House Escapo

Working at home can sometimes get boring and it makes me crazy. I have been thinking of going out of the house but my problem is the place to stay and the cost. I have been looking for a place with free wifi in our area but I haven’t found one except for Starbucks but they charge PHP100.00/hour. That’s too much for me considering that I have to buy atleast anything from them. That’s why I really hate reasoning myself when I want to do something because eventually I will end up not doing it. But I was a little crazy today and ignored my other self and thankfully I did!

I did not find any place with free wifi but I found at least a quite place to stay at Vienna Cafe in SM City San Fernando. I did not have an internet for 4 hours but I was still able to work – thanks to the coffee! I love the coffee though it’s expensive(super!). I will most likely do this again and seek for another place to stay. How about you – what do you do when bored?

Doing something different this year

I was meaning to write a post about some entrepreneurial plans I have for this year until I read Cal Evans post on entreprenureship which gave me a little boost of confidence. I also have a lot of ideas throwing out to people around me. Few were approved, most weren’t. Some ideas that I think are good but just thinking of what to do next scares me. Most ideas were denied because someone already have done it. But I believe in what others have said in Cal Evan’s post, the power is in the execution. The amount of things that I will learn in this experience might be more valuable than the lost I could get. I might fail now but I can use that for the next set of ideas.

The project

I really wanted to go ecommerce for the longest time. I have already 1 failed project on this last year because my partners and I were not ready yet for the challenge. So this year, a related idea came up. If I can’t have my shop, then I’ll help others who has the system but lacks the information needed to go online. It is targeted to small and medium enterprises who are interested or probably will get interested in putting up their businesses online. I’ve been involved in web development for almost 4 years now and I know how profitable the internet can be to anyone who would passionately learn it.

I took the first step and wrote some ideas, refined, refined and refined. I tried to create a business plan but I just failed in the sense that it is not that formal for a business plan – it’s too boring, But I did create a plan and that’s good enough for me. I ended up with my first task which is quite not what I wanted to. I did more research but that paid of with the information I was able to gather.

The next step was to start talking about it – writing a blog. A friend told me, no matter how good your product is, if you don’t market it’s useless. So I created a blogger account and called it SME Talk which tackles how a small and medium enterprise could start their online business. This is more of a help on the technical aspects since that is my forte. I have scheduled a twice a week post for this so good luck to me and to my future readers.

The future

I plan to do more on evangelizing my kababayan about internet and online opportunities. This could be an online and offline affair so I’ll probably be out more. Though I still expect a few things will probably change the plan for this year, some things are quite unstable and undecided but for as long as I am here this will be the BIG plan.

CSS Font Size and Family Cheatsheet

Here is a cheatsheet for Conversion from Points to Pixels (and Ems and %) and List of Web Safe Fonts. I did not create them, I got them from other sites and the original links are included for reference. It’s just handy when I have to convert PSD designs to HTML.

Download cheatsheet

Ruby Gotcha – PP not printing

So I have been studying Ruby and Ruby on Rails since last year — for a change. I am currently creating my first rails application and stumbled on a very confusing problem — I could not print a line in controller!

In cakePHP, debug() function is one of those tools I could not live without because it easily displays string and arrays in formatted HTML. I was looking something similar in rails and I stumbled on pp method. When I tried it in my controller, nothing shows up! Here is my code:

[ruby]
def new
@meeting = Meeting.new
pp params # I’m trying to display the contents of params to check on the content
end
[/ruby]

I spent a couple of hours googling, checking my environment if I was using the development environment, used puts, echo, print, p and a lot more googling. When I tried to ask for assistance in the ruby user group, I doubled checked my command line where I run the ruby script/server and AHA!! the data are displayed there! This is my first ruby gotcha.

How to find RSS links fast in a site

Are you also having trouble looking for rss links in some websites? Well, I did and not just once or twice but a couple of times! It really annoys me when I find a good blogs but doesn’t provide that little useful link in making me stick in their site. Sometimes they are just plainly playing hard-to-get and I won’t bother searching. Luckily I found a really good tip that made me love firefox even more!

Using firefox 3, you will see at the right side of your URL box a star and a rss image if it finds any link. It looks something like this:

Just click on that orange image and it will ask you to subscribe to that feed. It will automatically detect the RSS feed for you. I found this in this article which was written in 2005! Wow! It’s been here for quite a long time! So maybe this works in other firefox versions or other browsers, I just do not know how. You might want to check for your aggregator settings.

November is my Lucky Month

I think it’s my lucky month is november. Why? For three and a half (3.5) reasons:

1. It’s my birth month and I received my best birthday gift so far — woot!
2. We got in the finals of GlobeLabs contest — woot! again
3. I got the business cardsssssssss — woot! again and again
4. I finally reached my very first $10 earnings from google ads after 2 years of blogging! — woot! 3x and a half. Just half because I haven’t received it yet. Believe it, 2 years of blogging and I only started using it again around the 3rd quarter. I actually had one in my first few tries in blogging and then totally stopped using until this year.

I’m still hoping for another blessing this month. If not this month hopefully by early december. *crossing my fingers* and wish us good luck for tomorrow. What’s with tomorrow? It’s the final judging of our entry for the Globelabs event!

Business Card Winning Pieces

I just can’t get over the winning pieces title! haha! Oh well.. I received today my prizes for the business card raffle draw/contest held by octwelve and sponsored by Uprinting. I’m very happy with the outcome of my design and the quality of Uprinting’s cards.

Now I need to think how to distribute the 250 pieces of them… I hope you got the idea of how I got the title of winning PIECES (*corny* )

Thanks again Uprinting and Octwelve!

SoapClient could not load WSDL url

I’ve been quite busy for the past few weeks with a project called YouPing. It’s a program submitted for the GlobeLabs contest and next week is the deadline. We could not finish it because of a problem with soapclient.

Warning: SoapClient::SoapClient(http://xxx.globelabs.com.ph:1881/xxx/xxx/Platform?wsdl) [soapclient.soapclient]: failed to open stream: Connection timed out in /path/to/test/script/soapclient.php on line 1

Warning: SoapClient::SoapClient() [soapclient.soapclient]: I/O warning : failed to load external entity "http://xxx.globelabs.com.ph:1881/xxx/xxx/Platform?wsdl" in /path/to/test/script/soapclient.php on line 1

Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'http://xxx.globelabs.com.ph:1881/xxx/xxx/Platform?wsdl' in /path/to/test/script/soapclient.php:1 Stack trace: #0 /path/to/test/script/soapclient.php(1): SoapClient->SoapClient('http://xxx...', Array) #1 {main} thrown in /path/to/test/script/soapclient.php on line 1

The problem was that port 1881 was blocked by Hostmonster. So we are begging from our friends, colleagues or anyone with a kind heart to lend us some small space in their server so we will not get disqualified. Hehe. Just kidding. we are trying our luck with the AppContainer provided by globe. *hope it works*

Globe Labs ’08 Event at Shangri-La

Before this one is forgotten in my “Baul ng Kayaman”, last August 8, I had the privilege to meet again my fellow PHPUGPHers for the globelabs event held in Shangri-La Manila. Take a peek at some pictures.

Globe Labs is a new organization within Globe Telecom whose mission is to help bring in the newest future technology services at the earliest market-relevant time. They launches a new competition that will bring together application development companies, freelance software developers and members of the academe to build applications for the everyday communication needs of customers. check complete news here

I’ll be joining the competition, hopefully no pressure on my side. (cross fingers) I’m looking forward to also see the proposals and final products by other groups. I’m very much sure a lot of new and awesome ideas will gonna heat up the competition since it’s open for Java, Ruby, PHP, .Net and other developers. Let’s see how things will go.