I was surprised today when I received an email from drupalapc.com about the cancellation of Drupal Asia Conference in Sydney, Australia. Below is the email:

We are sorry to announce that the Drupal Asia Pacific Conference and the Full Code Press website competition have been postponed to a later date.

It was our hope that we could organise the event to coincide with the Open CeBIT conference in May. However the challenges imposed by a tight deadline and the logistics of integrating with the CeBIT expo have been too much to overcome.

We are still committed to running a Drupal Asia Pacific event and a website building competition, but with greater lead-up time to plan speakers and arrange venues.

continue reading here…

I learned about DrupalCon a few days ago and got excited. Right then and there I started on checking on how to process my papers. Unfortunately (or shall I say fortunately?) I will not be able to make it. I really feel pity about those people who already prepared for it. Just praparing for the Visa application is already time consuming, how much more when you have already reserved for plane tickets and hotels?

Hopefully the next one will be a success and hopefully they learned something from it. I still want to feel positive about this event so I’m still looking forward to the next Drupal Con in Asia.

Web 3.0? Web 4.0? What???

After the AJAX hit, Web 2.0 buzzword and Facebook API’s, another new word popped out somewhere when I was surfing. Adobe AIR. They say it is the new thing now! Oh my! I haven’t even mastered AJAX nor the APIs yet!

Now, now, now, what’s Adobe AIR again?

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime

Does that mean I can run this kind of app on and offline? Yes indeed. According to this very helpful article by BlueClock, AIR finds the best of both worlds. It can interact with online resources if connected or use local storage (via SQLite) and synchronise data when next connected. It runs well in Windows, Linux and OS X (isn’t that nice..).

I downloaded Google Analytics Reporting Suite to test what kind of application this technology has brought. Looks very cool. I quite actually liked this app compared to the web version. It’s fast and I do not have to worry about Firefox crashing again. And most of all, I do not have to worry cluttering my browser again with pages from analytics. In years, I have thought about this technology, and now look, it’s just a single download away from us. Try it!

After this, what’s next? Can you just please wait for me to study this app before coming up with another new technology????? Hehe.. how I wish *roll eyes*

Breaking news mga kapwa business-minded Pinoy! We can now directly withdraw paypal money to our local banks. Thus making business online a lot lot lot lot lot and 1millions times lot better.

Effective yesterday, PayPal started allowing users in the Philippines to withdraw funds to local bank accounts.

Yes, it’s confirmed. Log in to your PayPal account and see that in the My Account > Withdraw page, you now have an option to directly transfer funds from your PayPal account to your bank account in the Philippines.

Withdrawal transactions are expected to be processed within 5-7 business days.

There is no charge if the transaction amount is P7,000 or more but there is a P50.00 fee if the amount to be withdrawn is P6,999.99 or less.

A P250.00 return fee is charged if you entered incorrect details about your bank account so make sure you input the correct information.

To withdraw, you must attach a bank account first to your PayPal account. Once added, you can directly submit a withdrawal request.

It’s really true!

Wow this is nice and hot news! Finally IE is taking the standards seriously. The lawsuit of Opera to IE might have an effect afterall..

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video.

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

Ok, you might be wondering what is Acid2 Test. I myself was not familiar with it until now.

The Acid2 test was developed by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) as a challenge to browser developers. In a single page, the test makes use of a broad range of features from several different web standards that developers have wanted to have in browsers for some time, and it uses them to display a deceptively simple smiley face.

Now we can sleep real tight that in the coming future, developers and designers will have less headache making their website CSS based Happy New Year IE!