Activism 102

The movie, Archangel, is about a historian’s effort to dig deeper into the mysterious death of Stalin. His group of academicians from California University are in Moscow University to give talks and conduct further research on Stalin’s dictatorship in the ’20s.

Dr. Fluke (Daniel Craig) is lucky to have the ‘lone eyewitness’ to the death of Stalin. The old man with a nevus on his face reveals to the professor a notebook that was taken from Stalin’s secret vault when he was dying. The notebook is actually the diary of a girl from Archangel (a city in Russia’s northwest part) whom Stalin’s party recruited to be one of the servants to the leader. Stalin happened to be enamored by the girl’s charm, using his power to sleep with her. With the help of Zinaida, a prostitute and daughter to the old man holding the secret, the professor is led to believe that Stalin had a child with the servant lass.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last April 24, just as I was attending the second and last day of the International Conference on ICT, colleagues and friends of Enrico Cabanit, a farmworker leader slain last year in Davao del Norte, flocked to the entrance gate of the Department of Agrarian Reform to commemorate his one year of death since April 24, 2006. A mass was said and a program ensued afterwards.

So sad I could not make a way to attend that activity. But I’m sure Ka Eric is happy in company with the Creator. I’m also sure that the attendees have kept the fire burning just as when they did the commemoration.

When I was outside the DAR premises yesterday (coming from the seminar on Church social teachings), I saw the streamer mounted by UNORKA on the DAR’s main signage. It was meant to commemorate Ka Eric’s death anniversary. The red shawl below the streamer is our symbol for Ka Eric and other farmers slain in line of their struggle for land. It stands at Ka Eric’s symbolic tomb.

Read my blog tribute to Ka Eric last year and another piece on killing of peasants.

The second and last day of the First International Conference on ICT gave me a number of learnings and reflections on how ICT can really help the Philippines as far as genuine development is concerned.

China was the most dealt with based on the sessions I attended. I guess the reason behind is that the country has got great figures as far as ICT usage is concerned, e.g., 44.25 million Internet users and 290.6 million mobile phone owners. One presentation bragged about the government-funded satellite-based information system that targets rural folks. A number of receiving stations are installed around Beijing and rural folks get the chance to go there and watch videos on which experts tackle specific topics. As of 2006, there were a total of 3,500 courses given out benefiting 1.5 million Beijing people, half of whom were farmers. (I saw Fedora Core workstations in one of the presentation slides. Cool!)
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, a PLUGger announced to a mailing list about a news that reported Microsoft’s latest initiative that promises to be in the crosshairs again. The initiative is about giving incentives to governments of ‘emerging’ countries and even of poor states in rich countries by providing a USD 3 worth of software package (including XP Starter Edition and Office 2007 Home and Student Edition, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 and Live Mail Desktop) for every student receiving a free ‘Windows PC’ that his government has bought and supplied to him/her.

Sounds philanthropic, right? In fact, it’s no news any longer when one gets to know of any move by Bill Gates (Microsoft’s founder and concurrent Chairman) of that nature. But what looks interesting, if not intriguing, is the motive or intent behind those moves.
Read the rest of this entry »

For me, it’s OK to be informed about a very important site’s being down, so long as the maintenance pages look like that one with a cat struggling on a computer with a screw driver. It’s even OK to be told that my files hosted by a site are gone like forever. Who would not take pity of that cat feeling ashamed and sorry?

Bad thing I haven’t screen-captured that widget by Yahoo that has several cute hamsters moving their bodies asynchronously while waiting for a long transaction to finish. (I think that is on the photo service.)

So using animals to mellow down the high-blooded is cool. Twitter.com is the runaway winner.

Powered by ScribeFire.

My wife asked me to help her with a problem in which she cannot print an invitation letter addressed to the Japanese embassy. In other words, the letter was written in Japanese. She resorted to me confident that there would be a Linux way to solve the problem. I thought she’s right.

There sure was. But the solution was painstaking as it is not pre-installed with our Kubuntu setup. Theoretically, one has to install japanese fonts for the display and printing to be done right. But I was wrong. xpdf didn’t work. It can display the right fonts, but it cannot print them as displayed on screen. I thought acroread would be my friend. But, much to my surprise, it is no longer part of any of the repositories, neither universe nor multiverse, in Feisty Fawn.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a change, the ICT conference that I’m attending (23-24 April, 2007) is one whose participants are mostly Asian academics and researchers in their respective fields. The thing that threads them is the interest in ICT as a key factor in the context of their fields of analysis.

My interest in coming to the conference (in exchange for the non-NGO friendly fee and my absence from work) was to pick up some insights from the resource persons so that I can use these in my own organization’s plan to beef up its technical and theoretical capacity on ICT for agrarian reform, rural development and democratization.

Let me list down some of my reflections about the conference:
Read the rest of this entry »

Have you got cool activities that you want to invite people to? Do you have international conferences you’re attending that you want your distant friends to note so that they may set an appointment with you alongside them? Are you a fan of colors red and yellow?

Then, sign up with upcoming.org, a Yahoo company that provides calendaring services like Google Calendar. It’s much cooler than the latter. Although, as a Google Calendar user, you may still opt to sign up with upcoming.org and have two services inter-operate.

There is also a tags and groups feature with upcoming.org. I, for one, have just signed up with the group called ICT4D (information and communications technologies for development). All events across the globe that pertain to ICT are posted by the group. So if you’re an ICT activist, better sign up with upcoming.org and the ICT4D group.

I really like Ubuntu’s nomenclature for its flavors, what with the use of alliteration and the tribute to animals. First there was Warty Warthog. Then came Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, and Feisty Fawn (now in beta version). Up next is Gutsy Gibbon, which is due for release supposedly this October.

Could there be a tribute as well to the higher form of animals–humans? I wish there were a version for me, which I would like to be named “Doggone Dong”. (Well, I could build that version actually. But I don’t have the luxury of time and resources to do that.)

And you, what Ubuntu version would you be?

Powered by ScribeFire.

I’m not an English language expert. But I easily flare up, much less run amuck, when I come across simple grammar lapses. I can bear unintelligible English but I cannot take sitting down phrases like “1 comments” or “1 messages”.

The last time I checked (when I was a budding grade school pupil), a singular subject took a singular verb or something. In deference to 360 developers and programmers, and to all others taking this grammar lapse for granted, will you please insert just a line of code or two to handle correct English construction? For PHP buffs, it’s something like this:

if ($count['comment'] == 1) echo “1 comment”;
else echo $count['comment'] . ” comments”;

Powered by ScribeFire.