
- A plenary session geared to address technological advancements and the digital divide in the country today
- Country Pavilions by participating countries
- Job Fair for the IT enabled services industry

In view of all these, we would like to have you as one of our supporting associations for the event. By being one you will have the following benefits:

a. You may give your collaterals or leaflets at the venue
b. Your Logo and Company will be tagged as Supporting Associations and be included in the event advertising materials like Posters, Magazines and Newspapers
c. Your Logo will be included in the Invitation Letters sent to IT Company Offices and Website Media Partner Pages
d. Your Company Logo will be included in the event website for 1 year with active link linking to your website
e. Your Company will be acknowledged 10 times per day on the event
f. You may do a presentation at the stage area (this is on a first come first serve basis)

If you need a booth/E. B Station in our event, you can request to us as early as possible so that we can arrange it as early as possible also.

In exchange for all these we will only ask to place a banner ad to be prominently displayed at your website months before the event and usage of your organization logo.

You will greatly honor us with your support in this endeavor. We believe that this ambitious undertaking would be more possible to happen with your company at our side. Please don't hesitate to call me in our numbers below for any inquiries. We would like to thank you for your time and more power to you and your company!

I'm particularly interested in the 'presentation at the stage area' and 'booth/EB station'.

I'm thinking this is a good chance for us to hang out and get together, while checking out the other stuff going on at the event, and maybe hold a nice conference or two, where people can just talk about stuff they're doing (like topics we discussed in an earlier post). I'm not really interested in promoting PLUG - instead we can use this event to get a chance to meet and greet, do a show and tell, and if someone has a prepared topic to talk about, discuss stuff there.

I'm willing to 'man' the booth (if we'll get one), and help sched an activity or two. We can be very informal about this, and just work out stuff as we go along. In other words, no stress sana (who wants that?)

The good thing about this is that there is NO COST on our part. Pawis lang, 'ika nga.

what do you think guys? I wanna get some 'yeah looks good' votes before saying yes, or if there's an argument against doing such a thing, let's hear it.

Gary

See I was trying to get the valid XML feed for a particular Tag or Category from this blog, a process I've instigated on PLUG's mailing list, so that the PLUG website can aggregate feeds tagged as 'plug' or 'open source' or 'foss' voluntarily submitted by its (currently 130+ strong) membership.

The problem was when I try to get the feed URL, for example:

http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed

I get this error:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed
Line Number 2, Column 1:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^

After weeks of searching and asking at the WordPress Forums to no avail, I've finally tried validating at Feedvalidator, which recommended amongst other things, I check my wp-rss2.php.

And there I found it. What looks like this:

should be like this:

In short, remove the spaces on line #9 on your wp-rss2.php. Now it's validating. Check it here.

Can't wait to apply it on the other sites. Basketball Exchange, in particular, has got XML errors up the wazoo.

The latest case that has caught my attention is the Nokia Ogg issue, or to be exact, Nokia's claim that the Ogg Format is proprietary and hence must be removed from w3c's web publishing standards for html5. The best article I've read explaining this so far is from Ars Technica, and by 'best article explaining this' I mean 'I've only needed to read this 15x to understand it.

It's a very complicated issue that reads more like a legal document rather than a technical white paper. In essence what Nokia appears to want to say is the ff.: (lifted from same article)

1. W3C shouldn't make any standards relating to codecs. Leave that to other standards bodies like ITU-T and ISO/IEC.
2. There are over a billion PCs in the world today, many connected to the web, but these numbers are tiny compared to traditional video playback devices like DVD players.
3. This industry is used to paying license fees and royalties for video codecs like MPEG-2.
4. This industry is used to making money, and it doesn't care about keeping things free.
5. Web codec standards should be either free or low-cost to implement.
6. Web codec standards should support DRM to placate Hollywood, but DRM implementations should be optional.
7. H.264 for video and AAC for audio would be Nokia's recommendations for codecs.

The questions arise partly from the manner with which Nokia chose to explain their position, occasionally including typos, emoticons and (again as quoted) "the author constantly puts "free" in quotation marks, as if to raise doubt about whether something that is available for free is actually free.

Then there is Nokia's somewhat spotty reputation with regards to DRM, occasionally resorting to methods regarded as 'underhanded' by the community, as published in Engadget starting with here where they excitedly (and I don't blame them) announce news of Nokia's 'Comes with Music' program, only to discover hidden costs as detailed here.

Then finally there are merits of their argument itself, or lack of it. I'll leave the rest alone, but issue #6, which accounts for Hollywood as the moving force behind implementing DRM seems to me the most myopic of all.

If the last few movies I enjoyed (Tropa de Elite and Lust, Caution) are indicators of anything, it's that Hollywood in the next decade will play a vastly smaller role. Credit better movies outside of Hollywood. Credit cheaper and better technology. Credit rising stars, directors, actors and producers, all just as good or better than those in Hollywood. Even credit the ongoing writer's strike if you like, an indication that far too much money is spent on stars rather than the people who really count. And yes credit the Internet. The Internet always play a bad role as far as music and videos are concerned, so yeah let's not forget to credit the Internet.

The future shows a far more wider, bigger and larger scope than accounting for the interests of industry leaders today. Ten years from now, I am absolutely positive that DRM is going to be viewed as a laughable effort to try and dispel the obvious - people do not want to be shackled by the imposed limitations on the media that they buy. And even more laughable are methods such as hidden costs and attempts to kill off an open source format like Ogg by finding loopholes in it's history.

The result? It's obvious to me. If a Nokia gadget is not gonna let me listen and own my music or video in a manner I deem fit for my use, I'll go and buy a Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Philips, Bird, or any other type of phone that will. If using Ogg Vorbis, which is not all that popular to begin with, is apparently going to infringe on someone's rights, then the industry which thought of Ogg in the first place will just go ahead and make Ogg 2.0 - it may not necessarily be better, but will certainly not be unhinged by Nokia's or anyone else's legal hullabaloo later on.

In other words, you can go impose your 'rights' on people and underhand your way to force them to buy your music, and they'll just go ahead and find another way.

I finally got this:

Which led to this:

so I can finally relax, and drink this:

YAHOOOOO!!!!

Ok I know you don't know what I'm talking about. Well, it's about [tag]ISPCONFIG[/tag], but it's far too boring to discuss that. Instead, I'll just give you purty pikchurs like above. Yess. Success.

The reaction from PTB has been expectedly fierce, saying in effect that ICAP was out of its mind to choose that in lieu of Openoffice, and hinting at under the table arrangements.

However, I'd like to ask a few things first:

1. According to the Inq article, the ICAP (Internet Cafe Association of the Philippines) "teamed up with the local distributor of Ability Software to distribute a suite of applications similar to Microsoft Office but significantly cheaper." What exactly is a 'team-up'?
2. More to the point, does it make it compulsory to implement it amongst its members? Or maybe it's a distributorship agreement, where ICAP members are outlets where people can buy it from?
3. If it is to be implemented in member cafes, how did they go about the selection process?
4. The article mentions price as a major figure in determining their 'teaming up' with Ability software. Is this the only factor? And if it is so, how can you beat free?

This comes in the light of a recent personal experience, where I had been busy installing several brand new PCs with OpenOffice at a client of mine, to try and wean them away from, err, 'dubiously procured' MS Office 2000 installations.

Management was particularly looking forward to these new Celerons, which with 512mb. were capable of running OpenOffice. OpenOffice ran exceedingly slow on the previous PIII machines, hampering their adaptation. Now with the new PCs, all they had to purchase were Windows licenses, and thus, they thought, all their problems would end.

However, the opposite continues to be true, as the clerical staff to whom these were assigned to clamored for MS Excel and MS Word, without which, they claimed, they could not work productively. I reasoned to them the Management decision above, which was met with stares of indifference, some measure of hostility, and continued bewailing. Since they had become friends of mine, I was even offered bribes to install MS, winking that no one would ever know.

The situation continues to remain unresolved however, as I insisted that they please try them out first. This has left me with the obvious conclusion that if only OpenOffice was as widespread as MS Office, then we would not have had this problem.

Almost all of us have become quite the expert at MS Office, mainly because it was the default application available on the machines we first used. Since Internet Cafes are usually where the public first tries out PCs, and since these usually use MS Office, this continues to remain true. Many of the next generation of PC users will continue to use MS Office not mainly for its features, but because it is the one we've come to be familiar with.

Jose and Maria de la Cruz don't usually have time to search the Internet for applications when they're in a hurry to finish a report or spit out a presentation. They just need it done as quickly and effortlessly as possible, and today, MS Office is the de facto set of applications that will do that job.

It's therefore alarming that Internet Cafes will adopt a never-heard suite of applications inspite of the fact that there appears to be a more compelling choice out there. I imagine a new generation of PC users adapted to using OpenOffice, and I think what a wonderful thing that would be.

However, I still would like to give ICAP the benefit of the doubt, and assume they have good reasons. If it is not a distributorship and is in fact a compulsory widespread adaptation of Ability, I hope this decision came out of a fair selection process and with the good of their customers in mind.

This therefore requires more thorough research, and I hope Alex (whom I saw earlier today, although I didn't know he wrote that till tonight), will look deeper into it. Pending reason to believe otherwise, I think its best we avoid conclusions.

Technorati Tags: ability software, ms office, icap

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Technorati Tags: firefox, ie7.com, ie7

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I first read of it from Sacha's blog. Incidentally, her blog, featuring her travails as a stude in Canada, is a fascinating read of the adventures (and misadventures) of a young woman learning her way around the campus, and consequently in life.

It loads like molasses (sorry Sacha :D), but when you read it you'll likely feel like I do, and applaud her, as if cheering on a heroine in a movie, as she goes through her daily stuff. She is me several years ago (just how many years is not the subject of this blog entry thank you very much), and you'd probably find a part of yourself in her as well.

At any rate, Barcamp reminds me strangely enough, of a conference backroom. Anyone who does conferences will tell you that the real action happens in the area behind the stage, where all the geeks, speakers, and geek-speakers join up for refreshments.

The conversations there are fun and all limitations set forth by NDA agreements are thrown into the wind. These really capture the gist of these meetings, afa im concerned. You make friends and have a blast, all the while sharing what you know. In other words, its a party, where the people happen to be interesting (to a geek).

However like any gathering, I foresee some challenges:

1. logistics. Particularly, where.
2. Who's gonna spend for this. There must be as little reliance on companies whatsoever, and so it has to be kkb.
3. Pinoys are an affable, easy-going lot, so I'm sure it'd be easy for everyone to get along. (This isn't really a challenge, just thought that out aloud.)
4. Someone has to lead.

Even the party Barcamp in that video must have had some sort of taskmaster to get things going. The local tech scene (whether unfortunately or otherwise), has a lot of kids, and I'll be honest here, the maturity level isn't impressive.

It's very easy for things like these to digress into a drinking session, or taken over by one of those loud boring personalities.

So there has to be some chief dude or dudes to take the reins, if only to every so gently, ask a question to a shy speaker so that he can start talking, start talking themselves and ask the right questions to get others involved, and then step back and watch the magic of people enjoying each other's company.

It shouldn't be that hard. No one's more social than Pinoys. Once you get him out of his shell he'll talk up a storm.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, geeks

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