Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

In a yet futile attempt to write an April Fools’ Day joke, Palm Inc. will be offering palm leaves to Christian Palm buyers in observance of Palm Sunday.

Palm officials declined to comment.

When I tried setting a birthday alarm in elric last night, I found out that the year of birth field accepted years of up to 1000. Pity.

Anyhow, cheers be to everyone once again; server has rebooted, Jesus has respawned in Bethlehem.

Merry Christmas!!!

In a followup to my Perl enlightenment:

Today is the Sunday remembering the Holy Trinity, and the Monsignor was telling at the pulpit about the time when he was just a seminarian tackling the very subject in an exclusive course for one semester.

While he was going on and on talking about it, I saw something else in my mind that show the very essence(?) of that doctrine:


my $deity = [ Father => Son => "Holy Spirit" ];


Zomg I’m trapped in teh Perl mindset!

Hmm, been a long time since I’ve posted. Sheesh.

I’ve taken some time out this Holy Week to meditate on Christ and his Passion. I’ve also meditated on my own Passion and found out that I needed a bit of enlightenment on Perl and Python.

Now, I’m looking forward to finish DhIconCacheChanges before Dapper’s release; a great deal of bug-squashing on CVS; diving into Edgy Eft specs; and participating on Google’s Summer of Code.

Heh, that’s quite some dream…

Another year ends,
Another year draws near.
And despite the ups,
And despite the downs,
Always remember that $DEITY is there,
Always waiting for you,
Always beside you,
And has already prepared
A place for you in His
Abode.

Amen.

Merry Christmas!

Pax vobiscum, Iohannes Paulus PP. II. It seems you have only waited for the Feast of the Divine Mercy, as a fitting and final blessing for all of us. May you be always at peace, now that you are in God’s loving abode. Happy Birthday!

Today I spent some time reflecting on this event. Though unescapable the tinge of sadness is, I also saw a bit of hope. There were many people who were affected, some not even of Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, who saw him for what he is: a man capable of endearing himself to all, regardless of race or creed, a man capable of loving all and forgiving all. A man who strived to be truly like God, not in the powerful, all-seeing, almighty sense, but as God as He truly is: a loving Father.

I think that says a lot about the human world today: even though we are divided, whether by long-standing traditions or petty arguments, we all still manage to find some way to get back to each other and do things together, to hope for the world to get better. And that, I think, is what God’s counting on.

Paalam, Santo Papa.

`the Lord of Hackers is about to rise’ - And now He has Risen!

Happy Easter to everybody! Now get your bunnies!

Most recent first:

I have reinstalled Debian woody on eliza (our Parish’s second machine) today. It had managed to accumulate a lot of cruft in less than a year, especially with all those software in /usr/local (I haven’t done it in the same way as zaks, my home box, to put custom software in stow and organize it like apt.) I’m planning to upgrade to sarge ASAP as our Parish is considering getting an ADSL package (woohoo!)

I got my UPOU Undergraduate Assessment Test permit from snail mail yesterday, and the day before that, the notice in my email. The exam’s on March 5, 9:00-12:00, and my testing center’s in the National Computer Center in UP Diliman, but I’ve yet to verify from the TC the exact location. I’ve got the dates in my planner on priority A Wish me luck!

I’ve upgraded WordPress to 1.5. Everything’s neat! The only thing lacking now is PlannerMode integration: while Sacha gives a hint, I reckon planner-rss can export notes to RSS only, not the tasks. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to export these as well, perhaps as planner-rss-add-task? At any rate, though, I’m inclined to work on this :-).

I’ve been busy learning Emacs Lisp for several days now. I find myself alternating between the elisp and emacs-lisp-intro, and PlannerMode really helps on a one-Info-node one-task basis. I’ve read on the Hacker-HOWTO how Lisp changes the way you program, but really experiencing it is another matter

I’ve adopted mmm-mode for Emacsen on Debian. I’ve yet to complete a new upstream package, probably I’ll have it uploaded to my server at the same time as gtklp…

…

I guess this hints I’m havin’ a helluva good time forgetting to blog

Perhaps many of you felt relieved after receiving news of PCS scrapping Digital Pinay. I for one was most amused, particularly since I first heard about the contest from Hanna Wallach in Planet Debian, who in turn got it from Sacha. Perhaps the intentions were good, but the means could have been more inventive than just some beauty contest. Anyway, this isn’t the way to go, PCS, for trying to advance computing and the digital revolution here in the Philippines: there are a lot of better ways to do that, like a national programming contest or two, or a semi-formal conference gathering some of the best programmers in the world, like Debconf.

Speaking of intentions, it seems that even our parish has followed this curious trend: we here at the Parish of St. John the Baptist have announced our Jesus Christ Look-Alike Quest, for our upcoming Lenten Cenaculo presentation. Really, its for the street play that would rove the streets of Daet, bringing to life the time-honored story of the Passion and Last Hours of the Christ.

Now before you folks call this an even stupider idea, let me elaborate: Yes, we need someone to play Jesus for the cenaculo/street play, so there is the issue of look. No suprise there. And yes, it does sound corny and all, but its still tenable since what we need is someone who not just does look like Christ, but feels, moves and understands like Christ as well. Really clever idea, unless you’re outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic bent of things, and would rather just sit in a wet, slimy hole purring “precious” for a living and yet learn nothing.

Seems simple? Yeah right! As of today there are nine candidates. We expect more until Sunday, when we’ll announce who will be the winner. The prize? 3,000 pesos and a short-term acting contract, good for the coming Holy Week. Heh.

Well, as for me, I’m mostly amused at this turn of events. If its really to help something get going, I think there’s no harm in doing it. There’s no use ranting about it either, so you might just get a DVD of The Passion Of The Christ and have all the grisly details, or watch our presentation and see how things turn out in this small town in Bicol…

…and before I forget, let me say that this Quest is in no way connected to PCS’ racket. Any correlation to it is purely coincidental. Hell, we’ve been having the inklings of this thing well before the geeks announced their tilt…

Sometime before lunch I sat down with Father Joe Julian and my Dad as they were having a discussion on the upcoming Cenaculo / Passion Play this Holy Week. During the talk, Fr. Joe asked me about my recent datamining work for the Diocesan Survey, and I told him that, since I’m the only one really working behind the project, I would really like to assemble a team of volunteers (namely, those from the Corinthian Youth Movement) to help me get this project moving forward. As of now, I’ve managed to encode some 700 of the 6,000 survey forms, a somewhat small number for the big leagues, but very big for someone who just happens to learn enough Perl to cobble up a script to interface with the MySQL database. (pusakat from #PLUG tells me to learn PostgreSQL instead. When I get out of this rut, I will

The problem stems from the survey instrument itself. It isn’t as well planned as it should be; rather, it looks like it was originally from someone’s (not-so-well-thought-of) college thesis. In fact, the entire project can be compared to such, including the way it was organized and executed. At the very start, the survey doesn’t seem to (or fails to do so accurately) answer the questions the Diocese asked, like how many people or families out there that receive the Eucharist, or how often they hear Mass. Also, some of the questions themselves are really questionable, as most of the other data not pertaining to Church matters are easily obtainable through other means, such as consulting the archives of the local Census Bureau, or by aggregating data from smaller, parish-wide surveys.

Father Joe then told me to replan the whole thing, Diocesan affair though it was, as the Parish of St. John the Baptist is the largest in the province, and it has an even larger number of respondents to worry about. Specifically, we needed to replay the survey, stripping out all those that seem unnecessary, and to rework the database program. Dad even suggested to do it all over again in paper, something that he had already brought up during the first meetings on the project months ago, but wasn’t heeaded as many though this as a “throwback to the Stone Age”, though this wasn’t a bad idea really, now that we wanted to bring this altogether to a close really fast. Then by next week, we can assemble a team and start finishing this, and probably be done sometime before March, hopefully before I take my exam.

The morale: don’t even think about surveying the populace when you don’t know what the hell you want or need to know…

…especially when the Head of it all is due to retire in May.

Amen to that, btx (over #PLUG): Datamining sucks.