I’ve mentioned in passing here on this blog that my favorite number is the golden ratio. If you know me, this should not be surprising at all. Two of my favorite school subjects are math and art after all, and aside from fractals (which I also really love), the golden ratio is a concept that straddles both fields, having numerous interesting mathematical properties and being used as an aesthetically pleasing proportion in the arts and architecture. I’m quite sure that I am far from alone in having the golden ratio as their favorite number.

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Unless you didn’t pay attention, you should know by now that I left my 12-year job at Canon and started working for Cadasta since March. The update of my profile on Facebook and LinkedIn should have made that abundantly clear. And it should also be obvious that this career shift was what I alluded to in my post last year, though I didn’t expect back then that I would eventually end up where I am now.

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I last blogged about Wikimedia Philippines’ participation at Y4iT 2010 or the 8th Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology which happened two weeks ago. Well, I was also involved with this year’s Y4iT in a personal capacity, separate from being a member of Wikimedia Philippines: I was invited as a sort of last-minute speaker to talk about (video) game development.

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The third week of November looks to be an exciting month for Web enthusiasts as there are three Web-related offline events happening within eight days of each other. The first one, targeted to Web designers, is the Form Function & Class Mini Web Design Conference this Saturday, the 14th. The second event, intended for Web developers, is the Google Technology Users Group meetup on November 17. The third, for plain old Web surfers, is the Five Years of Firefox in Manila party on the 21st.

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For the most part I’m a big Google fanboy (well except for some things here and there). And because I’m nominally a web developer, I certainly will try to attend as many developer-oriented Google events as I can. The first event I attended was the Google TechTalk last November 2007 and the second one was the first ever Google DevFest Manila back in November 2008. So it should not come as a surprise that I turned up at the Google-Globe Developer Workshop last June 20. This event was held at Tech Portal of the really, really, really cool U.P.-Ayala Land TechnoHub in U.P. Diliman (see a rough map at OpenStreetMap ). Did I mention that the TechnoHub is really cool?

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While browsing around the blogosphere, I came across this interesting website called AideRSS on one of the comments on Google Blogoscoped’s article “Tips For Dealing With Information Overload”. AideRSS is apparently a free tool that takes an RSS or Atom feed, collects some statistics, and then gives each post in the feed a PostRank, which seems to be an objective measure of a post’s quality, based on “relevance and reaction.” (You might say that PostRank is similar in name and function to Google’s PageRank.) Among the metrics it uses are the number of comments, Delicious links, Digg votes (?), and Google Blogsearch backlinks. You can then use PostRank to filter a feed for the best posts if you so desire.

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Thanks to Andrew I was able to snag a slot at the recently held Google TechTalk, which was held in Makati last Monday, November 19. This event was organized by Philippine Google Country Consultant Aileen Apolo. Two Filipino American Googlers from the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA, Jay Aguilar and Franklin Naval, visited the country to promote awareness about some of the tools and resources Google has made available for developers.

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There are two technology fields that Google has recently entered and will prove to be interesting battle grounds: one is the cross-platform mobile application development space, and the other is the social-networking Web application space. Google entered the former by announcing the Android platform and launching the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which includes Intel, Motorola, and T-Mobile, and the notable absence of Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia. Google forayed into the latter field by releasing the OpenSocial API with notable partners Friendster, hi5, imeem, MySpace, Six Apart, and LinkedIn, and the notable absence of Facebook.

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One of my mid-term goals is to learn the Ruby programming language and then quickly move on to Ruby on Rails, a web application framework that lets you develop database-driven websites in a fraction of the time it takes to do it using traditional methods (like through PHP).

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Here’s the second part of the story behind Lakbayan. You should also read the first part or the launch blog entry if you haven’t done so.

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As promised, here’s the follow-up post for those interested in the technical and behind the scenes details of Lakbayan. This goes out especially to all those people who have been asking me how I implemented the grading system.

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Today is the 109th anniversary of the Philippine Declaration of Independence and I’m celebrating it by launching the beta version of Lakbayan! See how much of the Philippines you have visited! To whet your appetite and give you a preview of what to expect, my personal result is shown below.

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Yay! I finally upgraded the feed features of this blog. I’m not sure why I put it off for so long but I’ve now made it easier for everyone to subscribe to this blog in your favorite feed reader or aggregator. (If you don’t know what an aggregator is, it’s a software or web service that let’s you subscribe to blogs and news sites and be informed of new or updated entries without having to visit the actual website.) Some popular online aggregators are Google Reader and Bloglines, and for desktop applications, nothing supposedly beats NetNewsWire for the Macintosh. Mozilla Firefox’s own Live Bookmarks feature is a rudimentary aggregator.

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You might or might not know that I created the blogging software that runs vaes9 by myself. I have my particular reasons why I decided to have complete control over the application layer of my blog instead of opting for the popular blogging systems like WordPress or Movable Type. One particular advantage is the ability to customize and tweak my blog in any way I want. A disadvantage is that it takes a lot more effort to add functionalities that other blogging platforms easily get through plug-ins.

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Last weekend, I played around with the public domain data obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission or SRTM. I wanted to use this data to create topographic maps that I can contribute to Wikipedia.

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If you remember this previous post, then you should know that I like creating simple computer games in the office. The latest game I did is an adaptation of the primetime ABS-CBN game show Kapamilya, Deal or No Deal, minus the overly enthusiastic commercial endorser/host.

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I believe I have created the first Philippine-related Google Maps mashup that is more than just placing points on a map. I remembered recently that I have scanned before an aerial photography plate of the University of the Philippines, Diliman area from the early 90s. (These plates are used by U.P. Geodetic Engineering students in their courses.) So last night, I had this brilliant idea to create a custom map in Google Maps with the aerial photography as a new map type. So now I’m proud to present my University of the Philippines, Diliman Map Mashup located at my dormant U.P. community site ASwalk.net (which I plan on reviving soon). Please select the “Aerial” map type to view the “new” imagery.

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I’ve added a beta Map page to my second blog, Tanawing Pinoy, (now named Vista Pinas). Like the original Google Sightseeing, I plan this page to be an interactive embedded map pointing to all or a subset of the featured sights from the blog.

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There’s supposedly much ado on Joel’s Spolsky’s article, “The Perils of JavaSchools” (via Tim Bray). The violect reactions seem to come from people who interpreted Joel’s piece as a denigration of schools that teach Java instead of C/C++. It’s actually a denigration of schools that don’t teach pointers and recursion, two things that Joel believes necessarily (though not sufficiently) indicate whether a programmer is excellent instead of just good enough.

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Tim Berners-Lee has a blog! If you don’t know who he is, then you either probably haven’t read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, or you haven’t carefully read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. For the still clueless, he’s the reason you’re reading this blog entry now; he’s the inventor of the World Wide Web.

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I’m planning to move this blog to a new location since it is really just squatting on a domain that really has no relationship to the parent website that’s been dormant for several months now.

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Syzygy, my custom-built weblogging software, has been updated to add new commenting functionality.

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I’m now somewhat finished with the second phase of developing my weblog software, codenamed Syzygy (there is really such a word). What I’ve added is the ability for readers to add their comments to the page publicly. Before, you could send comments, but only to me. Now you, my dear readers, can have the option of leaving your comments for the world to read and react upon, or you can send me your comments privately.

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If you only see question marks or boxes in the title, then you need to install East Asian language support in your browser. You also need some Unicode fonts. After that, you should be able to see some Japanese characters.

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So I finally have a blog. Just like most pseudo-losers, I’ve decided to join all the cool people and jump on the bandwagon, adding my voice to the cacophony that is the blogosphere. It would be an interesting experience maintaining a blog as I never really had a journal or a diary nor even written a regular column in any periodical.

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