Trying to Work Remotely

My daughter Jamie has been going to all these different venues for her dance recital, rehearsals, fair events, etc. It’s a Saturday and I need to just work on some spreadsheet and email over the weekend. Perfect! Now seems to he a good time.

I’m now at the Joan Kroc Theater were Jamie’s doing a dress rehearsal for her recital tomorrow. And right beside it is a library, and I tell myself, perfect, I can quickly go in and out and get this thing done in the library but nope… It’s not going to happen.

Library has no free Wifi – well that’s ok I thought. I can use the PCs in the library.I though everything was ok then…

I don’t know my webmail password – since Outlook at work saves my password, I really do not know it. There was no request or forgot password options on the web-based script Horde. Anyway I can reset my password in the web admin panel. I thought everything will be ok… Then…

I don’t know the admin panel password – but I have it saved in a password repository software. In runs on my laptop and on my home PC. I can access my home PC by LogMeIn. I thought everything will be ok then…

The library cannot run LogMeIn – the only browsers were IE and ActiveX controls and some Flash was not allowed to run. And enabling them was also not allowed. Anyway I got the LogMeIn app on my iPhone… I thought everything will be ok… Then…

I could not edit the spreadsheet! – on my phone, I did logmein, go to web based admin panel to change my email password. I open the email in the library PC, download the Excel file and it didn’t open. I was saved in an Excel 2007/2010 format. The library was running Excel 2003. Anyway Microsoft has a compatibility add on from the MS website… I thought everything was going to be ok… Then…

MS Excel 2003 compatibility pack would not install – ok so I really cannot open it since any type of installs were prohibited in these PCs. Well I can still go it remotely by LogMeIn on my phone. But editing a spreadsheet on a very small screen?

I can but no way. I’ll just do it when I get home. 🙂

GSIS sues Questronix and IBM

GSIS fails running their software made by Questronix running on IBM DB2. GSIS sues Questronix and IBM. That’s sounds like GSIS bought fresh milk from the grocery store, then it expires. They still drink it without looking at the expiration date. They get stomach aches, then they decide to sue not only the grocery store, but the farm and probably even the cow. More here at ABS CBN News.

Added info as shared to me by Bert Peronilla through Facebook who has a PhD in Computer Science:

I like your analogy on the GSIS, IBM, Questronix situation. Here are some technical details as I understand them as of today (July 24, 2009.)
GSIS claimed that the application crashes were found by IBM Toronto Lab to be caused by an “overflow” condition when the table space exceeds the limit of 2 TB. This limit of 2 TB for a table space in one partition for DB2 Version 9.1, (which is the one used by GSIS,) is documented in IBM manuals for this version of DB2. Proper performance monitoring of the application should have alerted GSIS that they were approaching the 2 TB limit. However, this was not caught by GSIS and this led to the “overflow” error.
DB2 should have caught this “overflow” condition and issued a WARNING message, followed by a graceful shutdown of the application instead of allowing the application to crash. IBM has sent a DB2 special build to remedy this error which was installed on the GSIS system as of May 26, 2009. Questronix claims that this “overflow” error is no longer occurring after May 26, 2009.
IBM cannot be sued for this error because it is clearly documented in all IBM software contracts that it does NOT guarantee that the software is free of bugs. If GSIS obtained their DB2 directly from IBM and had a Maintenance Agreement with them, IBM will try to fix any program errors to the best of their ability, and if they are not able to do so, this gives the customer the opportunity to try to get their money back. Only for what they paid for DB2; IBM contracts have a Disclaimer that they cannot be sued for any consequential or any other damages.

I like your analogy on the GSIS, IBM, Questronix situation. Here are some technical details as I understand them as of today (July 24, 2009.)

GSIS claimed that the application crashes were found by IBM Toronto Lab to be caused by an “overflow” condition when the table space exceeds the limit of 2 TB. This limit of 2 TB for a table space in one partition for DB2 Version 9.1, (which is the one used by GSIS,) is documented in IBM manuals for this version of DB2. Proper performance monitoring of the application should have alerted GSIS that they were approaching the 2 TB limit. However, this was not caught by GSIS and this led to the “overflow” error.

DB2 should have caught this “overflow” condition and issued a WARNING message, followed by a graceful shutdown of the application instead of allowing the application to crash. IBM has sent a DB2 special build to remedy this error which was installed on the GSIS system as of May 26, 2009. Questronix claims that this “overflow” error is no longer occurring after May 26, 2009.

IBM cannot be sued for this error because it is clearly documented in all IBM software contracts that it does NOT guarantee that the software is free of bugs. If GSIS obtained their DB2 directly from IBM and had a Maintenance Agreement with them, IBM will try to fix any program errors to the best of their ability, and if they are not able to do so, this gives the customer the opportunity to try to get their money back. Only for what they paid for DB2; IBM contracts have a Disclaimer that they cannot be sued for any consequential or any other damages.

Trying Out Some Picasa Plugins

I love ZenPhoto, although I also love WordPress as a CMS platform and mixing these two will have two logins and can be confusing for other people so I am looking for the best photogallery out there that I can use with WordPress and so far after checking several plugins, I decided to try out altPWA. It pulls the images from any Picasa account. Let’s try it out with some Sea World photos.

Read More

Two Consecutive SEO Contest is Always Tiring

I remember some old SEO contest that I join, got a domain(s), did nothing until the contest ended. Sometime I guess I get too excited with SEO contest, but ends up too busy to work on them and they remained untouched. I remember joining the hoax contest shopautodotca which I did nothing but get a domain. Filipino SEO Leo Mirabuna did well in that contest along with Ashad Shaikh from India but the prize was never given by this Canadian Car Shop company. Same thing with Paradise Philippines. I guess when SEOContest2008 started, I was fresh again and after that contest, Busby SEO Challenge and the discontinued Kabon Footprint, were also contest that I took no action but get a domain. Now for Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb contest, well in this case, I thought I will still be lazy working on my site.

Read More

SEO Contest Like Busby SEO Challenge as a Personal Promotional/Marketing Tool

I join contest in the past mainly to test what I know and in the process learn more. And after doing about 2 or 3 of them, my attitude changed into I am joining SEO Challenges because I want to win! I liked these SEO competitions and worked a great deal into them trying my best to win and so far it paid off. Now it seems that after winning the previous SEO contest I have joined, it has helped promote myself, market myself to the Internet community mainly in the Philippines and other countries outside the US. Then I have seen more and more blog post talking about me (but not linking to me grrrr *LOL*) and I guess with the information out there I have seen a good mash up of information and is pretty accurate with the information about me but this site never contacted me about it. I have a professional profile on the Philippine Government’s National Computer Center. Listed in their Consultants / IT Professionals List. But there is nothing really special about that since they have a pretty long list of Filipino IT Professionals. I am just surprised with the length of info i have that is accurate. But again I am also not surprised since after reading the profile, I know where the information came from, interview blog post, other people I know that blogged about me, I blogged about myself, from my social media profiles, mainly LinkedIn and other stuff. (Wala man lang link papunta sa akin. *LOL*)

Read More

A New Busby SEO Challenge

I have been working on an SEO project, that has a lot of navigations using an HTML <select> tag. Which we all know is not search engine friendly. Because search engine spiders, also called bots cannot crawl this type of navigation. So I decided to redesign one and I made one using plain unordered list tags. <ul>,<li> tags that imitated how a <select> tag would behave. And the additional advantage aside from crawlability is the appearance is more customizable since there are many CSS properties that can change the colors of a <select> element but is not cross-browser compatible. With an ordinary list, you can customize appearance that is sure to look the same across all major browsers. I called this navigation the Busby Select Nav and so far the only problem I have is this is not working well on Safari and Konqueror. So I decided to ask help to get it work.

Read More

Large Team Effort in SEO Contest like Busby SEO Challenge?

Active SEO contest competitors know that the French SEOSphere team is a team hard to beat in SEO competitions and they are a current competitor at the Busby SEO Challenge. There were a strong team in previous SEO contest such as the SEO World Championship in 2007 that I was fortunate enough to win this contest. I myself must agree that I received a lot of help from many people who were not competing in the contest.

Just a few months back, our industry SEO friends in the UK organized by UK Webmaster World also ran an SEO challenge early this year, 2008 that ended on April Fool’s day although this was no joke. The SEOContest2008 where I won 2nd place, was an SEO challenge won by the French team, SEOSphere.

Read More

I need $7,000 by the end of this month

Sometimes I make suicidal decisions. I call them suicidal because they are like decisions that are more bound to fail but I still go for them always thinking I can overcome all odds. For some reason I always had this kind of attitude. I do not really call them stupid decisions but really challenging and if every it can be called to have calculated risk, it is really a tough calculation.

I decided to buy a piece of land

Ok, that even sounds good right? Land is always a good investment. Problem is I am not really the person that has a super deep pocket that can buy anything I want to. Last month, near the end of April, I went on a trip to take a look at some piece of land some one has offer me and wife. With the high cost of real estate and me having a full time job in an expensive city, and my wife who is less than a year in the US without a job yet, and us running a small business to make ends meet is not really the type of occupational situation we would want to have in investing in real estate. We have 2 daughters with us in the US as well. But why did I still decide to buy a piece of land?

Read More