Jaiku

Installed Jaiku Mobile Beta, played with the menu in the order that made sense to me, and basically felt I would rather do my calculus.

Screenshots can be viewed here.

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to post Jaiku messages, or read my contact's posts for that matter. There is something called "Presence," the mystery of which I have yet to resolve.

Most of the functionalities seem to revolve around location-based services (GPS, locating friends "near" you, etc.). Take a peep at your coordinates, and I won't be surprised if it scares the hell out of you. Someone need to assure me that these coordinates are not sent automatically to Jaiku.

In fairness, I didn’t read the user manual (C’mon, would you?) And, this is in Beta. Hopefully some sense come out of it in the final release.

They do have a kick-ass website. There is still hope.

By the way, in case your interested, which you're probably not since I'm as interesting as a taco shell, my jaiku username is chette.

As what can be expected, Smart Bro went down yesterday – or at least here in the Ortigas Area.

This is one funny thing about Smart Bro – whenever there is a long holiday (Christmas, Easter, etc.), they always make it a point to annoy their subscribers and bring down their service. And it always happens on a Saturday. Without fail.

Once again, calling technical support doesn’t help. You see, they have this oh-so-reliable channel portal that their call center agents use. It flags them if there is a “technical activity” going on at the base station. Since there was no flag when I called, they simply said there must be something wrong on my end.

That channel portal needs to be thrown in Manila Bay where no technical support agent can touch it ever again.

And once again, we wait until Monday. Until then, it’s 3G for me.

According to the World Economic Forum, the United States is no longer the technology king. The throne now goes to Denmark.

Below is the Networked Readiness Index Rankings for 2006:

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Singapore
4. Finland
5. Switzerland
6. Netherlands
7. US
8. Iceland
9. UK
10. Norway

However, I did receive an interesting email on who is the real technology king. Ladies & gentlemen, the evidence is real tight. So tight that not a single technology expert dare refute it. Read on below:

After digging to a depth of 1,000 feet last year, Chinese scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years, and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network a thousand years ago.

Not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, Japanese scientists dug 2,000 feet and headlines in the Japanese papers read: "Japanese scientists have found traces of 2,000 year old optical fiber, and have concluded that our ancestors already had an advanced high-tech digital network a thousand years earlier than the Chinese."

One week later, the Philippine newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 5,000 feet, Filipino scientists from Bocaue have found absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5,000 years ago, our ancestors were already using wireless technology."

This is the 1st installment of the Joomla Template Tutorial Series.

The following are discussed in this article: Design conceptualization, introduction to Joomla elements, template basics, modules & module positions.

It has been hell trying to maintain a photo gallery engine integrated with my content management system. In this light, I have decided to swallow my pride, and use my Flickr account for my photos. Let's see how it works out.

Speaking of Flickr, & social networking in general: I've been told numerous times of my lack of "socialization" skills -- Friendster, Flickr, MyBlogLog, Facebook, Yahoo 360, Twitter, Delicious, Multiply, What-have-you's.

I'm not a snob, really. I'm just a retard on social networking (both online & offline, hehe). Plus, it just took me a while to grasp the idea of buddies & friends list.

To make myself feel better, I am officially putting the blame on Friendster, and their ominous confirmation messages ("Are you sure Procopio is really your friend?"). I took it waaay too seriously.

It is good SEO practice to put the page title first in your title tags, and then your site name. Unfortunately, by default, Joomla places the site name first before the page title.

To change this, grab a copy of the file /includes/joomla.php

Around line number 507, replace this:

$this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . ' - '. $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

With this:

$this->_head['title'] = $title ? $title .' - '. $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

After my rant about the sheer ugliness of my website (c’mon, it was hideous, right?), I decided to vent out my frustrations and upgrade Joomla, play with some new components, and redesign my site. I have until Wednesday to get things in order over here, since I’m reserving Holy Week to do some serious maintenance on PhilMusic.com.

Well the good news is, this "ordeal" have forced me to start writing the template tutorial for Joomla. It's probably the most requested article in this site, and hopefully, I can do justice to it.

Anyway, if you got any suggestions for this makeover, feel free to send it over.