To those attending the Google-Globe Developer Workshop tomorrow (June 20, 2009), the event will be held at one of the conference rooms found at the West wing of the Tech Portal building of the UP-Ayala Technohub. The Tech Portal building is the horseshoe-shaped building where the shops and cafes are located.

Here’s a map:

For more about the event, click here.

Again, see you there!

Thanks to Bong for the original image of the map.

Imagine a phone that does the job of recharging itself. The geniuses at Finnish company Nokia in Cambridge, UK invented a new charging system that harnesses the infinite amount of radio waves that surrounds us, and converts the electromagnetic radiation into electricity to power a cellular phone battery. These radio waves can come simply from your own television set, wifi transmitters, radios, or any device with antennae. Still in the experimental stages, Nokia foresees this technology to go mainstream in 3-5 years. For now, they are working on getting the charger to generate 20 milliwatts, enough for a phone to run on stanby mode forever. About double that, we can do voice calls for whatever lengths we desire, load permitting.

Would you buy this cellphone?

HTC Country Manager Mark Sergio officially announced today that the HTC Magic™, the first Android-powered mobile phone in the Philippines, will be available exclusively through Smart Gold, the postpaid brand of leading wireless services provider Smart Communications, Inc. (SMART).

SMART and HTC Corporation will be launching HTC Magic™ very soon. The HTC Magic™ is the first of its kind to be introduced in the Philippines. The smartphone is equipped with the Android operating system, and is supported by SMART’s HSDPA network, the widest in the country.

“To truly maximize the power of advanced, all-in-one devices, they need to be powered by innovative operator technologies – offering the HTC Magic through SMART Gold is a natural fit,” said Miriam Choa, activations manager of SMART Gold.

The HTC Magic™ comes with a powerful mobile browser that provides easy access to Google services such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. It also has the Smart Dialer function, which allows users to either dial the phone number or simply type in the first few letters of the name of the person they want to call.

“Part of SMART’s efforts in putting the Internet in the hands of every Filipino is providing subscribers a broad selection of the latest, most advanced handset models that suit their lifestyles at very affordable rates,” said Choa.

SMART Gold is a pioneering postpaid brand which offers a wide variety of monthly plans, all offering free or subsidized handsets, free airtime and SMS. SMART Gold subscribers enjoy access to high-speed, mobile Internet and other value-added services powered by SMART’s nationwide mobile broadband coverage.

The HTC Magic will be available exclusively under SMART Gold subscription plans, and will be out in the market by the end of June 2009.

UPDATE: Globe made a similar announcement. I wonder how this would pan out.

The Daily Top 10 Posts Wordpress plugin has been updated and fully tested on Wordpress 2.8.

It’s not a major update, but I included a feature that many have been clamoring for — the ability to exclude certain posts or pages from tracking. You will need to edit the file manually. When I find the time you will be able to do this through the admin panel. For now, we’ll have to go manual. To exclude posts, open up the plugin file and edit the line (~99) that reads:

$EXCLUDE = "";

Between the double quotes, type the ID’s of posts you don’t want to track. You can figure out the ID’s by looking at Posts > Edit.

Your code should look something like this:

$EXCLUDE = "5,7,9,104,110,250";

Do this ONLY if you want to disable tracking on specific posts. Otherwise, leave the code as is. Disabled posts will stop registering hits and will cease to appear in all widgets.

I’m aware that some requested a feature to disable tracking on certain categories. That will be done in the next update. Give it a week or two.

To download the update, click here or automatically update in the plugins panel.
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To commemorate the country’s 111th anniversary of its declaration of independence, Google announced that it has created the first-ever Google doodle for the Philippines. The unique doodle can be viewed on Google’s Philippine website, www.google.com.ph.

A Google doodle is a “decoration” Google makes to its logo every so often. Doodles are designed to celebrate worldwide events, anniversaries, and the lives of notable artists and scientists. Among the doodles that have been displayed on Google’s website are international holidays New Year, Valentine’s Day, and the December holiday season, and logos commemorating Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Edvard Munch.

“This is the first-ever Google doodle for the Philippines so we wanted to make it very classic and meaningful for Filipinos. We created a special doodle on the Google Philippines homepage for June 12, 2009 to commemorate the Philippines’ Independence Day,” said Jay Trinidad, Regional Product Marketing Manager, Consumer Products, Google Asia Pacific. Trinidad is a Filipino Googler currently based in Singapore. “Google doodles also celebrate important local events and holidays such as this one. It is our honor to celebrate more than a century of national excellence and achievement with all Filipinos in our own creative and Googley way. On behalf of Google, I wish my fellow Filipinos another century of increasing prosperity and success. Mabuhay ang Pinoy!”

On June 12, 1898, revolutionary forces under Emilio Aguinaldo, the country’s first and youngest President, declared independence from Spanish colonial rule. The Philippine Independence Day doodle is based on the country’s current national flag, which is very similar to the one Aguinaldo raised 111 years ago.

“We’ve taken the sun with its eight rays, which represents the eight Philippine provinces that pledged their support to the revolution, and used it as the first ‘O’ in our logo,” said Trinidad, explaining the idea behind the doodle’s design. “We also used red, white, and blue, the Philippines’ national colors, which stand for patriotism, equality, and justice, respectively. We also incorporated the flag’s three stars in the design, symbolizing the three major geographic regions of the country.”

For background information on Google doodles, please visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/06/oodles-of-doodles.html

For more holiday doodles online, visit http://www.google.com.ph/holidaylogos.html

Google and Globe Telecom are sponsoring a developer workshop on June 20, 2009 at the Ayala Technohub in Quezon City. Google Developer Advocate Patrick Chanezon, whom you might remember from last year’s Manila Devfest, is coming back to go in-depth into Google’s and Globe’s API’s, as well as be on-hand to assist you in developing your application. The best apps created during the event may be monetized on Globe’s platform! Sound good?

All you need to bring is a laptop. Power, space and refreshments are provided for.

Slots are limited. Grab a slot by signing up here. Tell your developer friends to join in too!

Event details:

Google Developer Workshop
Saturday, June 20th, 2008
1:00PM-5:00PM (registration starts at 12 noon)
Ayala TechnoHub, Commonwealth Avenue, Diliman, Quezon City

See you there!

Good thing my friend Jehz informed me about an error he got when he tried to comment on my earlier post. No wonder I haven’t been getting comments lately! Argh! If you know me well, I <3 comments!

The problem happens when submitting the comment form. A blank page will appear, save for an error message like this:

“Sorry, No Posts Matched Your Criteria”

After a little research, it has something to do with a permalink bug in version 2.6.

So how did I solve it? Apparently the bug has been cleared since version 2.6.1. I’m that slow in upgrading my Wordpress. All you have to do is update your installation to the latest version and most likely the problem will go away.

Google is giving away business card sets to 10,000 users. It’s a cool way to show off your Google profile and moreover, it’s free! All you need to do is login to your Google profile and make it public if you already haven’t done so. Shortly after you’ll see the sign up link above. The downside is they ship only to U.S. addresses. Bummer for us. But I used my aunt’s New York address to snag myself a set of 25 cards. Sweet.

At $20 a pop, it’s now possible to register your own .mp domain. It’s quite expensive compared to a regular .com or .net domain so I’m not sure if I’m biting this one. But the number of words ending in “-mp” opens up a lot of doors for creativity, to boot: donaldtru.mp or whitemencantju.mp or bigpi.mp or my.mp (the band). The list goes on. For $20/year, your domain ought to be funny or cool enough to be worth it.

Get a .mp domain now! (not an affiliate link)

Mayday, mayday! We all have only about a day to migrate our Feedburner feeds to Google’s servers. Luckily I remembered to do that last week. Alleba Blog’s new feed address is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AllebaBlog. Please update your feed readers.

Naturally, the migration is meant to integrate our feeds with Google’s infrastructure. We lose our Feedburner accounts but are given options to which Google account you want to associate your feeds with. If you do not do this before the month ends, you risk losing all your feeds and subscribers. The process is pretty quick and painless. Visit Feedburner.com and login. A migration panel will appear to guide you along the way.

If you’re a Ratified.org member, use this form to inform me about your new feed address. Thanks.

I got 5 Chi.mp invitations to give away. If you want one, express your desire in the comments section below. Please include your name and email address.

What is Chi.mp? Quoting from their website:

Chi.mp’s service lets you register your own .mp domain and gives you a free Web site that serves as a hub for your content across the Web. Your chi.mp site also gives you one place to bring together and manage all your contacts in one “Ultimate Black Book”. Chi.mp lets you own and define “digital you” and to share different versions of “digital you” with your selected contacts. More than a life-stream or an aggregator, chimp allows you to take control of how you share your self with the world.

Although you get your own .mp domain, it won’t be like a regular domain where you can set nameservers and mx records. Your .mp domain will simply serve as your online identity’s jumping point. I picked davao.mp for mine.
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I put my Photoshop skills to the test today. The end result is a hedcut portrait of President Barack Obama which I’d like to show off to you, my faithful readers.

I started with this colored photo:
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Here are a few logos I was commissioned to do. Some of these you’ve already seen, some fresh out of the oven.

The newest logo I commissioned to myself while overhauling my search engine. The search engine got a very major upgrade recently thus it deserved a redesign. Homepage coding improved as well. Will work on the directory and this blog next. For the logo, I was going after something quirky but yet very much Pinoy. I think I accomplished that well.
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The funny thing about Wordpress is the way it behaves differently across my different webhosts – Dreamhost, Media Temple and A Small Orange.

My food blog is hosted on MT. Before I manually upgraded it to Wordpress 2.7, it was languishing in the old 2.3 version. Back then when 2.3 was the “in thing” it was already having issues with WP’s AJAX features. But I learned to live with it. Yesterday, while I was making a new post about an Indian Restaurant, the autosave feature was acting like its usual crazy self. It displays an error message “You do not have permission to do that”. Ok, so who does? Like before, I’m not allowed to make new categories. I was forced to create them in phphmyadmin. I don’t care for WP’s AJAX capabilities other than autosave. Otherwise I can totally do away with them.

I was determined to see what was causing the problem. It turns out that it had to do with permissions inside the wp-includes file. But I wonder why it *only* happens on my food blog, and not on my photo blog. Anyway, if nothing else has worked for you, open up your FTP client and connect to your web server. Chmod the wp-includes folder and everything in it to 644. I have tried all combinations of permissions and in this is the only that worked for me. If you can provide alternative solutions, please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Another bug I encountered on my food blog is the news on the dashboard aren’t showing up (solution still up in the air).

UPDATE: I looked into the second bug further and discovered that it is intertwined with the first bug. If I set the wp-includes folder to 644, the problems with autosave and adding categories go away, but as a result, the dashboard news fails to load. To fix it, I set the permissions of the wp-includes -> js -> jquery folder to 744. Still scratching my head over this.

I updated Daily Top 10 Posts to version 0.6. It includes only a couple of minor fixes, albeit aesthetic ones. I added the ability to set how many top posts will appear on the sidebar and dashboard. Does that mean I have to rename the plugin to Daily Top Posts? You need to open up the plugin file to edit the variables. By version 0.8 or 0.9 you’ll be able to do it directly from your admin panel. I promise. In addition to that, I tweaked the dashboard widget to look more streamlined with new admin CSS.

Download version 0.6 here or update it automatically through your plugin panel. For more about Daily Top 10 Posts, go here.

Thanks.