I've been too busy to blog. The project is really intense. I hope to read the pile of books in PDF over the weekend. I haven't been able to work on the tech blog yet, and it seems I'll be passing the work over to a friend.

I have been reading. I have finished a guide to Java coding standards, the introductory part of Refactoring by Martin Fowler, and Chapter One of Mastering EJB Second Edition. It's good that there are people to discuss these with, and will help give me more insights.

While part of me is in a hurry to take these in, I have to realize that I can't rush it and I need to let it seep in slowly. There has been discussion on the PinoyJUG mailing list about creating a world-famous Filipino project like an app server. Having Pinoys on something like JBoss team would be great!

For more on the country's IT strategy on the macro scale, here is an interview with Secretary Mar Roxas of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

The GlobeQuest DSL service of Globe Telecoms has been launched. They are offering what they claim is the world's first usage-based DSL. The catch is that the measurement is time-based. How can you properly tell if a user is using the connection or not?

This time, it's someone from CA telling us about "going beyond call centers.". Not to be outdone, the new country manager of Microsoft Philippines wants to start helping local independents software vendors (ISVs) develop business applications using Microsoft software that will fit the requirements of small- to medium-sized businesses.

Let them get to it while I work on my free software. Unfortunately, commercial work was the order of the day. While I'd like to use EJB, the people on the team and I don't know it just yet, and there are some issues forcing us against it. Nevertheless, EJB/J2EE is still up there in my to-learn list. I'm not making progress in studying Struts, though my cute app idea is still relevant.

While I'd love to have days devoted to nothing but writing and working on open source, the reality is I need commercial projects to get experience in things like Software Engineering. That's fine since I need to develop that too. So I'm working on having the chance to balance both, nicely.

Speaking of to-learn, my to do list is outdated. I just noted down that it needs to be updated. I should put a quick write-up of the pending projects I can share.

Wends had lent me a copy of Extreme Programming Explained, but I missed out on the reference to Socrates. college level philosophy and did some searching. This quote refreshed me:

A Socratic dialogue takes the form of question-answer, question-answer, question-answer. It is a dialectical style as well. Socrates would argue both sides of a question in order to arrive at a conclusion. Then that conclusion is argued against another assumption and so on. Perhaps it is not that difficult to understand why Socrates was considered a gadfly!

There is a reason why Socrates employed this style, as well as why Plato recorded his experience with Socrates in the form of a dialogue. Socrates taught Plato a great many things, but one of the things Plato more or less discovered on his own was that mankind is born with knowledge. That is, knowledge is present in the human mind at birth. It is not so much that we "learn" things in our daily experience, but that we "recollect" them. In other words, this knowledge is already there. This may explain why Socrates did not give his students answers, but only questions. His job was not to teach truth but to show his students how they could "pull" truth out of their own minds (it is for this reason that Socrates often considered himself a midwife in the labor of knowledge). And this is the point of the dialogues. For only in conversation, only in dialogue, can truth and wisdom come to the surface.

How apt that today's programming practice relates to 2,000+ year old wisdom. That's an insight for my quest towards software correctness.

For some wry humor, The Renaissance Girl talks about the Cardinal's Golf Tournament and the return of Padre Damaso, the archetypical Spanish frair villain from Jose Rizal's revolutionary novels.

Gerry Alanguilan, comics artist, has a new site. It reminded me that one of my favorite songs, The Dance by Barbie's Cradle, was the inspiration for his most well-known work, Wasted. I never got to read that.

I have never worked on formal projects that make use of Software Engineering. My code to date has been solo work or complements to existing free code. I am getting started and will learn a lot from the experience. I might also use the expereince to learn EJB.

I am now reading on refactoringand its related tools and techniques. In the book in progress about Refactoring to Patterns, there are many references to the Martin Fowler paper book. From the reviews, it seems to be something important enough to spend on.

The DNS for techscene.com is set up. I hope to find time this weekend to set up a tool for group blogging.

I'm trying out various IDE's and editors for my Java education project. This is to help fulfill the industry's need for Java programmers, to help friends, and to practice my training skills. One constraint is that the tool I use for teaching must also work well under Windows. Making the students learn both a new operating system, and a new language, is too much.

I have started writing rlm_java, the FreeRADIUS Loadable Module for Java integration using Java Native Interface (JNI). The goal is to integrate RADIUS systems with Java-based business processes and J2EE. While it would be nice to have a Pure Java RADIUS server, that's too much work for now. I'm now waiting for feedback from the FreeRADIUS mailing list on how to present a good interface to the Java programmers.

I registered a domain for the tech blog community. The DNS hosting is still pending at the GraniteCanyon free domain hosting service. I'll move the tech stuff out of this blog, get some more people on board, and keep personal stuff here.

Smart Money Holdings Corp. is signing up with Sun to market its mobile commerce solution to foreign markets. The corporation is a join venture of mobile operator Smart Communications and smartcard provider Mondex Philippines. Mondex Philippines is majority owned by Nextstage, Inc. (see Mondex Philippines FAQ). Nextstage is owned by Orlando Vea and his partners who founded Smart Communications in 1991 (see Businessworld article) which they sold to First Pacific, which later acquired Philippine Long Distance Telecom (PLDT). Hence, Smart is de facto the wireless company of PLDT.

The article about government e-procurement is related to Bayantrade, the largest local e-procurement operation. This Businessworld article describes some management changes there.

Systems Technology Institute, a computer school more commonly known as STI, is looking at an IPO next year. Their president is one of those who has spoken out against contact centers, recently.

A local update on the merger of HP and Compaq from ITnetcentral: integration is "90% complete" but 40 people or 20% of the local staff will hit the streets.

I have found two other Pinoy tech blogs, techinsights.blogspot.com, and The Web Log, which seems to have come from The Web Magazine.

I have just recently found kakosa.com. It's a hotbed of design and artistic creativity. Now to work on the software developers version...

I hope the Philippine Government e-procurement system takes off. (philstar.com)

The JUnit group did not respond much, so I won't go through the effort towards extending JUnit for network testing, just yet. Maybe when I do some intense network coding again. I also have to remember that JUnit is not a general-purpose network test suite, but rather a programming tool.

The hard-core programming might be with java.nio. I've been planning to study the Java Native I/O system for quite a while. It is very useful for server developers. I got reminded when I found out that the O'Reilly book on this topic is out.

I'm looking at another project that will make use of JNI and RMI, so I need to practice both.

I have quite a queue of things to learn, practice and master. I need the discipline to go through them, and the discernment to tell me that I should skip an area of study in favor of something else.

I am fascinated by the origins of words, thus The Phurba Etymologicon is noteworthy. It is "An Etymological Glossary of the English Language With Special Reference to Non-Standard English
And Uncommon Words." I do avoid obscure words in my writing, as my goal is to keep things simple and straight to the point.

The JUnit group did not respond much, so I won't go through the effort towards extending JUnit for network testing, just yet. Maybe when I do some intense network coding again. I also have to remember that JUnit is not a general-purpose network test suite, but rather a programming tool.

The hard-core programming might be with java.nio. I've been planning to study the Java Native I/O system for quite a while. It is very useful for server developers. I got reminded when I found out that the O'Reilly book on this topic is out.

I'm looking at another project that will make use of JNI and RMI, so I need to practice both.

I have quite a queue of things to learn, practice and master. I need the discipline to go through them, and the discernment to tell me that I should skip an area of study in favor of something else.

I am fascinated by the origins of words, thus The Phurba Etymologicon is noteworthy. It is "An Etymological Glossary of the English Language
With Special Reference to Non-Standard English
And Uncommon Words." I do avoid obscure words in my writing, as my goal is to keep things simple and straight to the point.

I'm looking at extending the JUnit unit testing framework to support IP protocols. This will be useful for my current project, and for RADIUS protocol testing. I have requested for comments at the JUnit Yahoo! group.

If this takes off, I might write about it for the Third Philippine Computing Science Congress. Otherwise, I might just resubmit my work with William Yu on IP engineering metrics. Or, I might think of something new altogether.

Congrats to PinoyJUG for putting up the new website.

I knew it all along. Not to put down supply chain practitioners, but their practice is used as an analogy for IT education. (ITnetcentral) I think we should look at other ways of solving the mentioned chicken-and-egg problem of work experience, by letting the students work on certifiable, useful projects while still in the academe.

My friend Chette is writing about the bias of policy-makers towards promotion and development of contact centers. As a developer, I would prefer to go up the value chain in a macro scale, and work the industry towards development and business process outsourcing. Unfortunately, we need the cash - or investment - now, so we can't pass up the opportunity to make use of what we have at hand.

I am becoming a strict coder! I just need to master log4j. I also figured out I need to know how to build GUI's with JFC/Swing since there is a class of applications that can use it.

O'Reilly now has a book on BGP. It would probably have a lighter, more tutorial-like treatment than the "classics" from Cisco Press and Addison-Wesley.

Chikka claims in this press release that it generates 20% of the world's SMS volume. Wow.

A new - at least to me - WiFi provider, Airborne Access, is launching its services at Seattle's Best coffee shops, among other places. (INQ7, Businessworld).

The project allowed me to do more original code for Java sockets and threads. I should be able to write from memory now, which is good!

I'm now applying log4j to implement logging for performance and auditing.

This article on the business of wireless applications in the Philippines is interesting. It's notable that it's the telco and not the provider who comes out in front. But where did the figure of 10,000 local SMS developers come from?

Thanks to my friend Wends, I am now reading God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe by Amir D. Aczel. I want to come up with such original ideas. Or do I just want to be an open source guru rock star?

Thanks to The Valkyrie's Journal for pointing out a narrative and photos of the wedding of musicians Mike Villegas and Bayang Barrios. I'm one of the few people with a copy of her album. Thanks to the rowster for linking to The Valkyrie's Journal!

The Tumble Dry Tour is on. I should be catching it soon. I missed last night because I was at another event - the Red Horse Muziklaban band contest, held at Padi's Point Las Pinas.

Still busy with the proprietary project. The nice part is I get to practice my Java coding skills, and getting rid of my newbie errors.

I want to get involved in some local developer advocacy work. The plans are not yet firmed up but I will start it off with a blog for more local developers and events. This came from a PinoyJUG post-meeting discussion Wednesday night which stayed up pretty late.

Congratulations to the Ateneo Bayanihan Computing project for distributed computing with XML and .NET. The Microsoft release is here.

Proprietary work the whole day. Have been reading on J2EE but haven't started implementing yet. I hope to get some work done on Struts soon.

I got a response to my comment to struts-user on the lack of documentation. I was pointed to the Struts book in review at TheServerSide.com. More reading to go! There's a chapter on Struts + J2EE so that will fit in my parallel reading. I hope to give them a proper spin soon.

I'm starting up on an m-commerce related project. Sorry guys but I really can't and won't say much about work proper!

That's my answer to the blog question "what is the limit of your blogging." Aside from that, I don't want to say too much about personal life here. I even have more to say about that at PEx.

I joined the PinoyBloggers group blog. I just might put the more personal stuff there.

I downloaded the Sun J2EE tutorial and the PDF version of Part 1 of the Mastering EJB book from TheServerSide.com. I will be using them to try out and learn the J2EE implementations.

I need to catch up here, I'm way behind the Java pros. I will need a good project to exercise this.

I still have no response on the Struts problem. Hopefully I can bring it up when PinoyJUG covers it later this month.

I posted my problem to the struts-user mailing list.

On a suggestion from PinoyJUG, I downloaded the Sun J2EE 1.3.1 reference implementation. for my EJB practice. Perhaps this time, I'll need a paper book to guide me. Until today, I have never purchased a single paper book on Java. I have "Algorithms and Data Structures in Java", but that is a Computer Science book.

I got started on my Struts practice, but got hit by two problems. The first is that the system could not find the keys in the properties files used in bean:message. The mailing list archives I found suggested no solutions. The second is that the WAR files I create are not loaded properly. I'm really new to Tomcat, JSP and servlets since I do nt use them for professional work, yet.

My head hurts. I should quit drinking coffee, or at least limit it to before lunchtime. A 4PM sip yesterday led to me sleeping at around 4AM even if I went to bed before midnight. Long after the caffeine is destroyed or passes out, my hyper and jittery state remains. Ah, the perils of being bipolar. But it sure beats being depressive, which has fortunately avoided me for months. See How to Recognize a Manic Episode, I've been through almost all of them, including #12 ("If she describes auditory or visual hallucinations or shows paranoid behavior, contact her psychiatrist immediately. These are serious symptoms."). #8 ("Notice if he complains that his thoughts are racing uncontrollably") is common and keeps me from sleeping once in a while.

On top of that, I'm a perfectionist - but not in everything, and an obsessive-compulsive list taker and schedule keeper. To explain, I make lists of everything I think of, in this computer and on paper. Broken schedules frustrate me, and I'm not happy when new things pop up unexpectedly. I'm a creature of routine.

My list of new tools to write is growing. I want to write an adapter between the Netflow traffic statistics collected by flow-tools, and the ACID monitoring console initially built for Snort. There is a possible need for working in the reverse direction - converting Ethernet-sniffed traffic collected with tools like tcpdump to Netflow packets for unified performance analysis. Doing these would be a return to Unix-oriented C-Python-Perl programming, good for variety.

An httpd access_log analysis task, plus discussion on Philippine Internet infrastructure encourage me to revive my domestic IP mapping project. This time I'm looking at completing the list of local AS Numbers? based on APNIC and ARIN sources. I would then look it up against the BGP routing table dumps provided by the
Route Views Project. Perl scripting again. I would prefer Python for elegance but Perl crunches logfiles faster in my limited experience. Perhaps I should write it twice for comparison. Implementation issues regardless, I hope will give more facts for IP network operators and content hosters to make intelligent decisions.

My college teacher back in 1992 was quoted in an article. My only remaining memory of her class was that I failed an exam. I overlooked the back page of the exam sheet and was gloating that I finished early!