Catching wind from TechCrunch, Microsoft is now trying to befriend the open-source community by releasing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows. And it’s not all crap documentation. Specifications for Vista, Server 2008, Office 2007, and others are included.

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.

Not yet open-source but Microsoft is starting to embrace the force that is open-source (rhyme unintentional). Or are they really? One can speculate. And Microsoft is doing all this in the name of Interoperability and Data Portability. This may also be in line with their participation in the development of OpenID.

The Redmond giants released this in a form of a promise. But as far as cliches go, promises are made to be broken. I still can’t trust Microsoft. And this move of theirs is just making me more paranoid. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed in the hopes that someday, there will be better interoperability between Microsoft and Open Source software.

A four hour bus ride, 15-minute tricycle ride, 45 minutes on a boat that almost toppled over, a couple of hours walking through a rainforest, rough terrain and a treacherous river, and it all boils down to this. And I’d do it all over again.

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The next major release of WordPress, version 2.5, is almost here. A release date of March 10th is scheduled and the developers have decided to put the development on feature freeze as they focus more on bug hunting and polishing the features and code already in there. Chris Johnston was also generous enough to host a demo site, but was abused and hacked to redirect to some other site. The link to the demo site was removed from WLTC and The WordPress Podcast. Ryan has it though, but it might be gone soon, so if you want to see what the new Administration area looks like, head on over to his blog and look for it in the Comments section.

I tried logging in and I checked out the new design, and honestly, I didn’t expect to see the new colors, given that the new colors are mostly in the same range as the colors here. The new design is refreshing, and quite a big step away from the hues of blues in the current (almost previous) versions. The Dashboard is more organized, and the whole Administration area is restructured to give more focus on what a blogger would do rather than be suggestive of what should be done.

Besides the colors of the Administration area changing, another feature that caught my attention is when I went to the Manage tab. There’s now an option to manage tags. This is a feature that, at first, was not really planned and will not be put in core, leaving tag management to plugin developers. One too many cherries on top of the begging and pleading and it was decided to put it in core. At least, that’s how I think it went.

Anyway, the tag management page looks a lot like the category management page. Let’s just see if this scales with a thousand tags to manage. Hopefully, it will. And gracefully, as it does.

All in all, having been able to test-drive WordPress 2.5 only whets my appetite even more and I can’t wait for March 10th. A new look to the Administration area is one of the things the developers did right. I just hope everything else is also the same.

a journey we have
long awaited, but well worth it
to chronicle life

An Indignation Rally in Makati, Philippines that would hopefully NOT lead to another People Power.

There is still an ongoing investigation in the Philippines regarding the ZTE / National Broadband scandal that involves a number of political figures that has ties with top government officials, including the President herself. In line with this, groups of people are organizing rallies demanding the resignation of the President. This rally scheduled on the 15th of February is rumoured to be a big one. So big that it may be cosidered as another People Power uprising.

Previous incarnations of the People Power uprising were successful in the sense that no blood were spilled and no one died to dethrone a tyrant and replace them with a more “suitable” officer. It was also successful in uniting the Filipinos to reach a common goal, that is to stop tyranny and oppression.

However, this time around, the reason behind the rally is to stop corruption. Leaders of various groups and organizations, militant or otherwise, are demanding the resignation of the President and, with her, the cabinet, so that corruption can be stopped. Obviously, these leaders have been influenced by someone who has a lot to gain if the rally is successful.

Let’s think about this, for a change.

No rally has ever dethroned a president. Except if it’s a People Power rally, which is already a revolution. For this rally to dethrone the President, the Filipinos must unite. That’s the catch.

How do you unite the mostly clueless Filipinos in this endeavor? The people, in my opinion, would rather stay at home and watch the poor suckers at the rally suffer its inconveniences. Unless there’s money involved. With the ever-changing prices of basic commodities, no one can blame the people for whoring their presence because they just want to make sure that they can be guaranteed survival for the next few days. And where, pray tell, will the money come from? No such principle as volunteering in this society. If you think this is bad, well, it actually is. My instinct tells me that some of the anti-administration government officials supporting the rally would be providing the grease money for this to push through. And I’m betting my blog, for what its worth, that this money will not come from their own pockets. All this to stop corruption in the Philippine government.

I remember reading an article about People Power being abused and its principle and ideology was lost because it was used too much too often. I vaguely remember what it said about People Power: The first People Power revolution amazed the world when the Filipino people united to stop tyranny and dictatorship. The second bored the world when it tried to stop corruption. The world will not forgive another. And yet, we are on a possible fifth, and counting. And from the third onwards, did not faze the government anymore. And this rally, speculatively funded by corrupted officials, is to stop corruption.

If irony was a country, it would be the Phlippines. Is it just me, or does it stink here?

It has been a few days or so when I first installed the Lite version of Windows Vista Ultimate. Needless to say, it runs fine, and quickly, too. I noticed a decrease in CPU usage, but not a lot of memory saved though. Nevertheless, it produces less heat because of the reduced CPU usage. The biggest jaw-dropper was the amount of disk space it consumed. When I was using the bundled Windows Vista Home Premium, the operating system and all my applications left me with about 85GiB free space in a 110GiB hard drive. When I used Lite Ultimate, I still had about 95GiB. 10GiB is not really something to celebrate but it’s the best outcome I have seen from using Lite Ultimate. Saving space and making your bootup quicker are really good reasons to take the risk and install Lite Ultimate. Some already did.

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I’m not an event organizer, and neither do I know anything about public relations. I have very limited knowledge in the goings-on behind an event. However, I have a pretty good idea how tedious, and taxing, it can be to the organizer(s). As far as I know, most of the legwork is done by the logistics team of the organizing committee. I have been (un)fortunate enough to participate in one such event that made me realize how difficult it can be when everyone is counting on you to deliver the goods behind the scenes in order to have a presentable and decent enough front.

But far more difficult than the logistics team’s tasks is to make people attend the event. After all, an event is only as successful as how the attendees perceive the event. Thinking about it, why would your prospective attendees even want to trade their comfy couches, big screen TVs, and Internet connections with a gathering of people whom they hardly even heard of, much less give a rat’s ass about. I’m not going to preach about how to make people go to your event. I’m here to tell event organizers what I expect from the gathering when AND IF I decide to attend. And I think some people would agree with me that if you’re going to try to pull us off of our couches, please make it worth our while.

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I previously posted an aside that Microsoft is trying to acquire Yahoo! but I felt I need to put in my two cents worth. I know a lot of blogs and websites have dicussed this matter in a very thorough and informative manner, but I just want to express what I feel about the merger, IF it happens, from a user point-of-view.

Microsoft has had its share of legal hurdles and stumbling blocks that makes every single Windows user think twice whenever the Redmond giants release new software. Although their practices are least admired by the Valley, the world still embraces, although reluctantly, almost each and every single software that hails from Microsoft. Their operating system practically runs almost every single computer on the planet. That is, if we think about numbers. However, some systems providing critical services run some other operating system, either *NIX or BSD. But that’s not where the money is, and Microsoft knows this. A rich and wealthy company, indeed.

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Catching up on my feeds, I read from GigaOM that there were reports in the UK “for the first time, root-and-master level domain name servers are returning addresses records that have the ability to map domain names to IPv6 addresses.” I decided to do some further reading and found out that “On 4 February the master or root servers for the net will have a small number of records added that are written in IP version 6 (IPv6) added to them.” This coming from the BBC.

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